I don't mean to self-promote, but http://hackdesign.org may be what the author is looking for. You can move at your own pace, and the lessons are curated by some of the most thoughtful designers I know of.
We're pushing out a lesson on Color Theory on Monday, then David Kadavy (author of Design for Hackers) is up the week after. We've already got 4 months of great content so far, and 8 more to go.
I'm glad you self promoted... looks like a cool program. I signed up and am about to start lesson one (I've already seen the movie, but really enjoyed it so I'm glad to see it again).
I came to the comments here for the express purpose of mentioning Hack Design. I've been doing it from the start and I've learned a huge amount in the meantime. It's fantastic.
There's already all kinds of resources to purchase on design (including Design for Hackers, which Wells mentioned). And if you're willing to pay for it, that's awesome. But the thing is, most of us developers aren't, because we don't think we'll be good at it, we don't think we need to be good at it, we don't think it's worth the investment, we aren't "designers" and therefore don't want to spend the cash on it, etc.
But we really need everyone to understand good design theory, at least at a basic level. It streamlines the development process, and it may even prompt a few developers who hadn't really thought about it to do a little more with design.
What I love about Hack Design is that it is free and very casual, which means I can look into it in my spare time because of my own interest and motivation, without any investment and without any risk.
Also it should be noted that the course is largely comprised of a curated set of already-out-there blog posts, articles, tools, and other materials. Curated is the active word there; it's like a guided tour of the design community. The toughest thing about getting started with any new area of learning is knowing where to start, especially with something so vast and foreign to many of us as design. Having someone to point you in the right direction, let alone guide you step by step through the entire foundational process, is a huge leg up.
Okay, I'll stop gushing now. I just really enjoy and appreciate this course.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. Apps like Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and AfterEffects would be amazing with Retina compatibility.
I think everyone is anxiously awaiting an updated Photoshop, but I'm just not sure how they'd do it. I've been thinking about it for a few weeks, but it's a pretty major problem. Ps is all about mapping an image to exact pixels, but that's not practical on a Retina display. A 1x image would appear too small (or pixelated, just as it is now, at 200%), and 2x images would be too small at 100% (Retina actual size) to do pixel perfect detail work.
Maybe there's an obvious solution I'm overlooking.
I use Photoshop mainly for front-end web dev. The most common use of it is just slicing up images to be used, having it work on a retina display would be great. It's so common for cutlines to become blurry the more you zoom out on an image, so I think that having it be 1 to 1 pixel density is a must have. I don't believe that since the pixel density is higher in the images, that the actual controls can't be retina friendly. Isn't that how Final Cut works on a Retina Display? I don't have either, but I remember Apple stating "In this window, you are seeing a full un-altered 1080p frame, along with the controls"
Yes, my most common use. I realize that Photoshop is an extremely powerful program, but if Adobe releases their next version with the option to display the image in a "fine detail mode" it would be a huge help for how I, and I'm sure how a lot of front-end developers use it.
When you need pixel precision, you generally would zoom beyond 100% on non-retina displays. The only thing that happens with retina photoshop is that at you need to zoom in farther to get the same detail. There is a potential problem for people designing for non-retina screens, as it would appear lower quality on the actual device; But this could be worked around with existing pixilation tools, or a more general option of rendering the image at a given pixel density relative to the display.
We're pushing out a lesson on Color Theory on Monday, then David Kadavy (author of Design for Hackers) is up the week after. We've already got 4 months of great content so far, and 8 more to go.
Let me know if you try it out - @wr on twitter.