4 Books For Learning to Design, The Hard Way: "Non-Designer's Design Book (link)
Robin Williams does an excelent job introducing you to the basic concepts of designing visuals, with clearly explained principles and techniques.
It's pretty hard for us developers to design anything pleasing to the eye. And that's not the only problem you're facing - the visuals of a site have to give hints to the user about their next actions, so you've got many constraints to worry about. Sometimes you get lucky by just copying and combining other designs you like. Sometimes you have a good idea about what you want, but one day you like the result, then the next it looks like an abomination."
'via Blog this'
