Ask HN: What do designers do during hackathons?

6 points by boringkyle 13 years ago | 5 comments

Any blog posts on this? Just as coders may use APIs to expedite development, I often wondered how teams got such well-designed sites up in such a short period of time. Do they use templates? Themeforest? And after they launch and iterate, do they outsource some of the design work? Esp. if it's all technical founders? Is this frowned upon? Is this done at Y Combinator or at other accelerators?

zethus 13 years ago |

I've gone to a number of hackathons in NYC in the past few months. As a designer you have to be very versatile. If you are a designer with front-end chops like me, you will be in VERY high demand since you have a good idea of the LOE for design implementation in HTML/CSS/jQuery.

Also, many back-end devs like to use bootstrap in interest of time, so knowing when/where to use custom design elements vs. using native bootstrap elements helps a lot. I've personally worked on bootstrap projects as well as 100% custom-designed.

boringkyle 13 years ago | |

Thanks. Sorry for the ignorance, but what do you mean by LOE?

zethus 13 years ago | | |

Level of Effort. So pretty much how much time you're spent in HTML/CSS/JS and integrating that with your back-end devs

OafTobark 13 years ago | | |

Probably "Level of Experience"

JanKoenig 13 years ago |

I have collected a pool of UI elements, mockup-templates and other freebie-stuff over time - that really helped me in designing fast website- and app-mockups.

I think in the end it is about experience. You often have to know what to look for and where.