>Learn basic graphic design. Not so much how to draw things or create your own artistic images (I'm hopeless in that regard),<p>This is called illustration, not graphic design. However,<p>> ..but how to use whitespace, how fonts work together, what a good color scheme looks like. Find web pages and book covers that you like and deconstruct them. Take the scary step of starting with a blank page and arranging colors and fonts and text boxes on it. Hands-on experimentation is the only way to get better at this.<p>Your description of graphic design is quite spot on. I would also recommend using a pen and paper, and trying to draw an UI with those—the most basic you can get without getting tangled into specialty–tools such as Illustrator and else. If you end up with an UI you are satisfied with, draw the next screen, i.e. what happens when an user clicks a button. Do a few of these and get an user to use it, when he clicks on something, replace the page. It's funny, but it works: it's called paper prototyping, the easiest and cheapest (both time and cost) way to get valid, useful feedback on design of user interfaces.