Thanks to the Clients from Hell, the Rules for My Unborn Son, and the Sad Don Drapers, the blogging platform Tumblr is about to hit a major milestone: 10 billion blog posts. Yet as its user base swells, Tumblr itself has miraculously managed to stay relatively petite: Only 45 people are on staff, including a surprisingly tiny product team consisting of five people. And for such a design-savvy, image-driven platform, here's the most surprising fact of all: Tumblr's design department consists of only one designer, Tumblr design director Peter Vidani. "It's really just me right now," he tells Co.Design, laughing. "So I direct myself."
That will change in the near future as Tumblr is hiring a designer and reportedly seeking a big round of funding, at a valuation of $800 million. While Vidani declined to comment on any of the financial aspects of Tumblr, he did provide some insight into the company's design strategy -- and what they're looking for in their #2 designer.
Vidani sits at the table with a five-person product team.Where more established tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are just recently starting to attract big-name design talent to bulk up their design chops, Vidani thinks that Tumblr already is, and always will be, a design-centric company. He attributes most of this to the fact that he's at the table with that five-person integrated product team, which he says acts like a "hive mind," bouncing ideas off each other, and making decisions as a group. "If marketing needs something designed, it comes through product," he says." Every facet, every feature needs to be looked at in the same regard."
A key tenet of Tumblr's design aesthetic is obvious from looking at its interface: Simplicity. "We really enjoy seeing a small simple page free of clutter," says Vidani. "If we can get rid of anything, we will." While other blogging platforms might hype their range of constantly growing features, Vidani says, his team does everything they can to minimalize them, or, in some cases, remove them. "We think the users are smart, and don't need things 'sold' to them," he says. "Keeping this in mind gets rid of the clutter, like labels and chatty copy."
Another design goal for Tumblr is the idea of taking away the intimidation of blogging -- you know, the dreaded confrontation of an empty page. This is achieved with with smaller text fields and even a range of non-text options. "We don't want to make you feel like you need to write three paragraphs and post a photo," he says. "You can just post a photo." The reason the "Create Post" button to publish a post is so big and shiny? They want you to feel good about pushing posts out in the world, as often as possible.
This flexible, friendly format has made it a favorite for designers and other creatives, who have praised Tumblr for its visual focus. Tumblr has found a way to evangelize those designers by showcasing the thousands of themes, or customized skins that change the look and feel of their blogs, that designers have created for the brand. Tumblr curates two galleries of themes for their users: Featured Themes, exceptional free themes which are brought to their attention and promoted through the signup process; and Premium Themes, where Tumblr reaches out to talented designers to contribute themes, and they get paid for their work by users who download them. This is a win-win situation. "It's the best way for a designer to get their names on the web in a short amount of time," says Vidani. "And it's to our advantage to give users the best themes and designers we can."
"If we can get rid of anything, we will."Vidani himself started his web-design career designing themes, part of his roundabout career before his arrival at Tumblr, working in post-production for reality shows and then at the homepage manager start.io. He values the kind of experience that might come from working outside of or in curious corners of the tech industry. In looking for designers, he's particularly interested in candidates who have some skills in illustrative and print work. "It's a telling sign that they have experience in art and not just making buttons on the web."
Designers joining the team now could have the chance to build a young but established brand that still has a great deal of freedom. For example, the product team doesn't do A-B testing or polls, says Vidani. Tumblr uses its own built-in audience of beta testers -- its own employees. Of course, with Tumblr's incredible growth has also come growing pains. Users have grumbled about the site's excessive service outages, which have caused downtime as long as 36 hours for the platform. While that's not necessarily a design issue, it's a potential challenge for a growing team.
As Tumblr's traffic skyrockets to over 90 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, according to Quantcast, Vidani has been busy expanding the platform into mobile apps, like the recent release for Android. Several more new features -- top secret, of course -- are on the horizon, but Vidani assures Tumblr fans that even as they continue to grow, design is a prized value for the company, both inside and out. "We always say we're making the best creative tools for the most creative people in the world," he says.
via fastcodesign.com
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