[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best UI design courses for hackers?
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Ask HN: Best UI design courses for hackers?
Hello HN, What have been some of the best UI design courses, in
your experience? I'm aware of avant garde works such as Bret
Victor's "Magic Ink" and love it. At the same time, I'd also love
to learn more about more "down to earth"
tutorials/examples/exercises/courses to build practical UI skills.
Something above "react tutorials", but something below Victor's
"Magic Ink" Big plus point if there is a coherent set of
principles/system propounded, to make it easy to apply in our
specific context.
Author : atomicnature
Score : 226 points
Date : 2023-12-10 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's a course as much as a book, but I found
| _Refactoring UI_ to be pretty helpful. It's done by the folks
| that brought us Tailwind.
|
| https://www.refactoringui.com/
| sxg wrote:
| The Refactoring UI YouTube videos are super useful too!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gdYHlYAKDY&list=PLDVpvW8ghD...
| atomicnature wrote:
| Looks like they have lots of examples; will give this a try!
| j3d wrote:
| Not sure if this fits your goal of a UI design course, but I
| found Josh Comeau's CSS for JS Devs course to be a great way to
| learn the fundamentals of CSS in a way that resonated with my
| developer mindset.
|
| https://css-for-js.dev/
| atomicnature wrote:
| Love the sharp focus on css, looks interesting. Thanks for the
| rec.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| The following will give you a good understanding of UI design.
|
| Number 3, Designing Interfaces, has a coherent set of principles.
|
| 1. [Don't Make Me Think](https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-
| think/)
|
| 2. [The Design of Everyday Things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| The_Design_of_Everyday_Things)
|
| 3. [Designing Interfaces, 3rd
| Edition](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-
| interfaces-3r...)
|
| 4. [Nielsen Norman Group Interaction Design: 3-Day
| Course](https://www.nngroup.com/courses/interaction-design-3-day-
| cou...)
|
| 5. [Apple Human Interface
| Guidelines](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-
| guideline...)
|
| 6. [A Dao of Web Design](https://alistapart.com/article/dao/)
|
| 7. [Usability Testing](https://www.nngroup.com/courses/usability-
| testing/)
|
| It's important to practice, not just read. The term is
| "dogfooding".
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...
|
| Finally, probably first of all, it's worth thinking about whether
| your user interface is harmful to the people using it, and
| changing if so:
|
| https://www.deceptive.design/
|
| https://www.humanetech.com/key-issues
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Anyone heard from Tog (#4 above)? The cert on his website,
| asktog.com, appears to have expired and no new content since
| 2014.
| atomicnature wrote:
| Woah, that's a long list of resources, thanks. I've read a few
| of those ((1), (2), (7)).
|
| (3) is new to me. Will give it a read for sure.
| preommr wrote:
| Whenever this question comes up, the usual suspects like "The
| Design of Everyday things" get mentioned and I can't help
| wonder what it would be like if someone asked for books about
| learning to program [websites] and kept getting "Godel, Escher
| Bach", "Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" or "Meditations"
| by Marcus Aurelius.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| For websites at this point in time I'd recommend Mozilla's
| Getting started with the web:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...
|
| I couldn't get through Godel, Escher Bach, but can recommend
| I Am A Strange Loop by the same author!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
| imjonse wrote:
| Unless you read The art of war you cannot possibly become a
| 10x ninja developer. /s
|
| More seriously, I have read the design of everyday things
| about 10 years ago and it was one of the most boring books I
| have ever had to go through. I only remember doorknobs and
| something about affordances. Read refactoringUI as well, some
| vague shiny UI tips of which can't remember any but 'have
| decent spacing'. I still can't design even a simple form. I
| am starting to suspect that if one wants to be good at web
| design one needs to start doing lots of web design until one
| gets better. Reading books may come later to place that
| practical knowledge in some coherent mental framework.
| _trackno5 wrote:
| That's interesting. I went through that book not that long
| ago and I found it fascinating. I had a hard time putting
| it down.
|
| I found that the concepts he covers in that book can even
| be applied for good software API design.
|
| Also, he did spoil doors for me. Pretty much every building
| I go into now annoys me because of the stupid door handles
| they pick.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| These books are a solid foundation for design education,
| but also design is its own deep field of expertise that
| you're not going to learn after a a book or two. Both
| things can be true.
| dutchCourage wrote:
| "Refactoring UI" won't make you a good UI designer on its
| own, but it's a great place to start. It's the perfect book
| if after making some software you feel like the design is
| amateurish and want to know how to start improving it.
|
| And then if you're interested you can dig deeper into
| colors, layouts, types...
| neeleshs wrote:
| That's quite interesting. I'm reading design of everyday
| things right now, and has been very valuable for my product
| (SaaS,drag/drop). Not actually to build it, but designing
| parts.(mockups etc)
|
| A lot of it is common sense, but only in hindsight.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > I am starting to suspect that if one wants to be good at
| web design one needs to start doing lots of web design
| until one gets better. Reading books may come later to
| place that practical knowledge in some coherent mental
| framework.
|
| This is true, but it's true for anything. Reading a
| programming book won't teach you to program unless it
| presents problems you can build on actively throughout the
| reading. You need applied reps, otherwise you'll at most
| get some vague inspiration or enjoy/hate it.
|
| This is why I don't read practical books anymore unless I'm
| prepared to _practice_ what I 'm supposed to be learning
| about during the course of my reading. This is also true
| for videos.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| DOET is very helpful in getting you to understand how to
| think from a user perspective.
|
| I found it to be one of the most useful books in my
| development as an application programmer.
|
| It teaches you how to see UI
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yes. But he also spends plenty of time on the idea that
| behind the scenes there are always trade-offs, compromises,
| etc. That is, organization and personel impact design,
| often in ways that aren't obvious from the outside.
| fernirello wrote:
| This has to be the best HN comment in a long time.
| cm11 wrote:
| I agree, but sorta in both directions--which paints a great
| contrast between product (design or management) and UI
| design.
|
| I really enjoyed the book and think it's great entry to a
| design mindset. This is a mindset for how to make products
| that work well and people like or would actually use. Is that
| what we expect of a designer or a product manager? Important,
| but just a bit downstream of that is how it works and where
| the buttons/interactions are and whether people think its
| attractive. Most designers (we can confine this to tech [1])
| consider themselves product designers rather than UI (or even
| UX) and often have that title and the bullet points in the
| job description to reflect it. That is, they want and are
| hired to understand users and design _products_. And then
| later, design _interfaces_--but only later because ofc the
| interfaces should derive from those things.
|
| You can argue, for various reasons [2], a majority of today's
| tech designers would not be good at making product decisions
| (which includes the processes of understanding users or
| designing products); to which I would mildly agree, but find
| more pertinent to then immediately question why recruit and
| hire someone with that offer. You could hire directly a UI or
| visual designer.
|
| In practice, because of power dynamics, most designers design
| UIs and some UX. There is indeed time spent on the product
| work that the designers feel they should be doing as part of
| a "real" process, but doesn't ever land in the product. That
| work is done genuinely, but frequently amounts to design
| theater--both internally to their own teams/companies (which
| "storytells" the work) and externally when they present their
| portfolio to others [3]. Most product (design) decisions are
| not made by designers because they're either not present for
| or can't win any of the upstream arguments. So even at the UI
| level, where there is more control, the design is based on
| "received" constraints.
|
| Anyways, I think your comment is a real good provocation for
| what do we mean by designer or what should a designer be.
|
| [1] I think this applies to plenty of folks called a designer
| pre-tech, say, industrial designers or architects.
|
| [2] There are many, but one is simply that designers who are
| capable at this, find that design is not the place to impact
| them. They should perhaps become a PM (which is full of its
| own pitfalls) or found their own company. Or more commonly
| become a disinterested designer. I'm not sure either role, PM
| or design, is able to really do this well in the way most
| tech companies are organized, but the PM is in many cases the
| designer's real informal manager. And the informality is the
| problem. They have more power, but not any hard
| responsibility for/to the designer. And so you get a junior
| and/or apathetic pool of designers.
|
| [3] Most portfolios, if you're not familiar, present designs
| as designed (what was made in the design tool) not as
| implemented (screenshots or the actual live app) for a
| reason. And further, most
| prox wrote:
| Great list! You are missing the big one (imho) : About Face,
| Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
| lstamour wrote:
| In particular, the third edition focuses heavily on desktop
| while the fourth edition strays into mobile. Love em.
|
| That said, more practical and recent resources include
| https://www.interaction-design.org/master-classes and
| https://designcode.io/ for different topics. I'm sure there
| are others, but these are just off the top of my head.
| ironskull wrote:
| 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/.
| atomicnature wrote:
| 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| > 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
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Feel free to give everyone your suggestions to learn UI
| design.
| ironskull wrote:
| I also started with RefactoringUI and agree that is a good
| starting point for a newbie.
| funksta wrote:
| 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.
| nprateem wrote:
| 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?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| 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.
| ironskull wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Agreed, Erik's courses are great.
| druskacik wrote:
| Refactoring UI is a book you can read in a couple of hours, but
| it helped me immensely to design my projects. It does not go to a
| great depth, but it's very useful for simple and quick hacking.
|
| https://www.refactoringui.com/
| ethanbond wrote:
| I'm a fairly experienced product designer and this book has
| been incredibly valuable even for me. Lots of _extremely_
| practical insights packed in here. IMO a must-read for
| engineers and designers alike, if you're building something
| where you need to care about point-and-click UI at all.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Should be noted, this booked was created by the Tailwind CSS
| folks (before Tailwind existed IIRC).
| BasilPH wrote:
| Came here to mention Refactoring UI. I think the structure
| makes it very valuable: Each one is focused on a particular
| problem or topic. So if you need help with font weights or
| spacing or shadows there is a chapter for that and I often go
| back and look at a specific chapter when I encounter a problem.
| strontian wrote:
| Just seconding this comment. RefactoringUI is a far outlier in
| how _useful_ it is compared to other books.
| JCharante wrote:
| The first two chapters are free and I've read them and they're
| very very good
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| With its USD 99 price (or USD 149 for a version with additional
| material), this e-book seems quite expensive to me.
| adamzerner wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Relative to other books, maybe it is on
| the expensive side. But relative to the value you get from
| it, I think it is incredibly low.
|
| One way to think about it is in terms of how much you value
| your time. If you value your time at $25/hr and this book
| saves you more than 4 hours of time learning UI design, it is
| worth it.
|
| Another way to think about it is in terms of ROI. As someone
| in the tech industry I think that having these skills is
| likely to pay off way more than $99. Not in a legible way --
| it's not like anyone will ever say to you "I see you have
| these UI design skills, here's a $5,000 raise." But I believe
| that the skills will ultimately shine through and improve
| your ability to get jobs and make more money.
|
| Also, in practice, if you're in the tech industry, there's
| probably a good chance that you can get your employer to pay
| for it.
| shinycode wrote:
| I totally agree, quality knowledge that will last years and
| saves time is worth it. Amazing book
| zengid wrote:
| Isn't that by the folks behind Tailwind?
| khaldiameur wrote:
| Yes it is. I don't like Tailwind but the book is great for
| devs.
| 3abiton wrote:
| I will take a look at this!
| sfRattan wrote:
| From their website:
|
| >Borders are a great way to distinguish two elements from one
| another, but using too many of them can make your design feel
| busy and cluttered.
|
| >Instead, try adding a box shadow, using contrasting background
| colors, or simply _adding more space between elements_.
|
| Emphasis mine. The above may be reasonable advice if you're
| building a low information density app for nonproductive
| content consumption... Or a touchscreen only app where all
| interactive elements must be at least a finger tall and wide...
| But it drives me absolutely batty when extra white space
| appears in software that I want to use to process/analyze a lot
| of information and actually get stuff done. And numerous
| examples on the website just make things... Farther apart
| and/or bigger.
|
| I still rue the day Spotify fattened up its row height for all
| lists in the app. _It 's less readable than it was if I can't
| read as many songs as before without scrolling._
|
| I don't want to rag on the book overall without reading it,
| especially given how many in this thread seem to love it and
| the table of contents does hint at good ideas within, but that
| seems like a terrible set of examples to lead with. _' More
| white space' is not universally good design advice_. Give me
| design in the school of TMUX and Bloomberg Terminal _any day_
| over extra white space for the sake of 'readability.' As much
| information as it is possible to present clearly on a given
| screen.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| None. The thing is for UX you have something like don't make me
| think but UI is a matter of taste so everyone has their own rules
| which might not appeal to you. You can check out the windows 95
| design docs as that might give you some ideas and then I would
| suggest using an uncommon UI component library and let that do
| the heavy lifting till you can hire a designer.
| brainbag wrote:
| I am a longtime developer but I'm passionate about design and UX.
| I'm always on the lookout for materials that I can give my team
| and other developers to help them get better at design. It's not
| a course, but "The Non-Designer's Design Book" (ISBN
| 978-0133966152, Robin Williams) is the best material for design
| fundamentals I've found. It's very approachable for anyone and
| it's broadly applicable across all kinds of design. Everyone I
| have convinced to read it has loved it, and I've seen an
| improvement in output and understanding. I highly recommend this
| if you have an interest in design.
|
| Refactoring UI is also valuable and can be impactful, though it's
| heavily web focused and is more like a Web Component Design
| Cookbook rather than foundational knowledge.
| andreasmueller wrote:
| ui design should be part of sophisticated ux (human centered
| design). https://uxqb.org/en/documents/cpux-f-en-curriculum/
| contains valuable ux know-how which meets professional needs.
| hackermailman wrote:
| Daniel Jackson's book
| https://subconscious.substack.com/p/concept-design-in-three-...
|
| I use it all the time after reading it for example they
| redesigned git into gitless using these methods to audit and find
| redundant or confusing features.
| civilitty wrote:
| _> At the same time, I 'd also love to learn more about more
| "down to earth" tutorials/examples/exercises/courses to build
| practical UI skills. Something above "react tutorials", but
| something below Victor's "Magic Ink"_
|
| I have no recommendations for UI in general but for practical UI
| skills I really like Every Layout [1] which covers common page
| layouts and how to make them responsive beyond just media
| queries.
|
| [1] https://every-layout.dev/
| rahoulb wrote:
| I found Every Layout incredibly useful and, even when I'm not
| using their components I rarely find myself writing a piece of
| CSS that just won't do what I want (an all to common occurrence
| before the book).
| couchand wrote:
| Strong recommendation for Every Layout, and any other project
| from creators Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering.
|
| What I find particularly compelling about that resource is its
| structure. It's not just a list of recipes (despite what the
| landing page suggests). They build it all up from a foundation
| of general principles which provide guidance in visual design
| far beyond the enumerated examples [0]. Then by showing their
| work developing each example, they show how to apply the system
| of design thinking. It's really quite elegant!
| patcon wrote:
| I recall the HackDesign website/course being great a few years
| ago! Not sure about now, but used to be free...!
|
| https://hackdesign.org/
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I'd add an additional request. Are there any materials
| specifically about touch interfaces?
| coldbrewed wrote:
| I found Design for Hackers[1] to be an incredibly informative
| book; it provides a great deal of insight into UI patterns, color
| schemes and selections, and overall UI design. It's definitely
| more oriented towards graphical UIs but provides enough general
| insight into design considerations that you could generalize it
| for TUIs and CLIs if needed.
|
| [1]: https://designforhackers.com/
| waprin wrote:
| I am a long-time developer who's always dreamed of building an
| indie software business but design skills hold me back.
|
| I recognize this and get plenty of feedback around it. So this
| year I set out to improve to at least try to get to "mediocre"
| instead of "terrible".
|
| Refactoring UI and Erik Kennedys blog / class are mentioned and
| are great resources and I own both.
|
| I did Dribbble's Figma UI design class which was $600. It's
| biggest strength is that its a cohort based class, and cohort
| classes tend to have much higher finishing rates than self-paced
| classes. Their instructor will review your Figma designs but only
| if you finish in time so if you want to get your $600 worth you
| better open up Figma, so I recommend it for that reason.
| Kennedy's is self-paced and while it's extremely high quality, I
| haven't even worked through most of it for this reason.
|
| Of course, the single most important thing you can do is build
| lots of UIs. If you're like me, your UIs will suck, but if you do
| it more regularly, you will also notice more UI/UX techniques on
| other websites. I save all those in a Notion database organized
| by category and refer to them.
|
| One thing I almost never see mentioned but it was a really good
| piece of advice. I told someone that I was between hiring
| contractor designers for my project, and trying to improve at
| design and do it myself. One person told me, it's not mutually
| exclusive. So you can design an app, and it will probably look
| bad. Then hire an experienced UI/UX designer off Upwork to do a
| better job. And pay attention to the decisions they made and the
| decsions you made and compare the difference. Figma is a great
| tool these days because it's much more collaborative than just
| getting a big stack of PNGs or SVGs at the end, you can discuss
| design choices in Figma comments as the designer works.
|
| Another thing worth noting - professional designers will make
| several versions and iterations of everything, each screen and
| each component on that screen. And then pick the best one. The
| Dribbble instructor said, the best design is almost never the
| first one. This is time consuming and tedious if you don't love
| design but it's how you get the best results.
|
| If you just have a one-off project and don't truly care about
| improving at design, the simplest option is to hire a contractor.
| UI/UX is not something you learn in a weekend and then you're
| good to go, it's more like learning a language or an instrument
| in that you're either going to invest a lot of time to learn it
| well or you're going to suck. It's pretty affordable to hire-out
| because it's mostly up-front work.
|
| Hiring contractors and spending for classes is the expensive
| route but spending money can expedite the process. But, there's
| lots of free resources if you're broke. The single most important
| thing is design a lot, and pay attention to other people's
| designs and what they're doing.
| no_wizard wrote:
| In addition to the many great recommendations already posted in
| replies I recommend reading and watching videos about how Steve
| Jobs approached product design, and watch some infamous Apple
| keynotes.
|
| A part of this is developing a sense of "taste", which I strongly
| believe is possible to do but you have to have a certain mindset
| to do it. This helped me immensely once I realized it.
|
| One great website with great tidbits around the creation of the
| original Macintosh is Folklore[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.folklore.org/index.py
| esafak wrote:
| Can anyone recommend any online communities to have designs
| critiqued?
| abhinavsharma wrote:
| I'd like to add https://growth.design/psychology to an already
| great list that's building here.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| What helped me go from being completely unable to design a simple
| form to doing okay looking UI (not great yet) was simply to learn
| to draw. The best UX designers I've had the occasion to work with
| came from art school backgrounds, so I think there's definitely
| something to it.
|
| After grinding drawing for a while, it becomes very easy to
| simply see what works (and what you like) in other software UI-
| wise, and re-use that on your own projects.
|
| One recommendation I have is not to try to over-focus on the
| design of single components (ie. buttons or form inputs). It is
| fine to reuse a lib for that. What's really going to make the
| difference is how you organize them across the page, and the
| colors you pick.
|
| Edit: since I haven't really mentioned any courses: proko.com has
| great drawing courses. For books, check out Andrew Loomis' Fun
| with a pencil and Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of
| the Brain.
| photon_collider wrote:
| I found the book _Practical UI_ (https://www.practical-ui.com)
| useful for learning practical design tips. I still reference it
| from time to time in my work.
| adriangrigore wrote:
| Best rule I believe is just iterate until satisfied.
| b2bsaas00 wrote:
| Refactoring UI
| fzeindl wrote:
| Apples Human interface guidelines helped me a lot in improving
| the windows gui application, apps and websites I was developing
| in my career. After reading them I was definitely able to create
| much simpler UIs. (Example: use verbs in message-boxes. Not:
| Delete? Ok/Cancel, But instead: Delete XYZ. Delete/Keep.)
| https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
| WillAdams wrote:
| An early text on this was:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_...
|
| (if it's at all possible, get a first edition which has good
| quality reproductions of the screen grabs)
|
| A list of the chapters gives a good idea of the content:
|
| - Introduction
|
| - Elegance and Simplicity
|
| - Scale, Contrast, and Proportion
|
| - Organization and Visual Structure
|
| - Module and Program --- "The module is a scale of proportions
| that makes the bad difficult and the good easy" Albert Einstein
| (to Le Corbusier, 1964)
|
| - Image and Representation
|
| - So What About Style?
| karaterobot wrote:
| As a designer, I think the two best exercises you could do would
| be:
|
| 1. Look at designs that work or do not work, and ask what makes
| them work or not work. You may have a gut reaction: examine that
| reaction in cold blood.
|
| But that's basic stuff. After you do that, you should ask what
| the designer had to trade off in order to arrive at that
| solution. Design is how you solve a problem given a set of goals,
| requirements, and constraints. If you understand the problem at
| that level, it's a very short path to the design. It's trivial to
| say "this designer was bad at their job" if you see a bad
| product, but it's more instructive to understand all the inputs
| into that bad decision, rather than just judge the output.
|
| 2. Give a shit. This is what makes someone good at their job--any
| job. Sweat the details. Do not trust a checklist of steps for
| "how to do design good" any more than you'd trust a corresponding
| recipe for "how to do programming good".
|
| The reason I went from front end development to design is that I
| found I cared more about getting it right than the original
| designer who handed me the mockups did, and realized I should be
| sitting upstream of where I was. If you don't give a shit, no
| course is going to make you a good designer, and if you do give a
| shit, you won't need a course. Along the way, sure, you have to
| pick up some basic skills, but that's trivial, and ought to be
| second nature for a hacker.
| jokab wrote:
| > give a shit.
|
| This is probably the best advice I heard in a while.
|
| On a slightly different note this is easier said than done
| specially if you have suspected adhd and live in the UK where
| you have to wait years before getting proper treatment.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think the best practical approach for designing UIs is to
| download (and buy) Balsamic[0] and use that to design UIs. Cut
| through the nonsense of colours and pixels in the first instance
| and just lay things out logically and simply.
|
| [0] https://balsamiq.com
| kadomony wrote:
| Heaven and stars, my soul hurts just reading this.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Why's that?
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