Ask HN: Should hackers know how to design?

Maybe not how to, but they should know design. Everyone should be a design observer, because it's so present in everything we do.

Of course it's good for a web developer to have a feel for design! At least at some level. Getting a feel for flow, balance, typography and colors at least at a level where you can recognize what makes a great design great, is a huge advantage.

There are some great resources for design, which I think can be approached by a typical programmer.

* Grid layouts such as http://960.gs/ and http://www.blueprintcss.org/

* Typogrify which helps you create better typography (and is also a resource for stuff to think about!) http://code.google.com/p/typogrify/

* Compass makes it easier to create good design with standards http://compass-style.org/

* Good read on typography http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...

* Color schemes http://colorschemedesigner.com/

On your other question, yes that sounds really, really tough. You should have a few people in your circle, to work with and to bounce ideas with. I wish I had more, knowledgeable designers myself, to learn from.

Answering the base question - everyone is a designer - a Hacker, a civilian, all. All persons I know of (where I am currently located) are hackers - whether they know how to write computer code, or otherwise. The way I see it, 'hacking' is a means of getting around an existing system - Gandalf and the white-cloaks wrote the machine language of Middle Earth, as do the jay-walkers of New Delhi write the unwritten civilian traffic codes, in the presence of abstract rules. 'Design' too, is nothing more than creative problem-solving. Anyone is engaged in the act of 'designing' as much in figuring out the best way to tie shoelaces in record time - as figuring out user interaction in a computational setting. Just apply the art. And science. Together. A hundred years ago, they were called Architects - of building, because code did not exist, and building was the only code available.

Cheers!

One of the things that has come out of some of the workshops I run is that even "design" is so broad that "designers" can't know everything about design, either; we have to specialize into visual design, testing, print, web, etc.

What is important is having the theoretical/academic basis for all of them, because it can greatly inform your decisions about your work and let you pull from a wider swath of experience.

I don't think you should have to be a graphic designer in order to be a web developer. You probably shouldn't be (and I find myself increasingly disliking generalists). But you should understand the principles of design, and know what goes into making a graphic work, and how designers communicate and the vocabulary, just as you should know the same sort of things on the back-end for the operating system, hardware and network environment your software is deployed on.