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Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#131

Post by d0m »

aerovistae wrote: post #111
d0m wrote: post #51

A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". I'll prob. be downvoted but here's my honest opinion: I think you'll gain a lot career-wise to learn about UX and UI. You'll be able to understand products in a deeper level from the customer's side and will then be able to make better decisions as an engineer. You'll also have a much easier ti…

Funny thing is, I find that site virtually unusable. It's impossible to navigate. I can't figure out what sections there are or where the content is or if there's an order or relationship between articles.

Yeah, a bit ironic but don't let that stop you from reading and understanding the content.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#132

Post by jolmg »

sfilargi wrote: post #117
d0m wrote: post #51

A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". I'll prob. be downvoted but here's my honest opinion: I think you'll gain a lot career-wise to learn about UX and UI. You'll be able to understand products in a deeper level from the customer's side and will then be able to make better decisions as an engineer. You'll also have a much easier ti…

> A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". Just anecdata, but as an engineer I think engineering is easy and design is hard. For engineering you just have to follow logic, reasoning, good practices and have discipline. Also you can test your code to death to make sure everything is correct. For design you have to have an artistic natu…

> For design you have to have an artistic nature.

I know what you mean, but I now read "artistic nature" as making subjective/arbitrary decisions that for some unknown reason a lot of people favor.

Though by the way I read d0m's comment, it seems like there's a fair amount of objectivity in graphic design as well. Lots of logic: If you need to design something, it's because you have a goal and you need to make every decision in that design further take you to that goal. Gotta pick a color for something? Your goal means influencing people? What's your target audience? Pick a color that's statistically known to elicit the emotions in your target audience that lead you to your goal.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#133

Post by jolmg »

titanomachy wrote: post #128
jolmg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basic on typography (It makes a big difference even if most people don't notice it) Can you expand on why typography matters? I've never understood why some people seem to care so much about kerning and line angles in the glyphs and such. What do you think are the most important topics in typography people should learn and why do they matter?

Matthew Butterick says it better than I ever could: https://practicaltypography.com/why-does-typography-matter.h...

> Whose ré­sumé got your at­ten­tion—Vi­o­let’s (the first one) or Trixie’s (the sec­ond)? [...] I’m guess­ing you picked Trixie’s.

Actually, Violet's grabbed my attention more. The dark backgrounds, the heavyweight bullet points, the bold letters... I guess my first reaction was that Violet's contained more information because it had a higher black-to-white ratio, and that's what caused me to favor it. Trixie's seemed too white (the black lines too thin) and so more difficult to read. I'm not sure what to take away from this. If Matthew's judgement is the more common one, maybe I'm a poor judge of what people would commonly think of as good graphic/typographic design.

Then again, maybe a large reason of why I favored one over the other is because I saw them as small images instead of printed pages. Maybe as printed pages, Trixie's would've read fine, and Violet's font would be too big and loud.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#134

Post by felideon »

jolmg wrote: post #133
titanomachy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matthew Butterick says it better than I ever could: https://practicaltypography.com/why-does-typography-matter.h...

> Whose ré­sumé got your at­ten­tion—Vi­o­let’s (the first one) or Trixie’s (the sec­ond)? [...] I’m guess­ing you picked Trixie’s. Actually, Violet's grabbed my attention more. The dark backgrounds, the heavyweight bullet points, the bold letters... I guess my first reaction was that Violet's contained more information because it had a higher black-to-white ratio, and that's what caused me to favor it. Trixie's seem…

> If you truly preferred Violet’s résumé to Trixie’s, you didn’t fail some typographic litmus test. The point is the same—whatever preference you had, it was based on typography, not substance. (Though after you read more of this book, come back and see if you still prefer Violet’s résumé.)

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#136

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

snerbles wrote: post #103
andrei_says_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made the bullet list readable on mobile: * Visual hierarchy (I.e. the same way you divide your code in modules and functions, you need to divide the visual space in a clear hierarchy). * Basic on typography (It makes a big difference even if most people don't notice it) * Understanding what's UX (I.e. reading "Don't make me think"). Just "caring" and "thinking" about UX will improve designs, even if you don't have mu…

It's more readable on desktop as well. Long lines in HN's code blocks render with horizontal scrollbars - using them to quote paragraphs is downright obnoxious.

Worse is that the horizontal scrollbars don't render (at least for me) unless I start scrolling the box, so it looked like there was just some missing text.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#137

Post by jtolmar »

The best solution is to learn graphic design. Most engineers make the similar mistakes when starting out, so here's a cheat sheet:

* Your colors are too saturated, desaturate everything. (If you're using LCH, make 50 chroma your default for something that's "colorful.")

* Use more padding, more whitespace, and bigger fonts. Increase it until you're starting to get uncomfortable, then increase it just a little more past that.

* Remove everything you can remove, or if you can't bare to do that, relegate it to a dumpster page like an "about" section. Use the extra space this frees up for more whitespace.

* Whenever you think something needs more X, consider making everything else less X instead.

* If you're using LCH, you can do color theory by the numbers instead of eyeballing it. e.g. add 180 to the hue to do complimentary colors. This is not true of HSV.

* Establish a consistent visual hierarchy to group your content. Expect this to be the hardest part; even the best designers brute force this. The top of your hierarchy should frequently be the least emphasized part.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#138

Post by anant90 »

ohkaiby wrote: post #57
d0m wrote: post #51

A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". I'll prob. be downvoted but here's my honest opinion: I think you'll gain a lot career-wise to learn about UX and UI. You'll be able to understand products in a deeper level from the customer's side and will then be able to make better decisions as an engineer. You'll also have a much easier ti…

I actually took a 3-month crash course on Visual Design because I was weak in that area (as a front-end developer). Probably one of the best professional investments I have made. The course taught me basically the above list. I would add knowledge about grids and negative spacing to the above list.

Sorry for the plug, but since others are asking for an introductory resource, I wrote a short course on UI Design myself not too long ago. They are just 17 short tutorials: https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/d5bae026ef6e4f949e63...

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#139

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

jolmg wrote: post #127
d0m wrote: post #51

A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". I'll prob. be downvoted but here's my honest opinion: I think you'll gain a lot career-wise to learn about UX and UI. You'll be able to understand products in a deeper level from the customer's side and will then be able to make better decisions as an engineer. You'll also have a much easier ti…

> Basic on typography (It makes a big difference even if most people don't notice it) Can you expand on why typography matters? I've never understood why some people seem to care so much about kerning and line angles in the glyphs and such. What do you think are the most important topics in typography people should learn and why do they matter?

"Good typography is something everyone sees but no one notices."

— John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

#140

Post by wpmoradi »

d0m wrote: post #51

A lot of engineers have the mentality of "engineering is hard, but design is just whatever some color matching and styling". I'll prob. be downvoted but here's my honest opinion: I think you'll gain a lot career-wise to learn about UX and UI. You'll be able to understand products in a deeper level from the customer's side and will then be able to make better decisions as an engineer. You'll also have a much easier ti…

This is an amazing resource! thanks for sharing
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