Hi, UX and interaction designer here, but once, a long time ago, I was a developer.

I learned to program typing in code from books and magazines, and, later, from reading and rewriting parts of open source projects that did things similar to things I wanted to do.

There's lots of ways to learn development like that today, online, including great open source books like Dive Into Python and Think Python and Learn Python the Hard Way.

There isn't so much of that for design. Not online, anyway.

I don't write about "how to design" because, like programming, it's something you have to learn by doing. There's no Learn UX the Hard Way, but maybe there should be.

One of the projects I tried once was running design workshops, so I could tease out repeatable design exercise and publish those: http://vi.to/workshop/premise.html I ran fifteen workshops, and ultimately discovered they were structured great for the attendees, but wrong for my goals.

There's a book, The Non-Designer's Design Book, which is pretty proscriptive, but does give you exercises you can try and repeat. There are other books, like Editing By Design, which tell you "why" certain things are important, but doesn't include exercises.

Critique is a related problem: most interactive designers today didn't go to school for it, so they're missing the common cultural and academic background that fine artists, architects and industrial designers have, where they've learned the history of the practice, learned fundamentals, and practiced constructive criticism for years.

I don't know if you're any good as a writer or a designer, but if you're looking to write about design and make an impact on non-designers, you could do worse than to take a design pattern or an element of design and make exercises around it. Give people ways to practice them, to study an implementation, to apply it something new, and to critique it, repeatably.

Thanks for the excellent suggestion. I'll think about it.

If you're a good/better than average UI/UX designer, you obviously know something that other people (including me) don't. It's your job to identify what that something is, your audience can't really tell you :)

I find that often in things I'm better at then other people, I have a better understanding of some basic principles, that form a frame of reference and help me make decisions. I'm sure there are some basic principles that the average hacker isn't familiar with, so I think that'd be a good starting point.

I also find that I understand things best if it's written in terms I already understand, so I can connect it to knowledge I already have. Analogies are really useful for that.

Thanks. Asking in HN is one of the ways through which I could identify what people want :) Your thinking on using analogies exactly reflects mine, thanks for the suggestion.

What design styles or trends piss you off?