Although I am sure some people get into programming excited at the prospect of dreaming and implementing beautiful, creative front-end designs, it doesn’t quite describe me. Like (I assume) many people, I can recognize when a site has poor UI/UX design: unintuitive layout, hard-to-read fonts and colors, and/or unresponsive design. However, criticizing a final product is much easier than designing and implementing one from scratch. I am the reluctant front-end designer for my capstone project.
While my only college art class under my belt is an Art History course (which I took senior year and mostly blew off), I’m doing my best with the power of Google and top-50-best-website-design articles. What colors look good together? What fonts are easy to read (on desktop and mobile)? How can I best format the components and layout on my site to ensure readability and usability on desktop and mobile devices? Hence, as I take a break from programming to write this blog post, there are over 50 tabs open in Chrome: hex-color swatches, several of the aforementioned clickbait rating articles, and dozens of documentation/StackOverflow articles having to do with anything and everything related to flexbox, layout, component props, and CSS.
While it can be a challenge to mold my usually un-artistic brain into thinking artistically, nothing beats the reward when something works. Getting components to resize properly, applying (somewhat?) good-looking global styling (learning to work on styles globally instead of page-by-page!), and various other adventures in front-end design is a rewarding challenge in itself. I appreciate the opportunity that I’ve been given to continue sharpening my programming skills while at the same time learning how to implement and design an aesthetically pleasing product.
