That's great to hear! I'd love to learn about your situation RE learning design. I hope you signed up for the email list, but feel free to say hi: david at kadavy dot net
I've recently been doing some of my own projects and realized that pretty much everything I make looks like ass. It's the one piece missing from my ability to do a complete website by myself.
Plus, for personal philosophical reasons, I'm growing more appreciative of visual aesthetics in every aspect of life, so being able to incorporate that into my chosen profession is important to me.
There are some good resources out there, and I feel that learning even just a few things about design makes a big difference. Learning to recognize different font families, the importance of alignment, etc. have all made a big difference. But I still feel there's something lacking - I still find it difficult to cross the boundary "doesn't suck THAT bad" and "beautiful." Aside from getting a degree in graphics design, I'm still not sure how to get the knowledge and techniques needed.
I suspect part of it is that I just need to practice a lot more, and design lots of sites just to see what happens and develop my style. But some "hacks" to make the process faster would be very welcome.
I don't know if I'll be able to provide "hacks," but your observation on it requiring a lot of practice is right on. My goal at this point is to change the way you see things, so when you see a good design, you understand what about it is making it great.
So, I'll be talking about composition, geometry, color, typography, and other design principles.
Finding stuff on the tools seems to be easy / every one is doing it.