Ask HN: How did you learn design? What resources exist to help one learn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you learn design? What resources exist to help one learn?

10 pointsjknightco10 comments

I'm currently a developer with the ability to put together organized wireframes, but I lack that certain something necessary to put together complete, quality designs. I've seen plenty of "Learn to Code" type posts, and I'm interested in what sort of resources exist regarding learning proper design.

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I came to design from engineering via usability. Usability gives you metrics you can qualify your UIs with, just like you have for your code. Time on task is like execution speed for people. Information efficiency is like lint checking for content.

I started with Jef Raskin's _The Humane Interface_. Chapters 1-4 cover the essentials about testing and usability and efficiency, and then Chapter 6 from 6.3 on, and you can skip the rest.

Then, assuming you understand semantic HTML, you can take efficiency and semantic HTML and understand information architecture and 2D content layout. Robin Williams' _The Non-Designer's Design Book_ and Jan V. White's _Editing by Design_ can teach you effective and attractive positioning of content on a page or on a screen. The principles are all the same.

From layout you can get into visual design through things like dashboards (Stephen Few's _Information Dashboard Design_) or other "practical" subjects without ever getting into becoming an actual artist.

If you want to get more into visual design, I've given out a few copies of David Kadavy's _Design for Hackers_, and it's supposed to be good, but I haven't read it. The best way is really to take some introductory visual design and art classes. Check your local community college.

If you want to get more into user experience or interaction design, Dan Saffer's _Designing for Interaction_ is often cited as a good overview of the practice of interaction design, but I haven't read it, either.

Thanks for the book suggestions, I grabbed most of them on Amazon!

There are a bunch of design and typography rules out there, such as Kadavy's book. One of the harder lessons to learn is that the most valuable thing to develop is your taste... and then your relentless pursuit of creating great work based on it. The better your taste, the more frustrated you will get until your skills meet it. I found this after a few years of torture:

http://www.mcwade.com/DesignTalk/2011/04/nobody-tells-this-t...

PG has a great article on the subject as well: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

I completely agree with you, and I think I've done a lot to develop my taste. I get extremely frustrated when I sit down to design things, because nothing ever comes out how I was hoping it to. Things don't line up quite right, colors aren't perfect, etc.

Thanks for the tips!

For me, I find it's actually a matter of learning more about myself and why I do what I do. I'm no great designer but I was a technically minded person who thought I could never design anything nice. That was until I tried to examine why I do what I do.

I keep asking myself "Why did I just do that?" and do whatever it takes to find out that why.

I was the technical reviewer on a recent book called "Design for Software". It's a good introduction to design with a focus on an engineering audience.

More info at http://www.design4software.com/

I'm the author of Design for Software. Chapter 5 in the book is dedicated to creating proper wireframes. I also have some freebies on design4software.com that might help. cheers!

Bought your book! Looking forward to going through it.

I think getting a mentor can be very helpful. A friend learned by designing a perspective of skewmorphic design (imitating real things).

http://hackdesign.org/

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