

Design for a developer? - dhaivatpandya

Here's my problem.<p>I'm basically a developer and math type of person (if you read any of abstract algebra posts), and I'm trying to learn design.<p>I can do UI design pretty well, it turns out to be quite usable and friendly and people can get around it, but, I can't get myself to design something that looks <i>good</i>.<p>Something that looks, you know, out of the ordinary.<p>I try colors and shades, and gradients but they all come out looking weird and I can never get them to work well together like some of these pages:<p>http://captaindash.com/
http://mailchimp.com/
http://joshsullivan.me/<p>Where can I learn to do this? I'm not saying how I can learn to make AWESOME websites, but, where can I learn to make websites can people can classify as looking "good"?
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hbien
For website design, I'd recommend two books: Mark Boulton's "Designing for the
Web" and Jason Beaird's "Principles of Beautiful Web Design".

It really comes down to practice. You could try imitating the websites you
like (implement but not release). It's good practice and will actively show
you what tiny details go into each website such as layout, typography,
gradients, shades, texture, colors, and so much more.

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rigatoni1
Try out this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-
Bea...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-
Beauty/dp/1119998956)

I went to one his book tour events and it was quite insightful!

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jashmenn
Regarding colors, shades, gradients, and noise, try spending some time on
bjango. This guy has a lot of bang for a small amount of reading:
<http://bjango.com/articles/noise/>

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dhaivatpandya
Thanks :)

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computerslol
Practice recreating site designs that you consider to be good, then practice
creating your own.

You'll have to devote a lot of time to this.

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dhaivatpandya
Oh, I also wanted to mention, I don't have Photoshop, and that makes learning
even harder.

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steventruong
There are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just
depends on what OS you're running.

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dhaivatpandya
Windows. Which makes everything a bit worse.

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mrmekon
Not that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I
switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector
graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier.

It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the
other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously
complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to
work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap
operations.

It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On
OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.

