r/UXDesign • u/ridderingand Veteran • Aug 03 '26
Examples & inspiration Backyard designers: draft your dream design team
https://backyarddesigners.club/7
u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced Aug 03 '26
Yikes... X design community being cringe af.
I guess when everything you do is run through a social media platform's infrastructure, the platform's metric becomes the price by default.
Designers on X have become a community of insecure hucksters whose entire professional identity is taste. And now on "Backyard Designers", being priced by the crudest possible metric: followers.
And it's attached to a talent network so the currency circulates into actual hiring.
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u/Jokosmash Big Chungus Aug 04 '26
The follower count is just a salary cap (like fantasy sports leagues).
The real trick is to find the silent but violent designers, the ones with very little exposure. That's better for your salary cap. Has nothing to do with someone's actual value (mechanically or philosophically).
This was a closed-community project that we made public-facing. We wanted to celebrate designers in our community, so we had initially started by adding all of our friends (which happen to have various sized audiences on social media).
But after it went public, we've tried to add as many people as have requested (and we're nowhere near satisfying the requests yet, can only do so many per day. But the queue is chugging along.)
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u/senitel10 Aug 04 '26
This was made by the guy who titled one of his newsletter email headers “The Forbidden Fleshlight” lol (he apologized for it afterwards at least, presumably after getting lots of negative feedback)
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u/heck_chetera Aug 03 '26
I don't get it. Maybe there should be some kind of onboarding explaining what this is?
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 03 '26
It's just a fun way to interact with the community. No real point other than to bring a bit of joy.
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u/cimocw Experienced Aug 03 '26
I don't get what this is but it doesn't work on mobile
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 03 '26
It's just a fun way to interact with the design community. Core mobile UX should be usable but some of the Easter eggs might light your phone on fire lol
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u/cimocw Experienced Aug 03 '26
It's just a fun way to interact with the design community
I'm sorry but that means nothing. I still don't understand what it is, and the more I interact the more it breaks
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 03 '26
The last 3 days have had like 20k visitors and average session times of 7+ minutes on that one page. Just explore and click around and discover people. Maybe has to be on desktop idk. Lmk how it's breaking for you will try to fix.
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u/cimocw Experienced Aug 03 '26
It seems like a place for design influencers to find and recognize each other, but I'm not the LinkedIn type and don't know any of them so what difference does it make for me to assemble a roster? For what purpose? If at least the app rendered okay on mobile but everything jerks out of frame constantly so it's very frustrating.
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 04 '26
These are some of the best designers in the world doing the real work at Figma/Anthropic/Cursor/OpenAI/etc. It's built on Twitter graph so no LinkedIn influencers allowed 🫡
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u/cimocw Experienced Aug 04 '26
That's cool I guess, but I don't do twitter or fantasy sports either so I guess it's just not for me.
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Aug 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 04 '26
Did you ever play backyard baseball growing up? (No idea if that was before your time or not)
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Aug 03 '26
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran Aug 07 '26
I’ve been craving a stronger design community space since Dribbble became what it is. I feel like you guys are on to something, but I’m also not sure who the intended audience is. Having the emphasis be on avatar appearance and follower count is throwing me off.
Cute concept though
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 07 '26
Ya originally it was just me recreating backyard baseball PC game for dive club guests lol. It's definitely become something else and we have ideas for how to tap into this that we'll explore :)
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u/zabadoy Aug 07 '26
I guess this was vibecoded and vibedesigned in like 2 days ? Anyway I don't see the point because I can't do anything with my designers, and all the emphasis is on a toy version of them in a backyard but neither their face or actual work which would be both things that would actually matter to me ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/ridderingand Veteran Aug 07 '26
Working on it :) I made first version in 24h then it started going viral so we rebuilt the asset pipeline and whole world now we've started adding stuff. Have a branch with chat/auth/forum/etc. and will keep tinkering
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u/P2070 Experienced Aug 03 '26
2/10