Design 101

 

This Summer, I have decided to get my hands dirty learning design. I had always been an admirer of the field and the kind of work my designer friends were capable of producing with their skills. If you’ve seen any of my previous projects, you’ll notice that all of them share at least one quality: extremely unflattering design. To build apps today that people would actually use, it is imperative that the design be close to flawless. And since designers are scarce from where I come, I decided to learn a few tricks of the trade myself; just enough to get by.

After several hours of Googling and consulting with a few designers about their learning paths, I realised design was much more than just knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator well. Training the eye to see, ‘stealing’ other people’s work and getting inspired on a daily basis were essential to producing good pieces. After going through many suggested paths, I decided to settle upon the following:

1. Introductory Design
2. Design and Psychology
3. Writing
4. Drawing: Digital and Analog
5. Graphic Design Theory
6. Fundamentals of UI and UX
7. Tools: Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch
8. Web and Mobile App Design
9. Portfolio

Going through all this will easily take me up to a year. I have decided to document my process of learning design on my blog here. This blog post will concern my adventure getting myself introduced to the world of design.

The first thing I did was subscribe to sidebar.io. This app mails you five design links every day and I’ve found them to be extremely interesting and engaging. Strongly recommended if you’re even remotely interested in design. I also followed a few publications on Medium, most notably freeCodeCamp, Facebook Design, Google Design and Sketch. It’s good to know what the design giants are up to in their day to day work.

I then picked up Robin Williams’ The Non Designer’s Design Book. I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to any subject I was alien to. Williams’ style of writing was extremely engaging and her advice was incredibly relevant to design regardless of the media: print or digital. In her book, Williams describes the four fundamental principles every designer needs to adhere to (which unfortunately has an acronym of CRAP)

The principles are :

1. Proximity
2. Contrast
3. Alignment
4. Repetition

The infographic below gives a good summary of the quadrate.

In the second part of the book, she gives a gentle introduction to Typography and Color Theory. Overall, I’d like to reiterate that this book is an excellent place to start learning about the principles of designing.

The next resource I took up was Kadavy’s Design for Hackers. Since I’m a hacker myself, I assumed the book would be relevant to me. A few pages into the book made me realise that Kadavy’s notion of a hacker was much broader than the one used in common terminology.

Kadavy’s book covered most of the material from The Non Designer’s Design Book. However, his work contained a heavy amount of philosophy, history and art. It became apparent that this man takes his field extremely seriously. To explain typography, he takes us all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphics to Gutenberg’s bible to Steve Jobs and Apple. He uses Impressionist paintings to explain design principles and color theory.

He also devotes an entire portion of the book to discuss proportions and the golden ratio. It was fascinating to read his analysis of every form of design imaginable: clay plates, marble sculptures, impressionist paintings, nature, web and mobile design, etc. Overall, the book was a very convincing account on why you should consider a career in design.

To sum up, the first module of my path dealt with the history and philosophy behind design. It introduced me to the major accepted design principles and foundations and got me acquainted to the possibilities in the field. Finally, it also gave me a gentle introduction to many of sub fields of design including graphic design (typography and color theory), UI/UX, Web and Mobile App Design, Print Design and Logo Design.

I shall follow up this module with the Writing or the Psychology portion as these are portions I’m already familiar and comfortable with. As I’ve stated earlier, I shall keep this blog updated about my journey in the aforementioned areas.

Web and Everyday Design

 

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As web developers who usually spent most of our time writing code at the back-end, we often overlook the importance of design. It simply doesn’t seem that important or difficult. It is the residual work left to the ‘artists’. There is a bias against designers in the world of web development akin to the greater favor engineering enjoys at the expense of art.

But the fact remains that good design is imperative to the success of any website, or any thing for that matter. As engineers, we may be able to build anything that is within the realm of our capability. But is the designers that determine what our users, our customers actually need. There is no point in building something that consumers cannot use or do not have a need for.

Personally, I feel that every web developer must have an elementary understanding of design principles. This would enable the designers and developers to work seamlessly on any project. There would also be increased mutual respect between the two groups.

So, with the above points in mind, I signed up for this course on Udacity titled Product Design (Incidentally, I learned approximately around that time that Evan Spiegel had built a prototype for Snapchat as a final project for his Project Design class). As is with most courses on Udacity, it didn’t disappoint me. It was definitely worth the time. I completed a third of the course before deciding that books were quicker and more efficient way to learn design.

I looked into the GoodReads of a friend of mine and decided to go through a couple of books she had rated highly. The first of them was this book called Don’t Make Me Think by a certain Steve Krug. It highlighted the principles that had to be kept in mind when building websites. I maybe stating this out of a hindsight bias but I felt that the things mentioned in the book were stuff I already knew. In other words, though the book had its share of wisdom, the amount of material absorbed was not in proportion to the size of the book (and it was a small book).

The second book though was amazing. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (He also offers a course of the same name on Udacity) was exceptional in the material it provided. Honestly, I will not be able to look at the world in the same way again. Norman makes us question the design of everything, from doors to airplanes. This wasn’t a book on web design but its principles applied to every product in every fathomable field. I seriously recommend this book to everyone who wants to gain basic understanding how people and products work.

As is evident, I haven’t dived that deep into Design. I do have a basic understanding and appreciation of the field though. Good developers are easy to find these days. Almost every engineering student is into coding. Good designers, however, is a different story. I am extremely fortunate to know some really good designers on campus though. Keep good developers close to you and good designers closer.