In general, what you really, really need to learn first, because everything else comes with practice is grid typography, hierarchy, readability and some basic esthetics. But you don't really need to be an artist and design is definitely not art. It's not art because you have a very limited, you know, kind of scope of what you can do and you can't be too creative because that's going to make it unusable.
So a lot of those Dribbble shots are basically artworks and they're just not able to become a real product because they are done in a way to just kind of have like a flashy visual. So we need to understand that. But what I think is the most important thing is the grid and the layout. I often tell the junior designers what I think the UI design really is, because this whole design thing is really, really like created to feel difficult to people. Like, you know, we have those super genius UX designers talking about lengthy processes
and as a junior, we get discouraged. We get like, Oh, I'm not going to learn that ever because I'm not a super genius like they are. But in reality, a lot of the design is basically moving rectangles around. So you take a rectangle and based on some research and some knowledge, you move it to a different position, change the color, change the size, and that's it. And it's all rectangles, even if you're moving ovals because the bounding boxes are rectangular as well.
So if you learn how and why and where to move those rectangles to, you're set to go. And after two years at university, I had a very hands on experience because I could actually walk to a desk and see what people struggled with. And these were the same problems over and over, mostly great problems, some color problems and typography problems. And do you think that this font is good and I'm going to break it to you know, it's not.
So rule one off one because there is basically just one rule of good UI design. You don't want your brain to be working too much because our brains love order. They, they really, really hate chaos and they love order because it's easier for them to process. So if something is well-organized visually, it's just faster to process. So that brain is just working a little bit less. And if something is harder to process and it takes longer visually
to process, then the brain is tired and it's kind of disliking the thing already.