
An easy to follow design course for programmers - thecosas
http://hackdesign.org/
======
fasouto
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...

~~~
ashray
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 ?

~~~
wells-riley
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.

~~~
titlex
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Rams.27_ten_principles_of_.22good_design.22)

------
Cyranix
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.

~~~
eranation
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>

~~~
Cyranix
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.

------
happywolf
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

------
rvkennedy
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.

------
wasd
"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.

~~~
alexkiwi
Back online now.

------
kurtfunai
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?

~~~
mathewsanders
How about Vimeo? <http://vimeo.com/12793996>

~~~
kurtfunai
This works, thank you!

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

------
nnq
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...)

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

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

[http://www.amazon.com/Objectified/product-
reviews/B002SOUVKU...](http://www.amazon.com/Objectified/product-
reviews/B002SOUVKU/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_2?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addTwoStar&showViewpoints=0)

------
sergiotapia
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?

------
AskHugo
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.

~~~
wells-riley
Not implemented yet. You'll have that functionality once we launch.

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

------
kaichanvong
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 :)

------
542458
Looks like their servers aren't quite up to the task - I'm only getting half-
formed content.

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

~~~
wells-riley
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.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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.

~~~
meric
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)

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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.

~~~
justincormack
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.

------
mdznr
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.

------
binarydreams
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.

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

------
rcavezza
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.

------
oboizt
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.

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

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

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

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

------
stavrianos
The unsubscribe link is missing an href.

------
holgersindbaek
Site is down. Scale the servers!

------
davidjnelson
Internal server error

