Refactoring UI
Learn UI design through case studies
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Antoine Plu

Refactoring UI: The Book - Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer

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Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer.

Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.

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Joshua Pinter
$79 USD for an eBook?! Me no think so! Make a print edition for $29 USD and I'm all in. Otherwise, this is outrageously priced.
Helen
@joshuapinter $79 for an ebook of years of professional real world experience and top notch in-depth step by step tutorial videos. If these co-founders put in just 1% of amount of effort into this book and it's content as much as they did w/ their marketing your $79 didn't go towards some curated old ass blog posts being sold as an ebook. Plus, if $79 is too steep for you, send the link to your family and hint this would be a great Christmas present ;-)
Joshua Pinter
@helengriffinjr You sound like a rich shill. The last people I would get to spend this much money on an eBook is my family.
Helen
@joshuapinter nope not a rich shill... I just learned over the years to invest in myself if I'm going to grow my business, finances. You can always go the sales route and sell a product or service to fund purchasing an ebook or whatever you choose to educate yourself. Financial independence and generational wealth isn't built by complaining how expensive something is. If I see something outside my price range I say to myself Aw hell nah but I keep it moving. By no means do I waste my talents on ruining another man's chance to feed his family w/ negative reviews about price. BONUS tip - get 4 of your dev buddies to chip in $16 to buy RefactoringUI if you see value in it's content. Drop that bad boy into google drive and y'all share the ebook. Start your own bootstrapped startup library. BOOM! Good luck, bruh!
Joshua Pinter
@helengriffinjr It's clear you have very little idea what you're talking about. You have no idea what my current financial status is and whether or not I'm already financially independent (Hint: I'm doing just fine, thanks - and very little luck was actually required. Mostly just a lot of hard work and constantly increasing value for our customers.) This has nothing to do with that. It has to do with something that is poignant whether you have a single dollar in the bank or ten million. That magic word I've already used: "value". Never forget it. It can be used for a foot long Subway sandwich and it can be used for a 2010 Porsche Turbo. It transcends absolute monetary amounts and takes a lot of factors in to attribute a more meaningful worth to a product or service. Even more important is that Product Hunt was not built to be limited to positive reviews and to mute objections and negative feedback. That's how we learn. I know this because I've launched real things on here before. My feedback on pricing could be some of the most valuable feedback they get. If this was _my_ eBook I know I would certainly appreciate the feedback and take it to heart, even if I disagreed with it. Anyway, I don't have all night to wax lyrical, I've gotta get busy starting my "own bootstrapped startup library".
Helen
@joshuapinter I wish you, your family and your venture peace, joy and success in the new year. Take care.
Antoine Plu
Hunter
Big day for product people who wants to learn design, Refactoring UI is out 🎉 As a designer, I can say the content is gorgeous, full of great tips. Lot of knowledge and tricks designers are learning over the years by doing, you can jump start your knowledge right now! Congrats to @steveschoger & @adamwathan for their awesome work and the new opportunities they're providing 👏🏻
Taurean Bryant
Definitely pricier than I thought it'd be and I'd love to see that cost subsidize access to those who couldn't otherwise afford it but it was still an easy decision to buy based on all of the content I've seen leading up to this release. edit It'd also be great to see this in at least an iBooks format in addition to just PDF, especially for the price.
Ingo Radatz
@_taurean yes, +1 for an .epub version
Gezim Hoxha
@_taurean Yup...ePub is a must, please!
Vince Mitchell

I've just started going through this material and it's an amazing resource that I'll be using daily. Can't wait to make it all the way through the book and videos.

Pros:

Such great content

Cons:

Is more content possible?

wojtek
I've been waiting for this for a long time. Your Twitter threads have been a huge help. The past few years I've transitioned more into a developer role and my design got rusty. Being tasked with designing things for startups has been a stressful experience because my expectations were always higher than my output, and I've ended up unhappy or stuck with my work. I'm sure this book and resources will help overcome these issues and make me a better designer. Glad this is finally out! 🙌️
Hans Pagel
great work! would love to see the component gallery as a website (images of the components would be enough), to quickly open it and discuss possibilities with students, designers or even clients (e. g. application layouts). or in other words: I hate PDF.
Justin Jackson

Everyone who works on the web should understand design: software developers, product managers, etc...

This is the best resource I've found on the topic.

Pros:

A no-brainer for web professionals

Cons:

Why didn't I think of this? 😜

Matthew Morek
@steveschoger I’d get the book if it was available in any other format than PDF. Can’t stand long form reads on screen, unless it’s a properly formatted eBook (ePub, mobi, iBooks). Also, why no print version? The medium IS crucial here.
Peter Suhm

Read this book in one go. It only took 1.5 hours, which is something other books should aspire to achieve. I don't know that I've ever consumed that much knowledge about a topic in such a short time. It's really packed full of actionable tips.

Pros:

Extremely actionable

Cons:

Steve doesn't have time to design my app

John Reel

I bought the whole package. This teaches you to make better and logical design decisions and to create a design system that makes sense and will look really good. I think it will make most designers better.

1) They clearly know their stuff and teach it in a very easy to consume manner. If you are starting off or are doing things by gut-feelings, this is worth the full price as it will make you a much better designer.

2) It is advertised as 250 pages. It is 252, but to get to that number, they included 32 blank pages throughout the book. Maybe that's normal, but it kind of bothers me. I'm sure 220 pages would have sounded just as good.

3) You can consume it all in a 2-4 hours, which makes the price seem quite high when you can buy $12 Udemy courses with 12 hours of videos.

4) I wanted to see much more on what to do and not to do for usability on forms. There is tiny bit in the book and some more on it in the videos, but a lot more could be said. That seemed like an important section that was missing, and is a place where it is easy to make a lot of mistakes. At this price, I expect it to be there.

5) It seems very odd that the color palettes and component gallery add-ons, are PDF files instead of more useful and usable Sketch files.

6) If they had included their component gallery as a HTML/CSS framework I could actually use, then it would have felt like great value for the money.

For me, the first half was pretty basic - though still things designers get wrong all the time, and I wish I had learned years ago from a book like this. In the second half, the color stuff and some of the font stuff was quite useful and I'll change the way I use color from now on. I've kept meaning to research that, so it is the one area I knew nothing about.

I also knew that upping my game on systemizing my designs was the next step for me, and that after reading this, I won't put it off anymore.

Final thoughts:

I ended up asking for a refund... reluctantly, as I want to build a design system based on it, but for ~$150, it irks me too much that a useable one wasn't included. I just wish it came with files you can just use instead of pictures of files! If it came with componentized Sketch or Figma files, I wouldn't dream of returning it. As it is, that omission makes it feel to me like not enough product for such a premium price.

UPDATE:

When they processed my refund, they told me that Sketch versions of the resources are coming. So, now I have to buy it again. That's the tipping point. Also, I discovered that neither Sketch or Figma use HSL to choose colour, which is what they recommend. So, need to find a workaround as their reasons make a lot of sense.

Pros:

UI Beginner? Buy this to start off from a very solid footing and avoid wasting ages of trial and error, researching, and mistakes.

Cons:

Experienced? You figured out some of it already. Would like to see more on forms, and wish it had usable files instead of PDF resources.

Andy Dent
The PDF-only bugged me too. For forms, suggest Adam Silver's great book https://formdesignpatterns.com/ (Multi-format, $20 eBook as well as physical). I love their writing but the sample content looked too much like stuff I already have and the pricing aggressive for what's offered.
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