Still, communicating through visual design is foundational to marketing your business. Sourcehut's design is fine for it's audience, that is to say people who don't give a shit about how something is presented as long as it works well.
Of course, you already admitted the subjectivity of it all. I accept that. But at the same time, there is a reality that we all exist in, a reality heavily dictated by what we see and what we feel, and design has the ability to affect and influence those at a "pre-attentive" level -- ie before the efficacy of a product can be known or evaluated. So when I land on stripe.com, and I know nothing about it, I can at a minimum infer that there is a team of competent, professional, smart people behind the product judging by how the website looks and feels. I'm also associating a sense of happiness, wonder, and enthusiasm with the brand through my interactions on the website. I am seeing the bright colors, the crisp lines, and the smooth animations and I am, in my mind, creating a narrative about Stripe - that they have a high quality bar, that this product will be enjoyable, that there is craftsmanship here. There are many more people in this world that are attracted to beautiful things and intriguing stories than people who aren't.
> deep down inside I personally belong to the functional design or “no design” camp.
I assume this is just about software. Of course, we all love decoration in other parts of our lives. We love our little icons, we love our desktop wallpapers, we love our avatars. At a broader scale, the presentation of food on a plate. A favorite t-shirt. Gardens. Book covers. The color of your car. The color of your house. What type of furniture you choose to own. Movies. Music. All of these, from functional objects to artistic expression rely on some sense of decoration. There is inherently an "excessiveness" to all enjoyable things that makes them more emotionally charged than the sum of their atoms (or code) alone. I'm sure we can also agree on that.
Sorry for the diatribe. I hope it doesn't feel like an attack on you, OP, but I just find the overall sense on HN that things like a color palette or some animations are meaningless.
Of course, design can be used to disguise bad products. That's the bad kind. Stripe, as an example, isn't in that category.
I enjoyed reading your response. Stripe definitely is beautiful and well polished. To be honest, Source Hut looks aesthetically ugly. I just feel that that Stripe's design isn't "great" by any means. To me a high benchmark of excellence in design is from print mediums, specifically, Josef Muller Brockmann and Elliot Noyes. They made print design (before we had digital screens) unadorned and highly functional.
Other classic HN examples:
https://pinboard.in/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
> Stripe’s design is decorative.
Of course, you already admitted the subjectivity of it all. I accept that. But at the same time, there is a reality that we all exist in, a reality heavily dictated by what we see and what we feel, and design has the ability to affect and influence those at a "pre-attentive" level -- ie before the efficacy of a product can be known or evaluated. So when I land on stripe.com, and I know nothing about it, I can at a minimum infer that there is a team of competent, professional, smart people behind the product judging by how the website looks and feels. I'm also associating a sense of happiness, wonder, and enthusiasm with the brand through my interactions on the website. I am seeing the bright colors, the crisp lines, and the smooth animations and I am, in my mind, creating a narrative about Stripe - that they have a high quality bar, that this product will be enjoyable, that there is craftsmanship here. There are many more people in this world that are attracted to beautiful things and intriguing stories than people who aren't.
> deep down inside I personally belong to the functional design or “no design” camp.
I assume this is just about software. Of course, we all love decoration in other parts of our lives. We love our little icons, we love our desktop wallpapers, we love our avatars. At a broader scale, the presentation of food on a plate. A favorite t-shirt. Gardens. Book covers. The color of your car. The color of your house. What type of furniture you choose to own. Movies. Music. All of these, from functional objects to artistic expression rely on some sense of decoration. There is inherently an "excessiveness" to all enjoyable things that makes them more emotionally charged than the sum of their atoms (or code) alone. I'm sure we can also agree on that.
Sorry for the diatribe. I hope it doesn't feel like an attack on you, OP, but I just find the overall sense on HN that things like a color palette or some animations are meaningless.
Of course, design can be used to disguise bad products. That's the bad kind. Stripe, as an example, isn't in that category.