Design the visual side of experiences (UI design)

UI design describes the user interface, or the visual side of experiences. This includes everything from typography and color to grids and layout design. The UI helps communicate the look and feel of a product from both a branding and a functional perspective. UI is how user experiences come to life and is a valuable skill for UX designers to have as well, whether they're doing the UI design themselves or collaborating with UI designers.

Before diving into the nuances of UI, we'll start by looking at the big picture of design systems and style guides. We'll break them down into smaller components: examining atomic design, design libraries, and responsive web to see how the building blocks are formed. We'll also consider how gaining a basic knowledge of code and learning to communicate with developers can benefit UX and UI designers when making design decisions.

This course is about the principles of UI design and does not teach specific design software. Whatever software you prefer to use, the concepts here will give you a strong foundation for making your sketches a reality.

In this course you'll learn how to:

• Communicate across a team of UX designers, UI designers, and developers

• Work with a style guide or design system to inform design choices

• Conduct an interface inventory to uncover existing components

• Consider responsive web across devices

• Articulate the benefits of design patterns as a way to streamline the design process

• Integrate existing design patterns into UI design

• Use color and typography as tools for optimizing the user experience

• Refer to accessibility guidelines when working with color

• Design for the web