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Design

Nick Pettit
STAFF
Nick Pettit
Treehouse Teacher
Posted by Nick Pettit
Nick Pettit
Treehouse Teacher

5 Design Tips Every Developer Should Know

Lots of developers often run into situations where they need to do design work, so I thought I'd write a blog post about design from a more analytical and developer-oriented perspective. :)

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/5-design-tips-every-developer-should-know

If you have any similar tips I'd love to hear them!

6 Answers

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

@Nick My reply to developers who want to add some polish to their creations is that #TheresAnAppForThat, here are my 10 tips.

  • Set your font size & leading based on a scale using Gridlover
  • Try out typography for body copy side-by-side using Typetester
  • Instead of a flat background color, use a Subtle Pattern
  • Pick out complimentary colors using Color Scheme Designer
  • Lighten bright colors if make your eyes bleed using Colllor
  • Use an icon font such as Entypo
  • Use CSS3 to add some subtle effects such as border-radius and box-shadow to give your page polish
  • Use a lighter color than black for text, try #444 instead
  • Limit the number of fonts used per page, 3 max
  • Don't justify text to avoid rivers in the text
Deleted User
Deleted User

very nice tips..thank you for sharing

Ernest Grzybowski
Ernest Grzybowski
Treehouse Project Reviewer
Ernest Grzybowski
Ernest Grzybowski
Treehouse Project Reviewer

Hey @Nick, great post about design. I had a question about what you meant here: "Take a screenshot of your webpage and then use an image editing tool (like Photoshop) to experiment with curves and levels." Specifically, the later half of that sentence. What do you mean experimenting with curves and levels? Thanks!

Zack Sjoden
Zack Sjoden
866 Points
Zack Sjoden
Zack Sjoden
866 Points

@Ernest,

I think Nick is referring to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_(tonality). You can adjust the over all look or feel of the site color wise to see how it would look darker, lighter, more blues, less blues, etc.

Nick Pettit
STAFF
Nick Pettit
Treehouse Teacher
Nick Pettit
Nick Pettit
Treehouse Teacher

Hey James,

Those are great tips! Thanks for taking the time to share those. :)

Vaibhav Kanwal
Vaibhav Kanwal
1,199 Points
Vaibhav Kanwal
Vaibhav Kanwal
1,199 Points

Thank you James. Awesome tips and tools