Easel: Design without a Designer | Hacker News Reader

Easel: Design without a Designer

blog.easel.io

81 pointsmcolyer23 comments

The gist of the post is not that you don’t need a designer, it’s rather that you should become one. Which is fine if you have some basic enthusiasms and talent in the area. As a designer it sort of pisses me off that people are going to skip hiring me, as a teacher I feel great about people learning about design :)

I would never recommend dribbble though, it’s glossy run of the mill boring stuff! You’d do better with dabbling in design history… My favourite design education text is the book ‘Thinking with Type’, which combines practical knowledge with a inspirational reading of typographic history, renaissance books, swiss grids, postmodern experiments http://www.thinkingwithtype.com/

The post is aimed at people who admit they can't design well. Starting with the boring run-of-the-mill stuff is exactly what they need.

For people with some good designs of their own under their belt, moving onto more advanced topics is appropriate.

That’s like saying that if you want to learn how to paint you shouldn’t be visiting the Louvre, you should go to a mediocre art fair instead! That’s not true, you need great examples at each stage of the journey.

Interesting feedback. What I meant to communicate is that there are some simple rules that people can follow to apply a minimal level of design to what they build.

However it's really no substitute for having someone whose sole role is design. So people shouldn't skip hiring you, but use these suggestions to hold them over until they could afford you.

A designer's job is not about using tools to make things look good. A designer job is to make decision about how things work together. And because of that, this post title pissed me off. If you're talking about a visual tool, talk about the tool, don't say you can design without designer.

The title should be Designing without design :)

I am a little confused as to how this is helpful (I did read it)

As far as iOS goes, for the recommendation to look at Dribbble, I'd substitute pttrns to see iOS app designs. For the recommendation to have a style guide, you can use a theme protocol (in the 2012 WWDC videos, I THINK it's the UI Design video, the one about the rocket ship).

On the recommendation to look at sites like Kuler, are color schemes copyrightable? I see people claiming copyright on colourlovers.

IANAL so I can't say for sure but the COLOURlover team doesn't seem to think that the palettes are copyrightable, as copyrights cover specific executions and not the colors themselves.

http://www.colourlovers.com/forums/1,1,149/Copyrighting_colo...

demo looks great. can't wait to try it out for real!

Neat app. I'll be using this when it launches.

Love Easel.

If you're not a designer, don't design. Just focus on building your product, app, service, whatever. Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product itself works as advertised and is fun to use.

Set your hourly rate, configure it to represent how much time you think you'd waste sifting through online designs and spend that amount on a decent theme that will work with Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework that a developer can configure.

Designers don't post billable collateral on the web. They're too busy working and keeping their design under the radar is part of the business. They don't have a Github mindset so don't bother trying.

> Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product itself works as advertised and is fun to use.

This is so wrong on so many levels. Of course it will hinder the adoption. In fact a poor design is likely to kill it altogether.

For one, and print this out in bold Comic Sans and hang it at the eye level, - "First impression lasts." If something looks like poop, no one will bother checking out if it works as advertised.

For two, and this follows from #1, a good product with a poor design is not likely to outperform a poor product with a good design simply because there will be fewer people trying former.

For three, it's not "fun to use", it's "a pleasure to use," again meaning that the visual component is the product is vital. Show me a poorly designed product that is fun to use. Seriously.

Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects. It is about forming an appropriate product impression. You just can't expect an average user to look past an ungodly frontend and appreciate the beauty of the guts. This just doesn't happen. You need... strike that... you must consider the design at the same level of importance as any other feature of the product. The same goes for "oh, just pick a theme" - sure, but it's a goddamn theme that's used in hundreds other places, so guess what - it comes with a "generic shit" tag. You want to have your blog/site/service have this vibe - fine, but is it sensible thing to do - hardly.

> "First impression lasts."

You're obviously too young to recall the first versions of Facebook or maybe you haven't even taken a good hard look at the latest one. They all suck but they're fun for their users and adoption rates speak volumes.

> Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects.

You have no idea about what you're talking about. You're not even a rookie.

"Just focus on building your product"

That's what we call design.

The command key shortcuts don't work on Linux, and that's particularly critical as the reason I am interested in this app is that I can't run the Adobe suite.

(And will never work, because I use xmonad and my super key is reserved for that.)

Did you try control key instead of command?

Apologies for the apple key on the demo. We'll fix it soon. In non-mac environments, the control key is substituted for all key commands.

Control key worked. The reason for the confusion is I am a Mac user and the cmd key is the super key on Linux. I'm even using an Apple keyboard :P

Thanks for clearing that up.

Off-topic - but doesn't that confuse you? I gave up on desktop linux - partly because I don't like Gnome 3 or Unity (Gnome 2 was good though) but also because my fingers are so used to Cmd-S, Cmd-T etc. I tried mapping Ctrl to the Cmd key but that breaks other stuff (like the Unity launcher).

>Off-topic - but doesn't that confuse you?

Nope, I've been using multiple OSes since I was a wee boy.

>partly because I don't like Gnome 3 or Unity

I don't use either of those, I use XMonad. XMonad is about 33% of why I prefer Linux to OS X.

>but also because my fingers are so used to Cmd-S, Cmd-T etc.

wee boy, multiple oses, etc. I use Emacs and vim concurrently as well (although Emacs is my primary editor for programming 97% of the time).

>I tried mapping Ctrl to the Cmd key but that breaks other stuff (like the Unity launcher).

Train the mind, train the hands. Linux, OS X, Windows, and Emacs are practically part of my spinal cord.

The video gaming probably didn't hurt either.

Nice, some good little tips here!

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