The Non-Designer's Design Book
Robin Williams
A Tier
When to Read
Before Refactoring UI, as the foundation for your design eye
Main Takeaway
CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) fixes 90% of bad design. You don't need talent, you need to apply four principles consistently.
Style
Theoretical
Practical
Read this BEFORE Refactoring UI. It trains your eye; Refactoring UI is the manual you reach for after. Genuinely useful if you're a non-designer who has to ship UI, decks, or docs. I'm a CTO with a bad design sense and I found the first half incredibly valuable. It teaches you CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) and that alone fixes most of what makes amateur work look amateur. The second half gets repetitive and dives deep into typography that's probably too basic for designers and too detailed for the rest of us. Read the first half carefully, skim the rest.