How I learned to design as a developer

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NOTES:

I started coding because I wanted to learn how to build things. It was easy for me to learn how to code because I always had analytical thinking.

Eventually I understood that app interfaces must be beautiful and functional to make people use them. That’s when I started learning how to design better UIs.

I was never a creative person and it limited my design skills. But then, I started to observe more closely the products and apps that I like and tried to understand what makes them unique. Eventually I developed this habit with almost anything (eg. TV ads, buildings, any everyday object).

In my opinion, it’s the perfect way to strengthen your design skills.

Watching Youtube course and trying to recreate with Figma popular effects that I've seen on Dribbble were very useful as well.

1. Watch closely how the beautiful products are designed. Why are they beautiful? What are they specific design aspects?

2. Recreate good designs on Figma. Look at the CSS for specifics of live sites. Unpopular opinion. Learn the basics of CSS to be able to extract elements, and make sure that your Figma creations and animations can be made with CSS.

3. Youtube and course. Recommend resources.