How can I make an Application look nice and not like an amateur pulled it together?
I mean graphic-wise.
Is there some sort of book you can read regarding beautiful program layouts, etc?
I put this in Community Wiki so please feel free to leave your opinions that way we can all learn. :D
Edit: Oh my god. I completely forgot to mention what kind of program. I mean desktop applications. Not web applications. :D
Three things:
Find a graphic designer.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just sayin'. I fancy myself a pretty good developer, but I am at stick-figure level when it comes to graphic design.
The skills (and the tools) for good graphic design are fundamentally different than the skills of a developer.
Hire an expert. Design is something you either have or you don't. It sounds like you (just like me) are in the "don't" category :)
The following terms are really important when it comes to the look and feel of an application
User Interface Design This talks about how the application has uniform soft colors, similarly sized controls, smooth fonts, appropriate groupings of data elements, etc.
User Experience This is a much more difficult thing to attain. This is how intuitive the application is "Are you sure?" and "Are you Really sure?" message boxes, doing away with pop-up's and dialog boxes, auto-save, the flow from one stage to another, accuracy of data saves, and a host of other things that make the user experience truly amazing.
You cannot have good UX without good UI, but it is definitely possible to have a good UI without a good UX.
I do try very hard to convince my users of the beauty of a command line interface.
Besides that, I think there is nothing better than "hallway testing". You can always hire an expert for GUI design though.
There are a lot of sites that offer tips on Graphical User Interface (GUI) design. Google for "GUI design guidelines" and you'll find some. While these tips might not make your application look 'beautiful' they can make it look professionally designed. If you want beautiful graphics you might need to get some help from a graphic artist.
Check here for a good list of books on GUI design.
I really like this book, from Joel Spolsky: [http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B001O9LB86/ref=nosim/betteraddons-20%5D
I recommend reading the AskTog site:
Bruce Tognazzini... ...founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's Human Interface Evangelist.
There's been some great stuff in the past, like how making buttons bigger is directly proportionate to their likelihood of being clicked, how mouse movement impacted design, etc.
But if you're not into learning - by all means, find a professional designer.
Just keep redoing it. Seriously, take all outside criticism. Ask them to be specific. If you're doing web work look at as many websites as you can. Sometimes, depending on the creator, you can email the website to ask why they did what they did and get a response. If you're doing desktop find a library you enjoy that can look good (not Swing, hate me if you want.) Then create, destroy, create, destroy, and so on until you're happy.
The biggest issue I think people have is learning to just throw away a component which isn't working for you.
Keep your coding work out of the design work, and do your mockups in photoshop or something similar before trying to implement them. Good coding and good visual UI design can be directly opposed to each other very often - what looks good on the outside takes some backend work that that most coders think is monstrous, and good UIs often require custom behavior where using standardized libraries might seem to make more sense from an engineering perspective. Having a target for the functional UI will help you to push yourself beyond the "good enough" results you might get if you let what your libraries do by default determine what the site or application will look like.
I really like the book Designing Interfaces. It presents many UI design patterns and when they are appropriate to use. It won't teach you how to make things "pretty", but it can help greatly in making your application intuitive and easy for a user to grasp. It also presents the patterns in a platform agnostic way.
There's lots of books out there are graphic design, interface design, web application design, css design, etc.
General rules:
I have found that going through the various desktop design guides can be pretty useful.
I don't think any of them can be considered as being "correct", but they will give you a good baseline idea as to what is expected in general as far as basic theory such as alignment, spacing and widget layout goes.
For Looks: Follow you platform's Human Interface Guidelines. Use the Golden Mean to please the eye. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.
For Behavior: Watch the users use your application. Don't help them, don't correct them. Stand behind a two-way mirror if you can. You'll quickly find lots of places where your UI could use a tune-up.
First of all, usability should always be priority #1 and should drive your design:
However, that doesn't mean your application has to be ugly. And I disagree with those who say "you either have it or you don't." I think almost anyone can develop basic design skills if they put their mind to it. The very fact that you're asking about it proves that you're interested, which is a big step towards learning. And indeed even as a developer it helps to at least have a good sense for what looks good and how to make an engaging user interface. And if it's important you can always hire a professional designer later to take it to the next level.
There are a few fundamental details to design work that have helped me:
1.) Use colors wisely. Dull colors are not bad but they can make the design look boring and uninspired by themselves. If you add exciting, more saturated colors sparingly you can emphasize the more important elements. This will not only improve the look, but it can even be used to improve the usability by bringing attention to elements that you don't want your users to miss. Again, if you overdo this it's kind of like highlighting everything in your physics book. If you do it everywhere, it loses its meaning. I wrote more about colors and contrast in my answer here.
2.) Use white space wisely. This is huge. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a website or a Windows app -- a cluttered application is an ugly one. There is a good article about this relating to web design, but the same basic rules would apply to a desktop app.
3.) Fear not the big fonts. Another means for providing emphasis -- the big font. When combined with proper whitespace, a call-to-action written in great big words can be a powerful thing visually.
Come to think of it, all of these suggestions relate to creating emphasis.
General guidelines we use:
Specific guidelines we use:
It'll give you an idea of where my head is at that my answer to "How do you normally make a program look beautiful?" starts with:
It's probably not a good idea to ask me what I think makes for a good UI.
Has anyone got any tips for the programmer who has no budget, or is working on a project at home for fun? We can't hire a designer, but we'd like to make a bit of an effort to get our applications looking less home-built.
I suggest showing a screenshot of your creation to family and friends. You'll hate their suggestions because they will differ from yours, of course. But it can help.
Research apps that are similar, AND some that are not, then pinch one small idea from each one!
