Ask HN: Independently learning design?

The only necessary book on design, at only 46 pages, is "Notes on Graphic Design And Visual Communication."

I have met AIGA award designers and Internet design celebrities who don't know some of the basics laid out in this short book.

It's probably the only handwritten book you'll ever read: http://www.amazon.com/Crisp-Graphic-Design-Visual-Communicat...

One method that I've found useful is to completely re-create somebody else's design in Photoshop. Find a website that you really like, take a screenshot of it, paste it into Photoshop, and recreate the whole thing.

The benefit of doing this is three-fold. For one, you are more than likely not going to functionally know how to re-create some effects which will force you to go out and read targeted tutorials. Second, you will notice the subtleties of the design that you are unlikely to notice when just looking, which will help build your design intuition. Lastly, you won't waste time trying to come up with an idea and failing through the execution; you will start with something great and end with something (hopefully) great.

Clearly this isn't the way to learn the creative side of design, but it will build up your skill-set such that you will actually be able to execute when you have a vision.

I can vouch for this method. I've been coding since childhood and developing websites for the past ~15 years, but I never quite figured out how to get designs in my head on to paper (or into Photoshop). Instead, I spent years designing websites by recreating individual elements from sites that I liked and frankensteining those elements together to create something.. respectable.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, I opened Photoshop one day and everything just clicked, and has been ever since. I can't say for sure if it's from working with so many different designs or styles, or being exposed to them, or just recognizing the styles that I preferred, but it does happen eventually.

If you're intentionally trying to learn design and you put in the time to consciously recognize what you're looking at and how it works, I bet that light bulb moment would happen much quicker.

Exactly what an advise is.

a long long time ago, i wrote a post here on hn on how to get started on web design [0], but since you already have the technical bit, you can just skip ahead to the Design part.

That said, I don't think that many "howto design" books are all that interesting (and the best design books are mystifying in a way which defies reason), but you will find books about the nuts and bolts of design which are very good even if you're totally green to the field. The other most important thing is that you keep making things. Even little things. Make them and show them to people and get feedback. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Anyhow... You will want to specifically look for books on Typography, Color, Layout, Photography, Contrast/Scale, and Poster Design. Poster Design is actually sui generis despite appearing to be a subset of graphic design.[1]

My belief is strongly on the side of typography being the most crucial skill a designer needs (since its use of space/contrast/layout) is basically design in a micro level, rather than on the macro (page) level. The skills you pick up in typography do translate over, but it takes lots of practice. Since illustrators are readily hopping into many design jobs, our best bet is to differentiate ourselves with our exhaustive knowledge of typography.

A great book on "Book Typography" is Cyrus Highsmith's Inside Paragraphs.

A good book on "Display Typography" is Wolfgang Weingart's My Way to Typography.

Three good books on "Typographic Fundamentals" are: Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type, John Kane's Type Primer and Erik Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep (and find out how type works).

One excellent "Typographic Reference" is Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style.

One good book about "Design Process" is Nancy Skolos & Tom Wedell's Graphic Design Process.

No design book suggestion will be complete without mentioning Emil Ruder's Typographie, Josef Muller-Brockman's Grid Systems and Armin Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual.

That said, a good starter is layout/formmaking Christian Leborg's "Visual Grammar," part of Princeton Architectural Press' Design Briefs series[2] (all of which are good for skimming the next time you find yourself in a bookstore/amazon showroom).

Finally, I never realized it until I made a joke about it, but you can summarize many of the principles of good UI Design in PEP 20, which is to say that if you care about API Design and Code Cleanliness and all that stuff, then you probably already have the right attitude towards graphic/visual design. Take those principles and apply them visually when you make anything or use them as a rough litmus test for your designs then break the rules as you see fit.

Have fun! Relax. Don't Panic!

[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1605228 [1]: While poster design employs many of the same structural techniques as Capital-D Design, it has its own rules which are useful to know, but above all it is free to play with scale in a way which is difficult in web and book design. Still, knowing about it will inform your own work and probably make it wayyyy more fun. [2]: http://papress.com/html/book.list.page.tpl?action=seriessear...