Curtis' abilities surrounding marketing, PR and his brand has and will continue to drive this product. Not the technology.
Copycats can build the technology, but that's it. All the aspects of the product that have resulted it reaching the top of HackerNews are unfortunately a lot harder to reproduce.
> Curtis' abilities surrounding marketing, PR and his brand has and will continue to drive this product. Not the technology.
I wasn't sure who Curtis was, so I looked him up. From his own sites, it wasn't apparent at all. I guess he is a superhero or villain, depending on which site of his you look at.
Because he does two things really well that build huge brands around specific people:
1. Acts like he knows everything and acts like a polarizing, arrogant ass
(I've never met him, so who knows if he actually is an arrogant ass. The majority of people I have met that act like that seem not to be IRL. It's often a persona.)
2. Consistently writes blog posts that cause a lot of controversy (e.g. get people fired, give more famous people you know a spotlight to write content for you, etc.)
I'm not bashing Curtis with the above, even though my tone seems pejorative. It's just true, and it's the same way most political talking heads and radio personalities work. Curtis is basically something like the Howard Stern of the YC set.
Uh, that's the title of his own blog post. The ongoing discussion has not involved other people talking about Dustin Curtis much at all. (Which is a shame, I think, as he deserves the credit.)
And few others could get away with that without being eviscerated as self-aggrandizers.
The ongoing discussion has not involved other people talking about Dustin Curtis much at all.
There is incredibly little that is compelling in what Curtis is pitching (in fact I find it all a bit laughably naive. His overarching goal seems to be to create the next The Verge or something? And some minor tweaks of blog authoring is going to make that happen?) It lit a certain niche of the web on fire because it was pitched by someone with a high PageRank, achieved via pretty pernicious tactics (the outrageous 3.5 inch bit being prime). Then everyone starts their clones and offshoots and discussions because they want a piece of the traffic attention.
I asked in my original comment in this post "What are those aspects [that resulted in it hitting the top of Hacker News]?" No one has answered. I have yet to see anyone describe why this deserves any attention at all.
One problem is that your average designer will not know what versioning is, never mind have an opinion as to whether it'd be useful or not.
I see this as a case of applying a successful model from one field to another without consideration around whether this is actually a problem in the first place.
The usefulness of versioning and other successful models in other fields/contexts is an interesting thing to think about. It could be that some applications of these models are not solving existing problems so much as creating new opportunities. Versioning for art and design could create new opportunities for collaborative creation even if it doesn't solve the problems of existing artists and designers. I don't know how well this can work, though.
Andy Warhol produced numerous versions of his Campbell soup, in doing so he added some value in asking questions, if it was just one can of soup this wouldn't have been the case.
A can of soup doesn't equal a painting of a can of soup.
Not really. As far as I can tell, the original artist wasn't selling his works, right? And apologies in advance to all the designers reading this, but the posters are a sentence fragment in a standard font. They're not printing off bootleg copies of the Mona Lisa here.
I suppose I'm being immoral and disrespectful, myself. Should I send Dos Equis a letter of apology, see if KC Green sells prints of his comics, and try to track down both the artists working on the Spiderman show as well as the person who placed text on this image? http://imgur.com/3CHhp
Let me know if I'm factually wrong in any of my statements.
I think many people on hacker news recognize good design skill takes years to develop, but this is an extreme. They took a simple four word sentence and printed it in red. Do you think the public benefits by having this designer have a ~150 year copyright monopoly on something as simple as this sentence?
It's a simple poster people were excited about and when it was unavailable went out to make it themselves.
That's cool and all, but these folks are hardly Picasso, and the art in question could've been trivially generated by picking a few words at random from a database and adding color.
