Question

I am a web developer and I am quickly realizing my biggest flaw as a web developer is when it comes to interface design.

That is to say, the actual making the interface look nice and clean. I am pretty good when it comes to creative UI solutions, the problem is making that UI look nice.

Does any one have any books/site suggestions that deal with clean, modern, minimal design for web application interfaces?

Answer 1

I have spent a lot of time on this. What I have found is that most designers process is 5-10% science, and 90-95% intuition, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a science and principals behind what they do. Often designer blogs will focus on that science, since that is often the part that is missing for actual designers. I would highly recommend http://www.smashingmagazine.com/, http://www.alistapart.com/, and http://webdesignerwall.com/ as good places to start.

A big part of design is inspiration/stealing (depending on who you ask). Start paying attention to you reactions when you visit sites. When you like what you see, ask yourself why? Start a bookmark folder of sites you like, and when you want to design something new, browse them for inspiration. All creative professionals do this in some form or another, it isn’t ripping off (as long as you aren’t copying wholesale), and actually executing an idea well is the hard part.

For modern web design, a big part of it is minimalism and human factors, which comes straight from UX. Think subtle, think clean, think usable. A big part of a designers job is making the important things obvious, without losing the details. For that, you want to read up on things like visual hierarchy. A huge part of modern web design is good typography. Some basic rules of thumb is you want between 12-15 words per line, and line height should be around 1.5x text height. Also, you want sans-serif (meaning fonts that don’t have feet at the bottom) body text. As of the last year or so, web font support has gotten really good for pretty much everything, and that has really opened up what you can do. There are some extremely high quality designer fonts out there with free embedding licenses (like the excellent stuff from http://www.exljbris.com/), and great tools for cross platform font pack generation (like http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator).

As for books, I have read a bunch, but really haven’t found that many standouts that were better then the stuff you read on smashing magazine or a list apart. I would highly recommend http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/a-simple-usable-book-review/, and http://www.lukew.com/resources/web_form_design.asp for anyone who is responsable for front end work, but both are more UX oriented.

I know this is a bit of a rambling brain dump, but hopefully you can get some use out of it. The one thing I think is most important then anything else is developing that sense of good esthetic through introspection and inspiration. It is a lot of hard work, and takes a long time, but is absolutely essential.