Reddit reviews Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
We found 23 Reddit comments about Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Wiley
If you want to be a front end developer then design will always be something that you will have to deal with. Most developers view design as a luxury, but it makes a big difference to the clients. Since clients cannot see your code, they judge the quality of the site by the design. I suggest reading up on typography and white space. Here is a Small Preview.
Bootstrap is a good framework to use because it adds some default best design practices and it makes your font helvetica by default which is one of, if not the most liked fonts.
I personally have a CS degree and can't draw if my life depended on it, but I know some basic rules to follow. Also I will use already made themes and if all else fails I will pay a graphic designer to help me out.
Here are some things that i suggest:
As with everything it takes practice. If you look at your CSS and you're not using a lot of margins, padding, letter-spacing, line-height, font-size and changing the color of the text then it's probably not designed properly.
It definitely looks better than anything I did when I was 15, back in 1999 (with Frontpage and no coding skills back then).
That said you seem to have a grasp of HTML and CSS. Your next step should be looking into some design material to improve in that front (color, size, composition). I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956
I'm almost finished with the book, and boy, it's great.
While we're making book suggestions, I also highly highly recommend picking up a copy of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. It's important to remember, when delving into design, that it's not just about making things pretty - you need to make them functional, too.
Personally, I liked Learning Web Design 4th ed.. It gives you a nice overview of everything you're going to work with on the front-end.
Duckett's book is good and easy to read, but as far as learning, it didn't do it for me--you may be different.
You would also be well-served to learn some design theory. Don't Make Me Think is probably the penultimate in this area. Design for Hackers is also very good.
Learning jQuery is also a must. Code School has a great jQuery course.
Like /u/ijurachi said, a scripting language like PHP or Ruby on Rails would be a next step after that.
Check out the book "Design for Hackers" by David Kadavy. The author teaches the principles of design in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1119998956
Something like Design for Hackers seems right up your alley. It's written specifically for people who want to make their projects look good but don't need to become full-on designers.
Design for Hackers is pretty great. Again, light on specific tools but focuses on core fundamentals.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956 is a great start. Covers all of the basics really well.
Read Design for Hackers, it's catered towards educating developers and engineers on the basics of design : Color, Layout, Typography, etc...
My process is for product design (building web apps and software) but it applies to static sites as well.
1. Consider your end goal for each piece of the product and optimize your UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience) for that goal. Start on larger site-wide goals and work your way into more granular component based goals. Establish a hierarchy of user needs and make give the most important things the most prominence.
>e.g.If you're building a blog site: Your overall goal is for users to find consume your content. The goal of the Navigation component is for users to easily get a sense of where they are on the site (information/site architecture) and navigate to different areas of the site.
2. Design and build your site with these goals are paramount, discard anything that doesn't advance your site towards these goals. Don't include something just because it's a typical convention or it's trendy (does a blog really need a rotating banner or carousel). Anytime you add something make sure it can pass this litmus test:
>Is this relavent to the siteIs this fulfilling a user need? Is this the best way for users to consume this piece of content?
The rubber duck method of debugging is also useful for critiquing design. Explain to your rubber duck why you choose these colors, this typeface, why you made the body copy this size, etc...
3. Establish rules, and stick to them unless absolutely necessary. People are great at recognizing patterns and prefer to have their content consistent. Could you imagine how frustrating it would be if every chapter in a book was typeset in a different font? In the same way it's frustrating as a user to identify a pattern (eg all of the links are blue and italicized) only for it to change arbitrarily throughout the site ("Wait. Why are the links not italicized now?"). If you have to change a pattern make sure it's for a good reason.
Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List
Read This First
Fundamentals
Development Theory
Philosophy of Programming
Mentality
Software Engineering Skill Sets
Design
History
Specialist Skills
DevOps Reading List
For anyone curious, it's from the book Design for Hackers.
I'm currently reading Design for Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956).
I'm a web developer also, and was always curious why designers choose certain fonts for certain mediums - for e.g. I learned Garamond is the most readable typeface for printed media and is also 400 years old, Georgia is the most readable serif font for the web, Arial is nearly the same as Helvetica and is the most readable sans serif on screen, and everyone hates Comic Sans and the book explains why (kerning between letter combinations is not optimized for example).
These are probably common knowledge to practiced designers, but from someone that looks at if else statements all day long, it was a wow moment.
The book goes on in depth by "reverse engineering Impressionist painting, Renaissance sculpture, the Mac OS X Aqua interface, Twitter's web interface, and much more" and goes on to "color theory, typography, proportions, and design principles", which really speaks an engineer's language.
Yup, designers throughout history have been following specific ratios because it means nothing. The golden ratio and fibbonaci ratios have nothing to add in design.
The above 3 examples are garbage because he wasn't really using this grid to create them. I was explaining what following a grid design means, which you obviously don't understand. If the play button was bigger (in the ham-fisting the grid on top of the shuffle), how the hell would it have stuck to the grid layout when it would obviously be outside of the inner ring?
Read this and learn something: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956
You need to check out this book. It is well written and particularly so for people who are coming in from a developer point of view: Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956
Design for Hackers is a pretty good read to help you in addition to the Google links shared above
I enjoyed Design For Hackers Breaks down everything from white space, to layout, to typography, color theory, all the good stuff... As a developer, I found it easy to grasp
Design for Hackers is a decent book, aimed squarely a Developers looking to pickup some design skills.
I was in a similar boat. I'm still not quite 'good' at design but I'm making progress.
Check out this https://medium.com/@karenxcheng/how-to-get-a-job-as-a-designer-without-going-to-design-school-bad8cdb67068
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956
This is assuming that you know HTML + CSS. If not, learn those too. This is a pretty useful guide for writing CSS https://smacss.com/
Yes ~2 grand of engineering books. Occasionally I will reference them, but google is quicker.
At the top is this book
Its my design/hackers bible, if you will.
Design for Hackers is a good starting point, especially for programmers.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119998956
RN styling is pretty much modern CSS styling using Flexbox.
Good
mobileUX design is independent of what framework you are using. If you want to start adding animations and such, then you need to dive more into the RN ecosystem, but to just make something that is visually pleasing, learn basic design principles.Pick up a copy of Design for Hackers. Yes it is a large book, but UX is a field people get a 4+ year degree in!
Same author, you can sign up for his online course.
After you understand the basics, Google's Material Design page can then give you insight as to how larger companies think about design.
Knowing what a visual hierarchy is, how to create it, and how to purposefully direct the user's eye around is fundamental though. It is the difference between an app that is easy to use an an app that is frustrating to use. It is also the difference between a landing page that converts and a landing page that doesn't convert!
Drop shadows and rounded borders and even icons go in and out of style, but good use of typography, not over-using colors, and good visual hierarchy are universally fundamental to all good design.
Edit: Best $ I ever spent was paying a good designer to give me UX guidelines.
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956 is the general recommendation.
I am also artistically challenged.
I recently read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956/ref=sr_1_1 - while it did not cure me, it was good food for thought. It talks about web design - not CSS and JS.
For some reason a google search for "web design" gives me a ton of sites teaching me to do something in JS. That has very little to do with design I think.