Building A Design Community
And How We Accidentally Taught Hundreds of Designers to Code in the Process
A Little History
The options for prototyping tools has exploded in the past few years and the information on which one to use can be overwhelming. This is a great problem to have considering 3–4 years ago the pickings were slim, there wasn’t an elegant tool out there that could support an iterative design process. The world was changing fast, as too were the expectations of a designer. Mobile began to dominate and on top of that people were becoming more aware of these rich and engaging experiences. Companies began pining for a place on customers’ home-screens, and the expectations of our clients, our bosses and our teams were for us to deliver. To develop a rich experience, we needed to move out of static mockups, we needed to convince others that we were delivering a great user experience; we needed them to feel the design.
Having started a career in web development, I was fortunate to leverage front-end development skills as I transitioned my career to a full-time designer (whatever that means). I began to prototype my work using HTML, CSS and Javascript, doing this throughout the process wasn’t perfect but it was faster and allowed me to express my ideas clearly to my team and vetting them with customers.
And then Framer.JS happened.
I discovered a video that was by Koen Bok. In the video Koen described the same frustrations I had with current tools, and his solution looked real promising. He had a simple layer importer for Sketch, that would essentially build a self-containing website where you could easily animate the layers — It was amazing! I didn’t have to slice assets or write all my own functions, which took so much of my time while I was still exploring and experimenting solutions. Framer.js didn’t get in the way, it just worked and I loved it.
The Beginning
Fast-forward a few years.
While living on the east coast, I met some great designers in the Framer JS facebook group, who I’m proud to now call my good friends. Many members were in or around the SF area but another group lived in Seattle. Ironically I accepted a job in Seattle (also in part thanks to Framer, which is another story for another time), where my friend Jordan Dobson lived. While chatting about Framer and how we were sharing our process using it with colleagues, we decided it would be great to host a gathering with other local designers from the community.
We posted to the global Framer group and announced if anyone was near the Seattle area we’d love them to join us. Our other friend Cal offered his studio space as the location.
On our first meet up day we only had 7 designers join who all knew Framer, so we spent the time with no agenda, just sharing tips and asking each other questions.
I was blown away by the energy, excitement and passion they had for the tool and the process. It was such a humbling and inspiring experience. One thing that felt different from other designer-centric gatherings was the humility everyone brought — when I or anyone said “I don’t know how you did that” you’d see the presenters eyes light up and walk us through how they went about it. That enthusiasm to learn and be curious was what we wanted to foster and promote each month and has been our main focus even today.
Teaching Through Inspiration
There was something really great about having such a relaxed environment where it didn’t feel like we were in a classroom. Our first meetup was fun because it was just a conversation with friends over beers- it didn’t feel like a presentation that was given and it left room for improvisation — it was important for us to maintain that. From then on, every meetup involved beer, food, and conversation.
We start with an open call for people to share what they’ve built or interesting things that were shared from the larger Framer community. When people present, no matter the complexity, we celebrate and cheer them on. It’s fantastic and one of my favorite parts of the evening. Many people new to the meetup comment on how they love seeing the thought process from different designers, hearing them talk about where they failed and how they pivoted; and Framer is the conduit in which it makes those things tangible.
A Community Mission
We realized that these meetups went beyond being about learning a specific tool, it was about fundamentally changing how designers explore, solve and communicate their work. Talk to an early adopter of Framer and you’ll hear a similar story about how they would design with code and they’d get a few raised eye-brows. We are just now seeing more and more people embrace this process (just see the many talented designers building amazing experiences).
The number one question we get at our meetups is “how can this benefit the engineers I work with?”. We like to flip that question with a question, “how can you leverage what you learn from Framer to help communicate with your engineers?”. If your work get’s lost in translation from your screen to your teammates, why not try to meet them on common ground? That common ground is not just why something should be designed a certain way but also how? The ‘how’ starts with code.
I am incredibly proud of our participation in building such a positive community, teaching designers enough code to be dangerous and to pass their knowledge on to one-another. It’s even more exciting when we see that spirit grow around the world (I’m not kidding). Since we’ve been doing our monthly meetups (coming on 2 years) there have been dozens of monthly meetups from our friends within the community.
If It Doesn’t Exist… Build it!
You don’t have to be an expert in any particular subject to start a community around something you are passionate about, believe me, I’m not a Framer expert (that would be Jordan). What I did have was passion for the subject matter and curiosity to learn and share with others. So, it starts with one other person who has the same interests you do, learning from one another and it can grow from there.
To start your own community, my advice is very simple:
- Make it open and welcoming to everyone. Introduce yourself to people you don’t know and introduce them to others. Ask questions and listen. I always share with people the things I don’t know but I am interested in learning. Showing that humility encourages others to do the same.
- Give everyone a voice by building a platform. Give people opportunity to share their knowledge and make it accessible and inspiring. Celebrate and encourage others to share, the variety of content is important as not everyone has the same knowledge.
- Be encouraging and enthusiastic. Don’t alienate your community, inspire them. I get excited when I see a designer show off something that was difficult for them do and they are so proud of that accomplishment, it’s those people who lift others up — it’s contagious. Celebrate those achievements.
- Have fun! This shouldn’t feel like a job so don’t make it one. The idea of community is for everyone to pitch in a little to achieve a lot so ask for help whenever you need it.
Thank You
Thank you Koen, Jorn and the Framer Team for all the support you continue to give over the years. The future is bright!
Special thanks to Chris, Isaac, Rich, Ryan, Cal, Mena, Lauren, Liz, Johannes and the countless others who have helped keep this community going strong.
Resources
To learn about Framer visit http://www.framerjs.com and join the facebook group http://www.facebook.com/groups/framerjs or if you are in the Seattle area check out our next event at http://www.facebook.com/groups/framerjs.seattle/
Want to see some of the cool stuff being built in Seattle? Check out Jordan’s awesome resource: http://framerco.de/
