The Non-Designer's Design Book has been a great help to me. I bought copies for my employees because it was easy to read and showed practical examples of how a few basic principals can radically improve your designs.

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Edition-Designers...

Have a look at "Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few, I also found "The Non-designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams very good but it's more concerned with general design principle then the specific stuff you're interested in.

My full list of books, including reviews, is here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015

From that list, my favorite ones were:

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/827338560

Made to Stick: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/897777811

How to Measure Anything: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/698402984

The Non-Designer's Design Book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1170518622

Masters of Doom: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/899580915

The Martian: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1136330196

The Mistborn Trilogy: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1388373037

Can recommend these two books: The Design of Everyday Things and The Non-Designer's Design Book.

TDoET will teach you about usability and designing for that. TNDDB will give you a vocabulary for design (much like design patterns give a common vocabulary for code problems, this does for design IMO).

Start with "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams
http://amzn.com/0321534042

You can devour that book in an afternoon.

And since Typography is such an important part of design. You should read this blog post here:
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/the-web-is-all-about-...

and:

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
http://webtypography.net/

i love smashing magazine too.
also try to read some design books, e.g. Universal Principles of Design, The Non-Designer's Design Book

The book that changed my outlook (as an engineer) and got me started on the road to appreciating good design is The Non-Designer's Design Book (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...). It taught me the basics of what makes a good design vs a poor design-- but beware, after reading this you will notice (and be annoyed by) poor design forever :D

These were some of the books which taught me a lot about Design were:

Don't make me Think by Steve Krug http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134...

Non-Designer's Design Book http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic-...

Universal Principles of Design http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design-Revised-Up...

Also make sure you go through design's everyday on Behance.net, they have some really amazing designers and design.

I'm no great designer, but a few things I did:

1. Read "Non Designer's Design Book" (amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...).

2. Subscribed to a lot of web-design blogs (try Six Revisions, NetTuts etc.).

3. Learned to work well with Photoshop. I especially loved Lynda.com's Photoshop courses.

4. Designed, designed, designed. As with everything else, actually doing is the most important thing.

I recommend the Non-Designer's Design Book too.

Also, I recommend Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug.

I'm a terrible designer, but have learned a few simple things from these books and other great designers.

First, here's what's most important:

- Copy (most important!)
- Size/Shape/Position

Much further down:

- Font and colors

Second(paraphrased from Krug's book):

1. Does this site offer something of value that I want?
2. How hard is it to extract that value?

If you're looking for a well-rounded education along these lines, two books I'd recommend checking out are "Don't Make Me Think" and "The Non-Designer's Design Book."

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

Hi, UX and interaction designer here, but once, a long time ago, I was a developer.

I learned to program typing in code from books and magazines, and, later, from reading and rewriting parts of open source projects that did things similar to things I wanted to do.

There's lots of ways to learn development like that today, online, including great open source books like Dive Into Python and Think Python and Learn Python the Hard Way.

There isn't so much of that for design. Not online, anyway.

I don't write about "how to design" because, like programming, it's something you have to learn by doing. There's no Learn UX the Hard Way, but maybe there should be.

One of the projects I tried once was running design workshops, so I could tease out repeatable design exercise and publish those: http://vi.to/workshop/premise.html I ran fifteen workshops, and ultimately discovered they were structured great for the attendees, but wrong for my goals.

There's a book, The Non-Designer's Design Book, which is pretty proscriptive, but does give you exercises you can try and repeat. There are other books, like Editing By Design, which tell you "why" certain things are important, but doesn't include exercises.

Critique is a related problem: most interactive designers today didn't go to school for it, so they're missing the common cultural and academic background that fine artists, architects and industrial designers have, where they've learned the history of the practice, learned fundamentals, and practiced constructive criticism for years.

I don't know if you're any good as a writer or a designer, but if you're looking to write about design and make an impact on non-designers, you could do worse than to take a design pattern or an element of design and make exercises around it. Give people ways to practice them, to study an implementation, to apply it something new, and to critique it, repeatably.

I'm not the original poster, but I would recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It's an easy-to-read book for absolute beginners in design. You can easily finish the book in one sitting - it's brief and concise. It discusses four design principles:

  - Proximity
  - Alignment
  - Repetition
  - Contrast

Each principle is illustrated with before-and-after design examples, so you can understand how the principle works in practice. The book is very much about the layout of elements, rather than how to create an image from scratch.

The book also provides a basic introduction to understanding and using type. The type section is not as strong as the first section of the book that covers design principles, but still useful.

I'll repeat that this is an absolute beginner's book for non-designers. There are many topics it doesn't cover that you might find in a beginner's book on Graphic Design. However, it provides simple practical advice you can put to use immediately in documents. That's why I think it's useful for non-designers. Since it is a well-known and popular title, you should be able to find it in your local library.

(Note: my comments above refer to the first edition of the book published in 1994, but there have been subsequent editions which will have updated content.)

A book I've found to be very useful for picking the absolute basics of graphic design (which applies to web design in many ways) is "The Non-Designer's Design Book."

It covers the basic principles of graphic design:

Proximity

Alignment

Repetition

Contrast

It also covers the basics of using color in design.

Universal Principles of Design is also a fascinating read.

I've found that reading these books, then trying to design something is helping. It helps if you've tried to design something before reading the books as well.

From the previous threads about design I would recommend "Non-designer's Design Book" which includes simple exercises. I also found this (http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/) article very helpful. And "Designing for the Web" book (http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/) which focuses on core principles of design and how to apply them for the web. For basic understanding of usability I recommend "Don't Make Me think" by Steve Krug which is an excellent book.

I'm currently reading multiple books. Some are technical, some are small enough to read in the subway, some are far too big, and are read before going to sleep ;)

- La Zone du dehors by Alain Damasio, a french author. I must admit I liked his more recent book, La Horde du Contrevent, a lot more. Sadly, it is not available in English. Read it if you understand French and like SF.

- Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (finishing the 9th book). It's a good story, but not a must-read.

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Liked the first 150 pages I read.

- Cryptography Engineering by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno. I'm learning tons about cryptography.

- The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd edition) by Robin Williams. Only read a few chapters, but I'm learning a lot about design. Very simple principles that change everything.

- Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman & Nat Pryce. I decided to go with this book instead of reading Beck's book on TDD. I'm learning / revisiting a lot of best practices from TDD masters. I recommend it to Java Developers (once they have read Effective Java, of course).

I still have a lot to read (
http://i.imgur.com/lgpjf.jpg and http://www.google.com/buzz/neveue/Kc4GhaSSoLE/Un-weekend-pro... ), and am looking forward to it :)

I anyone is interested, I've spent some time researching (on HN, StackOverflow, and other communities) about design & UX, Linux & System administration, and programming. Here's the list I ended up with: http://www.google.com/buzz/neveue/NBBSEryBonS/Woot-ordering-...

I came to design from engineering via usability. Usability gives you metrics you can qualify your UIs with, just like you have for your code. Time on task is like execution speed for people. Information efficiency is like lint checking for content.

I started with Jef Raskin's _The Humane Interface_. Chapters 1-4 cover the essentials about testing and usability and efficiency, and then Chapter 6 from 6.3 on, and you can skip the rest.

Then, assuming you understand semantic HTML, you can take efficiency and semantic HTML and understand information architecture and 2D content layout. Robin Williams' _The Non-Designer's Design Book_ and Jan V. White's _Editing by Design_ can teach you effective and attractive positioning of content on a page or on a screen. The principles are all the same.

From layout you can get into visual design through things like dashboards (Stephen Few's _Information Dashboard Design_) or other "practical" subjects without ever getting into becoming an actual artist.

If you want to get more into visual design, I've given out a few copies of David Kadavy's _Design for Hackers_, and it's supposed to be good, but I haven't read it. The best way is really to take some introductory visual design and art classes. Check your local community college.

If you want to get more into user experience or interaction design, Dan Saffer's _Designing for Interaction_ is often cited as a good overview of the practice of interaction design, but I haven't read it, either.

Developer as well here - mainly server side Java and Node.js on my spare time.

I started looking into useful material to help improve my non-design skills, because well... they are non-existent.

I started with Twitter Bootstrap but I don't think it is the way forward if you want to learn design the proper way. I recently bought this book: The Non-Designer's Design Book (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-The-Edition/...) and would warmly recommend it to anyone who wants to put one foot or their whole body into the design world.

I now try to spend more time analyzing the design of websites, brochures, menus, etc. It is very fun and I believe it is my observing and analyzing other peoples' work (mistakes included), then practising, that you can improve your eye(s) for design.

<Not Related>

Last weekend I finished reading "The Non-Designer's Design Book": http://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Will....

So, I decided to test my newly formed designer skills and modify the look of the site here:
http://i.imgur.com/k6y0g.png

The central point of the book is that we can tell when something is off with a design, but rarely we know how to fix it. So, yea this is what I thought need fixing on the site:

1. There is conflict between "What" and "Less Boilerplate" Header. Firstly, the fonts are the same size, so they are competing for who gets viewed first. Second, the orange on "What" is a warm color so it will stand our more, hence overpowering the header. So, I shrunk the "What" and increase "Less Boilerplate."

2. Too control the eyeflow from top to bottom, I increase the size of the navigation bar.

3. I increased repetition by changing the color of the header to white,the text to white and the separator in the navigation bar to white.

4.To highlight the "What" more I indent the text under it. And also set the text under it to be the same font size. There is no conflict here, since the header "What" is already highlighted alot.

5. To show what items that are important under "What", I bold the text that is not in the list.

</Not Related>