The Subtle Art of Celebrating Your Customers
No one's going to be as excited over your redesigned website as you. Pour all your energy into it, craft a singular homepage that takes the design leadership baton from Stripe and Linear, and you'll get kudos for a day or two, perhaps get mentioned in design blogs, and then it's back to the grind. No one other than your team—not even your best customers—will feel ownership and pride in its launch.
Which is the genius of Sketch's site redesign. How do you break out of your rival and their $20 billion acquisition's shadow? How about letting your best customers—and their work, especially—speak for you?
That's how I noticed the new Sketch site. I saw first one tweet, then another, from designers mentioning how excited they were to have their own Sketch site. That's enough to spark your curiosity, click through, and discover a redesigned Sketch homepage that contained multitudes. The default page featured a random scattering of designs—a nice redesign, but nothing that surprising. That is until you click through the tweets and realize there was literally a homepage for each featured designer. A homepage of icons from Gavin Nelson, of illustrations from Viviane Valenta, of landing pages and app designs from Rafael Conde. Real work signed by real designers, who just so happened to use Sketch to bring their magic to life.
And so could you, the site hints, without having to share numbers or forced quotes about why these designers chose to use Sketch.
