Design for Hackers - Reverse Engineering Beauty

Introduction

When I was in grade school, handwriting was my worst subject. I had terrible handwriting. It looked like a woodchuck had barfed a bunch of twigs onto a piece of paper. So, each quarter, when I was sent home with my report card, it was full of A’s and B’s . . . and one C-, in penmanship.

Never having been one to blindly accept convention, I asked why it even mattered if I had decent handwriting. It’s probably no surprise that I thought handwriting was “stupid,” even “a waste of time.” I was too young to respect the merits of something at which I had no hope of succeeding (though seriously, grading on penmanship is stupid and a waste of time).

No matter how many times I asked, I was always told the same thing: “When you grow up and get a job, you’ll need to be able to communicate clearly. You need good handwriting to communicate clearly.”

Thank goodness computers took over. My handwriting is still terrible. Oh, I can draw letters, but I certainly can’t write them.

Today I understand that at the root of my educators’ intentions was something valuable: Clear communication is critical to success. Luckily for me, I rarely have to rely upon my handwriting to communicate clearly. I can simply type an e-mail, make a slide presentation, or write a book, and it will be rendered in crisp, beautiful typography. Many of these letterforms were perfected over 500 years ago, and they still carry words with strength and clarity today.

Additionally, I have spent years studying the subtleties of visual communication. I passed countless boring Nebraska days as a child, drawing in my room. I got my degree in graphic design, while exhausting the university library’s supply of typography and design books – skipping keggers so I could conduct experiments with typography and geometry. I studied the very origins of modern typography in the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire. I’ve even discussed the hidden meaning of something as simple as a brick or a piece of wood, while working at an architecture firm. Finally, I’ve implemented the fruits of all this practice and analysis in the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley startups. Design and visual communication is so deeply embedded in my brain that I’m hardly aware of its presence. My handwriting still sucks, though.

Design as Literacy

One evening, I was “moworking” in a cafe with my friend Ziad, coding some design tweaks to the WordPress template for my blog. Ziad always has a way of saying abstract things that break my concentration and split my brain wide open, and this evening was no exception: “Design is this mysterious thing. The people who know it can’t seem to explain it. It’s like if you want them to teach you something about design, they just chalk it up to talent.”

Ziad’s comment did strike me as interesting, but the true weight of it took about a year to sink in. First came the realization that someone who wasn’t a designer by trade would actually want to learn about design. Being able to design was something I had taken for granted. It was a great skill to have, especially when creating my own apps or participating in weekend hackathons, such as Django Dash or Rails Rumble. I could create this perception of quality, this value, out of thin air. But, not being much of a back-end coder, I was envious of the fact that my design wasn’t worth a thing without the magic robot words behind it, which developers knew how to create.

Second, I realized that design skills are a new kind of literacy. The whole reason why I had suffered the consequences of poor handwriting was because handwriting was a part of communication. The only reason that I could write anything at all was that I was literate.

This idea sounds very simple, but it’s pretty novel in the scope of human history. Most people today know how to read and write, but even just a couple hundred years ago, this was not the case. For people to learn how to write, they had to know how to read. For people to learn how to read, they had to have access to writing. To have access to writing, someone with the ability to read and write would have to produce something with writing in it, like a book.

But books have only recently been affordable to common people in the civilized world. Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book, the so-called “42-line Bible” (see Chapter 3) in 1455. Books very rapidly dropped in price over the next hundred years, but before Gutenberg’s Bible, books had to be written by hand. So, it’s no surprise that few people, aside from the clergy, knew how to read or write.

Today’s world is, of course, vastly different. Not only can most of us read and write, but we don’t even have to worry about our handwriting. Desktop publishing, and even the ability to publish on the Internet, is available to the majority of people in the industrialized world.

Not only can we publish our words, but we can design them. We have access to thousands of fonts. We can change colors and sizes of fonts with a few clicks. We can edit and publish photos and illustrations alongside our words.

We’re all modern-day printers. We can create flyers, postcards, and PowerPoint presentations complete with animations. We can create blogs, posters, and even coffee mugs.

But few of us are design literate. Sure, matters of design taste are starting to creep into our world. There are backlashes over ugly fonts, such as Comic Sans (see Chapter 3). Much like having poor handwriting, not having design literacy results in miscommunication. Fonts, colors, layout, and the proper use of white space all affect how our message is conveyed, and nearly all of us have the ability to manipulate these factors. The world is in need of design literacy.

The Hacker Attitude

No group stands to gain more from design literacy than hackers do. No, I don’t mean computer geeks who break into networks and steal passwords. I don’t even necessarily mean software developers. I mean the renegade group of entrepreneurially minded people who are transforming the way we live, work, and interact.

Though the term hacker originated at MIT in the 1960s and was used to refer to a particular group of computer and software enthusiasts, to many, the term has a broader meaning. An article by Eric Steven Raymond entitled “How to Become a Hacker” (www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) presents five tenets of the hacker attitude:

> The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

> No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

> Boredom and drudgery are evil.

> Freedom is good.

> Attitude is no substitute for competence.

In short, a hacker values knowledge and learns whatever he needs to learn to achieve his vision. In today’s world, that often means learning at least a little coding, but the hacker attitude can be applied to problem solving of all kinds.

People who live by the hacker attitude are curious. They do whatever it takes to achieve their visions. They’re entrepreneurial. They value skills and knowledge over titles and experience.

At the forefront of the hacker movement is the Hacker News community (http://news.ycombinator.com), a news aggregation site contributed to by followers of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator entrepreneurial incubator program. The program tends to fund small teams of hackers who have used their skills and hacker attitude to build cool products that solve problems: UserVoice (www.uservoice.com) democratizes customer support; Reddit (www.reddit.com) democratizes news; Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) provides an easy, automatic backup solution; and AirBNB (www.airbnb.com) turns extra bedrooms into places for travelers to stay.

Hackers are the scribes of the modern world. They build products and businesses that not only communicate, but that users interact with and use to communicate with each other. Armed with a laptop, an idea, and a few hours to code, a hacker can build something that reaches millions.

Hackers are able to accomplish so much in so little time because they come from a community that’s built upon sharing knowledge. They benefit from billions of collective hours that these members of this community have invested in writing software, manuals, and other tutorials with which to empower one another.

They can learn whatever it is that they need to learn to solve the problem at hand. If they run into a coding problem, they can do a quick Google search or read a manual. If their business takes off and they have to do accounting or bookkeeping, they can find more of what they’re looking for on the Internet or read a book from the library.

The Gap in Design Knowledge

The one subject that is exceedingly frustrating for hackers to try to learn is design. Hackers know that in order to compete against corporate behemoths with just a few lines of code, they need to have good, clear design, but the resources with which to learn design are simply hard to find. They might hire a designer to help them out, but good designers are expensive and, when you’re bootstrapping a startup, you just don’t have the money to spend.

The main reason for the difficulty in learning design is probably that designers tend to have difficulty articulating the process through which they make decisions. Many designers are, in fact,...