Working on my Side Project, but finding it hard to do a design .
I'm a Junior Developer. I'm good with programming. But not so good (bad) with Designing. I find it hard to work on a good design for my side project. As it'll be a free app and I'm building it for learning purpose, I have no idea of spending money on a designer.
So, how can I get started with designing ? Basic stuff even ? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Hey, welcome to the design side! I am a self taught designer, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
First: Get inspired, dribbble and medium(muzli) are great places.
Second: Find your tools, personally I use Photoshop and Gravit Designer and Whimsical. Huge shoutout to figma and invision studio
Third: Start small - pick a design you like and mimic it.
Fourth: Recreate the design in code.
A bonus step, if you want to learn design is use page builders and themes, as these were designed by industry professionals. Carrd.co has cool simple designs
I'm in this same process, one of my many excuses to start something was that I'm not a designer nor know much about it.
I paid a designer in 99designs to make a landing page but there were way too many changes that I needed/wanted. I thought "I can do this myself". I took the final design and replicate it on Google Drawings and do my changes there. It turns out it was very easy (once I had the colors and fonts that I liked).
Now I'm starting to use Adobe Xd (it's free) and I'm getting the designs that I want.
As others mentioned before look at designs on dribbble, bookmark those that you like, analyze what is what you like about them, with time you'll develop this intuition.
Look for a "principles of design" tutorial / videos where you can learn topics such as color theory, use of space, typography etc. etc.
This so far is working for me.
I used to work with a lot of technical folks, when they'd ask for help with design, I'd always go back to the basics from this book: https://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-4th/dp/0133966151/ref=sr_1_1.
It's an easy read. Getting the basics down (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) and applying them without trying to be "creative" will put your UI above 90% of the stuff people just throw together.
Yeah, it's a mind-shift when you try to design as a developer. I know how it feels. Usually, when I'm bootstrapping things, I use templates and adjust them to my vision. It makes time-to-market really short, but it sucks when you want to deliver a unique experience to your users.
If you are planning to make landing page for your app, you can find inspiration here: https://land-book.com/
that's basic tips for beginner take a look at this.
and also you can see tutorial videos in YouTube.
but after learning all tips you should have a creative mind.
If it's website you want to design, take a look at this: https://www.pages.xyz/
I always use this website when I want to design landing or pricing pages. And I'm not a designer either 😄 I'm much better at writing code 💻
Pages is awesome! Thanks :)
I would think a good place to start would be Figma. It’s free, and after 5 hours of YouTube tutorials you’ll be feeling very comfortable. Good luck.
If you've already designed/sketched a couple of screens/wireframes for your app, feel free to email them to me (if you don't mind).
I can review them and try to give you actionable feedback.
P.S. I'm a UX Designer :)
Thank you for the helpful valuable replies everyone. I'll check these out :)