

Ask HN:On Hackers and Aesthetics - thirdrail

How useful is a knowledge of Design (Aesthetics) for a Software Engineer? Both as a Startup Founder and as part of larger firms?
It is common knowledge at my university that people in engineering fields who lack communicative skills and/or design skills are at a disadvantage, how correct is this statement in your experience?
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Detrus
An aesthetic sense takes a while to develop, it's one of those 10,000 hour
skills. Many designers never really get it, just as many working programmers
are not "hackers."

That said it might be useful to check out good art and design inspiration
sites, might help you tell apart the good from the bad and mediocre. You might
see the difference with some beginners luck.

There are a lot of "design blogs" that mimic smashing magazine and post ugly
stuff. Sometimes ugly stuff gets popular. Smashing magazine itself often posts
aesthetically mediocre content.

The trick might be to look at sites that always post top notch stuff and have
designer friends tell you what's pretty and not.

Sites like:

<http://surfstation.com/> <http://butdoesitfloat.com/>
<http://www.designiskinky.net/> <http://spacecollective.org/gallery/>

post aesthetically flawless stuff. When you agree with their selection, you
are an aesthetically proficient designer/artist.

Keep in mind that aesthetics and design are not the same. Good design might
need to be ugly. Google search results are closer to ugly. Aesthetically
obsessed designers would get rid of the underlines, add more white space,
etc.. But Google's purpose is to let you skim results quickly, not to impress
you with how pretty it is.

<http://siteinspire.net/> is a good resource for aesthetically pleasing UIs,
but some of them have poor usability.

As a startup founder you should probably be more concerned with UI/UX,
"design" in the sense of accomplishing goals or conversions, not necessarily
aesthetics. I haven't seen many startups with top notch aesthetics in UIs, so
hard to say how that converts. If you're in a large company and see something
ugly that's supposed to be pretty, it's a sign, just like bad code is.

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bluekeybox
Just throwing my two cents here: I think it is more useful for the startup
founder role, because some knowledge of design lets you better decide which
designer to hire, and also, in the beginning, you will probably be doing a lot
of the design decisions yourself. For working in a larger company -- I doubt
it would be as useful. I would recommend learning some regardless; knowledge
is power as someone said.

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shirohalim
a

