This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the shallow approach to design. Sure, it looks nice, but it functions awfully.
Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines. Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.
Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10 headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.
This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny things by following photoshop tutorials.
That's pretty hypercritical. Personally, I'd like HN to have more reasonable typography like a fixed width column for comments—somewhere in between Inbound and HN as it exists currently.
It's also not functionally awful. My wife, an interior designer, has often commented that she doesn't know how I can stand to read comments from this site because of how garish the colors and how poor the type is. We've had time to adapt to the use of HN because the content is great and the software has been evolved to function well.
Inbound also has an entirely different target market, one that is, by definition, more superficial and shallow in regard to design. Nothing that looked like HN would get traction in the marketing community, at least from the people I know.
@randfish and I were very inspired by HN. We understand the tradeoffs in terms of design (we're big reddit fans too).
Your observation that marketers (our audience) are different from hackers is dead-on.
With inbound.org we had some early debate around design. Candidly, I was more on the "lets make it like HN" (I write code every day) and he was more on the "lets do something creative and solve for our audience" (he has a much better aesthetic sense). We're still debating it.
We're also both entrepreneurs, so understand the importance of launching and just getting it out there.
Now, back to dealing with the technical issues we've run into tonight...
The measure (line-length) on HN comments is pretty damn bad, I agree. I'm purely comparing the homepages here.
And I do agree that HN could definitely improve. HN isn't perfect, nor is it beautiful. I think it functions extremely well, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.
I really do enjoy HN's design. But the fact that read stories become grayed out hurts in one circumstance: when you've started participating in a discussion on that thread. It would be nice (though admittedly it would break caching) if at least the 'comments' link changed color or were 'called-out' for the threads in which you have commented.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the [threads] link at the in the HN navigation, but it shows you all your comments and threaded replies. I use that feature to check back on discussions I've participated in.
Even so, I as a user who comments quite infrequently will often times want to, after reading an article, look at the discussion about it. On an almost daily basis I have difficulty finding that link because it has been so heavily obscured.
On long threads it usually becomes difficult to determine who a particular response was directed to.
There is no way to differentiate quoted text in your response.
The size of navigational elements are particularly small and hard to use on mobile devices.
You make the point that HN has clear brand identity, but that isn't much of an accomplishment. HN sticks to a four color palette ( Orange, Tan/Bright Desaturated Orange, White, and Black ), and places the YCombinator logo at the top left.
As someone else said, I think you are being far to critical. While I personally don't like the design of the site either, I wouldn't begin calling HN a good example. Sure HN is functional, but that is only one aspect of good design. Functionality in and of itself really isn't that difficult to achieve. It is when you are able to strike a balance between expressiveness, beauty, and functionality does a design become good.
Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines. Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.
Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10 headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.
This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny things by following photoshop tutorials.