Until I noticed the low-res quality of the screenshot I didn't know what it was. Lossy images in 2013; great first impression.

> Nathan has a unique design style

I'll keep my opinions on that to myself, but when someone writes two books on design and hawks them on HN, people tend to be more critical of your work. I think it says something about someone's expertise when at least two of the HN posts on his products had people confused about design choices and what they were supposed to do on the page.

> And it's well designed on top of that. Not everything on the internet is perfectly suited to your tastes, lay off.

Design isn't someone's aesthetic or someone else's taste, it's the ability to communicate. This page is confusing a lot of people, so by definition, it is not well-designed.

HN also advocates raising one's prices to imply value, and I think that's why this and other posts have had people questioning the price points for the content. Additionally, I don't think "Good question. Not sure." is good copy for when I can expect a product I've paid for.

I don't really have a dog in this race but I am a designer and I am a writer, and hey, deconstructing sentences is fun.

Starting at the top:

> Design isn't someone's aesthetic or someone else's taste, it's the ability to communicate.

This is not an accepted definition. In fact, it's a huge bone of contention. Exhibit A: the yearly surge of near-infinite "What Is Design!?" "Design Is…" articles.

But let's pretend it is a canonical definition and then talk about what that would mean:

> it's the ability to communicate.

How do people communicate? They can only communicate if they hold things in common. Example: a language. What else? Belief systems. Culture. Background.

Are aesthetics personal? Can different people hold different aesthetics? Can a mismatch between their aesthetics, like a mismatch in language or belief, cause a communication rift?

Yes, yes it can. Ergo…

> Design isn't someone's aesthetic or someone else's taste,

… is wrong.

If you don't think it's not, you've never tried to design something modern and sleek for lawyers… or tried to persuade somebody who loves floral wallpaper to side with Adolf Loos.

"Things that look better, work better," research has shown… but did they test it on people outside the culture that created the object tested? What is "better," exactly?

This is why knowing your audience's taste (beliefs about aesthetic) is critical to communicating effectively and, ergo, why aesthetics are a huge part of design.

> This page is confusing a lot of people, so by definition, it is not well-designed.

Let's take the two assumptions here:

1. This page confuses a lot of people 2. That means it's not well-designed

Even if you accept 1 as true, that does not lead to 2 as neatly as you suppose it does. What if it confuses people who are not his audience in the first place? What if it confuses people who aren't really interested in conversion rates, but simply interested because Nathan Barry is becoming an HN darling? Casual surfers, you might call them.

If casual surfers are the only ones confused, then does that mean the page is not well-designed?

What if what you consider "awkwardness" in the design actually attracts other people who are in the author's target audience, while repelling people who are the internet equivalent of windowshoppers?

Is that not the definition of well-designed?

Finally, I think what you meant to say is "This page confuses a handful of people who are commenting on HN" which is not the same as "a lot of people."

I think it fails on several points, many of which are design-related.

The aesthetic is fine, beautiful even. Full marks for that. But the page is confusing in that it is extremely long, it lacks focus, and it lacks organization. This is why, in as short an analysis as I could make, I deemed it "a confusing mess." In my professional opinion, most people will take one look at this page, start reading, get interested for about 12 seconds, scroll down one page, realize there are approximately 20 screens of additional content, and then click the back button thinking "I don't have time for this."

If you don't understand that, then you're wasting time talking about design and its origin and meaning. Waxing philosophical over this is not helping this page get any better. In other words, you're over-thinking it.

From the article: "As you’ll see, I had a huge amount of help from Amy Hoy. Throughout the process she gave great advice on copywriting that I’d like to share here."

MJR: This isn't very honest considering that you are the one giving Nathan the advice in the article. And he is creating ConvertKit while part of your 30x500 launch class, Correct?

Nathan is /not/ and has never taken 30x500. (I'm alumnus from way way back, and alumni get to attend all succeeding classes, so you have to take my word for it.)

So in that sense, Amy doesn't have a dog in the race, which she would were she partnering with Nathan on the product. She may have a tiny mouse, however. ;)

Clients? What design ends up being in the eyes of a client is not really worth discussing; that's a bastardization of our industry, not the definition or intention itself. No one actually knows what they want and why they should want it, but they'll tell you what to do anyway to justify the bill. On the opposite end of the spectrum, certain agencies can get away with charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for irrational, ill-thought out concepts because people just assume the cost ensures the quality.

I don't know what makes someone an HN Darling. What I have noticed is that people around here seem to take a blog post's title at its word and upvote it without doing due diligence when it comes to topics they don't understand. Seeing names repeatedly must mean that they're qualified, rather than just someone marketing themselves.

Here's what you didn't say: "The PAGE is confusing and I didn't like it." Here's what you did say: "DESIGN isn't x or y, it's abc" and "Lots of people xyz." One is clearly a personal opinion; another is an attempt to rely on "truths" instead of your personal opinion (but the "truths" are specious!).

You're welcome to think whatever you like of the page.

But to dress up an opinion in "facts" and sweeping generalizations? Expect pushback from people who see that gambit for what it is.

> Clients? What design ends up being in the eyes of a client is not really worth discussing; that's a bastardization of our industry…

As for clients, I'm not sure where that comes into the discussion. You are the first to bring up clients. Color me confused.

> Here's what you didn't say: "The PAGE is confusing and I didn't like it." Here's what you did say: "DESIGN isn't x or y, it's abc" and "Lots of people xyz." One is clearly a personal opinion; another is an attempt to rely on "truths" instead of your personal opinion (but the "truths" are specious!).

Design is a bento box, the aesthetic is the food. When your bento box doesn't effectively contain everything in a manner that people easily can digest, something is amiss. It doesn't make it any less so because only a "handful" of people were actually vocal about it (which is not true, the top posts complain about these inconsistencies and the one speaking to the actual pricing was admitted as confusing by the author himself).

“Well-designed objects make it clear how they work just by looking at them.” - Joel Spolsky, Affordances and Metaphors

On the topic of opinions I'll also ignore that elsewhere in this thread you concluded that your own headline worked "beautifully" despite the fact that people didn't understand the metaphor and there was no proof that the intended audience wouldn't feel the same way. Furthermore, this entire post is an opinion piece (as noted in the second-most upvoted comment); there's no solid evidence that any of these layouts are any better than the other in actual conversions and some commenters even felt that the last design was the weakest. But to get to the point --

I have a hard time reading and absorbing something that forces me to take in three very large mockups and all of the copy within it. I have a hard time reading lengthy body copy that is formatted poorly (weird/varying indentations of lists and chunks of copy with no subheadings), pasting the entirety of rewritten copy in plaintext instead of letting the mockup speak for itself, and no pull-quotes or otherwise highlights of important changes or concepts to break up the monotony. It was just a huge pain in the ass to read and the mockup designs themselves were incredibly generic, which - again - wouldn't be a big deal if he wasn't ironically selling his expertise on the matter.

A better way to have designed/written this post would have been to let all three sit side-by-side. Speak to the strengths and weaknesses of each and how you came to changes you did in a short, succinct manner (concise blurbs and bulleted lists under each). And like others have said, while I might know who both of you are, that alone doesn't make me inclined to believe you without some actual datapoints to back up the decisions made.

Someone said that this wasn't copywriting so much as landing page design, and that Posthaven's page was much easier to understand. You replied that this has nothing to do with landing page design and that their thoughts on Posthaven's design is merely an opinion. When the layout has to change to accomodate the hierarchy of the copy, it absolutely deals with design. It's about content flow and what that means if you had heatmapped everything out. Only then do you understand what is actually being seen and read.

Posthaven's page works far better than ConvertKit's because it is straight-to-the-point. In 10 seconds I know what it is and what I can expect and what I can do to get started. It isn't wishy-washy marketing bullshit that goes on and on and on, forcing me to scroll all the way down to get to the actual call-to-action. When a tiny box can do a better/faster job at selling me than a wall of text, that's not an "opinion"; that's a fact.

> As for clients, I'm not sure where that comes into the discussion. You are the first to bring up clients. Color me confused.

You, two posts up:

> If you don't think it's not, you've never tried to design something modern and sleek for lawyers… or tried to persuade somebody who loves floral wallpaper to side with Adolf Loos.

Those? Clients. If you're trying to say that "boys will be boys" and they won't budge on what they want, that seems to be a misunderstanding of what a designer's purpose truly is. If you're a grunt at a low-level agency that hasn't proven themselves yet, this might be the case, but your job is to prove people wrong with data to support your decisions. If they really care more about their brand and your professional insight and experience than they do about adding things for the sake of adding things, they'll throw their aesthetic preferences out the window.

Anyways, I've spent too much time writing on something that the comments here do a good job at justifying without, so I'm leaving it at this.

Apologies for not having the time to elaborate.