What to do if you are a good developer but no designer?

The best thing that ever happened to me in terms of my design skills was finding one person who knew a lot about design to rip my designs to shreds every time.<p>The reason for that is simple: You have to develop your eye.<p>Let me explain. One of the first major pursuits I took up was music - playing AND writing. Ever heard the phrase "develop your ear"? Basically, the more you do it, and the more you can hear the difference between the crap coming out of your instrument or computer sequencing program (in my case) and something professional, the better you'll be at finding those subtle things that make it that much better. When I got into recording engineering, I didn't know the difference between electric guitar sounds besides "distorted" and "not distorted." After getting feedback on my early mixes ("That sounds like shit."), I can now guess amp manufacturers and guitar brands with pretty good accuracy just by listening.<p>Now that I'm learning to code, I've discovered that it's similar. When I started, the difference between bad complex code and good complex code was not obvious to me. After having MY code refactored by my boss/mentor, I saw the difference unfold before my very eyes. Now I get compliments for writing clever, efficient code instead of "Um... can I sit down here? I'd like to go over that with you..."<p>So basically, aside from practice, it's about learning what to look for. Learn to identify what's good and what's bad about any design, and eventually, with practice, your own designs will improve. You HAVE to have both components, though, or you'll be stuck in an endless loop of making stuff that is different without actually being better. (Personal experience.)<p>That said, go get a book on typography from the library. Make sure it's one with lots and lots of pictures, diagrams, and full pages focusing on one or two typefaces. You don't have to read it cover to cover, but get the basics.<p>Once you've started, identify a few friends who are either great designers or at least who really know what they're talking about. Don't show it to random people who will say "yeah I guess that's good." That means "I don't know much about design, but that doesn't offend me so I guess it's okay." That's not helpful.<p>Also, <a href="http://kuler.adobe.com" rel="nofollow">http://kuler.adobe.com</a> is pretty cool for picking color schemes.<p>Before and after articles on redesigns of web sites and print materials are really helpful as well.<p>Lastly, find some computer programs (NOT web apps) that look really good and stare at them until your eyes hurt. Safari is one of my favorites - it looks great, but everything that makes it look great is incredibly subtle - The font rendering on the bookmark bar has a nearly invisible bevel, which inverts on mouseover (for instance).<p>EDIT: After an hour or so, I realized that parts of this came off kind of arrogant. I am not an amazing hacker or the best audio engineer - I just wanted to relate growth in those disciplines to growth in design skills as well.

Yes, there's a certain amount of raw artistic talent involved in design, but you can get a lot of the way with two rules:<p>1) Be Simple. 2) Be Sparse.<p>You don't need drop shadows, shiny buttons, gradients, rounded corners, animation, or complex imagery to make a good site. As any good musician will tell you, music is about what you do with the space <i>in between</i> the notes; graphic design is about what you do with the space <i>around</i> the content (and if your content is good, the less crap you need to put around it!)<p>If you use a simple layout, a very small palette of 4-8 colors, 1 font, and only a few font sizes, you'll find that your designs will improve automatically. If you lack even the basic ability to coordinate colors, use a tool (<a href="http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/</a> is a good source), and never deviate from the scheme that you choose.<p>Remember: think Google, not Microsoft.

Check out <a href="http://99designs.com" rel="nofollow">http://99designs.com</a> and <a href="http://www.crowdspring.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.crowdspring.com</a> to outsource your design.<p>Some people have natural talent with design. If you find you aren't one of these people, just get someone else to do it. I've had great experience with crowdspring and it is very good value for money. The best part about these two sites is, you get to choose the best design and give the designers feedback for further iterations.

If you're more just trying to make really nice forms for web applications, there's a nice set of CSS themes from Wufoo<i>. I've been using them for lots of my prototypes before we hire someone to do the final design. In the mean time, all of our demos look nice.<p></i><a href="http://wufoo.com/gallery/designs/" rel="nofollow">http://wufoo.com/gallery/designs/</a>

Hopefully this Google's Design Guidelines can help you: <a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/googles-design-guidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/googles-design-guid...</a>

If you're in the freelancing business I do have a bit of advice: if you work with another designer make sure you have a backup. If I had a dollar for every time a saw a project late/expensive because of the designer... I could eat at McDonalds a couple of times. Template sites are the best idea for less pretentious clients, and are much more profitable for you, so try to use them more often. But you do need a designer to work with for either the odd custom design or for the miscellaneous: logos, business cards and so on.

One thing I'm doing to keep the cost of a designer low is to have them focus on things I know I'm not good at.<p>I can slice the layout in Photoshop, markup the HTML and code the CSS--so I don't have the designer do any of these things.<p>I have them focus on things I'm not good at--colors, typography, general look and feel, etc...<p>This saves some money and let's me maintain control over the code base (which I like).

Designers are relatively cheap, compared to developers. If you can't find a friend to help you out, pay someone to do the designs for you.

I am pretty much the exact opposite. I am a designer, but not really a programmer. I can program, but it is not pretty and has to be pretty basic. I am pretty much forced to rely on ExpressionEngine to get things working.<p>However, I don't care. I focus on what I am good at in order to get even better. Don't try to diversify. Specialize. There is more money in it.

&#62; you can't just learn how to make great designs<p>I worked with many talented designers in pre-Internet-Crash 1.0 days. They were very good at telling me where to add some whitespace - almost invisible tweaks that made great differences.<p>They all studied at design college. Of course in those days, their training was in print, and didn't enjoy working with the limitations of the web.<p>You could do some traditional artistic study?<p>Of course, if you just want your website to look great - hire someone. An advantage you have over someone hiring you to do programming work is that you can look at a piece of artistic design work and make a value judgement about whether it is any good.

Actualy I think it is a matter of practise. I am a fairly ok coder (django and python :D), but I am not exactly artistic. But I attribute that to "oh i am a good coder, so its ok for me to not put in the effort to learn UI and Design skills" mentality. Note that this is not something I do actively. I do try and make an effort to read UI books but the effort is no way even close to what I do trying to tinker with all things coding related. Unfortunately, while there is an element of genius/talent/"born with it", it is ultimately a matter of hard work (a saying about perspiration and inspiration by Edison comes to mind).

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. It's good to identify those areas where you're deficient, the next step is to find ways to compensate. Partnering//hiring a designer is a pretty popular solution.

How many hours do you spend on design? How many hours do you spend on development? That is your answer, practice makes perfect.<p>Being artistic is a natural talent to some degree but you don't need to be a Picasso to create effective web designs. However, you probably don't want to waste the time to become a good designer when you could be working on skills which are closer to your core expertise.

Design is one of my weaker talents. When recently designing my new portfolio site I made sure to play to my own strengths and made something technically challenging with an extremely simple design. I won't misrepresent myself as a designer and I am sending a good signal about the code that strings my site together. Just play to your personal strengths and you will have a great site.

why not pick up a readymade template? something from template monster; or maybe even some free template (oswd.org, freecsstemplates.org)?

Hey guys, thank you for the massive amount of comments, I am going to look at most of the options: read the design book, keep in mind the priniples you mentioned and if that fails I'll look at the designer for hire sites.<p>Thanks again, I have never gotten so much helpfull feedback!

I like inkscape from inkscape.org better than GIMP and there are lots of tutorials around that tool.

Let other people who can design inspire you. Then copy the inspiration into photoshop and move it around till it looks nice.

Join the club:-)

Is a designer really necessary?<p>I argue here that they are not for the proof of concept stages.<p><a href="http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/30/the-power-of-elegance-in-design/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/30/the-power-of-elegance-in-de...</a>

haha... I have the opposite problem of being a good designer but a crappy programmer.