In my opinion, we are having some serious problems with the words we are using.<p>We are mixing aesthetics and stylizing with things like ui flows and product design. Just becasue it's called "Design" it doesn't mean it can only be done by people with "Designer" on their titles. It seems that the only reason we are separating "Development" as another dicipline incapable of doing some of the things we call "Design" it's because we don't call it "Code Design".<p>A visual designer is as capable of developing a useful and functional ui design as a developer. Even if one is called "designer" and the other is not. Stylizing is another matter.<p>PS: My point is that some of the activities we are calling "Design" are VERY different to some of the other activities we are calling "Design". We lump them together because, well, they are called "Design". But they are not equivalent, not even related really, or at least not more related that some of those "Design" activities and "Programming".<p>As a metaphor, Architecture is not Interior Design, nor is Structural Engineering. An Interior Designer, by definition, is as prepared to do architecture as a Structural Engineer... and even less so in some cases. But with the right training, both can become Architects. Or for an example closer to software, Game Designers come from a lot of backgrounds, from art to writing to technology. Their backgrounds affect the type of design they do and their focus (Jon Blow, for example, prioritizes the "mechanical" design of the game, while Edmund McMillen works mainly from an stylistic point of view), but all of them are doing great game design.
I really loved Mark Otto's sentiment here — design and development aren't separate jobs like, say, deep-sea oil drilling and copyright lawyering are. We're all working on the same spectrum with an increasing amount of overlap. <a href="http://markdotto.com/2013/04/22/designer-developer-spectrum/" rel="nofollow">http://markdotto.com/2013/04/22/designer-developer-spectrum/</a><p>There's definitely room for specialisation but our work is so much richer when we learn about the full stack. If you want to know more about design — just ask a designer :). We don't bite, we've just been a bit lazy with learning resources recently. HackDesign is a great start but the design community are well aware that learning to design at the moment is a mix of formal education, figuring shit out over years of making mistakes and a sprinkling of black magic. There's no Railscast to grok typography, and that sucks. We're working on it though :)
I don't mean to self-promote, but <a href="http://hackdesign.org" rel="nofollow">http://hackdesign.org</a> may be what the author is looking for. You can move at your own pace, and the lessons are curated by some of the most thoughtful designers I know of.<p>We're pushing out a lesson on Color Theory on Monday, then David Kadavy (author of Design for Hackers) is up the week after. We've already got 4 months of great content so far, and 8 more to go.<p>Let me know if you try it out - @wr on twitter.
This is a very self-aware article, and very astute. I would add that developers should not be afraid of design: in many ways, it is no different from programming, in that it follows some logic and rules, and that you can learn it, with time and the gumption to do so. Learn by copying the greats, learn who the greats are by watching who others watch, and just study what makes things look good.<p>Design is not some scary magical quality you're either born with or not—I am convinced you can develop an eye, and you can learn by imitation and attention.<p>But by all means, don't overstep the boundaries of your expertise. Good advice for any work.
Design is different enough from programming that if you're trying to learn both at the same time, you'll eventually give up. I believe that if you want to be effective, you have to get to a point where you can express yourself fluently in code, without any hiccups <i>at all</i>, before you can give design a shot.<p>Because basically, design (at the beginner's level) is a whole bunch of little tweaks until something looks <i>just right</i>. If you are designing in the same environment you code in, say by making your tweaks directly to the HTML/CSS, you're just going to get frustrated if your tweaks take any longer than a second or so to make and reload your page. To use a car analogy, it's taking your mechanical know-how and suddenly jumping into a NASCAR pit crew. You're not just fixing the car, you're doing it lightening-fast and super-accurate. If you're not already shit-hot, you're just going to burn out.
I, as a self-taught programmer, would learn design if I knew <i>how</i>. I just couldn't find any good material on this. I'm wondering if it is because designers are bad teachers or what. I subscribed to one of those courses that popped up here in hacker news. It was terrible. All it did was send me weekly emails with videos about how cool apple products are, or tasks that were way too far away from the actual work. I'm sorry don't remember its name.<p>Does anyone know of a good book/tutorial/course to learn the very basics? How the hell do I choose a good colour combination? I've read about the colour theory. Now what?
Design for Hackers is a good book. I learned a lot from it, one of them is that design isn't that hard, there are some tricks, but they are not that hard to learn, and they do help a lot.<p>IMO, a hacker should learn every aspects of software making, design included.<p>PS, I am not saying that this book is what you can used to learn how to become a designer, it's a good one for a developer to reasonably understand how design works. "Design for Hackers" is exactly what this book trying to achieve.
More often than not you'll either be strong in design/art, OR strong in programming.<p>There are of course amazing artists that are brilliant coders, but this would be far more rare than the norm, which is one or the other.<p>Saying that, I'm a bit of a hybrid, not a great designer, and not a great programmer ;-)<p>I suspect hybrid types are born of necessity; i.e. when one knows neither how to design a website, nor how to program. BA/MA graduates building websites for a living likely occupy much of this space.<p>I suspect pure programmers are those with a CS degree who found work right out of college, diving directly into Java/C-family projects for Big Co., what need for design/art?
I am in the same boat as the author. You can get a lot better at design by starting to look with a curious and critical eye at well designed web sites and things like movie posters.<p>I'm still not very good, but I'm able to put together nice sites with the help of Twitter Bootstrap and wrapbootstrap.com templates.<p>Here is an example of what a non-designer hacker can put together in a couple hours with a wrapbootstrap theme, icon finder and images from around the web:<p><a href="http://willholloway.net" rel="nofollow">http://willholloway.net</a>
<i>Hopefully, this will be my first step into acquiring an ability to make things [...] that people see and say “wow!”</i><p>Overall, great article, but keep in mind that the goal of good design isn't to make people go "wow," it's to be invisible. The best interfaces are the one people don't even notice. Remember that you're designing for your users, not for other designers. It's surprisingly easy to forgot that.<p>Also, I recommend checking out "Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. It's an excellent introduction into usability design.
I am a developer and I also prefer to leave the design to the designers. I learned long ago that I have no sense for it, and moreover I find it tedious, so my energies are best directed elsewhere.
The point of this really shouldn't be "I leave it to designers because they're better at aesthetic design" it should be "I leave it to designers because I'm already a good coder, and my time is more valuable".<p>Designing a really great product beyond choosing fonts, colors, and shapes (which is extremely hard, but you can Google good font pairings and color palettes) just takes time and lot of thought. Experience counts, but you have it. If you spent 2 weeks working on a UX, you'd do great work, I promise you.
I've been going through the free book Designing for the Web, and while it has some older material in terms of code examples about CSS, it contains a great amount of useful information about and theory behind design. A section of the book that was very helpful to me is about how to research and gather ideas for the design process. <a href="http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/</a>
I had similar thoughts. However, in the last year I've made a big effort to at least understand what makes design tick. I don't expect to ever become a guru designer, but there are benefits. A little knowledge goes a long way towards working better with designers, and much more useable prototypes.
Great design is art. You can master the principles, techniques, and skills, but in the end great design comes down to vision and imagination.<p>However that doesn't mean developers can't be really good designers. Anybody can learn how to emulate the good design of the present and create products which fulfill the design demands of consumers.
"Now, I leave design to the designers. I recognise that design and user interaction is a really insanely important part of a project, and that it should not be left to people who do not know how to do it. This includes developers, bosses, and even clients."<p>I'd rephrase that to "...bosses, clients, and around 65% of those who call themselves designers"
Your blog looks strange in Firefox 20.0.1 (latest stable as of today) on Windows 7.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/XwBytbO.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/XwBytbO.png</a>