How To Not Suck At Design For Developers 

The video was made with Animotion which you can find at animotion.pages.dev and if you want to support the work I do consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/joyofcode.

Designer here: design is a learnable skill like any other! Just don't make the mistake of underestimating the difficulty curve-this prevents many devs from being good at design. If you grow muscles with sloppy form and tepid effort, you're leaving gains on the table. Solve design problems like a designer, rather than a dev, and you'll soon be a good designer.

0:33 *Don't have enough vocabulary to speak about design in an intelligent way* What a brilliant way of explaining it.

Well, my design has always been crap anyway.

The production quality is insane on this one, great video

Inter is such a good font. Slap it onto anything and it starts looking good

When you talk about books, reminded me that I did bought a book in gumroad but forgotten to read it. This video invigorates my memory again to follow up on that todo item. thank you! btw the book is UI Design Principles by Michael Filipiuk

You've really outdone yourself in this one! Props!

Well done! Really underrated channel, glad I found it. I’ve been doing frontend for 8 years at a fashion company. Most of the time, you receive a Figma layout and simply implement it without considering the concept. It’s good to refresh some things. I wish I had a video like this before I started.

Funny enough I needed a video like this. I've tried going into VSCode ready to start a project, but planning the design has always been something I find more important before starting the code. Thank you for this video! I will write all the great advice down and get started on my next project!

Damn, really clean production value for your channel! Really loved how you explained your points visually with the clean graphics. The visual hierarchy example at 2:10 really communicated the importance of visual hierarchy intuitively.

Great video, fast, lean and accessible. A well designed and utilitarian presentation that exemplifies the design principles you talk about in the video. So you show and tell at the same time.

Loved this piece of content. Especially the resources at the end👏🏼

Just like you leave spaces in between objects on the screen, it's good to leave space in between the colours chosen. For colour selection, I recommend using a three-way system: Main, complement, and absent. Pick a colour as the main, then pick the two colours that are 1/3 and 2/3 the way around the hue wheel (one being the compliment and the other the absent). The colour that is exactly halfway between the main and compliment will be exactly opposite to the absent colour. This "halfway" colour is the overall colour of your composition, which gives the overall composition character. This is basically a different way of doing a very well-known form of colour selection, but I forgot the name of it sry

Excellent video, its always good to get back to the basics and keep it simple

Thank you so much for this!

Quite nice video, sometimes is good to chill and learn the basics, I've improved my design vocabulary!.

Awesome video. I've just learned so much. Earned my subscribe. Much appreciated!

What a great video, thank you so much for this!!

Great stuff brother! Keep it up 💪🏻

Thankyou so much❤❤🎉 I was struggling designing simple yet good looking webpages,just this video popped up.

For Layout, just splitting the screen into a 3x3 grid or using the golden ratio will work wonders for any composition.

Very well done! Thanks a ton.

Best video on design for developers I’ve ever seen.

When I read the title I thought the video would be about making designs developers are meant to use so I got excited lol I've used some developer portals/documentation with some truly awful design. Junk that got redesigned from an ugly but very functional to better looking but difficult.

As a FE developer I learn alot about design principles thanks for sharing ☺

This is freaking awesome, thanks a lot man

This channel is worth its weight in gold

Was waiting for this after your twitter announcement

amazing content like always!!

Very precious tips, ty very much.

Thank you ..! This came in handy

Thank you, that was fire.

Really enjoyed this one 👍 Any chance of a few more on the same theme? I don't know any Devs that would say no to a bunch of sound/practical design advice. Thanks for all of the hard work

This is amazing!!

Great video!

9:00 so something to think about with just using 2s powers with for layout. how something will look across all the different social media platforms is really important now. also the devices using to view it and the different levels of zoom, simply testing for these things will really help what ever you are making. 16 by 9 ratio is not 16 by 8 ratio.

Love this! Only wish it was part 1 of \d

very helpful thanks 🙏

Great video! I am full time frontend dev in a fin-tech company, and I do a lot of stuff outside of work. So the fact is that I just SUCK at design, not like badly, but my designs are always plain and insipid. So the best solution for me is to just… steal the good design. I usually go to website of some popular design stuff like shadcn/ui ant literally copy their typography, paddings and stuff. This way I manage to create more or less nice looking systems.

excellent video, thank you

Masterclass video, thank you from a developer

It's really valueabe content ❤

The acronym is hilarious :D

I can confirm that "Refactoring UI" is a perfect book for web-developers. It is easy to grasp and apply and has a quite pragmatic, no-nonsense approach. I can highly recommend this book.

awesome!

Designer here.. Great video.

true quality content.

Thank you.

are there any vscode extensions that let you easily slide the 3 values of hsl up and down? i need a slider handle to play with em all fast. tried a bunch of "color" extensions and they are almost always just the same box thing

thank you

subscribed!

Great video! If you don't mind me asking what program did you use to create this presentation? Was it powerpoint? And also what did you use to record this video Camtasia? Thanks so much :)

Brb gonna show this to our designers

Hi there, first time being here, can you make a video on Svelte/kit vs React?

great vid

yes, this is all perfect, but can someone actually explain for what I need accent color? it is totally my skill issue, but every time I try to use it, it looks awful (because it I use it first time), and I always find that shade of background looks 100% better

i know all the theory, the white space, components and elements. but the worst part for me is to think about a page to have a starting idea of it. i only can just copy from other websites because i just lack the creativity

When choosing colors, even better than hsl is oklch! Perceptual color space!

"alright you know enough design to be dangerous" quite the sentence 😆

my design does meet crap standards... not quite the CRAP

Your latest video is absolutely remarkable! 🌟 It's astounding to see content of such premium quality being shared for free. 💎 The effort, creativity, and professionalism you've put into this video rival that of high-budget productions, making it a standout piece. 👏 Your dedication to delivering exceptional content without the cost barrier is truly commendable and sets a new standard in the community. 🚀 Thank you for your generosity and commitment to excellence. 🙏 Your work is a genuine inspiration, and I can't wait to see what incredible creations you'll share next! 🌈

How about a video like how to not suck at developing as a designer? would help me :D

FYI, Black and White are not two separate colours; They are both just different brightnesses of Grey. When you choose black and white in a composition, you are just choosing grey twice.

I'll never forget CRAP, thanks!

I feel attacked.

my design is finally crap thx

Long story short: follow design principles. But also don't follow them. Got it, thanks.

I'm developer from 4 years . I can say what n all shit he is thinking I wish I knew from start

Strongly disagree with the "design is not art, just like development" at the start. Pretty sure that's not what you think but it's basically what you said.

1:08 contradiction no.1 you said design isn't art or meant to produce beauty but be utilitarian and useful. then you said that design solves utilitarian problems in an AESTHETICALLY PLEASING way...

I really love your videos but not sure about this one if you do not cover all topics on Web Design as long series. The Web Design or design generally is way more complex and it will take more than 14 min to cover one of these design rules "principles" and show developers how to approach thinging like designer and vice versa. ( 10 basic rules - PROXIMITY, SIMILARITY, CLOSURE, SYMMETRY, CONTINUITY, FATE RULE, HICK’S LAW, MILLER’S LAW, AESTHETIC USABILITY EFFECT, SERIAL POSITION, VON RESTROFF’S ISOLATION EFFECT ) what about color psychology and symbolism eg. in different countries .... but this is going more into branding territory... As developer and designer enthusiast I still prefer your videos about coding where you excel.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I'm at loss of words) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know about other devs that watched this, but he lost me the moment he said that now that we know the rules we should break them to create interest. How much can I break the rules? Should I always break them? Where do I break them? You have to make a video with the rules to break the rules.

I hate designing 😢😢😢😢😢😢

talent is a lie, just go see any 5 minute videos about the fundamentals of graphic design and apply it, any programmer should be familiar to studying it and applying new things, sure you may not like graphic design but theres literally nothing stopping you from sitting down and seeing some videos, and sure everybody learns differently, but everybody can learn, thats literally what makes us human, and what helped our ancestors to survive so long ago. i hate the idea that you need talent for anything or that talent even exists, and sure we could sit here and argue what contitutes talent or not, but ill just say a single thing, theres is no god given talent, the only thing they had more than you was TIME, time learning what you think they have so called "talent", some people just started sooner than others in specific fields, either direcly or indirecly, stop jailing yourself to the truly flawed logic of talent, it just dimishes us as people, inhibiting us from being the best version of ourselves. Thank you for your time this was my rant, what i recommend for beginners of graphic design, for any use purpose is "Beginning Graphic Design by Learn Free" its a series of 6 short videos that will get oyu acquanteced to all the fundamentals.

Design is crap! 🙌

It's crap

The design of this video is crap.

0. Just use AI designers...

this video is crap design

Such a great and Insightful video, thanks 🤍