Show HN: Want to learn design? Try Design Lab.

In my experience, of the best ways to get started in design is to replicate other people's designs as perfectly as you can, just to get the hang of designing something good.

For example, the other day I recreated the hat icon here: http://hicksdesign.co.uk. This is mine: http://cl.ly/GYHw.

If you make one thing every day, you'll eventually be pretty good at fleshing out your own ideas.

Resources: http://pttrns.com; http://teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-4-gui-psd-retina-display; http://dribbble.com

Not to be an ass, but the first thing I questioned when I came to the site was "If this is the best design they could come up with, what does that mean for the education?"

Sign up and design failure aside, I question what this site will do. Design a logo in 30 minutes? Design a one-page flyer with a minimum of 5 typefaces? Those aren't exercises, those are bad practices.

There's an overabundance of people who call themselves designers and not enough people who truly understand it and care about it at a depth that creates good products, not broken experiences. There's already an influx of graduates with degrees that show nothing except that they put the time in. There's an abundance of sites (ahem Awwwards, Smashing Magazine, Dribbble) that do their part to promote bad design as good design. And not to speak ill of any good designers who work for Google, but as a company they're not exactly known for it - quite the opposite. I would prefer qualified guest designers or actual professors as opposed to 'vetted' corporate employees to judge my work.

I don't think people need Design 101 anymore. I think we need a place for seasoned designers and people who are making the switch from print to web or design to front-end coding to fully understand what they're getting into.

As others have pointed out, the signup is broken/down.

But also: how much does it cost? "Get started for free." is interpreted by my cynical self to include the closing phrase "and as soon as you're interested, it's going to cost a lot to continue."

No contact information, no price information... what is this except an email harvesting exercise?

If you're going to design an online course to teach design, you actually have to know something about teaching design.

The foundation of a solid design education is actually the fine arts -- that's why since the days of the Bauhaus first year students study fine arts in a foundation year, and then spend the next few years studying applied design. The reason? Because before you can play with layout and typography you need to know about color theory and yes even subjects like art history. Learning the techniques of design without the basics is like trying to be a writer by learning all the functions of MS Word but not having read Shakespeare.

PS It's also slightly dishonest to put to put a photo of Steve Jobs down there which indirectly implies that he would approve.

Hey guys - cool idea. I tried entering my email, and there's no success indicator. Click the button, and nothing. Not sure if I just signed up 10 times, or failed to sign up at all :/

This sites design is....not good. The font is hard to read at that size, the icons are blurry, the quotes at the bottom look like endorsements on first view.

Needs some more time in the oven I think.

Hey HN, we've noticed that people are starting to understand how valuable design is these days - in order to make great products, design is arguably as important as engineering. Like HN-er @shl says, "everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy" (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669189/pinterests-founding-desi...). The problem is, we haven't yet found a straightforward way to learn how to become a better designer.

We built a simple product to address this, based on one core principle: the best way to learn design is by doing projects that force you to master the concepts, while allowing you to practice your creativity.

We'll start sending out the first project emails in a couple weeks, so sign up and save a spot! We'd love any and all feedback about this. Thanks!

Not to be mean but the site's fonts look absolutely horrible on Chrome 20 in Windows 7. The top ones look messy and thick and the bottom one looks much too thin:

http://i.imgur.com/KUVwh.png

Tried signing up through your Sign Up text box on the website, but when I click the "Sign Up" button to submit my email, nothing happens.

For those experiencing issues, I can attest that it was working perfectly a short time ago.

I've gotten a confirmation email, and the "View the full curriculum" link resulted in an overlay.

Edit: Just a note here. The "View the full curriculum" link doesn't work because designlab.js contains HTML instead of the script.

Link: http://s3.amazonaws.com/designlab_static/js/designlab.js

There was that book called Bootstrapping Design (http://bootstrappingdesign.com/)

http://blog.studiofellow.com/2011/11/01/bootstrapping-design...

As a designer, it makes me sad to see that while Design Lab is using a dot grid background, they failed to align the elements on top of the grid. (Good example of this: http://gridness.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sushi-and-rob...)

It's that kind of attention that really makes designs shine, not to mention aligning elements like that does a lot to make a design feel cohesive and less chaotic. It's disappointing to see a website purporting to teach design to miss a detail like that.

(Big fat notice: This is not a criticism!)

I love how the row of quotes about design from Jobs, Graham, and Maeda look and feel like testimonials due to their format and placing, yet are not. This is an interesting technique. As a random visitor used to analyzing my internal responses to things like this, it makes me feel good yet analytically I realize anyone can throw up quotes like this. Clever!

I'm excited about this. I've been reading design books for a while looking to become a more well-rounded developer but have struggled turning reading a book into actual design projects. So I'm excited about this format - weekly design challenges, feedback from peers and experts, and progressively advanced challenges.

Also, the sign up worked for me. So it must be fixed by now.

Are you guys part of the H&FJ web font beta? Or are you using Gotham on the web in violation of your license agreement with them?

I don't think I want to learn design from a site that hurts my eyes. Great concept but should be done by people that can design.

I must confess my heart sunk for a split second as we're working on the exact same problem with a very similar approach at http://method.ac, but as they say: if there's no existing competitors it means that the problem likely doesn't exist in the first place.

Looking forward to competing when we launch too!

Very cool, but this portion is hard to read - and made me an immediate skeptic of the authority behind the product: http://i.imgur.com/1kddf.png

Great idea but wish sign up wasn't busted (as everyone points out).

I am interested to actually see what the curriculum looks like when you get in. I think you can cover a lot of design principals effectively without studying art history. I am sure you will find a great many designers just fell into their current field with no formal training.

I don't know if it's so much about having the formal training and instead would be having an eye and then developing that eye. Design is really whatever you want it to be.

The site is functionally and visually broken:

- Not cross-browser compatible, completely broken in IE

- UI lacks instant feedback for submitting forms

- Not pixel perfect (icons are blurry, poor font choice)

- Broken links

I want to describe this as the "Codecademy for Design" but Codecademy lets you complete lessons before pushing you to sign up. I would've never signed up otherwise -- because I already know how to code but the interface/approach appealed to me. I know it would require a slight infrastructure change on your part to implement this but might pull in more users in the end.

No offense. But if you are making a site to teach people how to be better designers, you shouldn't make the site so ugly. This seems like a simple bootstrap site, but much uglier. I think it would have been better to just use the defaults. You might want to work on the design of the site to get more people to sign up. I probably would have signed up otherwise.

I have some good things and some bad things to say.

In the good column, I signed up (looks like you fixed the signup) and am looking forward to taking the course. Alas, I can't design my way out of a wet paper bag, so it may prove to be an exercise in futility...:)

In bad news, the site looks horrid in Chromium 18 for Ubuntu 11.04. Feel free to send me email if you'd like a screen shot.

In a "watch and learn" example of the halo effect, note the quoting of people on why to learn design. Personally the effect would work much better if they hadn't quoted Jobs. At a quick glance if they had just Graham, John Maeda and one other person or equal stature it might have seemed like a personal endorsement of sorts.

I like the idea of setting challenges, it's certainly more useful to me than the tutorial route.

This is a cool idea. Initially I wondered how you would be able to 'teach' such an amorphous skill set but your use of experts/peers seems smart.

I'd like to be more involved than a user= if you all were open to it but I don't consider myself an 'expert'.

I would expect a site like this to provide a good user experience, e.g. confirmation that my email address was accepted. Signed up all the same because it sounds like a great idea and just what I'm looking for.

Nothing happens when I click the Sign Up button. Chrome Beta, Win7.

I like the site. I decided to sign up. There was problem. After, I hit the sign up button, nothing occurs. I have not received a confirmation email. Am I missing something?

I bet there are designers who read HN who would like to teach developers design in exchange for development tutorials. Is there a HN Academy? Perhaps we should start one.

I think a plain white background for the site would have sufficed. It adds contrast, minimizes the noise and makes things cleaner and more legible.

Has anybody tried to email the website to ask a specific question and the delivery failed? I could possibly be emailing the incorrect email.

I wasn't really sure what to do after I got on the website..I just gave you my email but is the curriculum supposed to come via email?

I think the OP needs to pay attention a bit on the UX of his site first, getting 500 error is not a good sign.

Not exactly a confidence booster, is it possible that hits are the goal? Pretty weak sauce if so.

Being as commenters here are criticizing this site, what are some alternatives?

My Chrome JS console gives me a 500 error when I try to sign up.

I get a 500 when I try to sign up.

Getting 500 error.

Site's down.

My lord, someone look at it in IE9.

This is just laughable.