Like anything else, design can be hacked! Although I wasn't born with any particular sense of design, after years of working alongside world-class visual + experience designers, I've learned what I call "the minimum viable 20%" of design.
These slides accompanied my class at General Assembly, a startup incubator / co-working thing.
Design is no mysterious black art that requires loving Helvetica and smoking a lot. Design is something you do, not something you are, and everyone, even straight up command-line nerds like us, can learn it, at least well enough to bang out some decent looking version-ones. Time to get serious.