Refactoring UI
by Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger · first published 2018
90% recommend9% neutral1% critical
Why HN recommends it
Practical, example-filled design advice for developers and non-designers: small tweaks that add up to better-looking interfaces. Recommended as a fast crash course, pairing well with Tailwind CSS.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…- Grokking Deep Learning - by far the simplest and clearest introduction into deep learning, starts from scratch and takes you through the whole thing, without any of the scary/overwhelming math. - Refactoring UI (design tips), Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics, Master Algorithm - still reading these books, but they look REALLY good. - Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,…
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?” ↗Refactoring UI. Very pragmatic and approachable for us developers who may not have much idea about design. If you want 'good enough' design for your side project but don't want to use templates, this is the book you'd…
on “Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?” ↗…up designs (https://www.typewolf.com/checklist). Once you’ve refreshed the typography, take a look at these design tips from Steve Schoger (https://twitter.com/i/events/994601867987619840). His book, Refactoring UI is also a solid reference.
on “Want your opinion about website of my startup” ↗Second this, Refactoring UI is a good resource, Adam Wathan also created tailwind css and the authors of that book created Tailwind UI which is a collection of UI components based on Tailwind.
on “Ask HN: Resources to learn basic UI layout design for React apps?” ↗I like the Refactoring UI YouTube series.[1] Schoger takes a real website and makes incremental changes to make it gorgeous. He justifies his decisions and just generally gives you a good intuition for the why he makes a given…
on “How Stripe Designs Websites (2017)” ↗…"clean" css that encourages good UI/UX practices. We need to stop comparing it to Bootstrap. Tailwind is a tool that makes using "good practice" design simple and easy. If you haven't read Adam Wathan's "Refactoring UI", I'd recommend it. It's a book that helps developers make better UI/UX design decisions, and Tailwind is the framework that Adam developed that encourages a lot of those practices. On that note, my…
on “What working with Tailwind CSS every day for 2 years looks like” ↗For any complete design noobs, like myself, I asked HN for a crash courses in design, and the top recommendation was Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger. I studied that ebook over 5 days (it would be possible to read in 1 day), took notes, and found it a delight to read and incredibly unpretentious (sophisticated ideas…
on “Visual design rules you can safely follow every time” ↗Not fully programming related, but one book that made a massive impact on my abilities as a full stack dev was “Refactoring UI” by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger. From my experience, a lot of devs who work in a full stack roles are stronger as backend devs but they have some basic understanding of how to build a frontend in one…
on “Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?” ↗"The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman "Refactoring UI" by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger (creators of Tailwind)
on “Ask HN: Books or blogs on contemporary interface philosophy?” ↗Refactoring UI
on “Ask HN: What’s the best books and resources for UI/UX in 2023?” ↗…recommendations here. Usually they weren't even in recommendation threads, but just randomly coming up in comments. Some are ones you see coming up a lot: The Mom Test, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Refactoring UI, Don't Make Me Think. But then some were just way off my radar, like the writings of sociologist Edward T. Hall or Stephen Baxter's sci-fi. I also bought a lifetime subscription for an app I found here,…
on “Ask HN: What did you buy after reading about it here?” ↗I've got to recommend refactoringui.com. They sell a (rather expensive) book on web/mobile app design that explains how to build your design system and use it to create great looking apps. They cover all the bases you would expect like fonts, line-heights, colors, shadows, borders, sizing, working with images, visual hierarchy, using white space, etc. etc. I'm a developer by trade and I work pri
on “NoDesign.dev – Tools and resources for non-artistic developers” ↗On the topic of choosing colours, I recently discovered this article which cleared up a lot of misconceptions for me and made things much easier: https://www.refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color-p...
on “Colors.lol (2020)” ↗For what it's worth - I saw the value of Tailwind UI as its connection to the Refactoring UI product from Adam Wathan (tailwind) + Steve Schoger - https://refactoringui.com/ The tips, screencasts, and eventual book they offered gives a superb, distilled, crash course on making stuff "look good" when to the untrained eye it can all seem arbitrary. They take a lot of guess work out of adding polish
on “Tailwind UI has made over $500k in sales in its first three days” ↗Get Refactoring UI (https://refactoringui.com/book/)! I LOVE this book. It teaches you a bunch of rules, and has a component library with examples of things that look good.
on “Ask HN: Resources to learn basic UI layout design for React apps?” ↗