Courses on Making Professional, Usable Websites? 46
Hagmonk asks: "I've been writing website backends in Perl, PHP, and MySQL for years now. It's always been about the functionality though, not the presentation. What I'd now like to do is offer clients a complete service - a professional backend, -and- a professionally designed front end (both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint). The thought of heading to a 'typical' website design course frightens me. I don't want to waste my time being spoonfed the very basics. I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist? In Australia or on-line?"
Take an art course (Score:4, Informative)
If you're serious about becoming a front end designer, you ought to think seriously about getting further education and possibly a degree in art from a nearby college.
Re:Take an art course (Score:3, Informative)
Of course you can't just turn a geek into an artist by sending him to some classes; he needs some aptitude for it as well.
Re:Take an art course (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The best houses are staffed by artists and technical types that can render the artists' vision in standard-compliant glory. The worst houses are the ones filled with brilliant artists who can't be made to understand the realities of the web as a medium, and who crank out design after design that is absolutely beautiful on IE 6 at 1024x768 but looks like a top-right-corner blob on Mozilla at high resolutions.
An artist's eye is very important for developing an aesthetically pleasing site, but a technician's touch is absolutely critical if you want the whole world to be able to use it. This isn't a slam on artists; to the contrary, I'm a good technical designer, but my sites are specification-perfect yet boring. I just want to reinforce the idea that you need both types of skills to make good looking, functional sites. An artist or a technician alone will only get you halfway there.
Typography (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Typography (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, aside from the minor details that
Re:Typography (Score:3, Interesting)
If you ever use the bold or the underline controls in your desktop publisher you need Robin Williams (the author not the comedian). Her books The PC is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer's Design Book have been of particular value to me as a geek who too often ends up designing webpages, the occasional user interface, and generating documents.
Her complete book list [ratz.com]
Seriously, (Score:3, Insightful)
We are a web development company - all code gets written by us, all design by a graphics design company we're friends with. Sure we have to budget for their fees too, but at the end we get a highly functional, highly professional site.
Re:Seriously, (Score:3, Insightful)
The danger of diversifying into too many things is that you end up being a jack of all trades but a master of none, and are going to find it very difficult to differentiate your
Re:Seriously, (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and we all should go to interior decorators to have our houses decorated, professional cleaning companies to have our bathrooms cleaned, and professional shoppers to do the shopping for us.
Back in the real world, real people have to do interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping themselves. And they also have to do design themselves because they can't charg
Re:Seriously, (Score:1)
That may be true, but the same can be said about most things. For instance, basic programming isn't that hard: there are basic rules that you can follow and you can use one of the dozens of cookbooks out there if you really can't figure it out for yourself. Does that mean that if I read a book or go on a course or tw
Re:Seriously, (Score:3, Interesting)
The original poster isn't trying to pick up a few design tricks to make his blog page look cute. In his "real world", he is trying to offer design services in addition to application/database services. It's not unreasonable to partner with an already prominent design shop or sub-contract out work to freelance desi
Re:Seriously, (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you missed the point big time.
I can decorate my own home, but if my place of business is part of the image I project to my customers, I'll hire professional help.
If my web site is a form of revenue, I'll try to get as much edge as I can from my competitors, and that will most likely mean hire someone who
The difference between good amateur and pro (Score:2)
But they're not doing someone else's interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping, and then charging them for the privilege.
You're quite right that basic design knowledge, as with the basics of almost any field, can be learned by someone willing to put a reasonably small but still significant amount of effort into
Amen. (Score:1, Insightful)
Jakob Nielsen (Score:3, Informative)
Check his web site for things like this...
http://www.useit.com/
Re:Jakob Nielsen (Score:3, Funny)
Um... No. (Score:2)
That's debatable. His web site used to be pretty good: it featured informative essays on useful subjects, and was something I visited every couple of weeks to check out the new material. Sadly, in the past couple of years, he seems to have degenerated into self-promotional rants with little real content, relying more on links to his previous work than on any new material. His current Alertbox, for example, contains around 20 links, but every one of them is to another NN Group pa
A short course ? (Score:5, Informative)
You can absolutely look at improving your skills as a designer - someone mentioned Nielsen, you might also want to read Alan Cooper's "The inmates are running the asylum", and Joel Spolsky's book on user interface design, and maybe grab a book on general graphic design basics (colours, typography, layout) - if you have a good eye and are meticulous, that should improve the general look of your work. Just don't expect to go on a 2 week course and become a UI whizz.
The Inmates are Running (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really have any suggestions on where to acquire the required skills but I think it is important to realize that usability work is it's own independent skill.
Re:The Inmates are Running (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it's not all that seperate. Part of art (specifically, animation) is about learning to communicate with your audience. Those skills carry over into designing a good site. The real problem isn't so much that they're incapable of designing a good UI, they're just not so aware that they don't need to use every single tool in their toolbox. Early on, it's hard to stay simple when you have so much you want to show.
Train yourself (Score:1)
http://www.37signals.com/better.php is a great resource for an analysis of aras of a few selected (high profile) websites and why they let down their audience.
Remember, just because you can create an amazing looking website, doesn't mean it works amazingly well. You might want to look at the Gnome/KDE/Windows doc
Re:Train yourself (Score:2, Informative)
Learn to Draw (Score:1)
There are millions of online courses that teach you to draw, it ill help you tremenduously.
Not just in desing but in everything.
It helped me !
Re:Learn to Draw (Score:1)
Re:Learn to Draw (Score:1)
or this
http://www.howtodrawmanga.com/
or this
http://urd.alphalink.com.au/
those where the first 3 sites in google
Re:Learn to Draw (Score:1)
I searched for
how to draw manga
Classic Design Theory. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't help but wonder... (Score:2)
Courses on Usability and Design (Score:2, Informative)
The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design Seminar [humanfactors.com]
Info Design [infodn.com]
Online training [eeicommunications.com]
Online Web design courses [worldwidelearn.com]
Some R eading (Score:3, Insightful)
WebMonkey (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of tutorials, some more technical than others: webmonkey [lycos.com]. Wired said they're pulling the plug, however, so you might want to archive the site if HD space permits.
Information Mapping (Score:2, Interesting)
Since web-sites are all about sharing information or nice looking girls, it might be very worthwile to look at "Information Mapping".
The Information Mapping method is a research-based approach to the analysis, organization, and visual presentation of information.
See web-site of professor Robert Horn for a start. Unfortunately, his web-site doesn't use the techniques :), but you'll find some usefull PDFs.
Site: http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/
The designer of the slashdot site could also use a backgroun
Learn design & CSS. (Score:5, Informative)
For most browsers, CSS works. But it's not just about formatting the page with CSS, it's about designing your pages so that when the CSS fails, it doesn't look like a load of crap.
[I did a lot of coding in the days when <TABLE> was new, and you'd have to do some extra tricks to make sure that Mosaic and Lynx wouldn't display a bunch of run-on text.]
CSS also works rather well with
A few starting points --
- Design Graphics Magazine [designgraphics.com.au] I'm not sure if it's still in print, but it's Australian, so they might give pointers to some user groups of interest in your area
- CSS Tutorial by W3Schools [w3schools.com] Something to get you started on CSS
- A List Apart [alistapart.com], articles on doing tricky things with CSS
- Eric Meyer's writings [meyerweb.com]. Links to articles and such by the author of ORA's CSS: The Definitive Guide. [read the Web Review articles from 2000 for some of the real power of CSS]
- Learning CSS [w3.org] a list of books and online resources
- Westciv courses [westciv.com] on-line courses on CSS, CSS2 and some free resources.
Of course, knowing how to make things look good is completely different from actually doing it -- Lots of people know how to use a paint brush, but not all of our work makes it past our parent's fridges.With a bit of reading, the average programmer should be able to at the very least, keep their pages from looking like complete crap. As always, if you see a cool website out there, look at the source, and see if you can figure out how they did it. [but just because it worked, doesn't mean that it's not a complete hack, and that it won't break in every other browser out there].
Try things. Make mistakes. Learn from them. That's the best way that I've found to improve over the years.
oh -- and don't forget -- design is design. For the most part, design concepts work in both print and on the screen. There are people who think HTML should be able to do everything they can do in a PDF, and make pages that are nothing but one big picture when they're too lazy to learn good HTML, but the design concepts are still there, even if they fail on implementation.
Re:Learn design & CSS. (Score:3, Informative)
Photoshop, Fonts, Templates, and Stock Images (Score:2, Informative)
To get you started, try out designload.net, they have templates already done, which you can open up in Photoshop and play around with. Once you know how to make pretty navbars and buttons, and can find colors that don't clash with each other, you can go out and ma
Re:Photoshop, Fonts, Templates, and Stock Images (Score:1)
Actually, I'd be curious to hear a photoshop whiz compare photoshop with the Gimp... I've been playing around with the Gimp for quite a while and it appears to me that you can use it to do pretty much anything you could possibly want with photo manipulation. Seems awfully tedious, no matter what tool you use, though...
web pages that suck (Score:3, Informative)
cLive ;-)
A few starting points (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly? No. Good web design requires a wide range of skills, some general design and some more specific to the medium. It would take you far longer than a month to get to a standard where you could do it professionally, and any course claiming to teach it to you in the format you describe is almost certainly a fraud.
However, the good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of good web sites about various aspects of web design. Rather than giving lots of specific URLs, I'll mention a few keywords to start your searches below. The design community generally links well, so read a few of the top search results, and follow the links from a site you're reading to related sites on similar subjects. You'll find some themes and suggestions recur frequently; those are your basics.
Do you know the basic principles of graphic design -- contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity -- and what they mean? If not, you really need to start here.
Next up, you'll need some knowledge of how to use shape and colour. Subjects you might like to explore include:
Now that you've got some basic graphic design knowledge under your belt, you'll want to know something about typography. This is a complete subject all of its own, but at the very least, you'll need to understand the various aspects of typeface design. As with colour, you'll then need to explore how to choose fonts that work well together, and the emotional response various fonts are going to evoke. It's also important to know about legibility, particularly when you're talking about designing for the screen: a typefact that looks beautiful on paper might be hideously difficult to read on a typical 96dpi computer monitor.
Another basic skill I'd list for a graphic designer looking at web work is fluid design. On paper, you can fix the layout, make sure everything lines up nicely, choose your font sizes and graphic positions. On a web site, you can't (or rather, you probably shouldn't).
Finally, an additional skill that's much over-used but can be helpful is dynamic content, by which I mean things like DHTML, Flash and client-side scripting. As a back-end developer, I'm sure you're aware of the many uses for dynamic content on the server side, but here I'm talking about common things like menu interfaces, guidance when filling in forms, and so on.
Next up, as I'm sure you're aware from your original question, is the issue of usability. Again, this is a bit of a world unto itself: it's not what's easy to look at, it's what's easy to work with. This is perhaps the most under-rated skill of web designers, and is frequently the difference between a showy site and a really good one.
A related issue is accessibility, which is about how easily disadvantaged people such as the blind or partially-sighted can interact with your sight. Again, this is a large topic, though a little common sense and courtesy often goes a long way. Note that there are increasing legal obligations on some site designers in this respect.
Once you've done all of that, you c
IWA/HWG (Score:2)
Since you already have the development knowledge, it sounds like you want to steer towards the classes that teach design principles, (they have one called Design Concepts that sounds exactly like what you want - it covers color, typography, etc. like a some posters have mentio