Design for Hackers

I found Design for Hackers[1] to be an incredibly informative book; it provides a great deal of insight into UI patterns, color schemes and selections, and overall UI design. It's definitely more oriented towards graphical UIs but provides enough general insight into design considerations that you could generalize it for TUIs and CLIs if needed. [1]: https://designforhackers.com/

Just to add a +1 to point #2, I didn't even really like writing when I started my blog, and my first blog post sucks[1]. 9 short years later, I'm an author of a book that has done pretty well[2], and I LOVE writing. 1. http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/my-first-blog/ 2. http://designforhackers.com

Agreed. These are great books, but "design for hackers" implies that these book will help you "hack" design, which they won't. These books will help you get a better understanding of the principles of good design at root level, but they won't do much if you're just looking to make your app look or work better. On the other hand, these books are much more practical: http://bootstrappingdesign.com/ http://designforhackers.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ And I also wrote a design eBook myself (not as good as the three above, but it's also a lot cheaper): http://sachagreif.com/ebook

Try to understand design, and analyze sites and designs you like. I highly recommend reading David Kadavy's "Design For Hackers": http://designforhackers.com/

Why is it called UI/UX designer? UX is an umbrella term covering many design disciplines, like interaction design, UI design or research. UI is a subset of UX. Someone who is good at interaction design, IA, research and UI is nowadays called (digital) product designer. It’s somewhat frustrating that the design industry can’t agree to use the right terms. Also the guide missed to mention Axure or Just in Mind, which are real prototyping tools allowing you to prototype working forms and data grids, which are heavily used in business / enterprise apps. The other tools mentioned, apart from Framer, are closer to creating clickable slideshows rather than sophisticated prototypes. I would recommend these resources https://designforhackers.com/ https://rosenfeldmedia.com/ https://www.nngroup.com/ And most importantly start creating as soon as poosible… learning by doing, eg recreate one of your favourite apps or site… you will learn a lot.

Alternatively, Design for Hackers offers as well some good advise for creating an acceptable design without having to exercise your artistic skills (not too much, at least). Some areas could be covered in more depth, but in general it lives to the promise of the title, providing good rules of thumb for which you don't need a good eye to apply them. It also contains a historical tour of visual design, satisfying the need of knowing where these rules come from (e.g. why designers care so much about font families and their proportions, and where the basic design vocabulary comes from), which is a welcome approach for inquisitive minds who want to know the reasons why a rule exist. https://designforhackers.com/

Like learning to code, visual design, web design, user interface design, and user experience design are broad topics. No one book or resource can teach you all there is, but one resource can help you make a lot of progress. People on HN have recommended Design for Hackers https://designforhackers.com/ Learn about the design process https://www.slideshare.net/Klonowsa/design-process-overview-4517950 Some resources on prototyping https://www.productmanual.co/categories/prototyping Some resources on interaction design https://www.productmanual.co/categories/interaction-design This book is popular for people wanting to learn a little more about design. It's on my list of things to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things An application of design that is useful for projects and companies is the Google Ventures sprint is useful http://www.gv.com/sprint/

I found Design for Hackers ( http://designforhackers.com ) does a pretty good job of sensitizing a more engineering driven mind to the value of design

There's a book, Design for Hackers: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1… The author also produced a free 12 week email course: http://designforhackers.com/

The author does link to a full book along those lines: http://designforhackers.com/

Couple of things: - Get rid of the MailChimp, Facebook logos etc. On scanning it's shady. - The whole site comes across as a bit of a skeezy sales letter. You're a designer, you're better than that. I realise this is the favoured approach from Kalzumeus etc but I find it really cringey. - Make the bundles more easily comparable. I was about to buy but got bored scrolling up & down & up & down comparing the packages. - I'm a designer; will this be something I can still get value from? Are you pitching this as 'design for hackers' (ala http://designforhackers.com/ ) or is it just 'stuff I've picked up from designing apps that you might like' (which I might get value from as a designer)?

One point of emphasis should be on your front-end, which is pretty weak right now. Heres a few tips. Use a framework like http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ or the under rated http://foundation.zurb.com/ If you're looking for something a little more complete, spend a few bucks and grab a theme from http://themeforest.net/ Something like this http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates will make a HUGE difference on your products design and usability. Lastly, I would recommend reading http://designforhackers.com/ and get a better understanding of general design aesthetics like font, spacing, color etc. Good luck! You're off to a great start! If you want to chat about front-end, Im happy to help. You can email me through my profile

This book seems to go on the same principle of bootstrapping design (maybe a little more in depth?, check the sample chapters as well): http://designforhackers.com/

What about http://www.designforhackers.com/ ? I havent read it (im not an UI guy)

I'd suggest David Kadavy's Design for Hackers when it comes out: http://www.designforhackers.com/

There are quite a few good resources for developers to learn design. Disclaimer: I wrote a book on this topic, but because of that, I know resources made by other people too. --- Sacha Grief’s ebook is good for an in-depth example: http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ --- Design for Hackers by David Kadavy is also well written. He explores the more traditional way to learn design, with the history of fonts, color theory, etc. http://designforhackers.com/ --- A different approach might be reading about creativity. My friend Paul Jarvis has some great books about creativity, especially his new one, The Good Creative, if you’re looking to get inspired: http://pjrvs.com/books/ --- Nathan Barry’s design books are great. He also has a course on Photoshop if you’re looking to learn. http://nathanbarry.com/books/ http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ --- One of the best books about UI/UX/usability is Don’t Make Me Think: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/032196551… --- Great place for topic-specific books. Some of these are more advanced and intended for designers. I'd suggest these for after you read up on the basics. http://www.abookapart.com/ --- My book focuses on design fundamentals instead of advanced theory. It's intended as a starting point for things you can do right now. Actionable, focused on building skill instead of knowledge. http://bootstrappingdesign.com --- Email me anytime if you…

I'm not much of a designer, but one thing I've picked up from watching folks build convincing designs is that it's really an iterative process. The first crack at it might be just passable, but as you learn and implement new things, you can come up with a fairly compelling design. In fact, the first step should just be some ugly, pencil-drawn wireframes. I think the first and most important thing to get right is making sure you're solving the user's problem. Create user stories, and try to really put yourself in the shoes of the user. Training yourself to think like someone who is non-technical and perhaps a casual app user is often the most difficult step, but once you do that, it's almost like programming the experience and walking them through the app. Make the workflow as intuitive as possible ("don't make me think" principle), then worry about polish. Some useful resources that I've found useful and that might serve you well: http://bootstrappingdesign.com/ http://designforhackers.com/ http://hackdesign.org/ Keep in mind I'm pretty green as well, but I hope this helps. Hopefully some more experienced folks can chime in and call my b.s.

Some years ago HN had another link: Why You Don’t Use Garamond on The Web https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/

Two tips: - don't justify text, it doesn't look good and it makes text harder to (https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/) - 'On this page' section is too long. And once I scroll down I don't see it anymore so I can't use it for navigation. Look at https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/introduction/ or https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation to see how useful can it be.

So, is it me, or is their font choice obnoxiously hard to read? Why can't people just choose screen readable fonts. This is their font: http://www.hoftype.com/sinanova It is very obvious it was designed for printed text, not screens. It's like they wanted Garamond (ahem: https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/), but shot themselves in the foot with an even worse one. Usually I can prove bad font choices happen because of web developers being obsessed with rare computers (Retina-equipped Macs, forgetting the rest of the universe uses normal-DPI Windows machines), but I just looked on my HiDPI screen... it's nearly unreadable there too. Is anyone else having this problem?

I find justified text tends to create rivers and is a pain to read, rather than pleasant. This site does a good job explaining the issue - especially with the two gifs that show the problem of how browsers/CSS handle justified text. http://designforhackers.com/blog/never-justify-type-on-the-web/

The book "Design for Hackers" might be your choice. Next to other design-related advise (with explanations of the underlying reasons), it contains advise on font selection. Actually, if you go to the web page for the book, http://designforhackers.com/book/ you can get a free PDF cheat sheet for simplifying your font choices.