4 ms·
An aesthetic sense takes a while to develop, it's one of those 10,000 hour skills. Many designers never really get it, just as many working programmers are not
by Detrus 16y ago
An aesthetic sense takes a while to develop, it's one of those 10,000 hour skills. Many designers never really get it, just as many working programmers are not "hackers."
That said it might be useful to check out good art and design inspiration sites, might help you tell apart the good from the bad and mediocre. You might see the difference with some beginners luck.
There are a lot of "design blogs" that mimic smashing magazine and post ugly stuff. Sometimes ugly stuff gets popular. Smashing magazine itself often posts aesthetically mediocre content.
The trick might be to look at sites that always post top notch stuff and have designer friends tell you what's pretty and not.
Sites like:
http://surfstation.com/ http://surfstation.com/
http://butdoesitfloat.com/ http://butdoesitfloat.com/
http://www.designiskinky.net/ http://www.designiskinky.net/
http://spacecollective.org/gallery/ http://spacecollective.org/gallery/
post aesthetically flawless stuff. When you agree with their selection, you are an aesthetically proficient designer/artist.
Keep in mind that aesthetics and design are not the same. Good design might need to be ugly. Google search results are closer to ugly. Aesthetically obsessed designers would get rid of the underlines, add more white space, etc.. But Google's purpose is to let you skim results quickly, not to impress you with how pretty it is.
http://siteinspire.net/ http://siteinspire.net/ is a good resource for aesthetically pleasing UIs, but some of them have poor usability.
As a startup founder you should probably be more concerned with UI/UX, "design" in the sense of accomplishing goals or conversions, not necessarily aesthetics. I haven't seen many startups with top notch aesthetics in UIs, so hard to say how that converts. If you're in a large company and see something ugly that's supposed to be pretty, it's a sign, just like bad code is.