3 ms·
Design for a developer?
Here's my problem.
I'm basically a developer and math type of person (if you read any of abstract algebra posts), and I'm trying to learn design.
I can do UI design pretty well, it turns out to be quite usable and friendly and people can get around it, but, I can't get myself to design something that looks good.
Something that looks, you know, out of the ordinary.
I try colors and shades, and gradients but they all come out looking weird and I can never get them to work well together like some of these pages:
http://captaindash.com/
http://mailchimp.com/
http://joshsullivan.me/
Where can I learn to do this? I'm not saying how I can learn to make AWESOME websites, but, where can I learn to make websites can people can classify as looking "good"?
- jashmenn 15y agoRegarding colors, shades, gradients, and noise, try spending some time on bjango. This guy has a lot of bang for a small amount of reading: http://bjango.com/articles/noise/ http://bjango.com/articles/noise/
- dhaivatpandya 15y agoThanks :)
- dhaivatpandya 15y agoOh, I also wanted to mention, I don't have Photoshop, and that makes learning even harder.
- lcs 15y agoYou could try with Adobe Fireworks. It gets you a "good" design (at least, up to a certain point) and it's more easy to manage and faster than with Photoshop.
- steventruong 15y agoThere are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just depends on what OS you're running.
- dhaivatpandya 15y agoWindows. Which makes everything a bit worse.
- mrmekon 15y agoNot that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier. It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap operations. It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.
- rigatoni1 15y agoTry out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956 http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea... I went to one his book tour events and it was quite insightful!
- hbien 15y agoFor website design, I'd recommend two books: Mark Boulton's "Designing for the Web" and Jason Beaird's "Principles of Beautiful Web Design". It really comes down to practice. You could try imitating the websites you like (implement but not release). It's good practice and will actively show you what tiny details go into each website such as layout, typography, gradients, shades, texture, colors, and so much more.
- b1ind 15y agoThe best way I've found to learn design is to imitate, imitate, and imitate. Go on dribbble.com, find designs you like, and start emulating them on Photoshop. Eventually, you'll pick up on good design conventions.
- computerslol 15y agoPractice recreating site designs that you consider to be good, then practice creating your own. You'll have to devote a lot of time to this.