Resources to level up your UI/UX skills as a developer and maker

It's no secret, indiehackers, makers and solopreneurs have to wear all kinds of hats to bring their ideas to life and to make their businesses successful. Having the right resources with useful information at hand, can help a lot in that regards. 

Starting with this article, I'll share my top resources that I use to tackle various business-related issues in my journey as an indie hacker.

Let's begin with books and websites that help you to improve your design skills.

Refactoring UI

Created a few years ago by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, the creators of Tailwind CSS and kind of living legends already, Refactoring UI can be definitely called a classic by now. It helped countless developers to get better at creating nice looking and easy to use web apps and web sites, without the help of actual designers. The core of the product is the book, available in PDF format only, with over 200 pages of real practical advice by contrasting good practices with bad practices visually. This makes it super easy to follow along even for people without a design background. The book is accompanied with three video tutorials, showing the book's ideas in action. Taking the more expensive flavour of the product you even get different design assets to use in your projects like layout ideas, color palettes, font suggestions, and icons.

Cost: $99 or $149

Website: https://www.refactoringui.com/

50/100 Design Tips

Victor Ponamariov, a developer with a passion for user interfaces, was tweeting UI/UX tips for a whole year, until he finally compiled the best of these in two books (PDF only): The 50 Tips To Improve User Interface is free, while the 100 Practical UI/UX Tips is a bargain at $19. The books are shorter than Refactoring UI and they don't come with additional material, but they are definitely a great read. Like Refactoring UI the books contrast good practices with bad practices visually, and the focus lies on typical web/app design elements, too. If the books are not enough, you should follow Victor on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter or YouTube channel. He's very active and putting out new content all the time. He has just recently published a nice short History of User Interfaces.

Cost: Free or $19

Website: https://user-interface.io/

UX Movement

The UX Movement website has been around for quite some time now and provides a good selection of categorised and searchable UI/UX tips. So when PDF books don't work for you, this website is a good alternative to get examples and best practices for those UI elements you are just building. The tips are also contrasting good against bad practices visually and are explained in an easy to digest way. What's nice is the possibility to leave comments on the tips, so you might also get some different viewpoints from the comments. The UX Movement is also sharing tips on Twitter or in its newsletter (subscription via the website), although not so regularly as Victor.

Cost: Free

Website: https://uxmovement.com/

So that's it for now. If you want to recommend other websites, books or videos, that should be on this list, I'm happy to hear from you!