Loving this! I got really tired of logo redesigned that stripped all personality e.g. the recent Basecamp logo redesign. This redesign actually adds more personality.

I always find Amazon fascinating from a design perspective. It's without comparison the most successful e-commerce business. Yet, most designers wouldn't design the site like this if they opened Sketch. Why is there such a big difference in what a design evolves into and the design you would come up with if you sat down a designed it?

No, let's ask Figma to save us.

I like these colors better :D

Ok, got it.

Why do you think that?

I think you are right

Not really. I would say the most important thing is to hire the right persons. If people have been working as designers in large agencies, they might have taught themselves the wrong way to work and are stuck in that mindset. The culture of startups is very different. In agencies you often get paid per hour - it doesn't matter much if it takes 8 or 12 hours to finish a design task. In a startup you should be ask yourself if you need to do a "design" at all before any work is done. Can we skip the a design in photoshop and just do the design while prototyping in HTML? That's the sort of thinking that is valuable to startups.

I've had both and I can share my experience. When you are running a startup you have two resources that are incredibly scarce: Money and time. If a designer (or any employee) fails to understand that, then he/she is a bad fit for a startup.

I can give an example: we had to redesign a part of the UI. It took a designer we hired about 2 weeks to create a pixel-perfect design. It was handed to a developer who ended up doing it slightly different because the design didn't work on the underlying front-end framework (it would take a long time to change). This was simply too much time spent compared to the value we as a company got from the design.

In comparison, we had a designer who skipped all drawing tools and just cranked out the layout in HTML, CSS and JS. He ended up making much more pleasant solutions because he could work with the interaction design more easily. He would spend 10-20% of the time to solve a task and at the same time do some of the devs work.

This won't work for all types of design work - these examples were very focused on UI/interaction design.

The last thing I would add is to make sure designers in startups are ready to switch tools, workflows etc. Being flexible and have a broad skill set is great for startups. A startup by definition will change a lot. One year you are two person team, a couple of years later you might be 20 or 50. It's very important that the employees can evolve along with the company.