Design, and why I don't do it
hughrawlinson.me
hughrawlinson.me
We are mixing aesthetics and stylizing with things like ui flows and product design. Just becasue it's called "Design" it doesn't mean it can only be done by people with "Designer" on their titles. It seems that the only reason we are separating "Development" as another dicipline incapable of doing some of the things we call "Design" it's because we don't call it "Code Design".
A visual designer is as capable of developing a useful and functional ui design as a developer. Even if one is called "designer" and the other is not. Stylizing is another matter.
PS: My point is that some of the activities we are calling "Design" are VERY different to some of the other activities we are calling "Design". We lump them together because, well, they are called "Design". But they are not equivalent, not even related really, or at least not more related that some of those "Design" activities and "Programming".
As a metaphor, Architecture is not Interior Design, nor is Structural Engineering. An Interior Designer, by definition, is as prepared to do architecture as a Structural Engineer... and even less so in some cases. But with the right training, both can become Architects. Or for an example closer to software, Game Designers come from a lot of backgrounds, from art to writing to technology. Their backgrounds affect the type of design they do and their focus (Jon Blow, for example, prioritizes the "mechanical" design of the game, while Edmund McMillen works mainly from an stylistic point of view), but all of them are doing great game design.
'UI flows' as you say are a black art. They require considerable individual thought for each application (and potentially every user). Often engineers if they put their mind to it could do this better than any 'designer'. Usually nobody does. I think this is usually because there is no reward for it - because it takes time and doesn't produce any clear result.
Its the same in architecture (buildings) - I know because this is what I do for a living. People sell themselves as 'design-architects' but don't design good outcomes for the building's users because actually there is no incentive for them to put the time in.
For example I find I'm not very good at designing something that looks nice but I can design a site/app to work well for the user. The UX is good. Steve Jobs famously said "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." You and I may not be good at the aesthetic part of software design but that doesn't mean we should dismiss it all together. Software developers can still be good at 'how it works' and it's possible they might be better positioned than a UI designer to do this.
There's definitely room for specialisation but our work is so much richer when we learn about the full stack. If you want to know more about design — just ask a designer :). We don't bite, we've just been a bit lazy with learning resources recently. HackDesign is a great start but the design community are well aware that learning to design at the moment is a mix of formal education, figuring shit out over years of making mistakes and a sprinkling of black magic. There's no Railscast to grok typography, and that sucks. We're working on it though :)
We're pushing out a lesson on Color Theory on Monday, then David Kadavy (author of Design for Hackers) is up the week after. We've already got 4 months of great content so far, and 8 more to go.
Let me know if you try it out - @wr on twitter.
But we really need everyone to understand good design theory, at least at a basic level. It streamlines the development process, and it may even prompt a few developers who hadn't really thought about it to do a little more with design.
What I love about Hack Design is that it is free and very casual, which means I can look into it in my spare time because of my own interest and motivation, without any investment and without any risk.
Also it should be noted that the course is largely comprised of a curated set of already-out-there blog posts, articles, tools, and other materials. Curated is the active word there; it's like a guided tour of the design community. The toughest thing about getting started with any new area of learning is knowing where to start, especially with something so vast and foreign to many of us as design. Having someone to point you in the right direction, let alone guide you step by step through the entire foundational process, is a huge leg up.
Okay, I'll stop gushing now. I just really enjoy and appreciate this course.
Abusing the buzzword 'curated' though... :-)
Design is not some scary magical quality you're either born with or not—I am convinced you can develop an eye, and you can learn by imitation and attention.
But by all means, don't overstep the boundaries of your expertise. Good advice for any work.
Because basically, design (at the beginner's level) is a whole bunch of little tweaks until something looks just right. If you are designing in the same environment you code in, say by making your tweaks directly to the HTML/CSS, you're just going to get frustrated if your tweaks take any longer than a second or so to make and reload your page. To use a car analogy, it's taking your mechanical know-how and suddenly jumping into a NASCAR pit crew. You're not just fixing the car, you're doing it lightening-fast and super-accurate. If you're not already shit-hot, you're just going to burn out.
That's actually a moderately good analogy - even though I disagree with your conclusion.
Approaching design like that is like the developers who approach learning development by writing crap and then randomly tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until it sort of runs and does what they want.
Neither is a particularly good approach to learning design or development.
Does anyone know of a good book/tutorial/course to learn the very basics? How the hell do I choose a good colour combination? I've read about the colour theory. Now what?
What I found much more useful was tutorials on how to paint, because they started off by teaching artistic fundamentals, such as composition, colors, etc.
IMO, a hacker should learn every aspects of software making, design included.
PS, I am not saying that this book is what you can used to learn how to become a designer, it's a good one for a developer to reasonably understand how design works. "Design for Hackers" is exactly what this book trying to achieve.
There are of course amazing artists that are brilliant coders, but this would be far more rare than the norm, which is one or the other.
Saying that, I'm a bit of a hybrid, not a great designer, and not a great programmer ;-)
I suspect hybrid types are born of necessity; i.e. when one knows neither how to design a website, nor how to program. BA/MA graduates building websites for a living likely occupy much of this space.
I suspect pure programmers are those with a CS degree who found work right out of college, diving directly into Java/C-family projects for Big Co., what need for design/art?
The question is though whether that's a natural law, or an artefact of the culture of those communities of practice. Personally I lean towards the latter.
I'm seeing a lot more dev folk get more than competent on the design side (and a few UX folk getting competent on the dev side).
I'm still not very good, but I'm able to put together nice sites with the help of Twitter Bootstrap and wrapbootstrap.com templates.
Here is an example of what a non-designer hacker can put together in a couple hours with a wrapbootstrap theme, icon finder and images from around the web:
Overall, great article, but keep in mind that the goal of good design isn't to make people go "wow," it's to be invisible. The best interfaces are the one people don't even notice. Remember that you're designing for your users, not for other designers. It's surprisingly easy to forgot that.
Also, I recommend checking out "Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. It's an excellent introduction into usability design.
Or rather - it's only to make people go "wow" if making that happen is part of what the goal of the design is. Designs being invisible that should "wow" are just as bad as "wow" designs when they should be invisible.
If you find the process enjoyable, you'll be good at it soon enough. If not, well, there are plenty of other things you can do, but it's not because you "can't".
Designing a really great product beyond choosing fonts, colors, and shapes (which is extremely hard, but you can Google good font pairings and color palettes) just takes time and lot of thought. Experience counts, but you have it. If you spent 2 weeks working on a UX, you'd do great work, I promise you.
Once you dig into some design theory - you'll find that visual design (and other elements of design) are a lot more "logical, emotional and time/test driven" than you think ;-) There are lots of rules of thumb and heuristics. Lots of applied knowledge rather than just judging things from an aesthetic POV.
Indeed the process of becoming a good designer is basically building up that aesthetic POV from the ground up. In a similar way that experienced developers see "ugly" code much more directly than beginners do.
Obviously I don't know you - but I've worked with folk who have said very similar things to what you've said about having no eye for aesthetics who have ended up with some fairly good basic design chops.
However that doesn't mean developers can't be really good designers. Anybody can learn how to emulate the good design of the present and create products which fulfill the design demands of consumers.
I'd rephrase that to "...bosses, clients, and around 65% of those who call themselves designers"
Suggestion: Use web fonts. "Baskerville, Times New Roman, Times, serif" ain't a web-safe combination.