One of the things that I've decided to start working on is recognizing what makes certain designs good so I can start making some good designs.
After reading the sample chapters of several design-related ebooks on Amazon, I decided to buy this book called The Non-Designer's Design Book (4th edition) because it had a no-nonsense approach to explaining good design, supplemented with numerous visual and colorful examples.
The four principles that Robin Williams introduces are:
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Contrast - Make things obviously different. Don't use a slightly different font. Make the fonts dramatically different if they have different purposes.
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Repetition - Use certain things repeatedly. It goes hand in hand with the previous principle. If things aren't highly contrasted, then they should basically be the exact same. Slight differences is what throws the reader off.
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Alignment - Make sure things are where they're supposed to be. Align things horizontally and vertically so nothing looks like it's just floating mistakenly.
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Proximity - Put related things together. And space out unrelated things. Robin makes a big deal out of spacing numbers, bullets, etc next to words closely together so readers are not confused which symbol goes with which text.