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Ask HN: Best UI design courses for hackers?

332 points by atomicnature 3y ago

Hello HN, What have been some of the best UI design courses, in your experience? I'm aware of avant garde works such as Bret Victor's "Magic Ink" and love it. At the same time, I'd also love to learn more about more "down to earth" tutorials/examples/exercises/courses to build practical UI skills. Something above "react tutorials", but something below Victor's "Magic Ink" Big plus point if there is a coherent set of principles/system propounded, to make it easy to apply in our specific context.

catalypso 3y ago
Adding two resources to the mix: 1. https://growth.design https://growth.design: case studies + cognitive biases & principles that affect your UX 2. https://lawsofux.com/ https://lawsofux.com/: a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I wouldn’t say it’s a course as much as a book, but I found Refactoring UI to be pretty helpful. It’s done by the folks that brought us Tailwind. https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://www.refactoringui.com/
- sxg 3y ago
  The Refactoring UI YouTube videos are super useful too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gdYHlYAKDY&list=PLDVpvW8ghDr9tasku_YvuTy_l0xPUtOHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gdYHlYAKDY&list=PLDVpvW8ghD...
- atomicnature 3y ago
  Looks like they have lots of examples; will give this a try!
j3d 3y ago
Not sure if this fits your goal of a UI design course, but I found Josh Comeau's CSS for JS Devs course to be a great way to learn the fundamentals of CSS in a way that resonated with my developer mindset. https://css-for-js.dev/ https://css-for-js.dev/
- atomicnature 3y ago
  Love the sharp focus on css, looks interesting. Thanks for the rec.
hypertexthero 3y ago
The following will give you a good understanding of UI design. Number 3, Designing Interfaces, has a coherent set of principles. 1. [Don’t Make Me Think](https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/ https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/) 2. [The Design of Everyday Things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things) 3. [Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-interfaces-3rd/9781492051954/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-interfaces-3r...) 4. [Nielsen Norman Group Interaction Design: 3-Day Course](https://www.nngroup.com/courses/interaction-design-3-day-course/ https://www.nngroup.com/courses/interaction-design-3-day-cou...) 5. [Apple Human Interface Guidelines](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...) 6. [A Dao of Web Design](https://alistapart.com/article/dao/ https://alistapart.com/article/dao/) 7. [Usability Testing](https://www.nngroup.com/courses/usability-testing/ https://www.nngroup.com/courses/usability-testing/) It’s important to practice, not just read. The term is “dogfooding”. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start... Finally, probably first of all, it’s worth thinking about whether your user interface is harmful to the people using it, and changing if so: https://www.deceptive.design/ https://www.deceptive.design/ https://www.humanetech.com/key-issues https://www.humanetech.com/key-issues
- prox 3y ago
  Great list! You are missing the big one (imho) : About Face, Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
  - lstamour 3y ago
    In particular, the third edition focuses heavily on desktop while the fourth edition strays into mobile. Love em. That said, more practical and recent resources include https://www.interaction-design.org/master-classes https://www.interaction-design.org/master-classes and https://designcode.io/ https://designcode.io/ for different topics. I’m sure there are others, but these are just off the top of my head.
ironskull 3y ago
It's definitely not cheap, but I would be surprised if Erik Kennedy's https://www.learnui.design https://www.learnui.design isn't the best course out there. In fact, he has three courses: 1. UI design 2. UX design 3. Landing Page design I own all 3 and they are among the best purchases I've ever made, even at the cost. Erik is a former programmer who has taken the engineers mindset and systematically analyzed and broken down the various parts of UI design. It is very practical, which was something that was lacking in most resources I found when I was in your position. If anyone is interested, I would recommend starting with the UI course, which probably runs around $1000. Unfortunately It is only available at certain intervals, probably every 6-8 weeks. If the cost is intimidating, you can get a lot out of his blog, which will also give you a taste of how he thinks about design: https://www.learnui.design/blog/ https://www.learnui.design/blog/.
- atomicnature 3y ago
  Seems like a gem of a resource; took a look at the blog, and already found a great principle ("rule of locality; place button where the data is") which I had violated just today. Thanks for the recommendation.
- davidivadavid 3y ago
  With RefactoringUI and Erik's course, I think the 3rd I would use to complete my top 3 is Shift Nudge (https://shiftnudge.com/ https://shiftnudge.com/). There's a fair amount of overlap between all of them, so if you want to Pareto minmax it, I would recommend starting with Refactoring UI, which should help provide practical solutions to many situations and get rid of the most egregious horrors you might commit. Of course, UI design goes much deeper than anything those courses can teach, but they're a great start.
  - switch007 3y ago
    > https://shiftnudge.com/ https://shiftnudge.com/ Only commenting about it as that site is a course about designing interfaces: to me the font on that site borderline is ridiculous, with the flat lines on the t/f/g, narrow L, an ampersand that looks like an 'e' with a long tail. Makes it hard to read
druskacik 3y ago
Refactoring UI is a book you can read in a couple of hours, but it helped me immensely to design my projects. It does not go to a great depth, but it's very useful for simple and quick hacking. https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://www.refactoringui.com/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I’m a fairly experienced product designer and this book has been incredibly valuable even for me. Lots of extremely practical insights packed in here. IMO a must-read for engineers and designers alike, if you’re building something where you need to care about point-and-click UI at all.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  Should be noted, this booked was created by the Tailwind CSS folks (before Tailwind existed IIRC).
- BasilPH 3y ago
  Came here to mention Refactoring UI. I think the structure makes it very valuable: Each one is focused on a particular problem or topic. So if you need help with font weights or spacing or shadows there is a chapter for that and I often go back and look at a specific chapter when I encounter a problem.
- strontian 3y ago
  Just seconding this comment. RefactoringUI is a far outlier in how _useful_ it is compared to other books.
- JCharante 3y ago
  The first two chapters are free and I've read them and they're very very good
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  With its USD 99 price (or USD 149 for a version with additional material), this e-book seems quite expensive to me.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
None. The thing is for UX you have something like don't make me think but UI is a matter of taste so everyone has their own rules which might not appeal to you. You can check out the windows 95 design docs as that might give you some ideas and then I would suggest using an uncommon UI component library and let that do the heavy lifting till you can hire a designer.
brainbag 3y ago
I am a longtime developer but I'm passionate about design and UX. I'm always on the lookout for materials that I can give my team and other developers to help them get better at design. It's not a course, but "The Non-Designer's Design Book" (ISBN 978-0133966152, Robin Williams) is the best material for design fundamentals I've found. It's very approachable for anyone and it's broadly applicable across all kinds of design. Everyone I have convinced to read it has loved it, and I've seen an improvement in output and understanding. I highly recommend this if you have an interest in design. Refactoring UI is also valuable and can be impactful, though it's heavily web focused and is more like a Web Component Design Cookbook rather than foundational knowledge.
andreasmueller 3y ago
[dead]
hackermailman 3y ago
Daniel Jackson's book https://subconscious.substack.com/p/concept-design-in-three-easy-steps https://subconscious.substack.com/p/concept-design-in-three-... I use it all the time after reading it for example they redesigned git into gitless using these methods to audit and find redundant or confusing features.
civilitty 3y ago
> At the same time, I'd also love to learn more about more "down to earth" tutorials/examples/exercises/courses to build practical UI skills. Something above "react tutorials", but something below Victor's "Magic Ink" I have no recommendations for UI in general but for practical UI skills I really like Every Layout [1] which covers common page layouts and how to make them responsive beyond just media queries. [1] https://every-layout.dev/ https://every-layout.dev/
- rahoulb 3y ago
  I found Every Layout incredibly useful and, even when I’m not using their components I rarely find myself writing a piece of CSS that just won’t do what I want (an all to common occurrence before the book).
- couchand 3y ago
  Strong recommendation for Every Layout, and any other project from creators Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering. What I find particularly compelling about that resource is its structure. It's not just a list of recipes (despite what the landing page suggests). They build it all up from a foundation of general principles which provide guidance in visual design far beyond the enumerated examples [0]. Then by showing their work developing each example, they show how to apply the system of design thinking. It's really quite elegant!
patcon 3y ago
I recall the HackDesign website/course being great a few years ago! Not sure about now, but used to be free...! https://hackdesign.org/ https://hackdesign.org/
ChicagoDave 3y ago
I’d add an additional request. Are there any materials specifically about touch interfaces?
- ChicagoDave 3y ago
  I bought the Refactoring UI book and for web design it hits all the right notes. I'm trying to design a purely tablet touch UX and their offering does not have any that kind of help. If anyone knows of purely touch oriented design references, I'd love to know about them.
coldbrewed 3y ago
I found Design for Hackers[1] to be an incredibly informative book; it provides a great deal of insight into UI patterns, color schemes and selections, and overall UI design. It's definitely more oriented towards graphical UIs but provides enough general insight into design considerations that you could generalize it for TUIs and CLIs if needed. [1]: https://designforhackers.com/ https://designforhackers.com/
waprin 3y ago
I am a long-time developer who's always dreamed of building an indie software business but design skills hold me back. I recognize this and get plenty of feedback around it. So this year I set out to improve to at least try to get to "mediocre" instead of "terrible". Refactoring UI and Erik Kennedys blog / class are mentioned and are great resources and I own both. I did Dribbble's Figma UI design class which was $600. It's biggest strength is that its a cohort based class, and cohort classes tend to have much higher finishing rates than self-paced classes. Their instructor will review your Figma designs but only if you finish in time so if you want to get your $600 worth you better open up Figma, so I recommend it for that reason. Kennedy's is self-paced and while it's extremely high quality, I haven't even worked through most of it for this reason. Of course, the single most important thing you can do is build lots of UIs. If you're like me, your UIs will suck, but if you do it more regularly, you will also notice more UI/UX techniques on other websites. I save all those in a Notion database organized by category and refer to them. One thing I almost never see mentioned but it was a really good piece of advice. I told someone that I was between hiring contractor designers for my project, and trying to improve at design and do it myself. One person told me, it's not mutually exclusive. So you can design an app, and it will probably look bad. Then hire an experienced UI/UX designer off Upwork to do a better job. And pay attention to the decisions they made and the decsions you made and compare the difference. Figma is a great tool these days because it's much more collaborative than just getting a big stack of PNGs or SVGs at the end, you can discuss design choices in Figma comments as the designer works. Another thing worth noting - professional designers will make several versions and iterations of everything, each screen and each component on that screen. And then pick the best one. The Dribbble instructor said, the best design is almost never the first one. This is time consuming and tedious if you don't love design but it's how you get the best results. If you just have a one-off project and don't truly care about improving at design, the simplest option is to hire a contractor. UI/UX is not something you learn in a weekend and then you're good to go, it's more like learning a language or an instrument in that you're either going to invest a lot of time to learn it well or you're going to suck. It's pretty affordable to hire-out because it's mostly up-front work. Hiring contractors and spending for classes is the expensive route but spending money can expedite the process. But, there's lots of free resources if you're broke. The single most important thing is design a lot, and pay attention to other people's designs and what they're doing.
no_wizard 3y ago
In addition to the many great recommendations already posted in replies I recommend reading and watching videos about how Steve Jobs approached product design, and watch some infamous Apple keynotes. A part of this is developing a sense of “taste”, which I strongly believe is possible to do but you have to have a certain mindset to do it. This helped me immensely once I realized it. One great website with great tidbits around the creation of the original Macintosh is Folklore[0] [0]: https://www.folklore.org/index.py https://www.folklore.org/index.py
esafak 3y ago
Can anyone recommend any online communities to have designs critiqued?
abhinavsharma 3y ago
I'd like to add https://growth.design/psychology https://growth.design/psychology to an already great list that's building here.
zer0tonin 3y ago
What helped me go from being completely unable to design a simple form to doing okay looking UI (not great yet) was simply to learn to draw. The best UX designers I've had the occasion to work with came from art school backgrounds, so I think there's definitely something to it. After grinding drawing for a while, it becomes very easy to simply see what works (and what you like) in other software UI-wise, and re-use that on your own projects. One recommendation I have is not to try to over-focus on the design of single components (ie. buttons or form inputs). It is fine to reuse a lib for that. What's really going to make the difference is how you organize them across the page, and the colors you pick. Edit: since I haven't really mentioned any courses: proko.com has great drawing courses. For books, check out Andrew Loomis' Fun with a pencil and Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
photon_collider 3y ago
I found the book Practical UI (https://www.practical-ui.com https://www.practical-ui.com) useful for learning practical design tips. I still reference it from time to time in my work.
adriangrigore 3y ago
Best rule I believe is just iterate until satisfied.
b2bsaas00 3y ago
Refactoring UI
fzeindl 3y ago
Apples Human interface guidelines helped me a lot in improving the windows gui application, apps and websites I was developing in my career. After reading them I was definitely able to create much simpler UIs. (Example: use verbs in message-boxes. Not: Delete? Ok/Cancel, But instead: Delete XYZ. Delete/Keep.) https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
WillAdams 3y ago
An early text on this was: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_Interfaces https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_... (if it's at all possible, get a first edition which has good quality reproductions of the screen grabs) A list of the chapters gives a good idea of the content: - Introduction - Elegance and Simplicity - Scale, Contrast, and Proportion - Organization and Visual Structure - Module and Program --- "The module is a scale of proportions that makes the bad difficult and the good easy" Albert Einstein (to Le Corbusier, 1964) - Image and Representation - So What About Style?
karaterobot 3y ago
As a designer, I think the two best exercises you could do would be: 1. Look at designs that work or do not work, and ask what makes them work or not work. You may have a gut reaction: examine that reaction in cold blood. But that's basic stuff. After you do that, you should ask what the designer had to trade off in order to arrive at that solution. Design is how you solve a problem given a set of goals, requirements, and constraints. If you understand the problem at that level, it's a very short path to the design. It's trivial to say "this designer was bad at their job" if you see a bad product, but it's more instructive to understand all the inputs into that bad decision, rather than just judge the output. 2. Give a shit. This is what makes someone good at their job—any job. Sweat the details. Do not trust a checklist of steps for "how to do design good" any more than you'd trust a corresponding recipe for "how to do programming good". The reason I went from front end development to design is that I found I cared more about getting it right than the original designer who handed me the mockups did, and realized I should be sitting upstream of where I was. If you don't give a shit, no course is going to make you a good designer, and if you do give a shit, you won't need a course. Along the way, sure, you have to pick up some basic skills, but that's trivial, and ought to be second nature for a hacker.
- jokab 3y ago
  > give a shit. This is probably the best advice I heard in a while. On a slightly different note this is easier said than done specially if you have suspected adhd and live in the UK where you have to wait years before getting proper treatment.
- atomicnature 3y ago
  Yes that makes. The problem is how does one raise the bar within teams and orgs? There, I think principles do help. Also, for teaching others, it is best if we have a baseline of principles. One can always break the principles once advanced enough
robertlagrant 3y ago
I think the best practical approach for designing UIs is to download (and buy) Balsamic[0] and use that to design UIs. Cut through the nonsense of colours and pixels in the first instance and just lay things out logically and simply. [0] https://balsamiq.com https://balsamiq.com
- kadomony 3y ago
  Heaven and stars, my soul hurts just reading this.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Why's that?
panic 3y ago
There’s no coherent set of principles or system for UI design. It’s all about what will work or not work for real people. Paying attention to your own feelings about what works or not is the first step—listening to your users and understanding their feelings will take you the rest of the way.
ndiddy 3y ago
Not a course, but the best resource I've found for UI design is the Windows 2000 interface guidelines book: https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-Professional-Editions/dp/0735605661 https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-Professi... . It lays out everything (big and small) that made older Windows versions nice to use in an easy to digest format.
keiferski 3y ago
It's not a course, but I recommend the book "Universal Principles of Design." It's a set of principles covering various aspects of design, both for UI/graphics and 3D physical objects.
prossercj 3y ago
It's not a full course, but this set of principles influenced my approach to design: https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/saferules/ https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/saferules/ EDIT: To be clear, not the author. Just found this on HN at some point
- LukeBMM 3y ago
  When questions like this come up, this is one of the two sets of "rules" that I often point to. The other is Tania Rascia's (which shows each rule being applied to the same example, instead of each rule being demonstrated in a vacuum). I think the two different ways of illustrating the impact of each "rule" can be helpful for a pretty wide range of folks who often think in different modes. https://www.taniarascia.com/design-for-developers/ https://www.taniarascia.com/design-for-developers/

preommr 3y ago

Whenever this question comes up, the usual suspects like "The Design of Everyday things" get mentioned and I can't help wonder what it would be like if someone asked for books about learning to program [websites] and kept getting "Godel, Escher Bach", "Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" or "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.

hypertexthero 3y ago
For websites at this point in time I’d recommend Mozilla’s Getting started with the web: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start... I couldn’t get through Godel, Escher Bach, but can recommend I Am A Strange Loop by the same author! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
imjonse 3y ago
Unless you read The art of war you cannot possibly become a 10x ninja developer. /s More seriously, I have read the design of everyday things about 10 years ago and it was one of the most boring books I have ever had to go through. I only remember doorknobs and something about affordances. Read refactoringUI as well, some vague shiny UI tips of which can't remember any but 'have decent spacing'. I still can't design even a simple form. I am starting to suspect that if one wants to be good at web design one needs to start doing lots of web design until one gets better. Reading books may come later to place that practical knowledge in some coherent mental framework.
- _trackno5 3y ago
  That’s interesting. I went through that book not that long ago and I found it fascinating. I had a hard time putting it down. I found that the concepts he covers in that book can even be applied for good software API design. Also, he did spoil doors for me. Pretty much every building I go into now annoys me because of the stupid door handles they pick.
- jdgoesmarching 3y ago
  These books are a solid foundation for design education, but also design is its own deep field of expertise that you’re not going to learn after a a book or two. Both things can be true.
- dutchCourage 3y ago
  "Refactoring UI" won't make you a good UI designer on its own, but it's a great place to start. It's the perfect book if after making some software you feel like the design is amateurish and want to know how to start improving it. And then if you're interested you can dig deeper into colors, layouts, types...
  - lukewrites 3y ago
    I’d love to learn about colors if you know any layman level books about it. I picked up something about color theory that was way over my head.
- neeleshs 3y ago
  That's quite interesting. I'm reading design of everyday things right now, and has been very valuable for my product (SaaS,drag/drop). Not actually to build it, but designing parts.(mockups etc) A lot of it is common sense, but only in hindsight.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  > I am starting to suspect that if one wants to be good at web design one needs to start doing lots of web design until one gets better. Reading books may come later to place that practical knowledge in some coherent mental framework. This is true, but it's true for anything. Reading a programming book won't teach you to program unless it presents problems you can build on actively throughout the reading. You need applied reps, otherwise you'll at most get some vague inspiration or enjoy/hate it. This is why I don't read practical books anymore unless I'm prepared to practice what I'm supposed to be learning about during the course of my reading. This is also true for videos.
- charlie0 3y ago
  I can't remember most of the stuff I read. Doesn't mean having it on the bookshelf as reference is a bad idea. I think most books are like that anyway.
flappyeagle 3y ago
DOET is very helpful in getting you to understand how to think from a user perspective. I found it to be one of the most useful books in my development as an application programmer. It teaches you how to see UI
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Yes. But he also spends plenty of time on the idea that behind the scenes there are always trade-offs, compromises, etc. That is, organization and personel impact design, often in ways that aren't obvious from the outside.
fernirello 3y ago
This has to be the best HN comment in a long time.
cm11 3y ago
I agree, but sorta in both directions—which paints a great contrast between product (design or management) and UI design. I really enjoyed the book and think it's great entry to a design mindset. This is a mindset for how to make products that work well and people like or would actually use. Is that what we expect of a designer or a product manager? Important, but just a bit downstream of that is how it works and where the buttons/interactions are and whether people think its attractive. Most designers (we can confine this to tech [1]) consider themselves product designers rather than UI (or even UX) and often have that title and the bullet points in the job description to reflect it. That is, they want and are hired to understand users and design _products_. And then later, design _interfaces_—but only later because ofc the interfaces should derive from those things. You can argue, for various reasons [2], a majority of today's tech designers would not be good at making product decisions (which includes the processes of understanding users or designing products); to which I would mildly agree, but find more pertinent to then immediately question why recruit and hire someone with that offer. You could hire directly a UI or visual designer. In practice, because of power dynamics, most designers design UIs and some UX. There is indeed time spent on the product work that the designers feel they should be doing as part of a "real" process, but doesn't ever land in the product. That work is done genuinely, but frequently amounts to design theater—both internally to their own teams/companies (which "storytells" the work) and externally when they present their portfolio to others [3]. Most product (design) decisions are not made by designers because they're either not present for or can't win any of the upstream arguments. So even at the UI level, where there is more control, the design is based on "received" constraints. Anyways, I think your comment is a real good provocation for what do we mean by designer or what should a designer be. [1] I think this applies to plenty of folks called a designer pre-tech, say, industrial designers or architects. [2] There are many, but one is simply that designers who are capable at this, find that design is not the place to impact them. They should perhaps become a PM (which is full of its own pitfalls) or found their own company. Or more commonly become a disinterested designer. I'm not sure either role, PM or design, is able to really do this well in the way most tech companies are organized, but the PM is in many cases the designer's real informal manager. And the informality is the problem. They have more power, but not any hard responsibility for/to the designer. And so you get a junior and/or apathetic pool of designers. [3] Most portfolios, if you're not familiar, present designs as designed (what was made in the design tool) not as implemented (screenshots or the actual live app) for a reason. And further, most

windowshopping 3y ago
[flagged]
- replwoacause 3y ago
  Pretty sure this isn’t allowed here
  - windowshopping 3y ago
    I mean, you can just Google RefactoringUi PDF and it's the top result. Me linking the url makes little difference.
    - replwoacause 3y ago
      Well, there is a difference. It’s you doing the piracy legwork in a community full of the types of people who make this kind of content (hackers, designers, indie devs, writers, etc.), versus someone doing it themselves outside of the community. It’s a promotion of it which I think won’t be well received here.
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      So that justifies it?
      - windowshopping 3y ago
        Yes.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Looks like a trojan horse site
adamzerner 3y ago
I strongly disagree. Relative to other books, maybe it is on the expensive side. But relative to the value you get from it, I think it is incredibly low. One way to think about it is in terms of how much you value your time. If you value your time at $25/hr and this book saves you more than 4 hours of time learning UI design, it is worth it. Another way to think about it is in terms of ROI. As someone in the tech industry I think that having these skills is likely to pay off way more than $99. Not in a legible way -- it's not like anyone will ever say to you "I see you have these UI design skills, here's a $5,000 raise." But I believe that the skills will ultimately shine through and improve your ability to get jobs and make more money. Also, in practice, if you're in the tech industry, there's probably a good chance that you can get your employer to pay for it.
- shinycode 3y ago
  I totally agree, quality knowledge that will last years and saves time is worth it. Amazing book
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  In other countries, "tech industry" does not pay that well. Also keep in mind that there exist a lot of people who do programming (even often quite complicated programming) as part of their job, but work in a very different branch of industry than tech industry - also with a much smaller salary than what is common in the tech sector in the USA.
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    The example given was $25 per hour though, which is not some outrageous Silicon Valley salary. I think the idea may well be that there are two groups of people in the world. Those who pay for books and those who never pay for books, especially if they can find a free download somewhere. Students, young tech workers from low wage countries, people who just want to have a look or are horders rather than readers won't pay regardless of price. So the only question remaining is what effect price has on those who do buy tech books. Will they buy a cheaper book instead? I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that for me there is a psychological £49.99 threshold that makes me start thinking and looking at other options rather than making an impulse purchase. This threshold is completely irrational. If you double my salary today, the threshold won't change. It only changes gradually over time.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > I think the idea may well be that there are two groups of people in the world. Those who pay for books and those who never pay for books, especially if they can find a free download somewhere. I claim that I belong to a third group: I do spend a lot of money on books, but have to be somewhat careful with my spending. I can also claim that the knowledge that I get from the mentioned book will in all likelihood not increase my salary, so I am interested in this book solely because I am very interested in this topic. But since I am interested in a lot of topics (and tend to avoid illegal downloading of e-books if possible), I have to concentrate the huge book spendings on those books that are insanely good.
charlie0 3y ago
Yes, it seems expensive. However, you will save sooo much time by getting it. One of my regrets was not spending money at the beginning of my journey into software. It's easy to justify not spending the money when there's so much free content on YT and other places, but this book is really good. Adam and team has created Tailwind, so he knows what he's talking about.
mablopoule 3y ago
Yeah, same. I'm not ready to shell a hundred dollars for an ebook, however fantastic it is, my upper limit is around 50 USD, maybe 60, and only if it's very good and niche content.

sfRattan 3y ago

From their website: >Borders are a great way to distinguish two elements from one another, but using too many of them can make your design feel busy and cluttered. >Instead, try adding a box shadow, using contrasting background colors, or simply adding more space between elements. Emphasis mine. The above may be reasonable advice if you're building a low information density app for nonproductive content consumption... Or a touchscreen only app where all interactive elements must be at least a finger tall and wide... But it drives me absolutely batty when extra white space appears in software that I want to use to process/analyze a lot of information and actually get stuff done. And numerous examples on the website just make things... Farther apart and/or bigger. I still rue the day Spotify fattened up its row height for all lists in the app. It's less readable than it was if I can't read as many song names as before without scrolling. I don't want to rag on the book overall without reading it, especially given how many in this thread seem to love it and the table of contents does hint at good ideas within, but that seems like a terrible set of examples to lead with. 'More white space' is not universally good design advice. Give me design in the school of TMUX and Bloomberg Terminal any day over extra white space for the sake of 'readability.' As much information as it is possible to present clearly on a given screen.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
I had a local entrepreneur showing me their website/product at a meetup a while ago, and after scrolling a bit through an info page, I unconsciously switched to desktop mode to get more information density. The entrepreneur, who was watching me interact with the site, asked me what I was doing, and was confused at why I'd go to desktop mode. That, in his mind, was too information dense. But I wanted to see all the information at once without scrolling around, my eyes can scroll fine. I guess it goes to show it should be a consideration, given its variance.
sph 3y ago
There are no universal rule of design. You ragging about a mention of whitespace, as if whitespace is universally a bad idea, means you are just judging a book by its cover and only have the cursory understanding of the matter that is typical of most programmers. Remember, good design is not only what the cool kids do or what FAANG might believe it is. Good design is timeless. Good design is a conversation with the product. Sometimes whitespace is good, sometimes it is not. You saying whitespace is a bad idea is as misinformed as a naive designer saying whitespace is king. That said, I recommend Refactoring UI, but I recommend more anything on Dieter Rams or the book "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Good design is also subjective. More whitespace is trendy and it annoys people who prefer a higher information density (I see the same with code formatting preferences: some people really like to space out code, others like to make it as compact as possible. Most people are somewhere in the middle).
  - omnimus 3y ago
    There is a thing called user testing. I would say if big company makes design with a lot of whitespace its outcome of a process that had many variations and many tests. So yes its subjective and people probably like it.
- Sakos 3y ago
  On the flipside, probably the most common software found and used in businesses everywhere is spreadsheet related, and it's common even in non-business contexts. How many of these applications are adding senseless whitespace everywhere? In the cases I've seen where whitespace is added, it's purely an aesthetic choice and not a UI design choice.
rkagerer 3y ago
Agreed. The trend toward wasteful whitespace is like moving from mechanical pencils to crayons. Respect my pixels, dammit.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  I'd rather have a crayon than a mechanical pencil if a website insists on forceful nasal stylus movement.
druskacik 3y ago
There's a subchapter in the book called Dense UIs have their place in which the authors mention situations where more compact and busy design is more desirable, adding a screenshot of a sports results website as an example. The rules in the book (and on the website) should not be seen as set-in-stone, they are more principles we can follow depending on the situation. I think the use fewer borders principle is very useful in many scenarios. Saying that, I agree that today's designs tend to too much whitespace (there was a blog here recently ranting that all product landing pages are basically a navigation bar with a shallow text over a picture background). You can check this blog if you want to see more principles from the book: https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheating-at-design-40c736799886 https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheat...