Most developers are famously not great designers, but some of the best products come from teams where designers know a bit about design and the designers know a bit about what the developers do. Hack Design want to get developers up to speed with the basics of design by sending out a fresh and easy to follow lesson about design to developers. There is clearly a need for this kind of project and Hack Design has already signed up over 20,000 developers just a few days after soft launching on Hacker News.
The Hack Design team, lead by Wells Riley, a product designer at Kicksend, Stanford student Kevin Xu and product designer Alex Baldwin, has assembled a group of curators who all have a strong background in design and have worked on products ranging from Pinterest to Square and Evomail.
In an email to us earlier today, Xu likened the project to “Code Year for design.” Unlike projects like Codecademy, the experience during the first lessons is not so much hands-on as about reading various articles about design and development and then moves to the basics of web typography. Over time, though, the experience will surely become more hands-on and Xu tells us that some of the later lessons “will consist of highlighting articles, creating and critiquing each other’s design work, and interactive games to practice certain design principles.”
For the time being, Xu tells us, the project is “just an experiment” and the team isn’t focused on creating any revenue.
If you are interested in giving Hack Design a try, you can sign up on the project’s homepage or take a look at all the available lessons here.
