So, this is a follow up to my previous question. It may be stupid, but I am still trying to figure out how this works. I cleared up my confusion of thinking designers and developers were the same. I understand, that it should be a good idea to still have a understanding of design. This way the developer can take a design, and be able to place the content on the website to make it look good. Is there a place where developers can get already made designs? I know that sounds stupid, but if theres a developer who is not good at designing (me) how would they go about getting designs for their own project?
It’s definitely a good idea for developers to have at least some understanding of good design principles. Even if we aren’t good at making things pretty, it’s important to know how to make the usable.
In terms of resources, some key phrases to search are “User Experience”, “UX Design”, and “Usability”.
It may be stupid,
I’m not going to say there’s no such things as a stupid question, but I will say that there is nothing stupider than not asking a question out of fear or seeming stupid.
I cleared up my confusion of thinking designers and developers were the same.
Correct. Some people do both, but most of the designers I know don’t code and most the devs I know hate doing design - myself included.
I understand, that it should be a good idea to still have a understanding of design.
Yes.
This way the developer can take a design, and be able to place the content on the website to make it look good.
I don’t understand this. If the designer has done his/her job, then you would know what it should look like. You should have an image of what the screen should look like.
But of course sometimes they forget the error screen or whatever and you have to throw something together. Sometimes it is a rush thing and you just have to run with it. Of course, you’re still basing it on the look and feel of the other screens.
But of course, the relationship between development and design will vary from place to place.
The other reason to learn the basics of design is that you will notice things in designs better, you will be able to make suggestions, and you can get some basic design for your own projects.
Is there a place where developers can get already made designs?
You can practice by trying to recreate web sites.
I know that sounds stupid, but if theres a developer who is not good at designing (me) how would they go about getting designs for their own project?
It’s not stupid. I think for me, it was starting to pay attention to web sites and interfaces, to get an idea what works and what doesn’t. I also liked the books Don’t Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things.
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You can also use places like dribbble to get inspiration and “borrow” parts of a design. Just be careful not to steal designs for commercial projects. I don’t think it matters much for learning projects, although you should definitely still give attribution/credit to the designer, even in practice projects.
That is definitely a book I would suggest developers read no matter if they do design or not.
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It looks like that is the best way to do things. Just stresses me out looking at some of these websites, but I wont get any better by staying stressed out.
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As with anything, start small. Do simple designs, for simple websites or concepts.
This really depends on what the developer’s job is in the overall project. If the job is to take an existing design of a full website, and implement it from scratch, then there usually is some work cutout for them. Within a design there are usually smaller elements that can be made separately, prime examples are buttons, or larger more complex elements of the page.
Then the developer needs to hook those components up to actual logic/code to make them work, then put it all together on the page as original designed.
The part where a developer “can get help” is with the different steps. No one said you couldn’t let someone else make those components, or the designer could of made their pages out of scratch, rather than some pre-built elements previously agreed upon.
Even if your great at designing things from scratch, its a lot of work. You could easily just use existing design specs, and find pre-built code/libraries/components that implement that design spec and move onto the actual functionality.
The example I usually give out is Material Design, which is Google’s design system, and MUI, or Material-UI, which is a React library that provides components that generally implement the Material Design spec.
With MUI, you can then take those small re-usable components and build out an app that is designed around Material design, without the pain of building all those small reusable peices.
You still might need to setup the layout, and higher level design concepts, but even those are specified in the Material Design spec you may or may not want to follow.
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I used the link I was given for my first question. The site front end mentor is probably going to be my best bet. They have challenges based on skill for strictly html and css. I for sure need to work on those skills
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