Learning to design

[Awwent]

Hi everyone!
I've been developing for web for around four years now but I've never been good at designing, but I want to be good at that too. The last few days, I've tried to make tons of designs and layouts to just get better and sure, maybe I'm a bit better now than I was two weeks ago but not much. Maybe you guys could give me some tips and tell me what I can do better on my designs?

Example W.I.P portfolio I started making yesterday: [url]http://img.polizen.net/?di=412908785881[/url]

What can I do to make it look better? I need to learn a lot about fonts, coloring etc I guess.

[StankyJoe]

Read some books, find a good workshop or course or something similar, steer clear of 'Photoshop classes' and anything like that.

[BrettJay]

[QUOTE=StankyJoe;26334088]Read some books, find a good workshop or course or something similar, steer clear of 'Photoshop classes' and anything like that.[/QUOTE]

Pretty much this, familiarize yourself with the [url="http://www.google.com/search?q=principles+of+design"]principles of design[/url], read up on [url="http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html"]Colo(u)r theory[/url]/Typography, and practice, practice, practice.

And obviously, start design work in Illustrator/Photoshop, rather than diving straight into markup.

[StankyJoe]

Here, have some reading/inspirational material from my collection:

[url]http://designobserver.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.paul-rand.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.stinestine.no/[/url]
[url]http://www.typotheque.com/site/index.php[/url]
[url]http://thescienceofdesign.blogspot.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/[/url]
[url]http://butdoesitfloat.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.stafmagazine.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.uppercasegallery.ca/[/url]
[url]http://www.booooooom.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.designtripper.com/[/url]
[url]http://ffffound.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.adrianjohnson.org.uk[/url]
[url]http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/[/url]

As for books, pretty much any design book under [b]TASCHEN[/b], everything else is a matter of asking around.
[b][url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach]Gödel, Escher, Bach[/url][/b] is a must-read for...well, anyone.