Hack Design

Hack Design works by email. You subscribe with an address, and a lesson arrives each week — fifty in total, each one curated by a working designer who has picked the articles, videos and books they'd hand someone learning that topic. It's free, it's been running for years, and the site claims north of 400,000 subscribers.

Curation is the entire product. Wells Riley wrote the opening lessons on what design is and why it matters; Marc Edwards covers tools; Kerem Suer handles typography; Anand Sharma covers depth and visual hierarchy. Newer entries include Alex Baldwin on practical AI tools for everyday design work and Bushra Mahmood on designing for augmented reality, so the collection is still being added to.

How the lessons arrive

One a week, in your inbox, each a short framing note plus a reading list. There's no video course to sit through, no assignments, no feedback, no certificate. You read what the curator picked and, if you're serious, you go and try it.

The weekly cadence is a genuine design decision. Fifty lessons delivered at once would be a bookmark folder you never open; fifty lessons delivered weekly is a habit. Whether an email a week is the right pace for you is worth thinking about before you subscribe — for many people it's too slow, and there's no way to accelerate other than reading the archive directly.

The freshness problem

Here's the honest assessment. Hack Design is a mix of ages. The recent additions on AI tooling and AR are current. But the foundational lessons — typography, mobile web, tools — draw on articles written years ago, and design tooling has turned over completely in that time. Expect references to software that has been discontinued, acquired, or superseded, and expect some linked articles to have moved or vanished. Curated-link courses always carry this risk and a fifty-lesson archive carries it heavily.

What ages well is the thinking. What ages badly is anything naming a specific tool.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

Good for developers who want design literacy rather than a design career — enough taste to know why a layout feels wrong. Also good for anyone who prefers reading widely to following one instructor's opinion.

Skip it if you want to become a working designer; there's no portfolio, no critique and no structure, and the Google UX certificate or an equivalent will serve you far better. Skip it too if you won't tolerate an email subscription, since that's the only real way in.

Our take

A thoughtful reading list from people worth reading, wrapped in a delivery mechanism that keeps you honest. Its weakness is unavoidable given the format: a meaningful slice of the fifty lessons points at material that predates the current design toolchain, and nobody is going back to fix all of it.