Refactoring UI - two hours to noticeably better web design

This was amazing. I always struggled to know where to start with learning design, and this book is the answer I’d been missing.

I picked it up because I was doing more and more frontend work and my side projects were bugging me. I’d built a movie matcher app and wasn’t happy with how it looked, and I had an AI chat app in mind where I wanted the design to be a focus rather than an afterthought.

The book has a bunch of examples and extremely practical advice to make your web design better. The tone was great and the examples very clear. No theory-heavy lectures, just concrete ways to improve what is on the screen. Plenty of the tips are still in my toolkit, like using shades of colour on text to denote importance - title in solid black, subtitle a bit grey. It won me over enough that I bought Tailwind UI from the same authors, and I use a lot of Tailwind in my side projects now.

The best part might be the time investment. It’s a very quick read - you can get through it in a couple of hours tops. A couple of hours for a permanent upgrade to your design instincts is about the best trade I can think of, and that is why it gets a full 5/5.

Who should read it: a new frontend developer would be my first pick, or any developer who can build the thing but winces at how it looks. Who should skip it: trained designers will probably find it covers ground they already know.

Overall highly recommended.