Maybe they should actually find people who know how to drive first. I'm getting sick of these ridershares and their terrible drivers. I'm strictly speaking in San Francisco. It's ridiculous how many times they randomly stop in the middle of the street to pick someone up causing traffic jams or even stopping at a stop sign to drop or pick someone up. Plus all the illegal U-turns and crossing double yellow lines when they're not supposed to. I don't recall having this issue with cabs. It's almost unbearable to drive in the city now.
This post was on the home page then randomly dropped to the bottom of the second. Considering the amount of upvotes and the time it was posted this post should have still been on the home page.
You can try out http://hackdesign.org/ or read Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty[1]. There are plenty of other sources out there, but these are a good start.
Unfortunately, Helvetica Neue also renders poorly on Windows web browsers. It's a problem that I have been seeing a lot lately, especially with the popularity of Twitter Bootstrap. I understand that being a Windows user with Helvetica/Helvetica Neue installed is not very common, but when a website has an unreadable font I immediately leave it.
The only people who seem to get annoyed with the term "San Fran" and Frisco are either transplants or hipsters(which are usually transplants to begin with). Some of the old schoolers and hip hop community still use the term Frisco.
I'm glad that Objectified seems to have had such a large impact on you, but this really isn't a good way of starting this course, or any course for that matter. Reading Dieter Rams' ten principles of "good design"[1] would be much more practical.
Also, if the site is going to be focused on helping people with design, you should make sure the design of the actual site is good. Few issues that I saw:
-404 page should at least have the logo to know you're still on the same site
-/courses & /lessons/0 should have the full logo with the page title elsewhere
-Log in page animation does nothing for design and can confuse people into thinking they can type after the text
-Has already been mentioned, but the contrast in some areas could use work. Tasks for example should be the main focus point, yet the text is light grey.
-Using social media icons everywhere takes away from design IMO
Nice write up. Just curious, was renaming during the rebrand an option? Seems like the money used to purchase the domain could have been used elsewhere.