elmarschraml

Being a programmer, I lack a natural sense of design, and not every project requires or allows to hire a professional designer.

In short, I want to become better at making things look good. I like to believe that I have good taste, as in recognizing good design as such, but am pretty hopeless about creating good designs myself.

What books/blogs/websites have you found helpful to learn more about design?

Some suggestions of my own:

- Usability overlaps with design quite a bit (making things pleasant to use, getting rid of clutter etc), so books like Joel Spolsky's user interface design for programmers, Steve Krug's Don't make me think, or Alan Cooper's About Face can help with design, too.

- Robin Williams: The Non-designer's design book. Short, to the point, and teaches the basic principles.

- Blogs: Smashing Magazine and Six Revisions.

I'm a software developer currently in the process of setting up a new personal site. The goals are 1) Google insurance (somebody who searches for my name should find some good, real info about me) 2) A place to put content I'd like to share (personal programing projects, slides of talks, language reference sheets etc) 3) A place to point people to so they can see what kind of guy I am before meeting me (both personal - blog, pictures etc and professional - resume)

I was planning to get VPS hosting, and run everything myself (Apache, MySQL, Wordpress, Gallery, Svn-Server, Trac etc). But in the process, I realized that almost everything I need is available as a cloud service: Blog on wordpress.com, photo gallery in flickr, code hosting on github, slides on slideshare and so on.

It's 2010, is it still a good idea to run your own webserver for a site like this?

Main advantage of cloud hosting: A lot less work, leaves more time to create content.

Main advantage of my own server: You gain experience on the admin side, too. And you're fully independant if a cloud service is shut down.

What are your thoughts on this?

Also, if you run, or know of, good examples of such a site, I'd be thankful for a link to it.