DEV Community: designcourse

7 Reasons Why Developers Should Totally Learn Design

designcourse — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 02:08:05 +0000

I know, I know.. A jack of all trades is a master of none. Not necessarily true. If you're a master of code already, why not add design?

And that's the target demographic for this article. If you're an aspiring developer, you can skip this part -- you've got enough on your plate. I feel that only a proficient developer should dedicate the time to learn some UI (and perhaps) UX design.

And here's why..

1. Knowing design patterns will shape your code

If you lack the understanding of design patterns for various problems, your code will likely reflect that.

Design patterns aren't necessarily a function of UI, but rather of UX.

For instance, if you're building out an order form but you're requiring people to verify their email before ordering, you're going to have to refactor your code. Why? Because the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) team will make you!

Understanding proper design patterns will affect your code.

2. If you're a 1 man show, good design is a necessity

I can't stress this enough. If you're a freelancer and you handle it all, you're doing your clients a disservice. It's one thing if you're using templates or you're outsourcing the design, but if you're handling it yourself and you lack an eye for UI design, you need to invest some time to learn UI design.

People judge books by their covers. You could have the greatest code base ever, but if it looks like garbage, people will think it's garbage.

3. Hireability & Desirability

No brainer here. A coder who can design is usually going to demand more in salary and contracts.

4. Tackling Side Projects is Easier (MVPs)

Ever stumble upon a great idea that you'd love to create? But your design skills are crap, and the end result is so butt-ugly that you're afraid to show it to people?

Learning some basic UI design principles will have you blasting out projects left and right. With your new found confidence, you'll be creating projects that even your mother will love. No, seriously, she will genuinely love them, and not just because you're her kid.

5. You Challenge a Different Part of your Brain

I don't know about you, but I can't stand doing one thing forever. That's why I have so many hobbies. Not even coding and designing cut it for me anymore. I love reptiles, archery, weightlifting, running, and playing guitar.

How in little lord baby Jesus Christ do people only stick to one thing?

You just might find that you rather enjoy being able to put a nice pretty face on that backend you've been working on. It's so satisfying to full-stack the hell out of your own projects.

6. Other People Suck -- Project Deadlines

Ever have to rely on someone else to get something done on time? It sucks, because inevitably so, that person will let you down. If not now, maybe next time.

Then, you're stuck on the phone dealing with the brunt of an angry client who can't understand why her knitting website isn't ready to take orders!

7. You can brag about it

It's Friday night and you're at the club (and certainly not in mom's basement). An attractive individual approaches you and they ask what you do. This is your moment to shine.

You can either respond with, "I'm a web developer", OR, "I'm a F.U.L.L.S.T.A.C.K. Developer"

It's way more impressive by about 500%.

So where should I learn UI/UX design?

Well, there are plenty of places. YouTube can be a great place to get your feet wet with some UI/UX crash courses offered by myself or others.

There are also plenty of paid courses out there available on sites like Pluralsight, Skillshare & Udemy.

I recently launched my own at DesignCourse: Learn UI/UX Design Interactively

Whatever you do or wherever you go to learn, just do it! You might find you actually enjoy it. ;)

I refactored over 500 UI designs in 30 days. Here's what people get wrong the most.

designcourse — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 15:08:43 +0000

Recently, I launched a custom platform in which I teach UI/UX design on my site DesignCourse. Also, yes, I'm the guy behind the DesignCourse YouTube Channel.

Mentorship is an optional part of the program, in which Mentor students submit a Figma prototype that attempts to satisfy the demands of 12 different challenges.

I've reviewed and revised over 500 submissions in the last 30 days.

I thought it would be beneficial to share some the most common problems I see aspiring UI/UX designers make.

1. Utilizing the space in your layout

One of the first challenges is to take a headline, and a subheadline, and situate them on a desktop. The only thing students can do is change the font sizes, and position of these 2 pieces of type.

I see many students not effectively utilizing the space they have available. This is primarily achieved by scale -- and if we're talking about typography, it's achieved by properly adjusting the font sizes along with word wrapping.

Notice in the "after" example, by making the text larger and wrapping the headline on 3 lines as opposed to one, it consumes more of the layout?

2. Too many borders

I also see this quite often: too many borders. Sometimes they're high contrast borders, which make matters worse. If you use borders in your layout, you want to use them very sparingly, especially if they're of higher contrast.

Otherwise, this creates an issue where the borders become a distraction against the important content.

In this case, I was able to ditch both borders and increase the contrast in the design by making the card backgrounds white. So much better!

3. High Contrast Drop Shadows

Shadows are meant to be mysterious -- they're meant to be an afterthought. They're shadowy figures, lurking around the corner. Get it?

If you make your shadows high contrast as in this example, you divert attention away from the important typographic elements in your design.

This throws off the visual hierarchy (more on that later), because you're unnecessarily directing attention to an element that has very little importance.

Notice how the content itself becomes front and center when I decreased the contrast in my revision? That's what you want!

4. Not enough white space

White space is the empty space in your design. Too many new designers like to squish things together, which clutters the layout. Just by adding more white space on the top and bottom of the gallery in the example above, the layout is improved substantially.

5. Form elements that you can't see

Whether it's poor color contrast applied to textfields (as in the example above), or background colors that don't contrast enough -- new designers sometimes find it difficult to design accessible form elements.

You want to ensure that you're using adequate contrast. If you're not using a background color, then your stroke needs to be of higher contrast.

There are a lot of great tools and plugins for determining whether or not your contrast adheres to WCAG guidelines. Stark Contrast for both XD and Figma are great options. While it's meant for type, you can also use them for other elements like borders and icons.

6. Color contrast

This is a challenge where a student needs to take a dark mode side bar and make a light mode variation.

Notice on the original (to the left) how the sidebar background doesn't contrast well with the box to the right? That's poor color contrast.

Being that the adjacent side is gray scale (devoid of color), I simply made the sidebar background a few shades darker. Now, it's much more cohesive.

There's a lot more mistakes..

And sometimes, they certainly elicit this reaction:

But these are the most common that I see at times. Understanding how to create great looking and functioning layouts first starts with understanding solid UI design fundamentals.

Visual hierarchy
Color & Contrast
Scale
Typography
White Space
Alignment

If you can understand the above, you will have a great foundation.

This is a part of what I teach at DesignCourse! Check it out and the YouTube Channel.

uEye | A Game We Built to Help you Learn UI Design

designcourse — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 15:54:37 +0000

What is uEye

Play uEye (No signups or emails required!)

I wanted to create a fun, interactive game using modern technology (Nuxt.js) that helps users to develop an eye for design. So, I came up with this idea where users must identify which UI design fundamentals have been incorrectly applied to an example design.

Each correct fundamental you get right, you gain a point. If you choose a fundamental that hasn't been incorrectly applied, you lose a point.

So, yes -- you can end up with a NEGATIVE SCORE! There are a total of 28 possible points you can get if you answer everything correctly. The highest score I've heard of so far is around 18.

I urge you to take the game before watching this, but I released a video where I play the game and explain all of the UI concepts behind each challenge:

Post your scores below!

I'm making a Retro Sci-Fi Series that teaches UI Design (Trailer)

designcourse — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 14:46:42 +0000

Hey all, I run the DesignCourse YouTube channel. Over there, I've taught millions of people UI/UX & Frontend dev over the last decade+.

I've been thinking of ways to make learning more entertaining. Combine that with my other interests (music, snakes/reptiles, 80's aesthetic), and you get 'The Boja'.

The Boja takes place in the year 2082 with a fictional character (Jon Frok) played by myself, who's stationed in an unknown location and tasked with defeating an aggressive alien species by building an advanced user interface. The problem? Frok isn't a designer, he's a soldier.

Over the next 2 years, I plan to release episodes that will teach Jon Frok and my audience the essentials of UI design. Every episode will contain a few things:

Learning some topic of UI design
Retrowave/synthwave music with a guitar solo
A reptile

Check out the trailer I just released:

I hope people enjoy it. I put a lot of $ and work into this. I almost didn't publish it on YouTube today, because it's so out there and ridiculous.

Give me your thoughts!

I run the DesignCourse YouTube Chan. Should you YouTube too?

designcourse — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:14:03 +0000

So, I run the DesignCourse youtube chan which recently just passed the 500k subscriber mark. I teach UI/UX and Frontend Development. I've uploaded well over 700 videos over the last 10 years, and I thought I would create an article here to discuss some of my ideas on this topic.

Is YouTube Right for Me?

I'd say it's right for anyone, as long as they're willing to be as consistent as they have to be, and as long as they have something to offer.

I'm big on people understanding economic fundamentals -- Supply and demand. There's a demand for a lot of things. In just about every niche, there's a demand for education & enlightenment, comedy, drama, etc. With that said, if there's a demand for something, you'll reap the rewards if you can be the supply.

For instance, there's a big demand for education in the fields I teach -- so, I stick to education. Some other YouTubers in this niche are successful by mixing education & comedy. Other people even get their hands into the drama a bit, yet they're still successful, because people find that stuff interesting.

That's the first thing to understand. If you feel you have something to offer, you have half of the battle solved.

The other half of the equation is consistency.

Consistency -- Just how consistent do I have to be?

This is the part that pretty much deflates most people. I tell anyone, regardless of niche, that if they're serious about YouTube, they should produce at least 1 video per week and have no expectations for 1-2 years.

You might get lucky and knock it out of the park and end up with 100,000 subscribers your first year. But you might also end up with less than 1,000 subscribers after 52 videos. In the end, you can't be discouraged if you had no expectations in the first place.

Building a YouTube audience takes time. Unless you're one of the exceptions (I wasn't) and creates extremely engaging content, it's going to take years of effort.

My lifetime views:

As you can see, for years the channel was slow-going. On January 1st, 2014, I set out to create a video every day. I did so for 100 days straight. As you can see, it provided an initial bump right at the end of 2013, but it really leveled out for years.

I kept consistent though. And in 2017, things really started to take off. That's the takeaway -- you have to be willing to be consistent or you will definitely sell yourself short.

How much $$ can you make?

Oh, God, if the previous section didn't discourage you, this part probably will.

Let's take a look at my lifetime daily earnings:

In 2014 alone, where I uploaded 100 videos in 100 days, and loads more at a rate of about 1 to 2 per week -- I made a total of $3,087.74. This averaged out to about $12 per day. Each video took several hours to make. I was making way less than minimum wage for the work I put in.

Fortunately, I didn't at all rely on this income. At that time, I was creating UI/UX and Frontend development courses for companies like the Envato network TutsPlus, Pluralsight, etc..

Here's a year to year breakdown of the ad revenue:

2014: $3,087
2015: $3,612
2016: $3,728
2017: $6,018
2018: $28,263
2019: $52,100 (Over 100k+ with sponsorship deals)

Did I do anything special or different between 2017 and 2018? No -- Nothing that comes to mind. While I've always tried to improve how I teach, my production value, etc.. the formula has always remained the same.

The takeaway here is that again, don't have expectations initially, especially monetarily. The light at the end of the tunnel == if you keep consistent, keep striving for improving your videos in all aspects, some day you're going to explode and begin to make a real living.

Sponsorships

When my channel started to finally take off near the end of 2017, I was approached by a Sponsor. I charged them $800 for a video where I discussed their product/service. I told them I would give them my honest opinion -- and I did. Since then, I've never taken a sponsorship with a company that I didn't personally believe in. I knew my subscribers would eat me alive, and I would feel horrible for promoting a product I didn't feel was worth it.

In 2020 and beyond, influencer marketing is going to grow. In contrast to traditional mediums like TV advertising, it allows companies to gain exposure to a highly targeted audience for a relative fraction of the cost.

Once I really began to grow in the last couple years, these companies contacted me. I didn't have to search them out.

But if I were starting a new YouTube channel that didn't satisfy the requirements YouTube put in place for monetization -- I would contact companies in my niche and request sponsorships so that I could at least make something. I wouldn't do this until I had at least several months of videos, though.

What matters the most? Subscribers, Views, Likes, etc..??

In the end, what matters the most are views. Views from real people. Engagement too (likes, dislikes, comments, click through rates, etc..).

Too many people get hooked up on subscriber count, like it's the most important metric. It's not. There are channels with over a million subscribers who make far less than me. Your subscriber count is really just vanity; social proof. That's why I laugh when I see people buying subscribers, or trading subscriptions to each other's YouTube channels. It's a waste of time.

YouTube doesn't pay you according to your subscriber count. They pay you based on your views. And they will give you views as long as your engagement is good.

So, really, what matters the most is the content. You may have heard it before: Content is king!. It's true because the content is what drives the views and the engagement.

Stick to a niche, damnit

I made a big, big mistake early on. I got my hands into so many different topics (UI/UX, identity design, print design, 3D design, game development, web design, etc.) and while it helped grow my subscribers, it hurt my views.

It hurt my views because the interests of my subscribers were spread out so far. So, when I uploaded a video that had to do with web design, the people that subscribed to me for the other topics wouldn't watch the video.

Recent story: A local friend told me they want to get into YouTube. I asked them, Nice, what about? They responded with, Well, just my family and my life in general -- and whatever else. That's when I had to give him the reality check, while it's possible to have a successful channel about such a broad topic, it's highly unlikely. You can do it, but don't have any expectations.

If you're a frontend developer, stick to frontend development.
If you're an identity designer, stick to identity design.
If you're a ... well, you get the point

Is it possible to come up with THAT much content for THAT long?

Of course it is, I've done it along with countless others. It's not easy though, after 700+ videos, I do struggle at least once a week to come up with a topic.

I have a list in google docs with over 70 ideas that I've added to over the last couple years. Sometimes some topics require a lot of research and I don't have enough time, other times they might be too outside of my niche, so I don't always end up using them.

I also have a bunch of bookmarks of sites in the industry for potential ideas or inspiration for future video topics. Codepen, speckyboy, this site are all on there and more.

In the end, you need to think about what people are searching for or what might interest them.

If you're a coder and you want to teach, you could create a crash course on JavaScript. You could create a video that addresses a common error and how to fix it. If you're a comedian and love coding, maybe you can put a "meme" sort of video together about a common frustration (these types of videos are great with engagement and don't rely on search).

If you're a UI designer, maybe you can show people how to create an SVG line animation, or how to use MS Paint to create a UI -- I kid.. Wait, actually -- that could go viral. I'll save that for myself, ty.

There's really a million ideas in every niche, but you have to think in small bite sizes and create hyper-targeted videos for the most part. Your videos need to address something specific. People generally don't like watching people randomly design, or randomly code.

Don't rely on YouTube

Let's say you made it. You're now making enough from YouTube and maybe Sponsorships to quit your job.

Great, now... DON'T RELY ON YOUTUBE FOR INCOME!

Wait, what? you're thinking?

At any point in time, YouTube could close your account without any justification.

A hacker could access your account, post 1,000+ videos in 2 weeks, and YouTube will close your account and won't let you back in despite proving your account was hacked. (It's happened).

At any point, YouTube could decide that you and the other creators in your niche won't receive as many views and you could see your earnings dry up in a matter of days. (It's happened recently in the child-based creators niche with COPPA).

For whatever reason, advertisers might not want to spend as much and there goes your earnings.

There's a lot of things that could happen, and that's why you need to look at YouTube as a supplementary source of income. You need to build an email list, have your own site, sell your own courses or products/services, and whatever else.

Production value

One way to guarantee people will leave your video quickly is to have crappy audio. Get a decent mic. I use a Shure SM7B (The same one Joe Rogan uses), but you can get a decent mic for a fraction of the cost.

In our niche (design / code), you will be screencasting. You don't need your face behind a camera. In fact, that annoys some people. Just make sure that your screencast footage is crisp and clear with a high enough quality.

If you are going to put your mug behind a camera, you'll need a few decent lights along with the understanding of how to light yourself. It will go along way with increasing your production value.

Here's some of my equipment that I use:

Shure SM7B Microphone with a Cloudlifter
1x Neewer NL660 light
1x Aputure Light Storm c120 II with large light dome (pricy, not a necessity)
BMPCC4k Camera with Lumix f1.7 25mm lens
vMix software for screencasting and live shows

Final thoughts

You can make it on YouTube, but it's not going to be easy. You need to have Forrest Gump Runner-level dedication. If you can stick it out, the results might be glorious. But then again, that's true for anything in life: Fitness, business, etc.

So, if you're brave enough to embark on the YouTube journey after reading this, go on young seedling, start uploading!