UI design for complete beginners: common mistakes and easy fixes

12 steps to help new designers make awesome apps

“This design needs some visual interest… oh crap.”

Here are a few simple visual fixes that can turn your early messes into something you’ll be proud of.

Faded image backgrounds

This is a common crutch novice designers use to make a page look “interesting”. Unfortunately, using transparency makes the background image too faint to see — and the content is on top hard to read. It also means that there’s an image to distract them everywhere they look—but not enough of an image to tell a story. This is a “worst-of-both-worlds” situation.