Designing your first UI: where to start
Layout, type, and spacing are learnable rules, not talent. A first-week plan for developers and beginners who want to design clean screens.
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Most developers I teach believe design is a talent they missed. It is not. Clean screens come from a small set of rules — alignment, hierarchy, restraint — that anyone can learn in a focused week. Here is that week.
Day 1–2: Layout before decoration
Design in grayscale. Pick a content — a login form, a pricing card — and arrange it with alignment and spacing only: everything on a grid, generous padding, related things grouped. No colors yet. Most "bad design" is actually bad layout, and grayscale makes layout problems impossible to hide.
Day 3–4: Type does most of the work
Two sizes minimum between heading and body. One font family. Line length around 60–80 characters. These three rules produce most of what people call "clean." Resist adding fonts the way you would resist adding dependencies.
Day 5–6: Color last, and less of it
Add color only when the grayscale design already works. One brand color, one state for errors, tints for backgrounds. If a design needs more colors to hold interest, the earlier layers need more work — see color theory basics for non-designers for a gentle expansion.
Day 7: Steal consciously
Rebuild one screen from a product you admire, and write down five specific decisions it makes — where spacing is generous, how hierarchy flows, what it refuses to decorate. This is how taste is actually built: not by admiring, but by reproducing and naming.
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