new to HN so not sure who sees my replies or who don't, but I should've clarified - what you're saying is what I agree with, in terms of prefab themes.
it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious.
but, time and a place, etc.
and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!
The price point for a very solid HTML5/CSS reasonably-semantic gridded admin theme is $12 to use and $600 for unlimited license. Even the license is a tiny fraction of the cost of any design project.
I am very specifically saying that samey prefabness isn't a liability for web app UI; in fact, I think UX outcome is likely to be superior, since samey prefab admin themes that people will like enough to pay for are all the Themeforest designers tend to build. They're developing palpable expertise.
The liabilities of these themes --- for instance that they are highly non-optimized --- are things that (a) do not matter until you have lots of customers and (b) are not particularly expensive to remediate with contractors after-the-fact.
The liabilities of the DIY approach --- often, a devil's bargain between either waiting weeks or months to get a pro designer to pick up and complete a project, or going to market with a manifestly poor design --- are much higher.
I think for most app devs, not using Themeforest is an expensive, irrational point of pride. It's not good business.
This is a fairly recent revelation for me, so I'm being noisy about it.
it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious.
but, time and a place, etc.
and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!