GUI Design principles

wow this is so what you get drilled in at my university. i will try to make it short!

first of all the topic your are digging in is "human computer interaction". there exist tons of books and university courses on this. as for all university level books they are more abstract and don't give you a step by step "tutorial". the reason: the HCI topic is so complex that there never will be a best solution to a given problem. you always have to try out and throw away.

second: designing interfaces is not choosing colors. it is about how users and the system interact. specific visual (or auditive) artifacts might support this interaction while others don't.

for what i recall "Alan Dix" has written a good book on this topic. i recommend that you scrap your previous ideas and thoughts on what interface design might be like, since you will be surprised of how deep this rabbit hole goes!

i hope this helped a bit.

This is a good start:

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Des ... 579&sr=8-1

yeah there is alot of depth to this. what i think you might be looking for as principles is gestalt psychology as well (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology). it tells you how people see things, perhaps more so than any UI book will do. that being said, the sum is greater than its parts, so i recommend you take a look into a few decent UI books as well.

also, for sake of inspiration of familiarity, take a look at the GUIs of different OS. each OS has their own design principle in mind, and you can see how they consistently use it for the maximum usability.

Short formula made of win: Show no more info than actually needed, but make sure that what you show is good readable.

That applies to every kind of GUI, equivalent if game, office app or os. Most GUIs just fail to sort out what is important and what not. Your perception is most likely trying to steadily scan every information availble and will therefore give you a hard time figuring out what's important.

Quick examples:

Arcade Racing games need no kind of RPM-Display, Motor-cooling information and so on, you just need some time info and a speed info. Think about Need for Speed with the technical details of GTR being displayed - fail

A Shooter should bring down all informations to ammo in your current gun and health if the gameplay doesn't require any more information. It's most likely gonna distract everyone if you constantly show all weapons of the inventory + theyr current state of ammunition or adding stealth info to a shooter like doom 3.

In an office application: Hide symbols you won't need! Best example: Table controls should be not visible if you're not working within a table - but make sure you give a quick access somewhere to creating a table and opening the connected tools.

I didn't do that myself but when I read your post I thought it might be useful to read the human interface guidelines from Apple, Microsoft, Gnome, KDE, ... (imo none of them do it really well though)