Design for Developers

by Stephanie Stimac

Solve common application design and usability issues with flair! These essential design and UX techniques will help you create good user experiences, iterate smoothly on frontend features, and collaborate effectively with designer colleagues.

In Design for Developers you will learn how

Use color, typography, and layout to create hierarchy on a web page Apply color palettes consistently in a user interface Choose the correct typefaces and fonts Conduct user research to validate design decisions Quickly plan a website’s layout and structure
In Design for Developers, author Stephanie Stimac shares the unique insights she’s learned as a designer on the Microsoft Developer Experiences team. This one-of-a-kind book provides a developer-centric approach to the essential design fundamentals of modern web applications. You’ll learn how to craft a polished visual design with just color, space, and typeface, and put all your new skills into practice to design a website from scratch.

Foreword by Aaron Gustafson.

About the technology

Developer-made design decisions can have a real impact on a site’s user experience. Learn to speak design’s language, and you’ll be able to confidently contribute to a design process, collaborate with designer colleagues, and make more informed decisions about how you build your apps.

About the book

Design for Developers reveals essential design and UX principles every web developer needs to know. You’ll love the book’s developer-centric approach, which demonstrates new ideas with examples from popular sites and user interfaces. Discover insightful techniques for user research, and learn to use color, typography, and layout to create communicative web visuals. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know it’s having good design sense will make you a better web developer!

What's inside

Conduct user research to validate design decisions Quickly plan a website’s layout and structure Iterate smoothly on frontend features Use color, typography, and layout to create hierarchy on a web page
About the reader

For web developers familiar with HTML, CSS, and the JavaScript basics.

About the author

Stephanie Stimac is a design technologist and senior product manager who focuses on building and improving developer experiences. She has previously worked on the Microsoft Edge browser.

Table of Contents

PART 1 DESIGN BASICS
1 Bridging the gap between design and development
2 Design fundamentals
PART 2 USER EXPERIENCE
3 User experience basics
4 User research
5 User experience design
PART 3 VISUAL DESIGN ELEMENTS
6 Web layout and composition
7 Enhancing web layout with animation
8 Choosing and working with typography on the web
9 Color theory
10 Building a website
PART 4 AFTER VISUAL DESIGN
11 Test, validate, iterate
12 Developer choices and user experience

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Programming, Technology

480 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 17, 2023

Reviews

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stimac starts with a bold proposal: To teach design to non-designers, specifically (web) developers. She starts by laying a solid foundation of basic design principles (proximity, repetition, alignment, contrast, balance and symmetry). With the foundation in place, she discusses concepts like color, typography, layout, and animation as they apply to the user experience. Along the way she introduces us to various tools and techniques like the type ramp, color wheel, wireframes, layout grid, and various methods of doing user research. She includes lots of examples (both as images in the book and links to websites where the design principles can be experienced firsthand) to demonstrate what the concepts and principles might look like when implemented.

A separate walk-through chapter combines all of the previous information into a step-by-step build of a sample customer website, showing how all of the pieces come together. Each of the major design concepts is addressed, with discussion of the intended goals and demonstration (including detailed technical analysis) of how the goals are achieved.

Beyond just the technical aspects of design, Stimac also touches on the non-technical, such as the competitive advantage of good design and an appealing user experience. These themes are threaded throughout the book, rather than being separate chapters. Much of this is in the form of stories about her experience in industry and working on various projects.

So if you're not a web developer, or not a developer at all, should you read the book? The attention to basic design principles and the foundation of design at the beginning makes this a valuable book for anyone interested in understanding what design is, and what a designer does. Beyond that, she shows how the design process works, and provides both examples and tools to aid in the design process. I'm not a web developer, and I found the information useful if for no other reason than now I have a vocabulary to discuss why I think some websites are horrible, and others aren't.

The publisher (Manning) provided me with a digital copy of this book for review purposes, but I am not part of any Manning affiliate program.

[Weyert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book. I studied Arts myself back in the day but ended up doing more and more software development over the years. The book was a great refresher of design principles. It discusses topics such as UX design, how to do user research, explains what user personas are and how to write them. The first parts of the book give you the basics to design the perfect experience for your users and validate the design through prototyping and user interviews.

After your have validated through this user research, it will explain composition, color theory, animation basics to actual create a beautiful user interface design for your project! I really enjoyed reading the while I learned all these basics while studying Arts it was pretty rusty and for me personally it was a great refresher.

I think the book is a nice stepping stone to get into design as a software developer. After reading this book you might want to do deep dives in particular subjects discussed in the book. Such as prototyping, user research and/or design theory.

[To Nghia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an invaluable resource for web developers seeking to enhance their design skills and create outstanding user experiences. This developer-centric book bridges the gap between design and development, offering practical insights and techniques. The book simplifies complex design principles, empowering developers to create polished visual designs using color, space, and typography. It caters to developers familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for web developers to improve their design skills.

[Nikaa Haris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good design helps developers create user-friendly and understandable interfaces. It is important to consider not only the appearance, but also the logic of interaction with the user. This is especially relevant when creating individual solutions, as described in the article https://limeup.io/blog/bespoke-softwa... Such approaches make the product not only beautiful, but also effective in operation.

[David Cabrero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really useful reading for any software developer. You'll find a pragmatic approach to explain the fundamentals of interface design to non-designers. It doesn't matter if you are not designing the interfaces, knowing the process, the terminology and the fundamentals helps you becoming a valuable teammate when collaborating with designers.

[Søren Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a developer I often find myself using too much time on design. This book helped me understand the basic design guidelines and allow me to spend time on my code.

I recommend this book for all developers that needs to do some frontend design.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic; lots of pragmatic explanations (with illustrative examples) of how design decisions make apps more useful. Instantly my new go-to book for explaining what I do for a living.

[Andres Sacco · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book that I enjoyed reading