I like the idea of an "HN for designers." That said, I don't think it will work.
We built something similar around 2008 and maintained it for a couple of years. Ultimately, we chose to shut it down, due to the difficulty in getting good discussion, and the amount of "pseudo-spam" from folks who would flood us with links to crap and designer link-bait.
My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.
In my opinion, the real key with these communities is the discussion. HN is ugly, but the content is good. Additionally, the active nature of the community is huge. Part of that has to do with it having first-move advantage; the other may be the associated "carrot" of pg looking at contributor involvement, come application time.
My hunch is that the biggest part of why HN is so active relates to startup-folk being more concerned with the data/insight than presentation. I could be entirely incorrect on this point, but my feeling is that the majority of designers simply aren't geared the same way. They're more interested in seeing eye-candy than reading, thinking, and discussing.
This is a generalization, and there are certainly designers who are geared quite differently. (Personally, I find sites like dribbble really boring, but am on HN within 5 minutes of waking.)
The challenge here, for you will be in getting a sufficient mass of good contributors/commenters (i.e. Thoughtful, meaningful dialogue). I think it's will be hard to make this happen. I do hope you'll prove me wrong, though, as the design community could use something like this.
What? No way - this is absolutely a case of function instead of pomp and circumstance. One of the huge reasons, I believe, that HN was really kicked off well was because when Digg went stupid and redesigned their site (which looks like OP's design to a degree) people wanted more hacker/programmer style stories in a denser, less ad-drive way. HN was perfectly placed and lots of folks came over (lots of the better users, that is). These people hated the design of digg (a.k.a. "scroll scroll scroll") and needed a more information dense yet content and comment rich environment. This place thrived as did reddit - both sites who offer very dense information pages (reddit has styles/options to make it less dense though).
So yes, design is a huge factor IMO. Startup folks, articles, good comments - all of that works together with the design. You can't say that HN works despite being "ugly".
And when I say it's ugly, I'm not really talking about style. Instead, I'm referring to how I have to pinch and zoom when reading posts on my smartphone, and the awfully long line lengths, and the small type.
I get that such points probably aren't important to pg (or the community at large) and I can appreciate that. If it works, why muck with it? Still, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the design of this site probably wasn't ever treated as a key concern.
Another reason I prefer HN to Dribbble (although I think the bar is low as far as 'good design' is concerned here, too) is because people seem to care more about the effectiveness and purpose of what is placed in front of them, rather than if it's got 300 layers or was taken with an iPhone at enough of an angle to look cleaner than it is to get likes. The sad thing is that as designers we are first and foremost communicators, so when that communication fails, what's the point? Any given day on the popular shots page on Dribbble there are things that should never honestly be used in the wild, so why are we upvoting it and giving people the idea that it is good?
I've also found that a lot of people writing regularly on design (particularly on sites like SmashingMag that make useless lists of trends, but don't even find the best uses of those trends) aren't exactly the ones that should be. The biggest problem I see is that people don't know the appropriate verbiage or reasons as to why something is good or bad. White space? Must be well-designed! Large, thin text? Must be well-designed! Wells Riley's "Startups, This is How Design Works" (which was upvoted here and heralded across the web) was an ironically perfect example of using these methods in all the wrong ways. As a designer, you just hope the right people recognize it and know to avoid such things, but judging by how well-received it was; there's a problem afoot.
Personally, I wish there was a design section for HN, rather than adding yet another place I'm supposed to check every day. There are so many people here that could benefit from it, and a lot of the "design for devs" links I come across just seem to be more subjective noise rather than real-world application. Maybe that's just me.
I feel I should write about this somewhere else with proper justification, but something I've observed is that design culture is not an intellectual culture to the extent that programming culture is.
Having gone to school on the same floor as the design students at my alma mater and having met or worked with many designers, overwhelmingly my impression is that they are for the most part less verbally inclined than those who work with words, code, and math and prefer to express themselves through images rather than words.
The problem with this is that we don't recognize visual education in Western schools, so the average person lacks any kind of history or theory of visual art, design and culture, which are the foundation of taste and rational discussion.
As a result, the world is chock-full of designers who fall into simplistic design philosophies or obsessively identify with a particular design aesthetic simply because it suits their preference.
> They're more interested in seeing eye-candy than reading, thinking, and discussing.
I think that's right, and it's reflected in the design of the site. The narrow width of the comments page strongly conveys an expectation of tweet-length comments. I'd guess the comment field itself is similar.
In contrast, the HN comment page is designed for longer, more thoughtful posts, and that's what you get. (Although every time I comment, I resize the textarea -- wish that could get fixed.)
Narrow width is actually a design convention to help the readability of posts (usually you want to do anything around 450-600px.) You can see this in action as your eyes can quickly jump from line to line.
Also think about the default size of this comment box I am writing in right now. It is approximately the same size as the comments on DN.
It sounds like you are referring to the guidelines for how long the measure should be for for optimal legibility. What I'm saying is that aside from legibility, the length of the measure also influences user behavior - a shorter measure nudges users to write shorter comments. Comment replies are indented by 20px per level, making the problem that much worse.
They could easily increase the measure and still stay within typographic guidelines.
My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.
I largely agree with this. As long as it's functional, let design take a back seat to community. It can work, it just takes a lot of work. However, since your community is designers, you might want some way that they can contribute in a creative fashion outside of comments.
As someone who has dabbled in UX, I wouldn't call "HN is ugly", HN is minimal, functional and highly usuable. HN is lightweight without tons of JS to handle interactions, etc.
HN in a sense is well designed, if by design you mean its usability, interactivity, IA, etc. As a famous quote goes, "Good design is about taking away, and not adding".
We built something similar around 2008 and maintained it for a couple of years. Ultimately, we chose to shut it down, due to the difficulty in getting good discussion, and the amount of "pseudo-spam" from folks who would flood us with links to crap and designer link-bait.
My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.
In my opinion, the real key with these communities is the discussion. HN is ugly, but the content is good. Additionally, the active nature of the community is huge. Part of that has to do with it having first-move advantage; the other may be the associated "carrot" of pg looking at contributor involvement, come application time.
My hunch is that the biggest part of why HN is so active relates to startup-folk being more concerned with the data/insight than presentation. I could be entirely incorrect on this point, but my feeling is that the majority of designers simply aren't geared the same way. They're more interested in seeing eye-candy than reading, thinking, and discussing.
This is a generalization, and there are certainly designers who are geared quite differently. (Personally, I find sites like dribbble really boring, but am on HN within 5 minutes of waking.)
The challenge here, for you will be in getting a sufficient mass of good contributors/commenters (i.e. Thoughtful, meaningful dialogue). I think it's will be hard to make this happen. I do hope you'll prove me wrong, though, as the design community could use something like this.