This lesson is exclusive to members

Illustrator - UI & Web Design using Adobe Illustrator

Learning the language of UI user interaction design

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 1 of 45

Download Exercise Files

Contents

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

All right, now that we've created our first project together in Illustrator, you can now proudly call yourself a User Interface designer. Are you the world's best UI designer? Probably, not yet.

So the next step is to get as much experience as you can, and this can be done obviously by doing your own projects, and by reading, and following other people that are awesome, a bit of borrowed experience. So you need to go out, find out who the amazing people are, follow their work, learn from their experiences, and all the while you'll be learning, and picking up words and phrases that you'll be able to use to communicate your UI projects when you're working on them.

There are some really good places to get started. This one here in front of us, design.google.com is an amazing resource, this is like my go to for UI, it specifically targets more tablet and mobile, which is the kind of cutting edge new stuff. Mobile web design is amazing, and it's been around a long time, but a lot of the new language that you're going to have to learn is coming from these devices.

Probably the biggest word to learn is 'material'. Material is the word that we use to talk about how the design interacts with the person, in a more interactive kind of a way than it ever has before this, so many more features that a phone can do than, say a website. So, this is the place to get started, just start reading. There are so many well curated, and written articles on this site, it's pretty unbelievable. I love this site. 

Just start working your way through it. This site here has great articles, the resources are really cool. If I click on the 'Resources' here, material.io is Google's kind of explanation of how this kind of interaction works, and the cool thing about it is it gives you the language you might use, so I'm going to jump over to material.io, and it just gives you a really nice way of-- If you read it, and start understanding it, working it out, that means when you start talking to your clients, and working with your processes, it's going to give you that language that you need to be able to express what you mean, and give it some sort of credibility of why it should be done. I love this. 

There are so many like-- even just like looking at the icons, and some of these material components. Just gives you icons, and explains why, and it just-- even like this, it's just a simple resource of icons that-- especially for things like apps, where like, the kind of icons should be used for an announcement. It's simple when you see it, but somebody's slaved long and hard, and it's been through a lot of apps, so it's being kind of communicated to people, so let’s now understand this is a language that already exists, you're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Also, this component one, there’s some really nice documentation about how all of this works.

Google's resources, their articles are amazing. And another one that I quite like is Facebook's one, they've got one called facebook.design, and it's just their designers, and they get to post things that they are interested in, articles they've written, what they're working on, and I find this is a really cool resource for learning, and following cool ideas, and understanding how things work. Yes, this is another cool site.

So now let's go off, find the best UI designers you like, follow them on Twitter, follow them on Facebook, read these articles, and it will really help you get more confidence when you start delivering your designs, and be able to communicate those to your clients. 

All right, I'll see you in the next video.