Seriously? It's a two-column interface with extra heaps of whitespace and thick borders. Yeah, Obtvse imitates Svtble – that's the point. It's not like it was imitating anything especially unique or difficult to conceive.
I take it you haven't been on Hacker News for very long. I am a designer; one of my pet projects went viral after hitting the top of Hacker News. I've also closed a few blogs after my rants there hit the front page; it seemed to me that garnering hundreds of thousands of views for my eighteen-year-old hissy fits might not be the smartest way to make a name for myself.
Dustin's got a flare for minimalist design: he's good at making things simultaneously simple enough that you can grasp them and loud enough that they stand out. Sometimes I come close to admiring him, but he's so smug for so little reason that I can't appreciate him for his talents. Tim van Damme did the superhero thing first and with a tenth the ego; his http://timvandamme.com/ is better-made than anything Dustin's ever touched, spread further than anything Dustin's ever designed, and he never let it go to his head. He's also capable of designing a web site with more than five elements on it at once.
Simple is nice; elegant is better. Dustin seemingly doesn't aspire to elegance and he's content with simply being popular. I don't begrudge wanting popularity, it was hard for me to stop lusting after, but I do begrudge conflating "people like my style" with "I am a great person who makes great things". I love cocky artists, can't get enough of the Dadaists and Philippe Gaulier and jackass Zen tutors who smack you for saying stupid things; but it's got to be earned.
Dustin recently wrote a post that made the rounds which I admired because he seemed to be saying, "I'm not satisfied with how good I am; I want to be better, and do something worthwhile." He strikes me as a guy trying to do the right thing and going about it the wrong way, and I sympathize with him a whole lot. But his ego is hilarious and way out of proportion with the rest of his work, and I find it endlessly amusing how bad he is at handling criticism, endlessly irritating how certain he is that he doesn't deserve it.
Not to get too meta here, but unalone and I have continued this discussion in email, so I'm not going to bother with a large reply here. In short, I apologized for writing him off so quickly, but disagree with his assessment of Svbtle's elegance.
Well said. Most of the discussions are all about whether or not stealing designs is justifiable... and thats really missing the point. /btw welcome back unalone.
I don't see why. The linked site is a generic Apple style ripoff with an annoying and unnecessary swipe action. I've seen hundreds of sites just like it. Am I missing something?
I don't see the Apple part that you're talking about, but I think that he was the original one who did that, and others took inspiration from him. Or maybe I'm just delusional.
Well said. I can't wait until my side project (oops... startup... uh, I mean Rockstarium-ninjai fusion device) goes live and I get to satirize this trend with the site design (up until a point, probably the end of beta; at the end of the day I'm still trying to build a real service and a joke only goes so far). I may even be looking forward to this more than the end product.
