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You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

(www.chrbutler.com)
257 points delaugust | 5 comments | 24 Apr 25 21:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.246s | source
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rglover ◴[25 Apr 25 00:38 UTC] No.43789059[source]▶
This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).

The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.

Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.

Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.

[1] https://xtian.design/

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1. pixl97 ◴[25 Apr 25 00:52 UTC] No.43789153[source]▶
I mean advertising is advertising. You could have the best program in the world but if no one knows about it chances are you're not going to get rich.

Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.

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2. tough ◴[25 Apr 25 01:28 UTC] No.43789326[source]▶
This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
3. godelski ◴[25 Apr 25 04:20 UTC] No.43790071[source]▶
Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria.

I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.

4. rf15 ◴[25 Apr 25 04:46 UTC] No.43790176[source]▶
> you're not going to get rich

which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.

5. Mawr ◴[25 Apr 25 10:16 UTC] No.43792043[source]▶
Advertising is easy, making the best program is hard. If you have the best program already, solving the advertising problem is a non issue.