I’m a coder. As part of my job, I have to do basic UI/Web page layouts on occasion. Most of the time, I’m lucky, and I get to work with a talented graphic designer who sends me a screen shot and says “make it look like this.”
I like it that way, but increasingly, I’m wishing I had at least some basic design skills. I’d like to be able to throw together a web site that doesn’t look butt-ugly. I’d also like to be able to compose pictures (not necessarily take them - that’s Mr. Athena’s area of expertise).
I know that getting to be a really good graphic designer takes a lot of time, a degree, a lot of experience. But I see more than a few web sites created by amateurs that look about a gazillion times better than I can do, and I want to get to be at least that good.
Art talents run in the family, so I’m hoping that if I work at it a little bit, my latent artistic abilities will emerge.
With that in mind… can someone recommend a good book or two? Or a college course idea? Or online learning? I’m open to anything, but I’m looking for something more involved than a web page with a few ideas, but less than a four year degree in graphic arts. Preferably it’d be something that started with the basics of graphic design - the use of white space, page balance, and… um, well, that’s where my knowledge ends.
Edit: just to be clear, I am NOT looking for anything that talks about coding. I don’t need to learn HTML or CSS or anything to do with the mechanics of getting web sites to work. I can do all that already. I want purely graphic design, doesn’t have to be for web specifically, I want to learn the basics on up.
Most of us who aren’t amateurs will absolutely look at other sites for ideas too! I would never steal or copy any one else’s work, but it is incredibly helpful to see what else is out there when you find yourself getting in a rut and doing the same ol’ same ol’.
There are also lots of sites that offer free templates, which can be a good place to get ideas from as well.
Do you have a community college within striking distance? Most of them will have design courses and they are usually pretty good. That’s where I would start.
I think I’m largely in the same boat. I consider myself a (very) amateur designer and want to get better. One easy thing to do is just read about design a lot. Subscribe to a lot of blogs, and by constantly reading and seeing good design you’ll kind of just absorb good ideas. It doesn’t have to necessarily be graphic design, it could be architecture, interior, industrial, etc.
I read Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer Design Book over a decade ago, and a lot of the basic stuff in that book has still stuck with me to this day. Recently, I took a beginning Graphic Design class at an extension school and that was good, but one class isn’t going to cut it. For it to be truly useful, I’d have to probably take more classes, and at one class per semester, that’d take several years.
No, you learn it mainly by practicing, which is really how you develop any art talent. I can’t recommend a book because I didn’t learn basic design that way - I took a couple of art design classes (pre-web) in college and the assignments were our practice. I ended up minoring in visual communication technology and have applied that knowledge to both print and web design. I got better at it because I practiced - in the case of web sites, you can usually find people who need them made but cannot afford to pay - clubs, non-profit groups, etc. That’s a good way to practice.
I should add also that one very valuable thing about taking a class is that your stuff gets critiqued, which is also really important if you want to improve your work.
Depending on the class it may just be the instructor that does it, or the whole class may participate. For example, the second art design class I took was taught by a guy who was the co-owner of a local advertising agency. On days when an assignment was due, he’d take them and then we’d spend the rest of the class looking at them all. He’d critique each one, telling us what was good, what needed improving and why, and would suggest ways to make the project better. The class actively participated in this process as well (and it didn’t hurt that the instructor was also remarkably talented and very experienced). And we all learned a lot, since we weren’t just getting feedback on our own projects but were learning from our classmates’ examples as well. My projects improved markedly over the semester as a result. I couldn’t have gotten that from a book.
I think critique is even more important with web sites, since they not only have to be aesthetically pleasing but also easy to navigate and use.
But romansperson makes a very good point about having your work critiqued. The single greatest benefit to going to college and working in a design environment is that you learn from the experience and criticism of others. You really aren’t going to get very far with a book (even though there are thousands about - hey, what graphic designer doesn’t want to design a book!). Sign up to some courses.
First, there are the basic elements of design. The internet is filled with basic useful examples. here is Google’s first hit, and a surpisingly good explanation with some visual examples.
This site refers to painting and drawing specifically, but the basic ideas apply to everything from architecture to food packaging to photography to website design.
Next up is learning about balance and composition. Here is another link focusing on photography, but again, the concepts apply to design in general. The first third of the article repaeat alot of what is in the first link, but read it all again - learn to love the basics.
Finally, I suggest that you consider the power of asymmetry. personally, I favor this element of design more then any other, especially in graphic design where you often have different elements of various importance.
I hope this helps! There are many good books on these subjects, but I can’t recommend anything specifically. Most books will be centered on a specific topic, like photography or newspaper layout, or scultpure, but the concepts are all the same at the basic level.
You made a glaring omission – typography. Nothing more guaranteed to wreck a piece of design than poor execution of type (even some ‘professionals’ get this woefully wrong).
Never forget that graphic design is the business of communication not art - doesn’t matter how pretty your page looks if the message doesn’t get across in the right way to the right audience. Always think about who you are trying to communicate with - your audience may have very different ideas about what they like and want to hear about than what you personally would. Many ‘professional’ designers also forget this in their bid to make something beautiful for their designer friends to admire.
The thing about design is that it is a form of art and requires natural ability along with many years of hard work and education… to think you can just go grab a book and be able to do the same thing is a little condescending to those of us who have been honing our artistic abilities our whole lives, went to college (or, in my case, design schools) to learn even more, and our post-college career working in the field and improving our skills even further. If there was a book I could have read instead of all that work, we all would have done it.
It’s like asking “is there a book out there on how to sing?”. Sure, there’s books, but if you have no musical ability, a bad voice, and this is a brand-new interest that you didn’t care about for the first 30 years of life, how much do you actually expect to improve?
I don’t think the OP was suggesting that he was planning on putting us all out of work - indeed he specifically said he realises it takes hard work, a degree etc. But there’s nothing wrong in trying to improve his design appreciation. To be honest, if he’s already involved in website creation, anything he can learn about design can only help him improve his work in general. He doesn’t have to be the next Saul Bass.
Of course I’m not going to get as good as someone with a degree and a lot of experience just by reading a book. But it’s entirely possible to increase my own skills but putting a little effort into it, don’t you think?
A better analogy would be “Is there a book out there on how to read music?” You may never be a concert pianist but if you’re interested in learning how to read basic sheet music, there are ways to do that.
I’m not a professional but I’ve read enough that I think I can pick out the elements of designs I like and customize them to what I want without screwing it up too much. I think graphic design is a lot like programming. You can code completely from scratch if you really need to but I find that there is a lot out there that I can copy and modify without re-inventing the wheel each time. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about what works and why.
What I heard over that was “Do people really just learn this stuff by copying?”. No, we don’t… if you really had the appreciation for design that the OP implies, then I don’t think you’d have asked that. If you were being facetious, then I’ll take off my sensitive-slippers and apologize.
And to further clarify - I may have been using some wrong terminology, I’m mostly looking to learn better layout. I don’t expect start designing logos from scratch or create original artwork.
I do my best to bring a real graphic designer into the mix for any website of any size that I do. But occasionally I do websites for friends or really small organizations that don’t need super-fancy sites and can’t afford to pay much. It’s these situations that I’m looking at improving my own skills for.
