I obviously think they're super lame. You?

Unsolicited redesigns are just a way for young naive designers to flex their visual muscles. If you are wanting to do this to showcase your ability to use Photoshop, sure go for it! To think that it is a viable solution for a large company that it can be used in the real world your are living in a dream.

There are larger initiatives behind many product decisions that are beyond most anyone outside the company, to promote yourself with an unsolicited redesign is not very good practice and may detrimental to your career than you may realize.

(I was just going to respond to your previous comment.)

I think it really depends on the purpose. I've been involved with a few (Craigslist, SXSX, IMDB and Jacob Nielsen's UseIt.com) and I enjoyed the projects and though they served a purpose. However, those projects were very clearly defined in scope and purpose and they all clearly stated specific problems they were attempting to address. As well, the goal of these was to showcase process for conference talks.

For others, well, I think they're fun to talk about if they are well thought through and explain how they are solving an existing problem. Design should be about problem seeking AND problem solving. Having said that, if its just more visual fluff, I usually don't pay attention.

An anecdote: During my phone screen with Amazon, the creative director of my team asked me what I would change about the Amazon homepage.

After a few moments of thinking it over, I said, "You know, honestly, I could b.s. about the color scheme or typography or lack of whitespace... but to be totally honest, you guys are known for being data-driven and running tons of experiments. I have no doubt you've optimized the hell out of that page, so any answer I give you will honestly be pretty useless and uninformed."

Got the job.

They remind me of client services or studio work where execution is divorced from the product. Unfortunately that thinking showcases what design is often criticized for — being strictly polish and not fundamental to the product roadmap, development, and success. It's a very shallow representation of what we do.

No matter what we think, they get a lot of mainstream attention, though. So I guess for those that believe "no publicity is bad publicity", it's a great way to promote. I'm sure there are enough uninformed clients out there that get impressed by fluff redesigns.

"They remind me of client services or studio work where execution is divorced from the product."

"It's a very shallow representation of what we do."

Yes and yes. It pushes the same button as Dribbble does for me. YET I don't really have a problem with people doing them. I just have a problem with people's perception that "OMG WHY DOESNT FACEBOOK HAVE YOU ON A PLANE ALREADY" and that design is just glam.

These things (unsolicited redesigns) just smack of design school projects: pretty, but fundamentally shallow exercises.

The designs speak of a lack of understanding of expense. After redesigning our logo, our team spent months iterating on full redesign ideas, color palettes, layouts, typography, etc, only to have the giant "dev cost" hammer drop and smack us back into reality. Soon it was cut to "how can we redesign (to accomodate the new logo) without changing the page layout" and then "how can we do it by only changing graphics, type & colors?" Eventually we had to lose the type changes. Also, half the site (for merchant types) won't get the redesign for another month. And yet it still seems like our design group is asking for the moon.

One interesting thing I picked up with the latest drama is that these are always *visual* redesigns. The change in functionality seems to be glossed over in favour of sparkly gradients, and we're left wondering how anyone could think their idealised Photoshop mockup would work with real data.

Then I remembered Youssef Sarhan's Yo Zuck project. That was a (series of) unsolicited redesigns, but never got any of the criticism that the Dribbble-cruft tends to attract. It was tasteful and well-executed.

Why don't we see more unsolicited UX reviews? More unsolicted front-end rearchitectures?

Jon: I think the FB one in particular actually went past visual into the realm of interaction/UX when they started animating it. Whether or not it was well-done/tacked on is another thing.

Youssef's project is very much on the fine-detail side of things, though, and not a overall reimagining of things. I still think redesigns are fun and a good exercise and the problem is people's reactions to it. Does it mean we shouldn't do them? No. It means we need to educate people.

I can appreciate this as a design exercise, but the majority of design exercises should be private and shouldn't be published.

Jason - I'm not sure I agree. I mean, process, especially for young designers, is pretty important. There is value in sharing process, even if it's just a design exercise and not real. Look at what y'all do at Code School (which I thoroughly enjoy, BTW), you walk people through example projects to teach them the ins and outs of code. It's not exactly a design exercise, but there is a decent amount of process and best practice in addition to the nuts and bolts of code.

I suppose you could argue that many of these aren't teaching well, or perhaps hitting on the wrong things (visual style over content/experience, etc.) but I'm not sure they shouldn't be published at all.

I mean, what about Dribbble? Isn't the majority of that the same thing?

Dude got an interview on TheNextWeb, further proving my point that redesigning [popular site] with stock photos is a great way to grab attention.

Check out this designer’s beautiful vision for a redesigned Facebook thenextweb.com

I'd be curious what y'all thought about the Design Eye stuff, if any of you remember it. Here is a link to the original (published in Communication Arts back in 2004): designbyfire.com

Or our take on Craigslist: rynsms.com

Or Khoi Vinh's: subtraction.com

I'd post the others, but can't seem to find them. Anyway, the goal of these was to teach process by taking problems we saw with existing sites that everyone knew and going through the full process (planning, strategy, content, UI/UX, code, etc.) to see if we could do better. I think what we've seen here is different, but remember that people really enjoyed these exercises and learned a lot from them...

I wish more designers would post their problem solving process. But the keys there are solving problems...and a process.

The issue with most unsolicited redesigns that are published is that the goal is not to solve problems...it's to make it look "better".

If you can take a site and work through real life constraints, use real life assets, and provide solutions to real life user problems, that is incredibly valuable to a designer an may be valuable to others.

Dribbble is in large part just a celebration of "visual aesthetic". As a whole there isn't a lot of process or problem solving in what is posted...there are exceptions of course.

In short I'd live to see more private exercises using existing applications...redesign Facebook trying out different styles, layouts, techniques, principles. Use them as a sandbox in your private professional growth.

Then take what you learn, add it to your process, share that process so others can benefit, then apply it to actual products, applications, or sites.

i came up a good idea about what to do with the "OMG WHY DOESNT FACEBOOK HAVE YOU ON A PLANE ALREADY" people– they should be punished by having to use a facebook designed like that every day :)

I'm wondering if anybody here has had products they designed get 'redesigned' in this fashion. How does it feel? Are there *any* takeaways to be had?

I've done a couple of these redesigns purely for fun and to blow off 'design steam'. When you work on a single project/product for a long time, it's refreshing to go the entire length in a matter of hours, even though it's not practical/useable/actionable.

As Cemre pointed out, it's also a great way to get publicity, but I'd never want to promote or even share those redesigns beyond Dribbble.

I look at redesign as an internal question "if I was the designer behind this product, what would I've done differently ?" Some designers visualize it in their head and others take the time to get it out of their heads. I think that a 'successful' redesign should have the purpose of improving the product usability before making the product visually appealing.

My first reaction to the Facebook redesign was more like "this looks insanely cool (great photoshop skills)" rather than "this design just solved a huge problem." If anything, the redesign made Facebook more complicated and extremely busy."

Crafting experience and making beautiful pixels are two different things.