31–40 of 64 posts
My favorite UX books: The Design of Everyday Things ( http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d... ) The Humane Interface ( http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-... ) Contextual Design ( http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In... )
Ask HN: Learning Web Design — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604915
Ask HN: How can I get better at design? —http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474315
I’ve found this online book great — http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php
Experienced designers always emphasize learning about typography, and which seemed unintuitive to me until I began to study it. Bringhurst is a fantastic place to start there:
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...
I have to say of all 37Signalers, I enjoy listening to Ryan Singer the most. He seems to have a genuine interest in teaching and not in a "controversial for the sake of marketing" kind of way. He has a bunch of videos on Vimeo. He talks more about user experience and interaction, not graphic design, that as someone else mentioned, you can find tutorials on the tuts plus network.
But yea, Ryan Singer is the awesome.
You should understand the difference between Web design and UI/UX design: it's like Monet/van Gogh versus Da Vinci.
In UIs you're crafting like an "engineer", while with general website design (eg. most of the cases done by graphic designers) you're painting. Either way practice is required (if you're a programmer you know this, you can't learn programming only by reading books :).
Also if I may, I would recommend "Semiology of Graphics" by Jacques Bertin, it's a reference to information design and visualization (if you plan to design apps, you may want to give it a look). http://www.amazon.com/Semiology-Graphics-Diagrams-Networks-M...
If you want to understand the psychology of design you need to look for books on "human factors" and not web design books. Human Factors is a scientific discipline that is a subset of IO psychology. While many of the books recommended on this board are good books, some of the authors learned through trial and error without the guidance of the scientific rigor that is provided by Human Factors, while others are just p…
Can you recommend any books on "human factors"?
Many YC startups have stunning design e.g. heroku, wufoo. When you come across a beautiful site, open it in Firebug to see how it was done.
Stunning design doesn't really come from having "beautiful" html code so much I feel. People who really get design are the ones who think about how a product is going to be used, who is using it, and in what context. If you are talking strictly visual design, then the CSS/HTML markup is going to be even less relevant. For that I would go to CSS sites and galleries and derive inspiration from there.
My favorite UX books: The Design of Everyday Things ( http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d... ) The Humane Interface ( http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-... ) Contextual Design ( http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In... )
I like Luke Wroblewski's advice a lot ( http://www.lukew.com/ plus his two books on form design and web usability) I have to worry about form design mostly, so two links I liked were http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/ and http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement... I also stole some ideas from here: http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/ Those are the ones I've read and somewhat followed…
I discovered that a couple of weeks ago. It's really, really well done.
Grab a copy of "Rocket Surgery made Easy" by Steve Krug, a copy of Silverback for Mac, and start doing some user tests.
In time, you will start to see the same patterns coming up over and over again, and this information will begin to unwittingly inform your thinking during the design phase.
This isn't going to help you with visual design so much, but it certainly will help you with the communication aspects of the software/website, and will help you to avoid design/UX pitfalls.