I hosted a competition to fix my terrible website

The UploadThing design contest has concluded, and I'm so thankful to everyone who participated. The results here are so insane. Massive hiring opportunity for anyone looking for a design/engineer hybrid. Btw I added a discount code for 100% off UploadThing's 100gb plan for 3 months - code "designishard"

GRAND PRIZE WINNERS

ALL SUBMISSIONS

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - intro
17:28 - Finalists
22:50 - Winners

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[tdotgg]

QUICK CALLOUTS
- We got the animation down to 1.4mb with minor optimizations, gonna see if we can get below 1mb 👀 ty Rive for help!
- I added a coupon code to get 3 free months of UploadThing's 100gb plan: "designishard"

CHARITIES
- Tom's $500 donation went to ClientEarth
- Kayla's $500 donation went to Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation
- Jack had me donate his $200 to CodeYourFuture
- Phil had me donate his $200 to Education Opportunity Fund

[AlbatrossCommando]

"I'm currently trying to learn design" Bro you've made a better homepage than the majority of fortune 500 companies 💀

[sjzz]

What the hell???? That guy who redesigned the whole page definitely deserve the win.

[drooplug]

My head exploded when I heard Theo pronounce ASCII as assy.

[artemijspavlovs]

I hope Theo noticed that in Tom's design, as you scroll down from the hero section, the progress bar goes to 100%

[merlinwarage]

The "animations only 4 megs". lol

[wlockuz]

If Phil is still learning design, then I am basically striking rocks together in my Figma cave.

[Zeno_VT]

This video did a wonderful job showcasing how UploadThing, your channel and this community continue to grow and evolve over time. I think the contest was a wonderful extension of this idea and what I wish more coding/design channels were about.

For those commenting about quality of submissions, remember these people put their own time to make something for this contest with the idea that there would only be 1 winner in mind to win the $500. Expecting submissions to meet some subjective standard of an paid industry professional is simply unrealistic and quite frankly not what Theo wanted for his website (he said so at the start of this video).

[tizu]

I love how theo didn't want mouse cursors but the end result (see the website) contains three

[lakitu]

The rive animation takes between 4-8 seconds (uncached) to show up for me on ~50Mbs down in Europe. For something that's meant to catch the user's attention, that's way too long IMO. It doesn't seem to be automatically cached either, so any subsequent page reloads have the same problem

[RazoBeckett.]

ASCII one killed it. considering Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my most favorite game, if i would have done this contest, ... that's the winner 🏆. loved it so much 🔥

[SeaWaves]

"just 5 megabytes animation" seriously? it's quite a lot for this animation

[johnnytestarossa]

Well tbh most of them have nice "graphic design" but from a customers perspective (as a developer) none of these designs explains to me what uploadthing does differently in comparison to s3 and why I should give them my money. Imho the hero graphic should explain to me without having to scroll once what the service does differently. I would've taken part but missed the announcement :( maybe next time. Good job to all tho

[Drayken]

4:50 nah just happen to be a compulsive generalist monkey who's self-sufficient in a lot of stuff due to solo webdev, gamedev/level design, multimedia etc (can probably tell from my channel it's all over the place). Came in for fun and spent a couple min going for fitting inked/flat to match existing folder spec. If I knew how to animate svgs def would've wanted to spend the time adding files + loading anim. Does make a better card icon than anything for sure. Like the overall website redesign as well, it's cool to see that you essentially modernized the initial simplicity you had while avoiding taking itself too seriously like all those other overengineered sites these days (and corporate templates). Feel like it speaks to the no bullshit simplicity/accessibility of the service.

[deventerprises]

Give a professional graphics and web designer to design a webpage❌

Host a competition to design a webpage✅

[last.journey]

I noticed some of the fancy 3d designs are glassy and give me windows 7 era vibs and am loving it it feels gorgeous and also nostalgic

[a.yashwanth]

Adding a live upload right on the home page and showing the preview of the file right there would make this even better.

[dylankuzmick]

Already my 5th time or so coming back to this vid. Just want to say that I'm learning so much from this 1 video Theo, and the positive interactions you're having with everyone is making me feel much more excited to get into this field. So thank you for showing off all these great creators and their unique takes! Maybe one day I'll make it onto a list like this :)

[tarwin]

Holy hell. The Rive animation is 5mb?!

Makes me miss Flash. That could be done in 100kb max. 😢

[marcoio]

That's 100 points right there, mate. You could have played the card of "Make me a design and I'll feature you in the video" (I have seen so many YTbers do it, in one flavour or another) but you decided to 1. pay them 2. offer to charity. Sure, you'll be getting revenues from this video but still, I salute you. Not that I was doubtful, I have been following you and I think you are generally honest and fair, but it's good to see it also. 👍