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Refactoring UI
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Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer. Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.
ebook, 252 pages
Published
December 11th 2018
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I literally read this in 2 hours.
This book is great but it’s aimed primarily at developers who are looking to improve their UI designs when there’s no designer on a project (or similar situation). For that audience, it’s perfect. For designers coming from a primarily print background, I’d recommend this book in a heartbeat. As for the seasoned web or UI design veteran... a lot of it is stuff you’ll likely already know. But I found at least a couple of practical tips that I’m definitely going to include in my design toolbox and
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I'm starting to realize that as a front-end developer, I had no idea of designing UI's before. It explains it's ideas with nice examples and sketches and also, for example, gave me nice approach in using white space in my designs: "A better approach is to start by giving something way too much space, then remove it until it you’re happy with the result." It may seem simple but I wasn't aware how much this can help me. I would recommend it to you if you are a developer or a junior product
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Best book on UI/UX design. Great re-read value as well. Helped me clear a lot of fundamentals for designing good UIs without needing a designer.
Thought this one was great. Good, hands on advice on how you can bring your designs to the next level, will definitely go back to this one!
Tonnes of good practical tips
Concise guide to User Interfaces. Really helped me as a non-designer.
An excellent primer on how to make simple design decisions that could greatly improve your designs. No fluff; 100% signal, 0% noise.
This book is full of simple UI examples and comparisons: what is better, why, and how to control user focus. Refactoring UI doesn't dive deep into details and I think it's a good start point for Web Designing. If you are familiar with Bootstrap and Material Design then this book gonna fill your gaps and help you to see the full picture of UI and even UX.
Absolutely outstanding. It's only over 200 (easy) pages, but it's so packed with valuable tips and insight into creating great UI. I've definitely leveled up from reading this, and this will be my number one recommendation to developers looking to get a firmer grasp on design basics. Pricey, but well-worth it in my opinion.
Awesome book!
I highly recommend it for UI/UX and Web designer, and also for backend developer who want to learn some quick tips to make thiers own UIs feel designed and well organized.
Me as a backend developer, sometimes when I need to build some frontend for my APIs, I often waste time making decisions like : what perfect color to pick, what font-family to choose, how to position headlines, etc. I think this book will help me a lot :)
I highly recommend it for UI/UX and Web designer, and also for backend developer who want to learn some quick tips to make thiers own UIs feel designed and well organized.
Me as a backend developer, sometimes when I need to build some frontend for my APIs, I often waste time making decisions like : what perfect color to pick, what font-family to choose, how to position headlines, etc. I think this book will help me a lot :)
Adam Wathan had done an awesome job in this book. With just the right balance of design theory and examples, here you will find some clever tips to step up your User interface game.
Perfect for a solo-dev, who want to create a decent looking UI for his app.
Great book. Used Images to describe the points. Anyone will understand the views. Designers should read the book to grow their confidence.
If you're developer who uses bootstrap but wants to level-up your design skills, I highly recommend this book.
This book has practical details on how to think and design boring items such as Forms, dropdown, images, grid.
This book has practical details on how to think and design boring items such as Forms, dropdown, images, grid.
It is a really great book to get into modern applications design it works for designers and developers. Really nice examples easy to read.
I love this book, because it doesn't mess around: there's a title page, the table of contents, and then you're immediately presented with some great design advice:
That's the title of the first section of the first chapter of this book. The authors explain that design is different from aesthetics. When you're developing a product like an app or a website, the most important thing is that it's functional. Decide what UI elements you need to satisfy that ...more
"Start with a feature, not a layout"
That's the title of the first section of the first chapter of this book. The authors explain that design is different from aesthetics. When you're developing a product like an app or a website, the most important thing is that it's functional. Decide what UI elements you need to satisfy that ...more
Hats off to the authors of this fabulous book. I had intended to read it all in one day, a symptom of interest mostly but held off a couple of weeks through the holidays.
The holidays are now over and I once again, hungrily picked through the remaining treats left with its last pages. As a graphic designer of many, many years and web designer/developer for the last 5-6 years I was amazed at just how many things I picked up. You always try to design great work, as fast as you can but just in the ...more
The holidays are now over and I once again, hungrily picked through the remaining treats left with its last pages. As a graphic designer of many, many years and web designer/developer for the last 5-6 years I was amazed at just how many things I picked up. You always try to design great work, as fast as you can but just in the ...more
5 stars: very practical information in easily digestible parts
The information: I learnt a great lot from this book, and will probably open it up a few more times for reference. Very practical tips and tricks that you can use in your designs.
The readability: the way the book was built up, in tiny doses of information, made it very readable, and the writing style was easy to follow as well.
The structure: I don't have too much to note about the structure. It was very logical, but nothing special.
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The information: I learnt a great lot from this book, and will probably open it up a few more times for reference. Very practical tips and tricks that you can use in your designs.
The readability: the way the book was built up, in tiny doses of information, made it very readable, and the writing style was easy to follow as well.
The structure: I don't have too much to note about the structure. It was very logical, but nothing special.
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This is hands down the most useful and practical book that I've read on building software in a long time. It's a quick read since even though the book clocks at over 200 pages, most of the pages is just images. However, the book is still jam packed with useful and actionable information.
The book is aimed at software developers improve their UI design skills. The book shows practical examples of subpar UI being refactored into more pleasant UI, and provides just the right balance of theory to ...more
The book is aimed at software developers improve their UI design skills. The book shows practical examples of subpar UI being refactored into more pleasant UI, and provides just the right balance of theory to ...more
I first came across Adam Wathan through his Test Driven Laravel course. I've been following him ever since, so when he announced this book, I was interested to check it out. I am a web engineer, who is often more back-end focused, but this book gave such simple and easily demonstrable examples of how to quickly make design choices that have an impact, that I immediately was able to see ways to start implementing his advice for adding spacing and depth to my projects. Very happy I bought this
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Refactoring UI is a great small book, packed with tons of useful content. It’s full of practical examples and will certainly make you a better UI developer. You’ll start to understand the reasoning (or the lack of it) behind designs and UI decisions in various applications. The book is structured very systematically and everything is to the point (no BS and excess content). You should definitely read it!
As a programmer who has tried and failed many times to build beautiful UIs, I found many actionable tips about design. The sections on colors, fonts and spacing were especially useful. For example, grey looks bad on a colored background. Instead use a darker shade of the colored background to indicated secondary text.
If you are a developer interested in creating acceptable UI then this is the book for you.
Terse and to the point, you can say that there's no space for repetition in this book.
Every section is stripped to the essential, and the various examples help to understand what's the best way to create and design a good UI.
Really recommended!
Terse and to the point, you can say that there's no space for repetition in this book.
Every section is stripped to the essential, and the various examples help to understand what's the best way to create and design a good UI.
Really recommended!
This is excellent. I've been looking for a developer focused UI / design book, and this is it. Lots of great actionable tips with compelling examples. It probably isn't as exhaustive as some, but it will allow non designers to make good designs. For me, it is almost infitely more useful than About Face, and more useful than Don't Make Me Think (although this is great for usability testing).
This book gave really practical steps to applying design methods as a developer. It felt almost like a workbook of some sort, that I could have fun practising with and yet everything mentioned is so important. The choice of words made is easy to digest as well and I'd find myself looking over my UI, and going back to the book to see if there was something I could apply, which was great for me.
There is plenty of tips for developing nice UI designs, but at the end of the day it comes down to noticing beautiful UI all around you and collecting your own library of tips as it never ends and constantly evolving field.
Book is not just for novices, but for people who have been in the industry for a while as there are some really good examples and reminders.
Book is not just for novices, but for people who have been in the industry for a while as there are some really good examples and reminders.
Best book on UI. There are many great resources on UX, design principles, etc. Yet this is the only book that truly improved my designs almost overnight.
It's full of bite sized, actionable UI tips that are well explained and illustrated with great examples.
I recommend it to every designer and front end developer I know.
It's full of bite sized, actionable UI tips that are well explained and illustrated with great examples.
I recommend it to every designer and front end developer I know.
I really liked this book
I think it will be very helpful to anyone that starts his career as a UI designer
but for me, it helped me with some small details in colors, contrast, and visual hierarchy
recommended to read
I think it will be very helpful to anyone that starts his career as a UI designer
but for me, it helped me with some small details in colors, contrast, and visual hierarchy
recommended to read
An incredibly practical, helpful, and inspiring guidebook to help you level up your visual design skills. Adam and Steve have a way of articulating what seems hard to explain in such simple ways, and they show you how just a few small tweaks can dramatically improve a design.
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