I think you guys are still missing it / overselling the value of talent. Its really about consulting vs. in-house design team.

As a designer on the outside you can only make a surface level, and pretty trivial, impact on the stuff that really matters to companies – revenue, retention, customer success, brand perception, etc.

As a designer on the inside, you can make meaningful change happen. It means studying the business. Internalizing the problems. Shipping and iterating over many cycles and many years. Getting the internal culture to value product design. This actually gets the real job done – or per your article, gets people to really spend money.

I've been thinking about using Slack in this way (to host the convos for a community I run) for a while.

Curious how best to set this up in Slack? Best practices? Tips / tricks to make it successful? Thx.

CompStak is always looking for amazing product designers.

We do stuff like this: https://dribbble.com/CompStak

Design Studio VS. Startup/Product

Created this survey to add some objective data points to the debate on which is more lucrative/fulfilling work for designers.

Will share results at some point.

Anyone can fill out. Takes 30 seconds.

Anything that involves space flight, aviation, robots, blowing shit up, lasers = dream job.

Forget all the advice about coding anything.

Identify who you think the customers / users would be. List out all the assumptions surrounding your idea. Go talk to the customers / users about those assumptions.

And ask them to give you: Their time (to speak with you). Their reputation (share your idea with others). Their money (pre-sell the product).

Do this and you'll know the next step.

Zero code required.

Graphic/print is all about pleasing your client – and you never get much tangible feedback on how well your logo/book/etc does in the real world.

Interface is all about moving some kind of metric or outcome. And you can absolutely measure it in real time. You can build, measure, learn and improve in concrete terms.

You already solved it. Just say:

50/50 Designer & Front End Dev

That is pure $$$

I'd like to see more responses to the Bradford Shellhammer post. I was not a fan of his point of view or way of communicating.

I can't believe one of the Fab founders, who also apparently runs a design consultancy, has such a screwed up, negative attitude about working with designers.

Not to mention most of his observations simply don't have anything to do with reality.

Very strange.