I think the things I've been happiest with, at least visually, have been a result of the things I've been the most unhappy with to the point where I want to fix them. Things where I understand how I use them and understand how I'd _prefer_ to use them end up working well.

> I've had one semester of Computer Science, and have zero clue of how people do stuff like this.

Just wait, I've had about a decade of front-end dev experience and I think I could reverse engineer an API like this (maybe not quite so quickly). What I couldn't do, however, is write a C investment calculator text program. You're a whiz :)