The best thing that ever happened to me in terms of my design skills was finding one person who knew a lot about design to rip my designs to shreds every time.

The best thing that ever happened to me in terms of my design skills was finding one person who knew a lot about design to rip my designs to shreds every time. The reason for that is simple: You have to develop your eye. Let me explain. One of the first major pursuits I took up was music - playing AND writing. Ever heard the phrase "develop your ear"? Basically, the more you do it, and the more you can hear the difference between the crap coming out of your instrument or computer sequencing program (in my case) and something professional, the better you'll be at finding those subtle things that make it that much better. When I got into recording engineering, I didn't know the difference between electric guitar sounds besides "distorted" and "not distorted." After getting feedback on my early mixes ("That sounds like shit."), I can now guess amp manufacturers and guitar brands with pretty good accuracy just by listening. Now that I'm learning to code, I've discovered that it's similar. When I started, the difference between bad complex code and good complex code was not obvious to me. After having MY code refactored by my boss/mentor, I saw the difference unfold before my very eyes. Now I get compliments for writing clever, efficient code instead of "Um... can I sit down here? I'd like to go over that with you..." So basically, aside from practice, it's about learning what to look for. Learn to identify what's good and what's bad about any design, and eventually, with practice, your own designs will improve. You HAVE to have both components, though, or you'll be stuck in an endless loop of making stuff that is different without actually being better. (Personal experience.) That said, go get a book on typography from the library. Make sure it's one with lots and lots of pictures, diagrams, and full pages focusing on one or two typefaces. You don't have to read it cover to cover, but get the basics. Once you've started, identify a few friends who are either great designers or at least who really know what they're talking about. Don't show it to random people who will say "yeah I guess that's good." That means "I don't know much about design, but that doesn't offend me so I guess it's okay." That's not helpful. Also, http://kuler.adobe.com http://kuler.adobe.com is pretty cool for picking color schemes. Before and after articles on redesigns of web sites and print materials are really helpful as well. Lastly, find some computer programs (NOT web apps) that look really good and stare at them until your eyes hurt. Safari is one of my favorites - it looks great, but everything that makes it look great is incredibly subtle - The font rendering on the bookmark bar has a nearly invisible bevel, which inverts on mouseover (for instance). EDIT: After an hour or so, I realized that parts of this came off kind of arrogant. I am not an amazing hacker or the best audio engineer - I just wanted to relate growth in those disciplines to growth in design skills as well.