Sacha Greif

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it). I'm a bit late to the thread, but if anyone wants to get a sampling of the approach that I take to explaining design check out some sample articles I linked to on http://designforhackers.com I talk about design more abstractly than most, but I try to keep it entertaining. More than anything I want you to see differently. I also occasionally send out emails. If you sign up on that site I already have some queued up for new subscribers. Sacha Greif also sends out some good emails: http://sachagreif.com and of course there's http://hackdesign.org (I'll even be doing a lesson on there eventually)

Yes, good design is how it works. We aren't against skeuomorphism and don't think flat is opposite of it either. In fact there can even be flat skeumorphism. I think Layervault's post on flat interface design, and Sacha Grief's flat pixels post are the best out there to read up on what IS flat design. Or Almost flat design. http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface-design http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/

@patio11 has http://appointmentreminder.org and http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ He's based in Japan, but targets the US market. He's got a blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/ --------------------------------------------------- Sacha Greif lives in Japan, too. http://sachagreif.com/

Here's a great article that discusses the 'Metro', or 'Flat' design pattern that is now gracing the shores of many new up and coming projects and websites → http://sachagreif.com/the-flat-sink/

I'm Jarrod, the guy behind Bootstrapping Design. Sorry I'm late to this thread, and thank you for sharing the book! There are a couple of other design ebooks worth a look: Sacha Greif's Step By Step UI Design: http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ Nathan Barry's ebooks: http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ If I can answer any questions, leave a comment here or send me an email: hello <at> bootstrappingdesign {dot} /com/

Agreed. These are great books, but "design for hackers" implies that these book will help you "hack" design, which they won't. These books will help you get a better understanding of the principles of good design at root level, but they won't do much if you're just looking to make your app look or work better. On the other hand, these books are much more practical: http://bootstrappingdesign.com/ http://designforhackers.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ And I also wrote a design eBook myself (not as good as the three above, but it's also a lot cheaper): http://sachagreif.com/ebook

I got the newsletter via email and headed to buy the book where I reacted same as the majority of commenters on HN. After checking the options/prices, I am going to put that on hold for now. Good luck though, I am sure you've put a lot of effort into this. For HN users who are wondering about the author, I came across this: http://sachagreif.com/how-nathan-barry-and-i-sold-39k-worth-of-ebooks

Sacha Greif did our homepage. (http://www.sachagreif.com/) He's awesome, super talented and incredibly fun to work with.

I'm a developer too, for the last year I've been working on my UI & UX skills - and I've somehow managed to get paid to built out product features for the web (UI, UX + code) professionally. Here's what I figured out (YMMV): --- For UI design Books aren't that helpful, you have learn by doing. Instead, for theory Treehouse offers a primer on HTML, CSS & UI design which provided a great foundation, they have courses on things like colour theory. Really really helpful. Practice. I designed & launched a bunch of complete web apps, each one with a landing page + full functionality. Each attempt had a visible improvement in UI & UX over the last. I got tons of great feedback and encouragement (you're gonna need it) from forrst. So I'd highly encourage posting there and asking for feedback (tell people you're learning). Learn Photoshop. Check out Sacha Greif's ebook on UI design http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ it comes with a PSD and has a great intro into UI stuff. Check out Lighting & Realism In Interface Design by Mike Rundle (developer + designer) here http://designthencode.com Get a bunch of freebies from dribbble and deconstruct and remix them to your taste. ----- For UX Watch this https://peepcode.com/products/ryan-singer-ux then watch it again. Ryan Singer is an absolute UX god - he understands how to navigate the problem space very very well. To really improve UX measure how people use what you make (mixpanel, click tracking) & conduct user studies - watch…

Perhaps Sacha Greif's Telescope? http://sachagreif.com/introducing-telescope/

Shockingly not yet. I did find a potential hack, which I'm currently investigating: http://sachagreif.com/diy-email-referrals/ The big modification to this hack that im trying to find out is whether it's possible to substitute the referrers email (which is part of the referral link in this hack) with some other unique identifier.

Cute, but perpetuates the "false alternative" between "flat" and "skeuomorphic". The alternative to "flat" is a style filled with gradients, layers, textures, etc. (i.e., using lots of Layer Styles in Photoshop). Skeuomorphism is a subset of the latter style. See http://sachagreif.com/what-skeuomorphism-is-and-isnt/

May be you get some jump reading this nice article on Side Projects by Sacha Grief: http://sachagreif.com/the-side-project-project/

Ran a course. Sold a screencast. (Over $10k within 2 months for both.) A little busy to go into details right now but there have been lots of posts with similar case studies on HN - one of the better ones was http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/

Hey everyone, I'm happy to answer any questions about writing, marketing, and selling technical ebooks. I'm sure Sacha would be happy to answer questions as well. The books being discussed are here: http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook http://sachagreif.com/ebook

Start by getting Sacha's new book http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ :)

The original^2 post: http://sachagreif.com/stop-looking-for-a-co-founder/ It wasn't linked from the OP, so I had to trawl for it on Twitter, where it is sure to get lost within a few days.

Doesn't sound like this is it, but both: http://sortfolio.com/ and http://sachagreif.com/thelist/ might be interesting to you.

* http://sachagreif.com/google-webfonts-that-dont-suck/

The relevant paragraph from the original WSJ article: "Some suggested that in Apple’s next mobile operating system, Ive is pushing a more “flat design” that is starker and simpler, according to developers who have spoken to Apple employees but didn’t have further details. Overall, they expect any changes to be pretty conservative." I wouldn't exactly say that switching to a completely flat design as implied in the headline is a 'conservative' change. It's quite obvious that they are unlikely to go down the overly skeuomorphic route as seen in the Podcast app, so this is a fairly 'safe' rumor to spread. But of course, it incites the usual skeuomorphic vs flat arguments with the added bonus of accusations of 'copying' the Metro style. There are many misconceptions in regards to categorizing flat vs skeuomorphic design, here is a good article that explains the differences pretty well. http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/

A few observations. One, you haven't written that many pages, in fact you've written very, very few pages save for the preface and the like. This isn't an issue on its own, except theres no Table of Contents so it's hard for me to see where you are going to take it from here, or in other words what your vision is. The obvious result of this is that it's pretty hard to provide feedback. The flip side is of course, that you've demonstrated enough desire and initiative within yourself to endeavor to start the book, so unless you have a serious reason to stop, maybe forge ahead and try to finish what you started. One other thing that I just want to put in your head, I'm not sure if I'm even going so far as to suggest it, is the possibility of flexing scope to write perhaps a 50 page e-book, not dissimilar to the Sacha Greif ebook (http://sachagreif.com/ebook/) but for getting from zero to the next book on Rails for absolute beginners. The benefit of this would be that you could probably spend about 20 hours writing it (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, so I could be waaay off about this time estimate) and therefore you've risked a much shorter amount of time, which I'm assuming is your main concern.

Criticism is easy and I don't want to rain on your parade. After all, what do I know. Keep doing your thing, don't stop. But here's a few things that came to mind: The name reminded me of eatlime http://www.techsnack.net/eatlime-free-online-private-file-sharing which now pivoted to twitvid. And the scrolling image snippet looks better here: http://freshdesk.com/ because of a splash of background color. The lime part of your logo is too blurry. You can get a better logo font from here: http://www.myfonts.com/ And I'd make your footnotes lighter grey in smaller print. Also try to do with less text on the invite box. For an example scroll to this order section here: http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ More design inspiration here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/26696517701/design-and-copywri… All in all, great that you've done a landing page. It's the first step of many, and I'll be looking forward to seeing more. Best wishes!