Hi Dan, First off: I gave a talk on this very topic at DjangoCon EU 2010. Video: http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685673/ http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/36856

Hi Dan, First off: I gave a talk on this very topic at DjangoCon EU 2010. Video: http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685673/ http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685673/, slides: http://www.scribd.com/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers http://www.scribd.com/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers. A) there always comes a point in any project when I have that "fully baked" feeling -- a stage where I feel like I have spent enough time putting myself in the users shoes to understand how they can best accomplish their goals. Sometimes this comes quickly, and sometimes not -- it truly depends on the project. I don't go further than sketching until I've reached this phase; sketches are cheap and I don't need the high resolution which photoshop affords. Generally, I'll spend some time in photoshop after the sketching stage to work out a visual design "langauge" -- what's the colorscheme, what visual conventions am I going to use throughout the site, etc. I'll take one or two "core" parts of the site and mock them up in photoshop to figure out how the visual aspects affect the design, but I won't do every single page in photoshop -- it's a waste of time. B: I don't know. There's general stuff about performance from Steve Souders, and overall I think resources like ALA are probably a good starting point. C: It depends on your product, but I'd argue that good design is something that happens primarily before code gets written. The frontend of your app should inform your backend, and vice-versa -- ergo a designer co-founder is an extremely important asset, IMO. Every project with design "added later" looks like it had the design added later, not baked in from the start. D: I'm a designer/developer combo, coming from a formal background in computer science. I guess I started getting into graphic design and photography during high school. Learn about graphic design for print since it has a lot of history; the web is still in its adolescence and is heavily informed by this history. Don't neglect to learn a little about typography. In the end the web is mostly about reading words, so it behooves you to learn the art and science of arranging words on a page so as to maximize legibility and beauty. The biggest obstacle to learning this stuff is a broken understanding of design. It's a discipline like any other; you might not have the aptitude to become a master but you can learn the basics and become proficient, just like you did with code. It took you a decent amount of time to become a proficient coder; don't assume that three weeks of reading will turn you into a proficient designer. Stick with it, learn the terminology so you can start to read things written for an audience of designers, and don't forget to actually do stuff yourself -- like in code, there's no substitute for sitting down and grappling with some work on your own.