Ask HN: How did you learn web design?

If you look around professional websites, it looks professional for only reason they publish after it looks professional. Every thing iterative. Once you design some thing you just need to constantly iterate your own design. Trust me your end product will look professional. The main constituents of aesthetic is a combinations of colors, placements and font. Typical design colors should be in the range of blue to green. Which are pleasant to your eyes. Once you finish your design you can get feedback upon which you can improve your design.

I'm a self taught web developer and the way I learnt is by just start coding. Write mini applications, like login and sign up. Build it like a Lego, put small pieces together to build your structure. You will be better off keeping the UI design to the last.

One of my hard learnt lessons is that web applications has to be designed from back to front and not the other way around. Understand how CSS works, theme templates are great and are cheap to buy (themeforrest) but if you didnt know how to manipulate the CSS then you will be left with a lot of frustration.

I've learned by observing and reading. You can start here: http://dribbble.com/ . After that, use http://www.hnsearch.com/ to find good articles about UI and UX design.

One important lesson for me was that web design (UI and UX) and web programming are two different tasks. Best outcome is achieved when they are separated. Paper and pencil will be your best friends.

Do you have a link to share that shows your current design, maybe others can offer advice on what to change.

Usually all sites that become popular started off as a rather basic site, and didn't look very professional, go to the wayback machine on archive.org and take a look at Twitter/Facebook when they were first started, and maybe that will encourage you going forward

You can start out with a book like Design for Hackers, but then to get better you just have to keep your eye out for website designs that you really like. I take screenshots and keep a collection for inspiration later when I need it.

Also, using a framework like Twitter Bootstrap is really helpful as it gets some of the foundational styling out of the way.

What do you know already? With only HTML, it is hard to create something that looks professional in comparison to someone who is designing dynamic pages using HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc...

Its hard to answer your question without a bit more information. Are you just interested in learning more about graphic design?

Use a css framework, at least to begin with. I used bootstrap.js at my latest project: http://v0t.es It's not going to win any design awards but it's better than anything I could have come up with by myself.