Where to start and how to study web design, interface design in general?

Question

User interface

Hello.
A little preface: I am 18 years old and graduated from art school and decided to go into web design and design respectively.
And immediately ran into a problem: Very rapid aging of literature in this area. Now something is cool, but tomorrow they won’t remember about it.
As you probably already understood, I need a tutorial, preferably a fresh one. I will be glad to any literature and links to sites.

Answer 1

In order not to make a bunch of mistakes made by artists and printers who came to the web, as well as to understand what web design is, as well as interface design, I recommend the books below, in the order in which I read them. I read a lot of literature, but these are the most worthwhile.
1. Steve Krug "Web Design or Don't Make Me Think"
2. Jakob Nielsen "Web Design"
3. Donald Norman "The Design of Everyday Things"
4. Jeff Raskin "Interface"
5. Alan Cooper "Asylum in the Hands of Patients"
Well and of course, do not forget about Leadership and periodically look into the Soviets .
I have not seen a normal tutorial on creating a layout from A to Z. Sometimes articles slip on sites likeSmashing Magazine , or TechDesigner .
Well, in order to be “in trend” - I can advise, for training, to draw one-on-one several sites of eminent web designers (for example, from Revision , just don’t try to put them in your portfolio later), read everything you can find about modular grids ( 1 , 2 , etc.) and visit Dribbble regularly .

Answer 2

Find a site that excites you with its design, that excites your thoughts and makes your heart beat faster, that opens up new facets of applying and perceiving existing techniques or new approaches. Take a screenshot and try again. Ideally, the result should match pixel by pixel :) You
can search on resources like www.webcreme.com/ or just google "webdesign showcases"
And if English allows, make as many western step-by-step tutorials as possible that will teach you some tricks and hacks that they don't teach specifically. Tutorials can be found here - psd.tutsplus.com/
And the most important two tips:
1. Pay attention to every pixel.
2. Love what you do. Even as a good whore, for a short period of time work, but love with all your heart! :)

Answer 3

Only trends change, the fundamentals always remain.
First of all, read the books by Alan Cooper "Psychiatric hospital in the hands of patients" and "On the interface. Interaction Design Basics ”
Then you already need to follow the latest on the web, for this there is a good weekly digest about the latest in the IT world on Habré habrahabr.ru/company/zfort/blog/167143/
, if necessary, I will throw off my list of recently accumulated sites on this topic.
And then it all depends on skill and talent.

Answer 4

htmlbook.ru
Do not take it for advertising, but a worthy tutorial. Information about css + html attributes, tags, etc. is regularly updated. etc.
In general, if you want to type something of your own, then this is your Bible, the Koran, it doesn’t matter)

Answer 5

And in any case, it takes practice. You can either make websites “for yourself”, or take orders from not very demanding customers (if you are not confident in your own abilities), but do it in such a way that you like it, and not just so that the customer calms down. At the same time, there will be the experience of communicating with the customer, this is also part of the professional skill of the designer.
I liked Papanek's Design for the Real World. Excellent teaches not to dwell on the "ruffles".

Answer 6

How familiar are you with Photoshop? It depends on where to start.
In terms of visuals, the advice above is correct to walk around and look at good examples. I would advise you to look less at our sites and more at English-language resources. (for example, dribbble.com, just watch, where they give psd to download, disassemble and watch)
Then how are you with English? Because there is less information in RuNet and translations are late. But reading the manual and watching tips is also a good option, the main thing is not to take them as an axiom :)
Then you want to only do the visual part or design too?
But it's all about web design. What other design are you planning to learn?

Answer 7

smashing magazine churns out books , take everything, just took the first one from the shelf and everything is still relevant there. You can watch www.thefwa.com here and www.awwwards.com here . You won't find clear instructions. Yes, and Bobuk here addmeto.cc wrote everything correctly, I also think that web design is moving in this direction, so htmlbook.ru was not just advised to you.

Answer 8

Maybe they will throw stones at me, but here's what I'll say ... You shouldn't have studied at the worst school.
Firstly, in web design, your knowledge will not help much.
Secondly, there is less creativity in web design (when drawing for a company and not for yourself) than in many other professions. In my opinion, the electrician has a more interesting day.
Thirdly, you still need to learn at least html and css to know what you are doing. And in the future, you will have to learn how to draw illustrations, work with vector and create 3D.
Fourthly, you have chosen a very ungrateful specialty, which is not valued in our country.
Fifth... it's an absolutely thankless job.
From your youth and stupidity, it may seem to you that this is an extremely interesting job, full of creativity, and as long as you do it for yourself, it is. But when you get into a company where they will demand tight deadlines, high quality from you, and you are tormented to make changes and redo what you put your soul into wild trash, and you will be paid 15-20 thousand for it, your world will turn upside down. upside down.
While there is time, choose a working profession. You can go to the dentist .. surveyor .. car mechanic .. router .. or anyone else .. who pay normal money. Maybe now I will cause you negativity with my post, but after a while you will understand that I did it out of good intentions. I'm suffering myself now. Good luck ;)

Answer 9

At one time, I visited sites for freelancers (I myself was a freelance programmer at that time), looked for orders related to web design, and tried to realize them for myself, not for money, just on freelance you can find a lot of ideas on which you can practice. That is, I just looked at what site the customer needed and tried to make a design. This option is suitable if you have a lot of time.

Answer 10

Hello habr residents, it seems to me that at this stage of development of it technologies, everything goes into minimalism and simplicity, take the same world brands microsoft, google ... their logos have become simpler, everyone already knows that you can make a cool 3d site with a bunch of pictures, but this everything will take resources and if you take home Internet and mobile, they are very different in speed, almost every student already has a phone (aple, androin, windows7-8), but few have 4-g Internet, so you need to make a design that will be adapted to look here and there. for example, the business card site nexen.com.ru/ is colorful and expensive, but it takes me 1 minute to load on my phone, which is long and not very pleasant. while non-mobile habr is loaded faster, but there is 10 times more content on it.
I can conclude that now everything is going into minimalism and simplicity, a combination of accounts and what can be implemented on css + html + js, it's faster and very beautiful, take the same bootstrap, the masses liked it and entered web design for a long time.
Here are a few articles that I liked:
www.gm-group.com/index.php/internet-projects/31-t...
habrahabr.ru/post/166663/
www.dejurka.ru/articless/20_top_web_design_and_dev...
p /s — I am not a designer, I am a website development programmer, but when choosing a freelance designer, I am guided by these qualities and all my customers are satisfied with the final website.

Answer 11

Start learning with HTML markup, then learn CSS styles and then JS (optional). When you pass these stages, train slowly to typeset landing pages, then try to lay out a multi-page layout (for training). And then climb on design portals (like Dribbble), develop your design flair and professional taste :)