[mnicole]

Of course.

Knowing there's someone there curating quality stuff is a huge plus, but having a curator that is truly knowledgeable in the industry is preferred. I actually wrote an email to the fine folks at Behance letting them know that their Web Design Served gallery was pretty lackluster considering the talent they have on their site, expecting that there was some sort of algorithm in place that would shuffle content tagged as Web Design over to Served once it hit a certain amount of Likes or if the user has a lot of Followers. To my surprise, they got back to me and told me that their posts are hand-picked by staff members. After that, I lost a bit of faith in the platform and stopped utilizing it as a place I went to (daily) to find inspiration. Clicking through page after page of thumbnails got old and was really time-consuming, and I was hoping a site like The Served would eliminate that work for me, but it had the same problem.

Another thing for me, personally, is I thrive off of competition; it has consistently kept me moving forward and it seems to be the driving force behind a lot of Dribbble trends and rebounds alike. At the same time, as a day-to-day designer, I'm not going to be in the market for assets for most projects so the question becomes "How do you get designers to stick around and contribute to a site they wouldn't necessarily use themselves?" I think an answer to that would be that competitive factor; give them the opportunity to upload and explain changes they made from the original(s) and get real feedback not only from other designers but people that are actually in the market as well. One of my biggest issues with Dribbble is that it can tend to be more of a wankfest than it is a place to get real constructive criticism, and sometimes those criticisms are weak or flat-out misinformed.

I don't know how you monetize off of the concept of designers one-upping other designers to ultimately create a quality pool of assets for people to choose from, but I like the sound of it and will keep thinking about it. :)

Does that help?

[cilliankieran]

Really helpful mnicole, thank you! Sorry to ask more questions but you're offering a truly valuable and different perspective to other feedback. I'm curious to hear more on your view that you wouldn't use it for assets and you don't think most designers would.

Interestingly some other designers have said that they're looking for 'building blocks' or components to save time in the design process. Do you feel that's an exception rather than the rule and therefore you design absolutely everything from scratch without borrowing inspiration or gathering assets to speed things up? This is really what I'm interested in knowing more about as it's really this insight that to speed up design downloaded assets that are still in layered art format (i.e. a PSD) can help to speed things up? Would love to hear more and incidentally if you could drop me a mail would love to ask you some more questions?

cillian (at) fol (dot) io Cheers.

[mnicole]

I might be in a different boat than many of my peers (and for this reason I wish HN had more designers), as I've started designing almost exclusively in the browser outside of some initial wireframing on paper, so my assets are CSS and not PSD. In that sense, I wouldn't mind using others' work because the ability to see the code and the output are valuable in determining if I'm going to (or can, browser-dependency pending) use it. I'm also able to change values on-the-fly to see if it looks good in different colors, dimensions, etc. With PSDs, I'm left waiting until I open the file to see how it was created, hope it was done right, and then try to tweak the Layer FX to suit my needs. I've also then got to go through and slice it up and sprite it out.

When I was using Photoshop exclusively I created everything from scratch, mostly just because I am a perfectionist and because it was another way to learn. As is the case today, the only assets I'm willing to download and pay for are icon sets and typefaces. If I see something someone else did and want to use something similar, I'll simply copy/paste the flat image into Photoshop and recreate on top of it to cater to my needs.

Emailing you now!