Courses on Making Professional, Usable Websites?

Hagmonk asks: "I've been writing website backends in Perl, PHP, and MySQL for years now. It's always been about the functionality though, not the presentation. What I'd now like to do is offer clients a complete service - a professional backend, -and- a professionally designed front end (both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint). The thought of heading to a 'typical' website design course frightens me. I don't want to waste my time being spoonfed the very basics. I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist? In Australia or on-line?"

Comments

Re:Take an art course

[Just Some Guy]

The best website design houses are staffed not with computer programmers, but with folks with degrees in art.

No. The best houses are staffed by artists and technical types that can render the artists' vision in standard-compliant glory. The worst houses are the ones filled with brilliant artists who can't be made to understand the realities of the web as a medium, and who crank out design after design that is absolutely beautiful on IE 6 at 1024x768 but looks like a top-right-corner blob on Mozilla at high resolutions.

An artist's eye is very important for developing an aesthetically pleasing site, but a technician's touch is absolutely critical if you want the whole world to be able to use it. This isn't a slam on artists; to the contrary, I'm a good technical designer, but my sites are specification-perfect yet boring. I just want to reinforce the idea that you need both types of skills to make good looking, functional sites. An artist or a technician alone will only get you halfway there.