2015 resolution 💪

Ever year I set myself the same new year resolutions; learn to code, build a website, drink less alcohol :) and ride my bike more. Usually I only achieve the last one but 2015 I wanted it to be different I want to ‘get it’ in HTML /CSS/jQuery. So far I dabbled in and out and never really pushed myself to really learn and most importantly practice code.

At the start on the year I was reading more and more about the T shaped individual my expertise is UI/UX but I felt to be a better a designer I should understand code. This was also the year of the the multiple blog posts about how designers should code. Over the years, working closely with engineers I had the grasp of the principles and could communicate with them but that’s where it ended and I wanted that to stop. Being involved in the code would speed up the process so instead of waiting for developers to build something instead I could build it and bring it to them.

Luckily I have a training budget at ustwo so instead of going to the usual design conferences I put it towards a General Assembly course in front end web. This was the kick start that I needed to get me going. The course was good maybe at points I needed it to be a bit challenging but that was okay at the end I managed to build something even though its a bit crappy and broken I was getting somewhere.

This was the beginning.

Over the rest of year I built some small projects a new holding page for my portfolio and I also looked for tutorials.

But what really pushed me forward was Framer Studio I found that coffeescript was really easy to get my head around. It’s so vital for product design to build prototypes either for testing or for proof of concept so learning framer.js/coffescript was starting to help me become a more rounded designer.

At the start of December I felt this was the time to build my portfolio I knew I wanted to challenge myself so I did not use any themes I wanted to build it from scratch.

As with any project I started with some sketches in my note book but I quickly moved into sketch and just as quickly moved in to the browser.

The site is built on SASS using Bourbon grid which was perfect as it was lightweight semantic grid.

You can view my new 🏠 here if you have feedback please stick it in the comments.

This year the resolution might be to write more. 👌🏻