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Comment by alexkearns | Hacker News Reader

The beauty of being both a coder and designer is that you can conceive, build and launch a product completely on your own. This makes setting up your own start-up (or lifestyle business) a lot simpler.

My advice for any developer who wants to do their own start-up is - once you have reached a good standard - to forget honing your development skills and start learning to design.

Learning another programming language or mastering another object orientated design pattern does not bring you much closer to being able create a product yourself. Learning an entirely new but relevant skill like design does.

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In addition to learning design, learn how to market and sell stuff. It makes your other skills (dev and design) so much more valuable.

With ThemeForest and the like, design is the easiest skill to fake in the requirements set of launching a product. I can get a theme for $20 that will take me at least to MVP stage without looking silly (for most products), but I can't easily get to that stage without development skills, customer development skills, market skills, etc etc.

I'd leave design for last and advise people to learn the other skills ("other" means "skills they don't already have", so development for market-people, marketing for developers, etc) first.

In a similar vein, one does not really need to, persay, study design. Simply visiting sites like ThemeForest and trying your best to copy the designs from scratch or by using some of their assets is a completely legit way of learning how to do it on your own.

It's like building a working memory of design that you can pull from when you wish to be creative. Kind of like when you learn to code, you need to look at code examples and you need to eventually write it yourself.

I think this goes for most things. Step 1) develop a sense of judging how well-made things are, step 2) develop the skills that allow you to create your own.

I'm pretty good at telling if a design is good or not, but I can't for the life of me create my own. I just get lost in the space of possibilities, or don't consider alternatives an experienced designer would.

The problem with ThemeForest (and I'd imagine most other marketplaces like it) is that while the design may be passable, or even good in rare cases, the majority of development I've seen is staggeringly bad.

This is painfully evident in the WordPress themes. Gripes about WP's code aside, the themes are generally poorly developed and usually rely on hacked together code instead of utilizing what the WP core gives you.

I made a sizable piece of my freelance income in the past few years fixing those themes.

Edit: This is probably caused by designers trying to hack together a theme using spaghetti PHP more than anything else. I've used several of the admin templates for my own projects as well as client work and the code there rarely has any glaring issues.

You may be right, but the HTML themes I've used are pretty well developed. I can't say about the WP ones.

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