Hello

[bengunbharta]

Hi, I'm Bengun.

I'm a Sales lead at a tiny technical startup in New York. I'm working on building an app that gives a gentler and more guided introduction to our product. This is my personal pilot project so I'm learning frontend dev by myself. While the coding and UX part is relatively easy for me, I am finding the UI part challenging because I know good work when I see it but I don't know how to do it without a graphic design background. Topics like typography, spacing, padding and white/negative space are completely new to me. I would love to learn an artist's view of frontend dev from this community. Basically, how to first recreate and then adapt aspects of design I like on apps. In return, I'm happy to help the community with testing your apps and workflows or any other general research projects for your app industry or customer segment.

My favorite emoji is smirking face emoji

[Graeme]

@bengunbharta Welcome Bengun

Topics like typography, spacing, padding and white/negative space are completely new to me

I think one of the best resources at the moment for learning about this is the work from Refactoring UI by Steve Schoger.

For example, check out this article - lots of useful UI tips! Looking forward to your app and giving more feedback.

The smirking emoji is a great choice btw

[bengunbharta]

@Graeme said in Hello:

this article

Thank you! I'll add those to my reading for this week.

[karl_iaxd]

I am finding the UI part challenging because I know good work when I see it but I don't know how to do it without a graphic design background

I am a completely self-taught designer, my academic background had nothing to do with design at all.
I'm always sensitive to the UI trends and keeping an open mind to other designers' opinions.

Font end dev is super fun, it's like when you have all the assumptions about a good design, the front work further proves that your assumptions are indeed legit. But of course you have to be able to make those assumptions in the first place

[kelechi]

@bengunbharta welcome to the community! Glad to have you here as I'm also learning front-end dev and product design with a focus on UX. Are you taking courses? If so, which ones? If not, what's your learning process like? Were you totally all sales before starting with this project? Or have prior coding experience?

[bengunbharta]

@kelechi Maybe we can team up I’m doing the usual Udemy courses (Colt Steele for fullstack web apps, Angela Yu for iOS native) and supplementing it with YouTube playlists (Corey Schafer for Python, Futur for design, product based playlists for Sketch, InVision and Figma, MIT OCW for intro to algos). I don’t have a coding background but my jobs in technical industries gave me some modify/copypaste code exposure. Now I need to build stuff from scratch so I am picking up more of a theoretical basis.

[bengunbharta]

@karl_iaxd that’s inspiring. So what was your approach to building your first client-ready app? I start building elements like a swipe-able card or modal and then start debating where to place them on a page or what font settings to use. I can build functional apps but they don’t yet look designer-made.

[kelechi]

@bengunbharta wow. Thanks for these resources. I'm doing the Product Design course and Frontend Nanodegree on Udacity. Add that to work and that's about all I can manage

But I'm also gobbling up a lot of articles and short resources shared here. We should definitely team up! I'm going to create a Newbie Designers group on here so we have more of these convos there and other newbies can join the 'team,' see our resources and not feel so overwhelmed.

I'm just like you too in that I have worked in tech for the last 4 years, even cofounded a startup of my own back in 2015 at StartupChile.
Excited about this new beginning though, no external pressure and I'm figuring out what kind of products I truly want to create, even if just for fun.