Ask HN: UI/UX people, good resources for digital artists wanting to design apps?
TL;DR: If a digital artist who is good at stuff like painting, 3D and animation wants to do some UI work for a hackathon project, what are some good resources/tools/suggestions? More generally, what are essential reads for non-UI artists or even engineers who hope to develop beautiful and usable interfaces?
I'm a CS student who has decided to go to a hackathon with two other friends (also CS students). We figured that UI is very important for hackathon projects, so we decided that we need an artist on our team. One of our friends goes to a digital arts school and makes absolutely stunning paintings, characters, 3D scenes and models, animation, etc. She's especially fond of video game art and wants to work in gamedev after school.
Now, she has done some graphic design and layout for school projects, but not very much besides that. She has a good eye for aesthetics, but I want to help by providing her with some good resources, tools and suggestions on how to approach UI/UX work. She'll probably make mock ups or wireframes during the hackathon, and I'll translate that to HTML/CSS.
I'm interested in write-ups, cheat sheets, important principles that may be overlooked by someone who's an artist but has had little prior experience with UI design, examples of well-designed apps, tools that can help with the rapid development of mock ups, wireframes, maybe some Photoshop resources (icon packs, templates maybe?) and things like that.
More generally, I believe that UI/UX people of HN can help everyone tremendously if they would post some essential resources for non-UI or even non-artist people out there. We see a lot of interfaces that e.g. engineers design, and they all look like an engineer designed them :) (I myself am guilty of this too often.)
Thank you in advance for your suggestions!