I'm not a graphic designer. I'm pretty bad at drawing anything. I struggle to build things that look even as nice as "sample" applications bundled with development tools; primarily because I don't have squat in the way of art assets.
What strategies might I take to mitigate this?
I personally do not think you have to be good artistically to create pleasing user interfaces.
What makes a good UI is not up to creativity, but is more related to a couple of well-established guidelines. If you follow these guidelines and practice some you can create great interfaces yourself.
I would suggest doing the following...
I forecast that if you do this exercise for a week or two (and if you ask me, a week or two to learn how to design good interfaces is not such a long time), you will learn most of what makes a good user interface.
Just a couple of things I found that make user interfaces pleasing:
Also... do not start with the design. Start with functionality and let the design evolve. Also, experiment! Do not get upset if it does not look perfect after 1-2 'iterations'. It gets better over time. But most importantly, you have to try.
My art ability is about 5th grade on a good day:). I employ a graphic designer, either professionally when at work, or my wife, who has excellent art skills and loves using them.
Note that in my mind Graphics design is not UI/UX design. I either do a majority of UX, or employ a UX expert to retain control of UX, who then works with the GD to make it look pretty. Although I am sure there are good combined UX/GD professionals, I have had very bad experiences with GDs doing stuff that looked pretty, had very bad UX, and was outdated in a couple of months, and won't take that risk until I have worked with the GD for a couple of projects.
If you’re looking for graphical assets there are a few websites which collect high-quality graphics for free use:
And many more, such as the GNOME art project which includes lots of free graphical assets as well.
Not being the least bit creative, and having no education in design, I always strive on the side of conservativism: use established patterns (i.e. frameworks) and deviate as little as possible from trodden paths. This won’t necessarily be very interesting but at least you minimise your chance of failure and UX disaster.
Picasso said that “great artists steal” but in reality it’s mostly the talentless hacks, and look where this has led Microsoft and Samsung: to great-selling platforms.
You can hire specialists for this sort of thing, but you don't need innate artistic ability to learn some basic techniques. My undergrad degree actually required a semester of "art for engineers." Taking a class or two at your local community college could be very beneficial. You still won't be as good as people specially trained in the field, but you can definitely improve to the point where your programs look more professional.
There are also books geared toward relative amateurs. One book I found useful for web design is The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. Even if your designs don't improve much, getting a little education can help you better verbalize what's wrong with a design. Instead of always saying, "I know it looks bad, but I can't figure out why," you'll be able to pinpoint problems like bad kerning or a lack of negative space, and defining the problem is half the battle.
What you might be looking for is "UI/UX Design for Developers". One book related to this topic is User Interface Design for Programmers
If you're not looking for UI/UX design but looking to improve graphic design skills, I would recommend finding a class on how to use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator (if not, at least some tutorials on the internet). By learning a few techniques and looking at other people's work for inspiration, you would be surprised how little artistic creativity you need.
For example, you could learn the Gradient Tool in Photoshop, along with the Rounded Rectangle tool, and you could make something similar to the "Sign up for the newsletter" button on the right (although in this case it's done with pure CSS).
Let others "do the work for you" in the form of using frameworks, templates and pre-built gui components. For example I can't draw or design are either so for every new web project I do I start off with a css template (from the many free css template sites) for the layout and design and then 'tweak' it from there. These templates include a complete design that can help you address this gap.
I agree with c_maker in that good usability is good design, although it sounds you are being more specific on the 'arty' designy end.
If you are doing web design and layout work here are some of those css sites:
http://www.freecsstemplates.com/
http://www.templatemo.com/
http://www.free-css.com/
http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/
