how can engineers (or anyone) get better at design?

I'm not a designer. I don't know who the guy is who posted this, but from what I recognize in the suggestions, it seems like a good place to start. Would love to hear @deSign_r's take on it.

i get this question a lot. as someone who went from cs to design, here's a real path:

start with systems thinking engs already get this. design is just systems for humans & our senses, instead of machines. read “thinking in systems” if you haven't.

learn the fundamentals there are systems we humans evolved for centuries to visually present and receive information. you cannot escape these even for the cli:

typography — start with “details in typography” by jost hochuli

color basics — start with “interaction of color” by josef albers

grid systems — start with “grid systems” by josef müller-brockmann

visual hierarchy, reading rhythm, symbols & conceptual systems, motion, accessibility, … — you’ll pick more up as you go

open your eyes & brain look at things around you, digital and natural. observe the beauty and sameness in everything. think why is it made this way. make connections between what you observe and what you think and make. break away from rigidity, linear thinking, let loose. stare at the sky, do nothing. see through everything.

then just start making stuff now that you notice things, try to make things better, your way first. redesign apps you use daily. copy designs you love pixel by pixel — you'll learn more in a week than months of theory. then share it with others, get feedback, and design for more people.

key mindset shift: feelings first stop optimizing for the computer, start optimizing for the human. engineers think in edge cases and error states. designers think in happy paths and emotions. the feelings and how things fold together ends up to be way more important to humans than the edge cases.

tools don't matter much Figma is industry standard. learn it in a weekend (it’s basically visual flexbox). use Cursor to dismantle and prototype with existing design systems and study how they are built — frontends go deep.

most important: find your design voice through constraints. pick one great typeface, limited color palette, and make 10 different layouts. constraints breed creativity. iteration is how you get there.

great engineers already understand systems, logic, and problem-solving. just need to apply that to human concepts and problems instead of technical ones.

start tomorrow. redesign your personal website or a simple app. ship it. share it. repeat.

We intend design as the process of creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system; so to necessarily focus on the visual appeal but design as process of creation aimed at solving a functional purpose with an act of creativity and innovation in any industry or application. Beauty is simply a perceived subjective consequence of it. ↩

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @deSign_r 8h

It's a great introduction, a nice summary. Consider everything comes from what we already know: Nature. We simply try to replicate it and accommodate some details of it to specific cases.

System could be a possible output but does not need to be. I'd define Design as a process to get a specific and defined outcome. Otherwise, when inspired by emotions and feelings, it could become art. There's no line defining the two, and in most cases both happily coexists.

So let's think of Design as a process, more than a system. Engineers, like anyone else, define system through design.

Colors, grid, ia (information architecture) —i'd add shape in this list, I'd remove typography, as are common shapes we attribute common meaning to— are core elements organized and categorized in systems. Not even sure grid belong here. That's to satisfy simple minds and provide a sense of order we could not reach otherwise. There's order in the sky when we look at it at night, we perceive it as beauty, we cannot say it's organizes.

Tools: are just tools, the medium used to translate ideas into reality. They come and go, one can be a designer simply mastering pen and paper.

Design is often defined as visual design, in web and print. But it goes behind that #384007 ¹. Creativity is the juice feeding it. Feel it, make it flow, someone will attribute you the designer tag, if you don't do it first.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @deSign_r 7h

Design is like Bitcoin: undervalued and misunderstood.

A Weekend Conversation: What's Design and where its basics Principles applies to #386627

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nitter 13h bot

https://xcancel.com/ryolu_/status/1952759102058242253

Footnotes