Thanks for making a presentation that's useful to readers. While I'd still prefer to see video, this stands on its own.
I see a lot of presentations hit Hacker News that aren't very useful on their own because they were meant to accompany a talk -- and a good talk usually omits the best material (or a at a minimum, important context) from the slides.
Sometimes I prefer video (esp. if the delivery is very good) but for learning purposes I prefer reading since then everyone can choose their own tempo.
This is probably one of the best presentation about the basics of web design that I know. He also mentions the book, Designing for the web, in the presentation which is a good entry for typography, colours etc http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php
Just tweeted that this was the best presentation on design that I'd ever seen. None of the tips will turn me into a designer but they will help.
I've looked at lots of design for developers presentations, the topic must be guaranteed link bait. None of them really were all that helpful to me until this one.
I've only met two developers in my career that were were world class at both programming and design. People are looking for a magic shortcut to grokking design that just isn't there. The best solution for me right now is to use Bootstrap but there really isn't a great alternative to hiring the best designer that you can find.
> I've only met two developers in my career that were were world class at both programming and design.
The one I know through a friend of a friend has had multiple apps in the top 100 overall, App Store. And he is a better designer! And so hard on himself (e.g. you see his design and you think it is done and he keeps on going...)
"Just flipping the gradient direction is the equivalent of the environment light changing direction when you hover over/click a button, this makes zero sense."
Inverting the gradient for pressed down button can also be seen as a convex surface becoming concave; think a membrane button. (A flat button wouldn't have such a gradient.)
While that kind of "faux membrane" buttons are not very common in real world, the inverted gradient effect immediately gives me feeling of "popped in" button. Am I alone here?
That makes more sense if the gradient is radial. For a linear gradient, inversion gives the appearance of a changing light source - just like the example given shows.
A radial gradient, on the other hand, might more typically assume an 'oveerhead' light, which is why inversion makes sense.
For me the linear gradient hints that the surface is curved on one axis, i.e. is cylindrical, not spherical.
Of course the context plays a role too on the perceived illusion; the appearance of changing light source may be stronger for lonely button (vs. group of elements sharing the same light source).
Thanks for this! As a developer who has been slowly learning design by trial and error, I wish I had access to this resource years ago. It's totally frustrating when you know something just looks awful, but don't have the knowledge or background to know how to fix it.
Nice presentation with notes for people reading afterwards.
One thing I don't get is the font sizes. At one point, it says something like "notice we're using 24px to tie into the multiples-of-6 rule", but elsewhere recommends 16px as the main base size.
If you use 16px, the 1.5 line height I use for paragraphs becomes 24px, which ties again with the multiples of 6 rule again. So your lines are actually 24px high, if you then use maybe 48px for spacing around your blogpost, things look balanced because they're even.
Good stuff to read. I got chance to learn things which I usually ignore while developing sites.
People who are recommending to hire a designer, I would add that its quite a cultural thing. Not every designer is good at UX. Most of the designers in my country are more into graphics rather than thinking of how to use good color combination and typography.
The point about colors, specifically grays, on different screens is really important. I can't think of how many times I look at a website I'm working on at a friend or family member's house and am disappointed with how it looks.
Sufficient contrast is important. Worse still I have color blindness so for me contrast is critical sometimes.
It's also important to consider the opposite perspective, when you're working on design touches that usually should be subtle. Some very common examples are lighting effects like gradients, drop shadows and cut-outs.
These effects need to have quite a gentle contrast between the darker and the lighter colours, and if you start throwing around 25%+ differences in grey level your results could become overpowering for viewers with decent screens.
Of course, in such cases, you also won't completely break your design for viewers with poorly configured screens or imperfect vision if the contrast isn't as strong to them, so you can afford to be more subtle than when choosing, say, foreground/background colours for body text.
If you can afford it, please hire professional designers. These posts are interesting and useful. But as in any industry there things that you can only learn through years of experience and education.
I agree, this is also mentioned somewhere in one of the last slides.
As a designer I know about MySQL, the terminal, PHP, Javascript, jQuery, RoR, Sass, HTML, CSS etc.; if a developer knows the basics about color, typography and alignment and knows why the designer in his team does the things he/she does it's probably going to be much easier working together.
Just as is the case with many things, ability comes with experience. Design, while dealing with many concrete and quantifiable considerations, still relies heavily on a distinguishing and trained eye. It's what separates the Jakob Nielsens ( almost entirely intellectual in approach ) and marketable attractive design.
Odd bit of design problem on slideshare: if you change the page font size, all the characters remain in place, but change size, making the presentation look awful.
For a slideshow about design, it sure isn't very pleasing to the eye: sticky notes, inconsistent formatting and image sizes, verbosity. The tips aren't exactly creme-de-la-creme either. You'd learn more from just looking at the Apple website (which actually looks good) or reading Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep. OP would do much better at self promotion if he actually provided good tips and decent slides, instead of the heavy self-advertisement. Keep it lean.
Hmm. I think Ext is great for stuff like dynamic datagrids and they have some proper interactions (a lot of it based on the YUI! design library, which is one of the best resources out there). Unfortunately most of it looks very developer-y and doesn't really have good defaults. I can't recommend it.
I see a lot of presentations hit Hacker News that aren't very useful on their own because they were meant to accompany a talk -- and a good talk usually omits the best material (or a at a minimum, important context) from the slides.