Strongly Typed

If you are not the best designer in the world there are a few rules that you can follow to make sure what you do have looks like you have put a little thought into it. The truth of the matter is that like anything you will get better with practice, you gradually get “an eye” for what works best and develop you own style the most important thing to remember is that ultimately you are trying to make your interface work for the user.

Only have a maximum of five colours

Having to many colours in your design is an easy way to go wrong.  This is a good rule of thumb
A main colour: Don’t go for anything to bold here its much harder to make this work
A secondary colour: This should be something that complements the main colour
A highlight colour: You will use this colour sparingly just to highlight a particular area
The background colour: This will usually be white
You text colour: this will usually be black

Choose colours that work

There are an endless number of ways that you can get a colour scheme.  A really simple approach is to open your favorite image editor start by choosing the main colour that you want to use this can be pretty much anything you want.  A word of advice dont go for anything to bright or you will find it harder to work with.

Another great way to choose a colour scheme is to take a photo!  This sounds a little mad but it really works especially with photos of things like flowers, animals, people. (see Mezzoblue)

Make connections between connected items

What you are trying to do here is put things that are connected together we see this all the time in applications that we use menu, context menus, toolbars they all group like functionality together (cut, copy, paste)

Line things up

You might not notice that at a glance but if two items are just a pixel or two out then it will look amateur, thats not to say that everything has to be aligned but following on from above the connected items should be aligned this helps to re-enforce the connection between the elements.

Consistency

Being consistent in the style of elements on your page can make a big difference to the overall look of your design. This also means meeting a users expectations about how things behave on your page.