A non-artsy guide to creating beautiful apps and sites

NOTE: For the full, updated version of this article, please go here.

Introduction

OK, first things first. This guide is not for everyone. Who is this guide for?

Developers who want to be able to design their own good-looking UI in a pinch.

who want to be able to design their own good-looking UI in a pinch. UX designers who want their portfolio to look better than a Pentagon PowerPoint. Or UX designers who know they can sell an awesome UX better in a pretty UI package.

If you went to art school or consider yourself a UI designer already, you will likely find this guide some combination of a.) boring, b.) wrong, and c.) irritating. That’s fine. All your criticisms are right. Close the tab, move along.

First, I was a UX designer with no UI skills. I love designing UX, but I wasn’t doing it for long before I realized there were a bunch of good reasons to learn how to make an interface look nice:

My portfolio looked like crap, reflecting poorly on my work and thought process

My UX consulting clients would rather buy someone’s skills if their expertise extended to more than just sketching boxes and arrows

Did I want to work for an early-stage startup at some point? Best to be a sweeper

I had my excuses. I don’t know crap about aesthetics. I majored in engineering – it’s almost a badge of pride to build something that looks awful.

In the end, I learned the aesthetics of apps the same way I’ve learned any creative endeavor: cold, hard analysis. And shameless copying of what works. I’ve worked 10 hours on a UI project and billed for 1. The other 9 were the wild flailing of learning. Desperately searching Google and Pinterest and Dribbble for something to copy from.

These “rules” are the lessons from those hours.

This article is not theory. This article is pure application. You won’t see anything about golden ratios. I don’t even mention color theory. Only what I’ve learned from being bad and then deliberately practicing.

The Rules:

Let’s get to it.

Rule 1: Light Comes From the Sky

Shadows are invaluable cues in telling the human brain what user interface elements we’re looking at.

This is perhaps the most important non-obvious thing to learn about UI design: light comes from the sky. Light comes from the sky so frequently and consistently that for it to come from below actually looks freaky.

When light comes from the sky, it illuminates the tops of things and casts shadows below them. The tops of stuff are lighter, the bottoms are darker.

Well, the same is true for UI. Just as we have little shadows on all the undersides of all our facial features, there are shadows on the undersides of tons of UI elements. Our screens are flat, but we’ve invested a great amount of art into making so many elements on them appear be 3-D.

My favorite part of this image is the poker finger in the lower-right.

Take buttons. Even with this relatively “flat” button, there are still a handful of light-related details:

The unpushed button (top) has a darkened bottom edge. Sun don’t shine there, son. The unpushed button is slightly brighter at the top than at the bottom. This is because it imitates a slightly curved surface. Just as how you’d need to tilt a mirror held in front of you up to see the sun in it, surfaces that are tilted up reflect a biiiiit more of the sun’s light towards you. The unpushed button casts a subtle shadow – perhaps easier to see in the magnified section.

That was just a button, and yet there are these 4 little light effects present. That’s the lesson here. Now we just apply it to everything.

iOS 6 is old news, but it makes a good case study in light behavior.

Here is a pair of old iOS 6 settings — “Do Not Disturb” and “Notifications”. Look how many light effects are going on with them.

The top lip of the inset control panel casts a small shadow

The “ON” slider track is also immediately set in a bit

The “ON” slider track is concave and the bottom reflects more light

The icons are set out a bit. See the bright border around the top of them? This represents a surface perpendicular to the light source, hence receiving a lot of light, hence bouncing a lot of light into your eyes.

The divider notch is shadowed where angled away from the sun and vice versa

Now that you know, you’ll notice it everywhere. You’re welcome, kid.

Rule 2: Black and White First

Designing in grayscale before adding color simplifies the most complex element of visual design– and forces you to focus on spacing and laying out elements.

UX designers are really into designing “mobile-first” these days. That means you think about how pages and interactions work on a phone before imagining them on your zillion-pixel $6000 pro monitor.

And that sort of constraint is great. It clarifies thinking. You start with the harder problem (usable app on a teeny-weeny screen), then adopt the solution to the easier problem (usable app on a large screen).

Well here’s another similar constraint: design black and white first. Start with the harder problem of making the app beautiful and usable in every way, but without the aid of color. Add color last, and even then, only with purpose.

Haraldur Thorleifsson’s grayscale wireframes look as good as lesser designer’s finished sites.

This is a reliable and easy way to keep apps looking “clean” and “simple”. Having too many colors in too many places is a really easy way to screw up clean/simple. B&WF forces you to focus on things like spacing, sizes, and layout first. And those are the primary concerns of a clean and simple design.