The Principles of Great Design

drawar.com

37 points·MrAlmostWrong··6 comments

If you enjoyed this article, check out the book "Universal Principles of Design"- it has a wider breadth and depth, and the approach is similar. They use it at my school to teach basic design to programmers.

Cool! Coming from a CS program that thought of design as "scoff that thing they do over in the art building", I will definitely check that out.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Coming from a CS program that thought of design as "scoff that thing they do over in the art building"

Dude, you should name and shame that CS program. Sure the art building can argue about aesthetics, but bad design is a bug and should be treated as such.

I went to Gonzaga University. In fairness, their program was awesome at teaching the fundamentals, and I did leave with an excellent grounding in both the theory and practice of programming.

But only when it came to the actual code. Nothing about UI, design, business, etc. And only as much architecture as they really HAD to teach to make the students strong programmers.

I second this suggestion, and also recommend reading about Gestalt psychology, since that's really the basis of design principles.

Anecdote: I bought Universal principles of design in university to help me learn to do web design that didn't suck (only partially successful). At the time, I lived with a friend who was studying studio art. The book was assigned reading for one of her classes, so independently she bought a copy at the same time. Universal, indeed.

I own this book and refer to it all the time. It is really well written and well presented. It's essentially a crash course into the principles of design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com