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

Typography

[wan-fu]

Learn typography. You'll get tons out of it because a lot of the things you'd learn that apply to print media regarding text apply to the web.

Re:Typography

[irontiki]

There's a lot more to type and design than is obvious to the layman.

If you ever use the bold or the underline controls in your desktop publisher you need Robin Williams (the author not the comedian). Her books The PC is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer's Design Book have been of particular value to me as a geek who too often ends up designing webpages, the occasional user interface, and generating documents.

Her complete book list

Re:Typography

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I work in print and setting type on paper and setting type on the web are COMPLETELY different. With type on the web you're limited to 2 or 3 typefaces. That's it. So what good is a course in typography going to do you?

Well, aside from the minor details that

• graphics and headers often use different typefaces and aren't limited to "web safe" fonts
• intranets running on local systems can use any fonts the sysadmins install on those systems
• embedding fonts is possible for web pages anyway
• there is more to typography than typeface design

I dunno. But I'd stick to working in print if I were you, because you don't appear to know a whole lot about web design.

Classic Design Theory.

[The Cydonian]

Can't give you *specific* advice on courses per se, but you'd generically want to look at courses that teach you classical design theory (in a media-agnostic sense), as opposed to merely courses that teach you *web-designing*. Won't turn you into a creative genius overnight, but knowledge of proper design principles (such as the "Gestalt Principle" or understanding which colours match etc) always helps.

Information Mapping

[Herrieman]

Since web-sites are all about sharing information or nice looking girls, it might be very worthwile to look at "Information Mapping".

The Information Mapping method is a research-based approach to the analysis, organization, and visual presentation of information.

See web-site of professor Robert Horn for a start. Unfortunately, his web-site doesn't use the techniques :), but you'll find some usefull PDFs.

Site: http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/

The designer of the slashdot site could also use a background on Information Mapping(R), IMHO :)

Re:Seriously,

[sahala]

Back in the real world, real people have to do interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping themselves. And they also have to do design themselves because they can't charge it to someone else.

The original poster isn't trying to pick up a few design tricks to make his blog page look cute. In his "real world", he is trying to offer design services in addition to application/database services. It's not unreasonable to partner with an already prominent design shop or sub-contract out work to freelance designers.

Now, that's not to say that picking up a few design skills isn't useful. You're right: rudimentary design skills aren't that hard and are pretty quickly applicable.