I want to learn about design.

I'm doing something bold in this post: I'm asking designers to read it
all the way through and take me seriously.

Because I need help.

As the image above (made with pixlr.com) clearly demonstrates, I am not a designer. I can't imagine a future when I will ever be able to claim in good faith that I am a designer. I have, arguably, tried to design things. Most notably, I "designed" my homepage at joeross.me. I wrote the code, sparse as it is, by hand. I chose the color scheme, or rather I chose not to have a color scheme. I even decided to use internal links to let users "jump" between sections.

Is that design?

My friends and I at KeyPulp.com bought a Wordpress template, but we customized the hell out of it. We chose fonts, colors, layout changes and widget positions by vote, but the task of revising the underlying code to reflect our decisions fell to me. The most creative part of it all for me was coming up with our series of 404 Not Found error pages. Keep refreshing, there are a few gems in there.

Is that design?

I modified the theme I use at joeross.tumblr.com to add a "back to the top" arrow in the navigation bar. I was proud of that.

Is that design?

I chose, for a long time, to make all my backgrounds #E3E3E3 (something like gray, for those who don't read hex colors). My thinking was that plain white is hard on the eyes after a while. Gray is easier on the eyes, and #E3E3E3 was the most "balanced" gray I could find. It was classy without being "dead." Recently, I grew to feel like even my #E3E3E3 version of gray looked "dead." I also noticed that lots of websites are using something close to it as their background now, or they were doing it long ago and I hadn't noticed.

(As an aside, this gray background trend looks like part of the larger "rounded corners, big brightly-colored, shiny buttons, and real-world textures" trend I've seen in web design over the past few years.)

So, I backpedaled on my logic and made my backgrounds white. They look crisper, more professional. But my eyes hurt, and it kind of makes me sad.

That color change, the thought process behind it, the sadness when the scale tips in favor of appearance over user experience, is that design?

All of my links are colored #7D0000 (something like dark red). I like this color. I stumbled upon it somewhere a while ago and decided it would be "my" color, used for links and accents. I try to use it consistently across blogs, social networks, and other places where I have some control over the color scheme.

Is that design?

If you're a designer and you're still reading this, you deserve an award. I suspect that the stuff I described above is to design as cave paintings are to Da Vinci. But I want to know which blogs to read, what designers to read biographies about, and how to look at things with a critical eye toward design. I just want to get inside the heads of good designers.

Again, I don't suspect I'll ever qualify as a designer, but I want to learn all I can about design. I'm often called upon to at least offer an opinion about design decisions and I want to make sure those opinions are somewhat educated.

Any advice?

This was originally posted to joeross.posterous.com.