| There are a lot of angles to approach this from. There are core principles and foundations to design, much like engineering. Cultivating a personal sense of taste is important as well. Start by doing some reading on the fundamentals of design and typography. Also, start frequenting various design blogs and websites. You need to expose yourself to design much in the manner that programmers get exposed to open source code. Once you start seeing things created by designers, you'll start to understand what reflects your personal taste and hopefully you begin to develop a coherent opinion. Give serious thought/time to UI/UX from a functional standpoint. I highly recommend Tufte's treatises on data visualization as a way of thinking about how to model and present data to your users as well. Next you'll want to begin doing lots of mock-ups, preferably with actual HTML/CSS/JS. Now you can start respinning designs of existing projects you've worked on, and re-do them in a way you're proud of. Invest enough time, hammer out enough work, you should start producing thngs you can be proud of. Just like code. Here's a basic starter page with some information: http://metatoggle.com/design_crs/contents.html |