Sacha Greif

I'm a developer too, for the last year I've been working on my UI & UX skills - and I've somehow managed to get paid to built out product features for the web (UI, UX + code) professionally.

Here's what I figured out (YMMV):

---

For UI design

Books aren't that helpful, you have learn by doing.

Instead, for theory Treehouse offers a primer on HTML, CSS & UI design which provided a great foundation, they have courses on things like colour theory. Really really helpful.

Practice. I designed & launched a bunch of complete web apps, each one with a landing page + full functionality. Each attempt had a visible improvement in UI & UX over the last. I got tons of great feedback and encouragement (you're gonna need it) from forrst. So I'd highly encourage posting there and asking for feedback (tell people you're learning).

Learn Photoshop.

Check out Sacha Greif's ebook on UI design http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ it comes with a PSD and has a great intro into UI stuff.

Check out Lighting & Realism In Interface Design by Mike Rundle (developer + designer) here http://designthencode.com

Get a bunch of freebies from dribbble and deconstruct and remix them to your taste.

-----

For UX

Watch this https://peepcode.com/products/ryan-singer-ux then watch it again. Ryan Singer is an absolute UX god - he understands how to navigate the problem space very very well.

To really improve UX measure how people use what you make (mixpanel, click tracking) & conduct user studies - watch…

A few observations. One, you haven't written that many pages, in fact you've written very, very few pages save for the preface and the like. This isn't an issue on its own, except theres no Table of Contents so it's hard for me to see where you are going to take it from here, or in other words what your vision is. The obvious result of this is that it's pretty hard to provide feedback. The flip side is of course, that you've demonstrated enough desire and initiative within yourself to endeavor to start the book, so unless you have a serious reason to stop, maybe forge ahead and try to finish what you started.

One other thing that I just want to put in your head, I'm not sure if I'm even going so far as to suggest it, is the possibility of flexing scope to write perhaps a 50 page e-book, not dissimilar to the Sacha Greif ebook (http://sachagreif.com/ebook/) but for getting from zero to the next book on Rails for absolute beginners. The benefit of this would be that you could probably spend about 20 hours writing it (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, so I could be waaay off about this time estimate) and therefore you've risked a much shorter amount of time, which I'm assuming is your main concern.

Criticism is easy and I don't want to rain on your parade. After all, what do I know. Keep doing your thing, don't stop. But here's a few things that came to mind:

The name reminded me of eatlime http://www.techsnack.net/eatlime-free-online-private-file-sharing which now pivoted to twitvid. And the scrolling image snippet looks better here: http://freshdesk.com/ because of a splash of background color.

The lime part of your logo is too blurry. You can get a better logo font from here: http://www.myfonts.com/ And I'd make your footnotes lighter grey in smaller print. Also try to do with less text on the invite box. For an example scroll to this order section here: http://sachagreif.com/ebook/

More design inspiration here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/26696517701/design-and-copywriting

All in all, great that you've done a landing page. It's the first step of many, and I'll be looking forward to seeing more. Best wishes!

The relevant paragraph from the original WSJ article:

"Some suggested that in Apple’s next mobile operating system, Ive is pushing a more “flat design” that is starker and simpler, according to developers who have spoken to Apple employees but didn’t have further details. Overall, they expect any changes to be pretty conservative."

I wouldn't exactly say that switching to a completely flat design as implied in the headline is a 'conservative' change.

It's quite obvious that they are unlikely to go down the overly skeuomorphic route as seen in the Podcast app, so this is a fairly 'safe' rumor to spread. But of course, it incites the usual skeuomorphic vs flat arguments with the added bonus of accusations of 'copying' the Metro style.

There are many misconceptions in regards to categorizing flat vs skeuomorphic design, here is a good article that explains the differences pretty well.

http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it).

I'm a bit late to the thread, but if anyone wants to get a sampling of the approach that I take to explaining design check out some sample articles I linked to on http://designforhackers.com

I talk about design more abstractly than most, but I try to keep it entertaining. More than anything I want you to see differently.

I also occasionally send out emails. If you sign up on that site I already have some queued up for new subscribers.

Sacha Greif also sends out some good emails: http://sachagreif.com and of course there's http://hackdesign.org (I'll even be doing a lesson on there eventually)

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