Polished Applications – How to Create Without Drawing Skills

graphics

I'm not a graphic designer. I'm pretty bad at drawing anything. I struggle to build things that look even as nice as "sample" applications bundled with development tools; primarily because I don't have squat in the way of art assets.

What strategies might I take to mitigate this?

Best Answer

I personally do not think you have to be good artistically to create pleasing user interfaces.

What makes a good UI is not up to creativity, but is more related to a couple of well-established guidelines. If you follow these guidelines and practice some you can create great interfaces yourself.

I would suggest doing the following...

Read about what makes a good user interface. (online mostly)
Research and find some user interfaces that are pleasing to you.
Compare several good designs and try to pick out things that are similar between them.
Now look at your own design and see if you have those elements.
Try to recreate your user interface to be similar to the ones you liked.

I forecast that if you do this exercise for a week or two (and if you ask me, a week or two to learn how to design good interfaces is not such a long time), you will learn most of what makes a good user interface.

Just a couple of things I found that make user interfaces pleasing:

Simplicity
Consistency (colors, fonts, usage of buttons, links, etc...)
Spacing
Less is more (hide as much as you can from the user without diminishing usability)
Do not use white background and black font. Make sure the contrast is good enough, but usually change your background to a light shade of gray while your font to be dark gray.

Also... do not start with the design. Start with functionality and let the design evolve. Also, experiment! Do not get upset if it does not look perfect after 1-2 'iterations'. It gets better over time. But most importantly, you have to try.

Related Solutions

How to draw a spiral using segments of varying circles

My first choice would be to just use short line segments to approximate the spiral. A spiral in polar coordinates is just:

R = a + b * Theta

Rough pseudo-code for a spiral generation using line segments should be something like:

LastPoint = (0, 0)
DeltaTheta = 0.01   //Radians, Make smaller for a finer resolution
NumTurns = 4
CONSTANT_A = 0
CONSTANT_B = 1

For Theta = 0 to NumTurns*2*PI STEP DeltaTheta
   ThisR = CONSTANT_A + CONSTANT_B * Theta
   ThisPoint = (ThisR * cos(Theta), ThisR * sin(Theta))
   DrawLine(LastPoint, ThisPoint)
   LastPoint = ThisPoint
Next Theta

If you can make the DeltaTheta parameter small enough you should be able to get a relatively decent looking spiral. For a smoother spiral you may want to look at bezier curves, assuming your plotter supports them. Another option would be to use arbitrary arcs that match the slope of the spiral on each end.