Unsolicited redesign is a strange beast
From time to time an unsolicited redesign pops up and receives a lot of attention. This time it was Fred Nerby’s take on Facebook’s look and concept.
Unsolicited redesigns are a new look on something familiar and they seem to be an interesting experiment or exercise for the designers creating them. That is great.
On the other hand they are completely based on assumptions. They are missing a basic building block of good design – understanding the needs of a client. That is something a designer gains by direct communication with his client. It is like telling someone you barely know, that they should change their haircut. Brandon Harris said this well in Quora thread about Wikipedia: What does the Wikipedia community think of “The Wikipedia Redefined” concept?
I know, authors of unsolicited redesigns usually don’t explicitly say that the target of their redesign has to consider the new concept. The problem I see there is that they don’t say anything at all on this topic and silently wait what will happen.