Design for a developer? | Hacker News Reader

Design for a developer?

Here's my problem.

I'm basically a developer and math type of person (if you read any of abstract algebra posts), and I'm trying to learn design.

I can do UI design pretty well, it turns out to be quite usable and friendly and people can get around it, but, I can't get myself to design something that looks good.

Something that looks, you know, out of the ordinary.

I try colors and shades, and gradients but they all come out looking weird and I can never get them to work well together like some of these pages:

http://captaindash.com/ http://mailchimp.com/ http://joshsullivan.me/

Where can I learn to do this? I'm not saying how I can learn to make AWESOME websites, but, where can I learn to make websites can people can classify as looking "good"?

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For website design, I'd recommend two books: Mark Boulton's "Designing for the Web" and Jason Beaird's "Principles of Beautiful Web Design".

It really comes down to practice. You could try imitating the websites you like (implement but not release). It's good practice and will actively show you what tiny details go into each website such as layout, typography, gradients, shades, texture, colors, and so much more.

Try out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...

I went to one his book tour events and it was quite insightful!

Regarding colors, shades, gradients, and noise, try spending some time on bjango. This guy has a lot of bang for a small amount of reading: http://bjango.com/articles/noise/

Thanks :)

Practice recreating site designs that you consider to be good, then practice creating your own.

You'll have to devote a lot of time to this.

Oh, I also wanted to mention, I don't have Photoshop, and that makes learning even harder.

There are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just depends on what OS you're running.

Windows. Which makes everything a bit worse.

Not that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier.

It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap operations.

It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.

You could try with Adobe Fireworks. It gets you a "good" design (at least, up to a certain point) and it's more easy to manage and faster than with Photoshop.

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