3 Practical UI Design Resources
When I graduated from my dual-degree (Human-Computer Interaction/MBA) graduate program last year and started in my first role as a Product Designer, I thought that I didn’t really need to focus on crafting UI design skills. From my HCI program, I was under the impression that to be a proficient Product Designer, UX was more important than UI. I was most certainly quite mistaken!
More and more the trend in the market is moving away from segmented roles and instead wrapping UX and UI responsibilities into one person and one role, especially at smaller companies (often with the title of Product Designer or UX/UI Designer — just take a look through any of these job descriptions). My MBA of course didn’t focus on visual or interface design, and I only took one graphic design course as part of my HCI curriculum. Realizing it was sink or swim, for the past year, I’ve been inhaling content and steadily practicing to improve my visual and UI design skills.
I put together this quick list of three (well, actually four) resources that I have helped me immensely in the past year. It’s not an exhaustive list, but instead is meant as an action-based plan if you are a developer, designer, researcher, product manager or anyone else who wants to up their UI design skills fast. While books and articles on color theory and the golden ratio are perhaps helpful later down the line, I found that for me too much theory-based content didn’t actually help to get started. I wanted to learn the concepts behind all the apps that I use on a daily basis and initially found many of the books on visual design, color theory, typography, etc. to be a bit too theoretical. It is just a first step in the journey (I still have a lot more to learn), but I think these resources are a great place to start.
Just a quick note, I am not receiving any type of compensation or affiliate revenue for these products.
1. Learn UI Design (Newsletter and Online Course)
Erik Kennedy’s Learn UI Design blog, newsletter, and course has been my favorite resource for learning UI Design. Kennedy is a developer turned self-taught freelance designer who talks about and teaches UI Design in an extremely approachable way. I think because he was previously a developer, Erik has this nice way of reverse engineering the design work that exists out in the market today and then translate how things were designed back to you in a usable manner. Subscribing to his free newsletter and reading through his previous blog posts alone will give you plenty of practical advice to get started. (One of my favorites is this article on 7 tips for creating gorgeous UI). After reading through his free content for a couple months, I decided to dive in and pay for his course which covers everything from color to typography to designing tables and charts, in a very practical manner. The course isn’t cheap (~$1000) and is only open at certain points of the year (he caps it because there is a Slack channel to which you can post homework to) but it is certainly worth it.
URL: https://learnui.design
RATING: 9.0 / 10
COST: Free (Newsletter, Blog) / ~$1000 (Learn UI Design Course)
2. Refactoring UI (Twitter Tips & eBook)
In a similar vein as Erik’s Learn UI Design is Steve Schoger’s Refactoring UI. I first came across Steve through his awesome Twitter tips on UI Design and his YouTube channel where he redesigns various products and walks you through why he is making the choices that he is. In December 2018, he released the Refactoring UI eBook which packs all of his practical advice into a 200-page eBook. I found that the Refactoring UI book covered a lot of the same topics as Learn UI Design so I ultimately decided to return it, but depending on your learning style (and budget), I think it is a top-notch resource.
URL: https://refactoringui.com/
RATING: 8.5 / 10
COST: Free (Tips, YouTube channel) / $79 — $149 (Refactoring UI eBook)
3. Hello Web Design (Book) and The Non-Designer’s Design Book (Book)
For you book readers out there, I found these two books to be great. Both are short enough to read in an afternoon and provide practical visual and web design advice to help you become a better designer in a short amount of time. If you’re getting them, I would suggest getting the paperback versions since both are fairly heavy on images.
URLs: https://amzn.to/2WKW7Eo and https://amzn.to/2MsHMst
RATING: 8.0 / 10
COST: $15 — $25
If you have books, online courses, eBooks, mentors, or any other resources you’ve used and liked in your journey to becoming a better UI designer please do share in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
