Dustin Curtis

He's a talented designer and a couple of his blog posts were relatively well talked about a few years back (eg: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html) and he capitalised on that. From what I understand of him he's not had any individual achievement that people care about but it's his ability to write with confidence that gives the impression he has a rich history of experience in all these many fields and so people choose to listen to him. The site that he originally published articles through (http://www.dustincurtis.com) is worth a look just for the quality of the design. Probably his most effective post (the one that most people will have experienced the effects of) is this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

While the big text and focus on content is great, I really think the two-column layout is a disservice to usability on the web. I get to the bottom of the page and am forced to scroll back an arbitrary amount 'til I find the header of the article and start over on the second column. Looks ok, but isn't that thought-through to me. Some interesting design choices to be sure though. I honestly think what Dustin Curtis does with his site (http://dustincurtis.com) is a better testament to how to write and display articles on the web, though his site doesn't claim to be a "web magazine" (whatever that means). A List Apart used to do it well too, but I find their articles quite stale nowadays.

It's not bad design but I have to point out that he's following in Dustin Curtis's footsteps quite closely. Each article is complete with its custom design and an obvious amount of effort goes into the look of each one. http://dustincurtis.com/ He calls it a "blogazine" format. Dustin is the first person I've seen do it, but I'm happy to see it catch on.

If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web. I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building http://dustincurtis.com, and what happened surprised me: after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just don't exist. Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the status quo.

I am pretty sure that this site was hosted on Svbtle as well. His other personal site still seems to be online: https://dustincurtis.com/

This is a great read on the topic: http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html It got a lot of coverage here and elsewhere.

Umm... AA fired the designer, after he wrote back to Dustin Curtis with "an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations."[0] [0]http://www.dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html

He did a couple of things. Svbtle aside, he was the first guy I know of to tell people to follow him on twitter at the end of every blog post. The practice has subsequently spread to the rest of the web. http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html You can see his submissions over time on HN to get an idea of how he's known in this community. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=dustin+curtis…

I think it's an intentional play on the infamous "you should follow me on twitter" sign-off popularized by Dustin Curtis[1] and propagated by bloggers who don't understand the limitations of split-testing. [1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

everything he does comes off as elitist and egotistical. http://www.dustincurtis.com/ - Dustin Curtis is a superhero are you fvckin' kidding me?

You might enjoy reading this. http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Dustin Curtis has some tips for you. http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

D Curtis' A/B testing data does not support this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Please, you don't have to apologize: The quote is great and relevant right now, with the last acomplishment of Elon Musk and his crew that is extraordinarily remarkable. And I think that the determination line of thought is very appreciated here in HN and consistent with your own work. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html http://www.dustincurtis.com/press_on.html Thanks for sharing.

While I applaud the effort, this seems like a very short-sighted project. Design is not about how things look, it's about how things work to advance a set of goals. And it's very difficult to know how things work without research and exploration. Any new design would start with reviewing stats, business goals and the competition. Projects that don't do that should more-aptly be called "re-colouring" or "moving things around to be pretty." Incidentally, there was a designer who did a "redesign" of the American Airlines site a while back and ignited a fire store. The response from one of AA's designers is worth a read: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

It looks nice. It doesn't matter. I'm not convinced that redesigns done in isolation are useful. As the AA designer's reply to dcurtis indicated [1]--in the prototypical example of this kind of stunt--the design can't operate in isolation from the structure and goals of the organization (even if those are dysfunctional). These "blank page" redesigns disrespect the hard work these YC companies are doing A/B testing and talking to users to improve what really matters: conversions. But they are great for self-promotion. [1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

Just because he says > Also, saying "You should move it to the Trash" is weirdly strong wording. when he published a very influential write-up[1] of how he discovered that "you should follow me on Twitter" was the best text to use to actually get people to click the link and follow him. It's not unlikely that people implementing this UI were actually influenced by Dustin's original findings when choosing this wording. So he may be calling his own idea "weirdly strong", which is how I always felt about his "you should follow me on Twitter" phrase (and the resulting explosion of it around the web). It's a meme come full-circle, and the father doesn't recognize it! [1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html Dustin has clout in the web UI/UX/whatever designer blogo-webo-sphere.

I like how @dcurtis approached a similar problem with his open letter containing a redesign of the horrific aa.com website: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html I'm not sure how effective such an approach would be considering it's much harder to get Indian organizations (especially a Government one, oh boy) to respond to feedback of the people, but it's definitely worth a try. As some of us know, Anna Hazare and his stellar campaign against corrupt politicians in India is an inspiration to get Governments to act.

Another and well written article on the same subject: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

I believe this is the article you're referring to? http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

No problem. Actually just in case chrysb's answer is too vague, the reason you see this pretty often is that Dustin Curtis ran an experiment a couple of years ago, which was heavily discussed on HN, in which he concluded that adding the sentence "You should follow me on twitter here" made him get the most click through rate. http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

I thought exactly the same thing about the polyphasic sleep section. To be fair, most of it is admittedly written by Dustin Curtis. If anyone else thought that chapter sounded familiar, it's basically this web page with minimal editing. http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html Going back, I see Tim mentions using the "Everyman" schedule with "great success." If you were cynical, you could interpret that as 'I managed to do Everyman for a while, but the Uberman plan was impossible for me to adapt to long term.'

haha, yeah, good one ;) From what I've seen, it doesn't really work, though Dustin Curtis' article on sleep hacking is most definitely a good read: http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

Some background: http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Dustin Curtis may have a lot to answer for. http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Not that this is what's going on in this case, but the story reminds me of how ducklings can be made to follow anything, presumably thinking that it's their mother. Dustin Curtis wrote a fascinating piece a while ago about similar behavior in newborn seagulls: http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineered_the_seag…

I know my personal wording along those lines, untested, comes from this Dustin Curtis article - http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html I suspect you may be right - reasons work better than 'just because', and I note Dustin didn't test that in his experiment.

Disambiguation: * http://dustincurtis.com/ * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Curtis

http://dustincurtis.com/ is his index of articles, some of which are really good, and all of which have a unique design. They almost all have Hacker News discussions. http://searchyc.com/submissions/dustincurtis.com?sort=by_date_r