Issue#23: Linear.app, a trend setter in dark theme. Perfect plan doesn't exists
1 design thought and 1 insight about life.
Linear App dark magic
A dark background. Silver font where some areas have less opacity. A sexy slick screenshot of a product’s page. Those are the ingredients. Here is how it looks:
It gave birth to a dark movement. Where 2/5 (statistics made on the spot) SaaS app follow the same pattern. Of course they have a dark background.
It looks good, feels professional and has a feeling of achieving something high.
The title, subtitle and the “get started” button are standard set way before. This is what makes or breaks the landing page.
Here the title feels a bit vague to me. It doesn’t tell me how. Leaves a mystery to it. Even in the subtitle it tells me benefit. But doesn’t tell me the how. I will have to scroll down for that.
The product’s screenshot gives me a little idea. Its like Clickup or Jira.
Scrolling down, the factor of “how” becomes clear. It lists out the parts which stands out from competitors.
So it follows the order of
This will help you achieve this and that
Using this and this features.
This works but leaves a mystery at the beginning.
But then again people planning to use this would be testing the product out before going all in. So buyers consideration span would be longer. Which removes the need for optimizing “how” at the beginning.
Here is the link of the app.
Perfect plan doesn’t exists
I remember when I started out my journey of a creator. I was building an app which would aggregate small stores products. And there would be a search button which will help visitors find items.
An amazon for small stores.
I built a backend system for it. Which would get all the data, format it nicely, store in database. Then it will be accessible to one more server which handled search queries. It was an amazing backend structure.
And guess what happened after that? Nobody cared about the product. I tried to perfect each flaw at start without validating. And wasted my time and energy.
This doesn’t just apply in building stuff. It applies everywhere.
Perfect planning for:
a trip
movie
get together
writing journals
Solving all possible problems that pop up in your plan from start doesn’t work. Such precise planning is required for super precision tasks. Like a military operation or a rescue operation.
But you are not doing that. Your work is more simple. Often the problems that come are simple too. You and I just tend to make it complicated.
So my lesson here is don’t go after perfect plan. Go with simple plan and work on it as you go. Improvise like Jack Sparrow.
Are you working on something now? Do you have a plan? Try to see if its over optimized. Eliminate problems where the downside is low. Elimination is hard and most fruitful.
But I know you got this. Best of luck.
And I will take my leave now. Thank you for reading and see you next week.