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Design Hacks

Design Hacks

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.

jm3 (John Manoogian III)

September 13, 2012
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  1. Design Hacks in 90 minutes 10M who am i 20M

    design strategies 50M design exercises 10M Q+A
  2. Who am I, aka, “Why listen to this guy?” ★

    CTO, engineer working next to designers for years ★ Watched the flow of power around design to initiate things. ★ Never took design classes. Never read design books. ★ Have designed: beds, chairs, fliers, film titles, dvd labeling systems, signs, slides, ads, t-shirts, album covers, posters, applications, websites @jm3
  3. It’s easier than ever to learn to code… ★ from

    scarce resources: books, smart people ★ to plentiful + cheap ubiquity: Google, blogs, StackOverflow, Skillshare, General Assembly, etc. ★ (none of which existed when I learned to code.)
  4. But Design hasn’t bent itself to be very approachable to

    Engineers yet. ★ While there are dozens of “learn to code” classes popping up, we mostly still think in terms of roles that sound innate: ★ designer vs coder ★ ux designer vs visual designer vs x designer ★ But design ISN’T something you ARE; design is something you do. ★ Design, like code, should be open to everyone!
  5. Why Hack Design? ★ Lone wolf; you want to work

    independently. ★ You’re speaking at a conference and want your slides to look cool. ★ You just like learning cool new stuff. ★ Iconoclasty: you hate smarmy people acting like they know something you don’t (this was kinda me) ★ Other?
  6. What are Design Hacks? ★ Cutting corners? ★ Faking it

    until you make it? ★ I like to think of it as…
  7. 1 ( rr b r ) R r / v

    r br PDF 31
  8. 2

  9. 3 r p… r r . I P p +

    Pr v w, Crop 50
  10. 4 S r F (+ V G f) P w

    r r Shortcuts 64
  11. 4 p v r w r . L r -

    Text Tricks 66