I have talked in previous blog posts about finding my place in the world of software engineering. I may have ruled out front end design!
As we continue to create the UI for our project, I am amazed at the beautiful user interfaces that my teammates can create. We are using the Ionic framework, which comes with great components for building apps. Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t had enough practice, but I am struggling to make a good-looking UI for the page that I am working on. I have watched several tutorials on how to use Ionic and I find myself lost in the various options that are available for each element. I think this is only one factor in my frustration with UI design. A few quarters ago I took the Usability Engineering course, which involved a great deal of UI design. I was able to create wireframes and very crude prototypes with a design tool called Figma. This allows you to create prototypes where you can link screens through buttons and get something that feels almost like a production product. My experience in that class was that I was good at the nuts and bolts of interconnecting screens and rough layouts, but when it came to making beautiful looking screens, I was lacking. I work in an artistic field, but I have never had a knack for visual arts (drawing, painting, etc.). The execution I can manage, but the art not so much.
I began this post thinking that I would not be good in a front-end role. After writing about it a little, I have concluded that, although I do not have an eye for design, I am confident in my ability to realize somebody else’s design. I suppose that this is why companies hire designers and not just software engineers!
