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by baggsie 1230 days ago
Generic design system looks generic shocker!
4 comments

...actually the team openly admitted to copying the site directly after we called them out publicly.

Here is the direct message of them apologizing: https://imgur.com/a/OlNJ5U4

Nice try, Cloudthread.

Yes, the design is fairly generic but if you can't see that someone ripped off someone here then you must be trying a bit too hard to not see it.

I'm trying but both looks like countless other soul-less corporate sites.
Ya, not sure how they do not get your point… regardless of that fact, it is a completely uninspired design and it’s not hard to imagine this is some stock Tailwind UI component. Yes, they are wrong, but this isn’t some revolutionary stuff here. Let’s call a spade a spade.
This. There's only so many ways you can design a graph, table, and rule editor. The icons just seem to be from two packs, so they likely picked out the most appropriate icon for the action, and when you have limited icon packs you'll likely converge on similar icons.

Notably, in a reply where they're calling out the similar icons, only one is the same while the other two are different, the only similarity that one of them has a graph.

I have to disagree with both comments on this... That was my first thought as well. But looking at the screenshots in the Twitter post, it goes beyond design systems. Structurally, it's the same. Layout, it's the same. Purpose, it's the same.
I don’t really buy it.

There’s only so many logical ways to layout a graph, breadcrumbs, and table. If the breadcrumbs perform an action, which they seem to do, then you’ll want them center to emphasize that. That’s just basic UX design.

I could argue they copied the query builder from dozens of different sites because they all look identical. It’s a query builder, there’s only a few ways to design and implement one.

The tables straight up are just standard design tables. They could’ve come from Bootstrap at how plain they look. The only thing they have in common in terms of the things they show is costs, which, I mean for two tools used to keep track of cloud spending, seems like a given.

The copy is completely different even if the purpose is the same, and “slicing and dicing data” is a go to phrase in the industry. We used the phrase all the time when developing a graphing tool.

Nothing in that Twitter post is unique. It’s what I, and I’m sure many others would converge on for any sort of tool that interacts with graphed data. Especially for two tools in the same space, there’s only so many ways to show people their cloud costs. If anything, both companies just have extremely generic looking and feeling UIs.

Um. Their marketing copy... the words used to describe things and the order in which they're laid out? You think that's GENERIC?
Please show me the exact marketing copy that is the same. They use different words to describe slicing and dicing data, which as I already said is an extremely common term in the industry. For two companies doing the same niche and relatively simple thing, I would certainly think that there would be a lot of similarities.

As I have said like half a dozen times now, there’s only so many ways you can show cloud costs. It’s not like this is some innovative space, it’s just showing costs over time on a graph and table. If I were to clean room design an interface for this problem, I would certainly have the same sort of design, layout and copy as these two.

And yes, all of those things are generic, for the reasons I’ve given. Do you have any actual response other than being incredulous that someone has a different opinion than you?

Pretty much generic nonsense text. The one of the left didn't optimize like the one on the right.
Yeah I am with you the screenshots look like some bootstrap or whatever generic CSS framework of the day there is