How did you learn design?

Have been in your position before and one of the best resources I've ever seen is https://refactoringui.com/

Steve (the author) is turning it into a book as we speak. No connection, just amazing content.

Read The Non-Designer's Design Book and Don't Make Me Think. Both are high signal-to-noise books that focus on the pragmatics, not theory.

I'm not a professional designer, but I'd say I'm "good enough" to create compelling designs for side projects. I also am more of a "hands on" type learner (rather than reading long tutorials).

When I first started getting into web design, I would take dozens of screenshots of websites that I liked. Then I'd read through their HTML/CSS. Finally, I'd recreate those components in my own projects. It was a great way to learn why (and how) certain designs worked (and others did not).

After a while, I started developing my own style. I think it worked well for my learning style.

I signed up to the DailyUI challenge, where you design a different UI every day. Browsing a lot of Dribbble (though you have to be careful, a lot of those designs are really pretty but not practical).

I've always had an eye for design though, I'm arguably 100x better at design than development (my day job lol).

I second a book already mentioned here, Don’t Make Me Think. I’ll also put a vote for Design for Hackers. I think both can get you pretty far enough that you have a solid enough foundation to start doing design work on your own projects. The rest is based on showing it to people, digesting the feedback and iterating on your design.

I am really impressed by how Pieter Levels is able to design such nice UIs all by himself.

I want to point out that Pieter is great at doing the show, digest and iterate loop I mentioned above. I don’t want to rain on a parade but Pieter gets a lot of help by his community and friends on iterating the design of his products based on feedback and using heuristics for a usable product, just like any solid design work you’ve likely seen; it’s usually never one person “is able to design such nice UIs all by himself”.

I'm not a designer but this reminded me of http://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-benjamin-franklin-method-of-reading.html

The basic premise of the method is to be a human auto-encoder:

1. Find a good design that you like such as a website or app

2. Try and recreate the design from memory

I was in the same boat. I'm a programmer but always considered myself quite creative. Nothing really helped things click until I started using Sketch as opposed to Photoshop or hacking CSS. It was way easier to trial and error things than getting frustrated refreshing a browser after making changes.

I use Dribbble for inspiration. More for colour schemes and ideas than UX principles. Then I read blogs and tutorials on Pluralsight on UI design and have watched some good YouTube videos on branding/logo critique.

I'm a designer that started an email newsletter to learn and improve on web design with my developers friends in mind - http://www.howwebdesign.com/

One must first separate the fundamentals from the tools. For the former, there are quite a few resources [1], read through them. The goal of design is ultimately to solve problems for the end user. Often people think it is simply to look pretty, but if it doesn't solve the users' problems in a way that is simple, accessible, and friendly, users will use something else. To that end, you must conduct user research [2] to understand their problems. Read through case studies to understand how other designers tackle problems [3]. You can also look through Dribbble and Behance for visual designs, but do so with caution as many designers here take a form over function approach, in that the designs look pretty but are not actually solving problems, the so-called Dribbblisation of design [4].

On the tools side, many use Sketch, but it's Mac only, so another popular tool is Figma [5], a web based platform for creating UI/UX designs. It's what I used to mockup my UI for my open source project management tool (https://getartemis.app) and it works quite well once you learn it. Tutorials for them are on YouTube. Ultimately, the tool you use doesn't matter so much, just make sure that you're truly building what people want.

[1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/before-you-can-master-design-you-must-first-master-the-fundamentals-1981a2af1fda

[2] https://medium.com/dev-channel/getting-started-with-ux-research-f6ac3e5c26a0

[3] https://www.hhjeong.com/airbnb

[4] https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-dribbblisation-of-design/

[5] www.figma.com

I just wrote a big long post and then deleted it :) it got a bit ranty.

In short: for multiple reasons design has a very very high noise to signal ratio and make sure you research each author before taking what they say to serious. feel free to message me if you'd like any specific advice, I was a designer, creative manager and a design consultant in the past so I've seen most of it :)

## UX/UX Good Practices and Design Guidelines

1. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/resources-to-help-you-improve-your-ui-design-134dbd3367

2. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/how-do-you-make-apps-look-polished-with-no-design-background-cc1183aad2?utm_source=Indie+Hackers+Newsletter&utm_campaign=indie-hackers-newsletter-20180314&utm_medium=email

3. https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro

4. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/experience-design/speed-is-key-optimize-your-mobile-experience/

5. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/principles/

6. https://lawsofux.com/

7. https://twitter.com/i/moments/880688233641848832

8. http://nelucebotari.webflow.io/#contact

9. https://codeburst.io/5-javascript-style-guides-including-airbnb-github-google-88cbc6b2b7aa

10. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/google-publishes-a-javascript-style-guide-here-are-some-key-lessons-1810b8ad050b

11. https://uxplanet.org/7-inexcusable-yet-common-ux-gaffes-that-make-you-look-like-a-total-amateur-cb504a74b917

12. https://uxplanet.org/

13. https://www.indiehackers.com/@pedrocortes/the-anatomy-of-a-great-landing-page-694e691963

14. https://dev.to/oninross/the-art-of-minimalism-with-ux-4ppd

15: http://www.centerline.net/blog/user-experience-design-process-infographic/ ( https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c6/9b/89/c69b89d2a5c5000bf9ff30a515a4e58e--app-design-design-websites.jpg )

16. https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.2/color-contras

17. https://dev.to/assaultoustudios/a-ux-review-framework-anyone-can-use-bhn

18. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/principles/

19. https://icons8.com/articles/most-hated-ui-ux-design-pattern/

20. https://medium.com/@simomagazz/homepage-design-for-2018-15-epic-ux-tips-9a9f5004c540

21. https://www.humanproofdesigns.com/ (especially the footer, signin callout)

22. https://www.nickkolenda.com/user-experience/

https://gist.github.com/McKabue/e0ed350fbbbf9f9b10a3308935f02b1a

I took the course on https://designacademy.io and learned a ton very quickly. I find myself rewatching the videos every couple months because design is really not my forte.

I've always been inspired by the things I like. Luckily, I like very simple design and I'm able to emulate some of that in my product work. While some web design is appealing to me, I also look in a lot of other disciplines for inspiration like fashion and music.

Hey,

I was working in a company and they had some really bad UI and UX so since nobody was doing anything regarding that I started creating some of my own.

I started first in Illustrator since we had it in the company and then started to learn about better tools. Currently I'm using Figma and Adobe XD, but Figma is my favourite.

The rest I started looking around the web for designs how people were doing it mostly on ProductHunt, Dribbble and Twitter (following a bunch of designers there).

To improve myself I started working on my own project and did mockups for my friends and for most people who asked or I found on the net they needed help.

The good thing for you is as well that you are a developer so you know what's possible to implement and the difficulty for it, for me that's a big plus.

I just posted today that I can do some tips and tricks as well so if you want you can ask me more specific things later.

Overall just download some mockup tool (psst, Figma rules!) and start rumbling around 😊