Sorry Amy, I have a lot of respect for you but I think you let your emotions get ahead of you on this one. It seems you're more interested in defending Nathan after helping him with this post than you are in understanding what the actual argument here is; that the blog and the content therein are a mess. Normally I wouldn't care about this in an HN post, but we're talking about someone that considers themselves qualified enough to ask for money on their knowledge of design, targeting people who don't know anything on the subject. Instead of blindly drinking the kool-aid, some of us legitimately care why someone's not practicing what they're preaching and how they have attained this "Darlinghood".

> Here's what you didn't say: "The PAGE is confusing and I didn't like it." Here's what you did say: "DESIGN isn't x or y, it's abc" and "Lots of people xyz." One is clearly a personal opinion; another is an attempt to rely on "truths" instead of your personal opinion (but the "truths" are specious!).

Design is a bento box, the aesthetic is the food. When your bento box doesn't effectively contain everything in a manner that people easily can digest, something is amiss. It doesn't make it any less so because only a "handful" of people were actually vocal about it (which is not true, the top posts complain about these inconsistencies and the one speaking to the actual pricing was admitted as confusing by the author himself).

“Well-designed objects make it clear how they work just by looking at them.” - Joel Spolsky, Affordances and Metaphors

On the topic of opinions I'll also ignore that elsewhere in this thread you concluded that your own headline worked "beautifully" despite the fact that people didn't understand the metaphor and there was no proof that the intended audience wouldn't feel the same way. Furthermore, this entire post is an opinion piece (as noted in the second-most upvoted comment); there's no solid evidence that any of these layouts are any better than the other in actual conversions and some commenters even felt that the last design was the weakest. But to get to the point --

I have a hard time reading and absorbing something that forces me to take in three very large mockups and all of the copy within it. I have a hard time reading lengthy body copy that is formatted poorly (weird/varying indentations of lists and chunks of copy with no subheadings), pasting the entirety of rewritten copy in plaintext instead of letting the mockup speak for itself, and no pull-quotes or otherwise highlights of important changes or concepts to break up the monotony. It was just a huge pain in the ass to read and the mockup designs themselves were incredibly generic, which - again - wouldn't be a big deal if he wasn't ironically selling his expertise on the matter.

A better way to have designed/written this post would have been to let all three sit side-by-side. Speak to the strengths and weaknesses of each and how you came to changes you did in a short, succinct manner (concise blurbs and bulleted lists under each). And like others have said, while I might know who both of you are, that alone doesn't make me inclined to believe you without some actual datapoints to back up the decisions made.

Someone said that this wasn't copywriting so much as landing page design, and that Posthaven's page was much easier to understand. You replied that this has nothing to do with landing page design and that their thoughts on Posthaven's design is merely an opinion. When the layout has to change to accomodate the hierarchy of the copy, it absolutely deals with design. It's about content flow and what that means if you had heatmapped everything out. Only then do you understand what is actually being seen and read.

Posthaven's page works far better than ConvertKit's because it is straight-to-the-point. In 10 seconds I know what it is and what I can expect and what I can do to get started. It isn't wishy-washy marketing bullshit that goes on and on and on, forcing me to scroll all the way down to get to the actual call-to-action. When a tiny box can do a better/faster job at selling me than a wall of text, that's not an "opinion"; that's a fact.

> As for clients, I'm not sure where that comes into the discussion. You are the first to bring up clients. Color me confused.

You, two posts up:

> If you don't think it's not, you've never tried to design something modern and sleek for lawyers… or tried to persuade somebody who loves floral wallpaper to side with Adolf Loos.

Those? Clients. If you're trying to say that "boys will be boys" and they won't budge on what they want, that seems to be a misunderstanding of what a designer's purpose truly is. If you're a grunt at a low-level agency that hasn't proven themselves yet, this might be the case, but your job is to prove people wrong with data to support your decisions. If they really care more about their brand and your professional insight and experience than they do about adding things for the sake of adding things, they'll throw their aesthetic preferences out the window.

Anyways, I've spent too much time writing on something that the comments here do a good job at justifying without, so I'm leaving it at this.