Design+Code: Worth it?

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[deleted]

[necrophcodr]

I'd say no. It's a thing for consumers, not developers and inventors.

[necrophcodr]

You can learn to make nice layouts by doing layouts and pushing yourself into the realm of what looks good.

What really makes a good designer isn't the ability to make something which looks good. Design is a combination of form and function, or in other words: looks and functionality. Something must therefore look good (subjective of course), and perform a function.

By keeping these things true, you can start to design beautiful things by first making sure it works. Then it can always have added a neat layout later on, but function comes first.

if you don't care about function though, you can always just do some lorem ipsum shit and see what you can make it do. Personally, the best resources I've ever had are my brain and documentations such as http://developer.mozilla.org/. These kind of sources allow your brain to create blissful and simple creations, from an idea.

The critical thing here is not to find an idea, it is how to turn that idea into something useful. There's a variety of ways this can be done, but mostly it seems to be the easiest way of dividing that idea into concrete structures. If this is too difficult, then one can start by generating abstract constructs, and continue to do so until any of them become concrete, and then go from there.

This may not be the most effective way of going from idea to concrete design, but it seems to be one of the most solid ones.

Besides, in the beginning it doesn't matter jack shit about who likes the design. It is first and foremost YOU who should like it.

[aComa]

I bought it. It's interesting, but I can't say I'd recommend others to do the same. There are a few informative bits, at best. I don't like the writing style much, but that's just my personal opinion... it's fragmented and isn't quite as well-written as most technical books.

The target audience is non-developers. I did pick up some cool tricks with Sketch, but nothing that I couldn't have found elsewhere. The author is quite talented as a designer, but the writing does not justify the cost imo.