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Comment by ironskull | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely not cheap, but I would be surprised if Erik Kennedy's https://www.learnui.design isn't the best course out there. In fact, he has three courses:

1. UI design

2. UX design

3. Landing Page design

I own all 3 and they are among the best purchases I've ever made, even at the cost. Erik is a former programmer who has taken the engineers mindset and systematically analyzed and broken down the various parts of UI design. It is very practical, which was something that was lacking in most resources I found when I was in your position.

If anyone is interested, I would recommend starting with the UI course, which probably runs around $1000. Unfortunately It is only available at certain intervals, probably every 6-8 weeks.

If the cost is intimidating, you can get a lot out of his blog, which will also give you a taste of how he thinks about design: https://www.learnui.design/blog/.

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With RefactoringUI and Erik's course, I think the 3rd I would use to complete my top 3 is Shift Nudge (https://shiftnudge.com/).

There's a fair amount of overlap between all of them, so if you want to Pareto minmax it, I would recommend starting with Refactoring UI, which should help provide practical solutions to many situations and get rid of the most egregious horrors you might commit.

Of course, UI design goes much deeper than anything those courses can teach, but they're a great start.

> https://shiftnudge.com/

Only commenting about it as that site is a course about designing interfaces: to me the font on that site borderline is ridiculous, with the flat lines on the t/f/g, narrow L, an ampersand that looks like an 'e' with a long tail. Makes it hard to read

And, appropriately, that font is not used for an application's interface but for a display title.

Legibility sometimes needs to be traded off for impact or other variable that matters more depending on the purpose.

He could have used Inter, like every other landing page on the internet these days, but then it wouldn't stand out.

These are the kinds of things that have more to do with graphic design and that incorporate other considerations than typical UI stuff.

Contrast is terrible on the body text, especially compared to those brightly coloured highlighted sections... It's like he's shining a torch in my face while asking me to read grey chalk on a blackboard in a darkened room.

There are big weird gaps everywhere, some of them have mouseovers which change my mouse cursor into something intended to be amusing but have no link.

The "This will/won't work if..." items seem to be links but clicking them just jumps me back to the top of the page.

The weird animation under "Pro", no idea what that's supposed to be telling me.

Company logos at the top. Used with permission, I wonder? They have mouseovers but don't seem to be links.

"5-star rating"? Really? Who from? I need more information for that to be remotely useful, should be a link. Let's say my HN post has a 5-star rating too * * * * *.

As a "beautiful and functional interface" I'm afraid the web page scores a 0/2, for me.

completely agree, whoever thinks this site is great UI might already be lost.

Feel free to give everyone your suggestions to learn UI design.

I also started with RefactoringUI and agree that is a good starting point for a newbie.

Maybe those walls of text with testimonials AND THAT'S NOT ALL!!! work for some.

I lost the will to wade through to find out how much the courses are - how much are they roughly?

This, combined with the fact that it's an asynchronous video course but somehow "closed for enrollment" also left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm sure they're great courses but I'm not really interested in supporting the artificial scarcity so someone can charge a few hundred dollars more per person.

After all the praise, I powered through and scrolled all the way but apparently it is closed for enrollment. No mention of the price either.

Erik opens the courses up regularly (I would guess every 6-8 weeks). If you sign up for his newsletter (which is also quite good, almost completely original substance like his blog) he will let you know when registration is opening.

The approach is definitely unconventional - I would guess the main reason is that selling a high ticket item like this benefits from a longer sales cycle. The other reason he might do this is he has a Slack group where students can post their homework assignments and get feedback. So having a cohort start at the same time might be desirable. As a consumer I would agree with the comments that I would prefer to have them always available for purchase. If you do buy one of them, he makes all of the other courses available at any time.

As I mentioned in my post, the price is probably around $1000 for the UI course; the other courses are typically a few hundred dollars cheaper (they aren't quite as long). The course prices do tend to increase over time, and I think Erik is very averse to offering discounts.

Seconding this. Not cheap, but so worth the money. Learn UI design and RefactoringUI are the best resources I've found for engineers who want to learn design. I'm just starting Erik's Landing Page course now, and so far it's also really good.

Seems like a gem of a resource; took a look at the blog, and already found a great principle ("rule of locality; place button where the data is") which I had violated just today. Thanks for the recommendation.

Landing page design? Well...I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the home page to find out the course is currently closed. There's also no mention of price.

Agreed, Erik’s courses are great.

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