Design Design Design
This past week at Array, we moved away from coding and drove into project design and graphic design. We were introduced to a couple of new tools — Sketch and InVision. Using Sketch, we learned how to do some fundamental graphic design, such as drawing shapes and vectors, combining shapes, coloring and shading, and making pixel-perfect graphics. We created a few icons, from scratch and from replicating existing icons, that helped us practice our newly learned skills.
We also learned about UI and project design and how to create wireframes and mockups. We worked on a UI project, using Sketch to design the wireframe and mockup, and then bringing the mockup to InVision to add some interactions to begin our prototype.
This week has taught me a lot about the overall web project development process, and what goes in during each phase of the development — design, wireframe, mockup, prototype, and then the actual coding development. The majority of what we learned and did this week utilized a completely different skillset and really worked my artistic and creative part of my brain. I can say I’m a pretty right brain dominant person, as I love working with logic, problem solving, and math. Nonetheless, I’ve learned to appreciate the skill, complexity, and delicacy involved with design, and how important it is for me to learn these design skills.
Throughout this past week, I was feeling some thirst for coding. The only codes we worked with during class this week was looking at and SVG codes and learning how they work, and quite frankly, that wasn’t enough for me. In my spare time in the evening this week, I started going through a Bootstrap tutorial from BootstrapBay, as I wanted to get a head start on learning how to use Bootstrap for front-end web development.
Although the video tutorials were pretty good, they often lacked detailed explanations for how certain bootstrap classes work, or how different Bootstrap classes work together. This is where the Bootstrap documentation from the Bootstrap website and other resources come in handy. This is another vital skill that I’ve learned to develop in my coding journey so far: reading documentations and researching for resources. I cannot rely on classroom time at Array to teach me everything I need and want to learn, I am spending time on my own to learn and practice further so I can continue to develop my skills and knowledge. So far, my thirst for this world of coding is driving me to do that, there’s just so much more that I want to learn and I know I need to learn. It can certainly get overwhelming and it often makes me feel inadequate, but I love learning all of this and I’m actually excited by the fact that I will never stop learning, and I’m determined to achieve my goal of becoming a web or software developer.
