

Ask HN: Should hackers know how to design?  - sam191

Just curious how everyone deals with the design of their sites. For a one-man bootstrapped startup, outsourcing is not an option. How much should a programmer (with no design skills) know about design, and how much is usually required for a decent looking site?<p>On another note, is it pretty much impossible to be a freelance web developer without knowing or having someone else take care of the design aspect?
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yesbabyyes
Of course it's good for a web developer to have a feel for design! At least at
some level. Getting a feel for flow, balance, typography and colors at least
at a level where you can recognize what makes a great design great, is a huge
advantage.

There are some great resources for design, which I think can be approached by
a typical programmer.

* Grid layouts such as <http://960.gs/> and <http://www.blueprintcss.org/>

* Typogrify which helps you create better typography (and is also a resource for stuff to think about!) <http://code.google.com/p/typogrify/>

* Compass makes it easier to create good design with standards <http://compass-style.org/>

* Good read on typography [http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...](http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/)

* Color schemes <http://colorschemedesigner.com/>

On your other question, yes that sounds really, really tough. You should have
a few people in your circle, to work with and to bounce ideas with. I wish I
had more, knowledgeable designers myself, to learn from.

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vitovito
One of the things that has come out of some of the workshops I run is that
even "design" is so broad that "designers" can't know everything about design,
either; we have to specialize into visual design, testing, print, web, etc.

What _is_ important is having the theoretical/academic basis for all of them,
because it can greatly inform your decisions about your work and let you pull
from a wider swath of experience.

I don't think you should have to be a graphic designer in order to be a web
developer. You probably shouldn't be (and I find myself increasingly disliking
generalists). But you should understand the principles of design, and know
what goes into making a graphic work, and how designers communicate and the
vocabulary, just as you should know the same sort of things on the back-end
for the operating system, hardware and network environment your software is
deployed on.

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richtofen
Answering the base question - everyone is a designer - a Hacker, a civilian,
all. All persons I know of (where I am currently located) are hackers -
whether they know how to write computer code, or otherwise. The way I see it,
'hacking' is a means of getting around an existing system - Gandalf and the
white-cloaks wrote the machine language of Middle Earth, as do the jay-walkers
of New Delhi write the unwritten civilian traffic codes, in the presence of
abstract rules. 'Design' too, is nothing more than creative problem-solving.
Anyone is engaged in the act of 'designing' as much in figuring out the best
way to tie shoelaces in record time - as figuring out user interaction in a
computational setting. Just apply the art. And science. Together. A hundred
years ago, they were called Architects - of building, because code did not
exist, and building was the only code available.

Cheers!

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lovskogen
Maybe not how to, but they should know design. Everyone should be a design
observer, because it's so present in everything we do.

