Build Startup In Public

As founder, I noticed and found that people were “influenced” by leading companies whose websites are trending. While we were building our first iteration of the product, we found that websites and products had started being “influenced” heavily by Notion. Notion was a website with 2 colors - white and black. Again, we observed the same thing when Google rebranded their logo to multiple colors. Suddenly everyone was aping their vibrant color palettes. I see this as an disadvantage, while companies bringing in the trend; have a point of view. The companies aping the trend have no point of view on their customers. When a design or color palette becomes in trend and leaders who brought the pattern in, get all the attention and praise, the rest of us following the trend, subconsciously remind our users of the “leading” trend setter. For multi colored logos aped by companies, for users like me, we are reminded of Google.

For small founder-led teams the advantage of getting influenced by a certain design aesthetic is that we minimize our “brain cycles” and time spent on the topic. Many times, small teams don’t have an experienced designer on board. In those cases, it does make all the sense to save time and money by being influenced by existing designs. A founder friend once told me that they bought design and code templates from the website and used it for as long as 4-5 years, till their design teams started to complain about the fact that their design choices were getting seriously impacted by the design template bought during the initial stages of the startup. 

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