An easy to follow design course for programmers | Hacker News Reader

An easy to follow design course for programmers

hackdesign.org

171 pointsthecosas55 comments

I tried to watch the first video but I cannot use netflix in my country. No problem, let's watch the youtube playlist"The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Ok, I will rent it on youtube: "This movie is not available in your country."

And then they ask why the people use the pirate bay...

Exactly, why is this content available to US users for free (via Youtube) but I have to pay because I'm outside of the US ? I guess it's to do with youtube ad revenues for US impressions but as a customer it makes me feel a bit shafted considering that you will, in no way, make $3.99 from a single US user watching this on youtube.

However, I appreciate that you're doing this course for 'free' and I do think it's a great idea. Just wish I didn't have to pay for the very first video that I want to watch. Why not provide a TPB magnet link ?

It really sucks. In fact, I wholly believe that many people will turn away from Hack Design because there's essentially a paywall right out of the gate. I don't regret my choice to start with this film, though.

Objectified had a profound impact on me as a designer. I first watched it in a slump of disenchantment that my "web design" skills would never amount to anything valuable or earth-shattering. This film gave me perspective. It showed me that, in extreme cases, design can make the world a better place.

There are moments in this film that give me the shakes. It resonates so deeply with what I believe, and what I want to achieve during my career. I can't think of any better way to help put hackers into the mindset that I believe is most conducive to learning the basics of design.

I hope you figure out a way around paying an exorbitant amount of money to watch the film, and hopefully see you next week for Lesson 1.

I'm glad that Objectified seems to have had such a large impact on you, but this really isn't a good way of starting this course, or any course for that matter. Reading Dieter Rams' ten principles of "good design"[1] would be much more practical.

Also, if the site is going to be focused on helping people with design, you should make sure the design of the actual site is good. Few issues that I saw:

-404 page should at least have the logo to know you're still on the same site

-/courses & /lessons/0 should have the full logo with the page title elsewhere

-Log in page animation does nothing for design and can confuse people into thinking they can type after the text

-Has already been mentioned, but the contrast in some areas could use work. Tasks for example should be the main focus point, yet the text is light grey.

-Using social media icons everywhere takes away from design IMO

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Rams.27_ten_princip...

If it wasn't for the conversation here on HN, I would have assumed the whole site was just a referral-scam. Not just a paywall, but a scam, since there is zero warning upfront until after you've subscribed.

And please, unless what you do is explicitly aimed at the US, treat all users as equal. We're not "international users", just list the options equally for everyone.

It's a very interesting documentary, thanks for the tip. I am looking forward to the rest of the course.

They seem to have added more links:

http://www.amazon.com/Objectified/dp/B002SOUVKU/

http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/stream/

The Amazon link don't work internationally I think. I can't download because "It is only available on US".

The objectifiedfilm works fine though. Downloading right now...

Likewise as an Australian. If you're going to make things like this, please consider non-US users.

I hate to be "that guy" but I'm genuinely having a hard time reading this page.

  * thin white text on light grey buttons
  * thin light grey text on almost matching light grey background
    (anti-spam message below email input)
  * small thin light grey text on white background
  * on highlight, dark grey text on... burnt orange?!

I'm in the target market for this program -- a developer whose design skills are pretty weak -- but the landing page is a big turn-off. Even I can recognize when fonts are needlessly small and low-contrast.

EDIT: Pull up your favorite color contrast analyzer and run this site through it. Using AccessColor, the results are ~4% failure and ~75% warning for WCAG 1.0 standards.

There is a site dedicated to the topic actually: http://contrastrebellion.com/

I think there is a difference between "looks good aesthetically" and "readable" and sometimes making it more readable doesn't overlap with pure artistic choices, so sometimes it's the best designers that fall into this trap.

Edit: see previous discussion on this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047

I might cut them a bit more slack if the image to the CTA wasn't for "Typography Crash Course"!

Thanks for the reminder on Constrast Rebellion.

I am not sure which part you are referring to, but here i see mostly black text on white background.

but that is the landing page, the email itself is indeed hard to read (all the problems you mentioned).. I waited several seconds after opening the email because I thought the CSS haven't finished rendering.

I see black text on white background as well, but since multiple people are mentioning this problem, I'm suspecting that the landing page is being A/B tested as we speak.

UPDATE: Either the maintainers are responding to feedback or, as speculated downthread, some A/B testing is going on. If the latter is the case, pick B, for the love of all that is holy!

Responding to feedback because I love you and you were right.

Agreed.

I kept mousing over the low contrast areas expecting it to dynamically change to a darker font.... no dice.

What operating system are you using? It looks great on OS X 10.8.2.

In case anybody is not aware, TreeHouse has a lot of design courses available for free.

http://teamtreehouse.com/library

I am in Singapore and as like other people here, has hit a pay-wall. The issue is at the landing page, it says: "Receive a design course in your inbox each week" which gives me an impression these courses are free. I understand good things usually aren't free, but not saying it up front until I gave my email address is something that I don't like. Therefore, I am not going back

I'd feel happier going along with this is the commercial relationship between hackdesign.org and the makers of the Objectified documentary was upfront and clear before sign-up for a putatively free course. There's nothing wrong with making money this way (if they are, I can't tell). But tell us, before asking for email addresses: what it actually costs, and whether (in your country) you can even get the required content.

"Application Offline for Maintenance" at 3:40 PM PST.

Edit 1: And at 3:41 PM its up. Spoke too soon.

Edit 2: And its back to a screeching halt at 3:42 PM.

Edit 3: Ups and downs. Works for 1-2 minutes and then breaks. 4:15 pm. I still haven't managed to read a whole lesson. Its a slow day so I'll check again in half an hour.

Back online now.

Site took a long time to load, but when it did, I gladly signed up. Got my first email already.

Really looking forward to this, thanks.

* Edit, It appears that the video "Objectified" (Or at least the preview) is not available to rent from YouTube in Canada. "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." :(

I don't have time to try renting it right now, but I'll test it this weekend. Perhaps only the trailer is unavailable. Can anyone test/confirm?

How about Vimeo? http://vimeo.com/12793996

This works, thank you!

If you're outside the US, try here for Objectified: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/stream/

Tip: make your lesson 1 a "free demo" or something if you want to get more people interested! (the only reason I didn't say "fuck this" and moved on after amazon said it won't stream the video to me because I'm not in the US was because I happened to remember the Helvetica documentary and thought maybe it's worth the pain...)

For the 1st lesson I don't have Netflix and the youtube playlist is not available in my country (Brazil) :(

I was all excited and then ... Seriously? Objectified is your first lesson?

http://www.amazon.com/Objectified/product-reviews/B002SOUVKU...

I'm not sure if this is free or not. Someone in the comments below mentioned this was a bait and switch scam where they make it look free, then push some payments on you.

Any confirmation on the 'free' status of this course?

I can't seem to be able to change my password. Is that not implemented yet or am I not looking in the right place?

Great idea by the way. Looking forwards to the lessons.

Not implemented yet. You'll have that functionality once we launch.

Objectified is okay. The Eames documentary is much more interesting in terms of the design process, as is the Milton Glaser one.

Super slow to load the page and just got an application error.

Looks nice, hopefully I'll get on and learn a thing or two :)

Looks like their servers aren't quite up to the task - I'm only getting half-formed content.

I can't even get the first lesson. This is a lesson to all developers. Don't underestimate the power of HN.

On it, fellas. We weren't expecting so many beta signups... didn't think we needed more dynos until launch ;)

Check back in a few minutes, we're already working on it.

How much traffic are you actually getting?

HN doesn't drive all that much traffic to a site, even for sites at the top of the first page. It's virtually nothing compared to what Slashdot could drive to a site in its heyday, or what reddit's front page can drive today.

I don't mean to offend you, but something is seriously wrong with your web app, your database(s) or your other infrastructure if it can't withstand a relatively minor amount of traffic. It's hard to tell for sure given all of the application errors, but it seems like your web app's functionality is pretty basic.

How many requests per second do you think a website needs to be capable of serving to handle the traffic from HN? (Performance newbie here)

Well, it depends on the site in question, of course. But we can make some estimates, if you want.

In the past, I've talked to some colleagues who've had content hit the front page here, and they reported numbers ranging from around 1,000 unique visitors to about 30,000 visitors over a one-day period. So it can vary quite a bit, apparently.

Let's assume that things are more intense than that, and go with 50,000 or so unique visitors in a single hour, distributed rather evenly over that time period, making 2 page views each. Let's also assume that our web server serves up 20 style sheets, JavaScript files, images, and other assets each page view. We'll also assume that this is an interactive web app, so there'll be some database activity, too. No CDN is being used.

So we're talking around 2 million requests over that hour. Since we're assuming they're evenly distributed, for the most part, we'll assume we're dealing with about 550 to 600 requests per second.

That may seem like a lot, but it really isn't. Many of the requests will be for static content (JS scripts, style sheets, images, and so on), so they should be trivial to serve up. Apache or nginx running on a modern, bottom-tier VPS should have no trouble keeping up with this.

Likewise, assuming queries that aren't overly intensive, MySQL or PostgreSQL running on the same server should easily handle a few hundred queries per second. Only a fraction of the requests will actually involve any significant work from the web app itself. It should not be considered unreasonable for the web app to handle a few hundred requests per second.

We won't even consider using a reverse proxy like Varnish, for instance, to reduce some of the load on the web server, web app and database.

Keep in mind that this is a relatively intense scenario, too, at least compared to the activity than can be generated by an appearance on the HN front page, as has been described to me in the past. In reality, we're likely looking at much, much less traffic than in our estimate above, even during the period of peak activity.

Hopefully that helps explain why I think something is very wrong here if a relatively basic web app can't keep up with a relatively moderate amount of traffic.

I doubt that requests are that evenly distributed on a second by second basis so peak response rates might be a few times that for some seconds.

Thanks for the explanation! When you put it that way it doesn't sound so intense.

I've been working at a company where their forums have trouble keeping up with 300 concurrent users in a single forum thread, even when CDN and caching was being deployed and I'm trying to figure out how to improve that.

Still super flaky. Alternating between Application Error and half-loaded pages. :(

You should also be giving those avatars height attributes. When some of them load in slower (Also, I see you're loading them @2x, essentially), it shifts the formatting of the page a bit.

Any special reason why "Objectified: A documentary for design" is on Netflix (as it's not available in my country) and NOT Youtube ?

Also, getting heroku application error several times.

Site loads fine for me. Cool first lesson, love the idea.

My girlfriend is interested in design, but she's not a hacker. Could anyone recommend any courses for her? I haven't been able to find any.

I can't get the page to load, but judging by the title, this is something I desperately need as a programmer with zero aesthetic talent.

I am a designer, but I am really looking forward to this. New resources, insights, and challenges can only help.

I wish they didn't make you do stuff, but I guess its a course. I want to just see tips and tricks.

Lovely idea! You may want to mention in Week 0 that Objectified is also available on Amazon Prime.

I am the target market for this. Unless I have to pay.

The unsubscribe link is missing an href.

Site is down. Scale the servers!

Internal server error

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