While studying Interface in Potsdam, I worked a lot as a Freelancer to finance my studies. Besides some smaller design gigs I also worked on a few projects as a front-end developer. Most of it had been Wordpress projects and in general a lot of HTML, CSS and a little jQuery. After receiving my BA, I turned my focus completely on Product, UX and UI Design. I was still benefitting from knowing my medium very well and being able to speak a bit of Developer. And now after a decade of focusing on product design, I wanted to dive back into coding. But why?
First: To get back in touch with my medium. I feel like a much stronger designer when I have the option to work directly in the medium and there a lot of things you can do in a code environment, that you can't achieve in a tool like Figma. And from a product design perspective it provides me with a better judgement of the realizability of my designs and makes it much easier to collaborate with developers. That are skills that need to be updated from time to time.
Second: It's about advancing my skillset. When working at Rose and designing custom visualizations, like the rose compass, I quickly reached the limits of what Figma can do, and changing data or iterating on the chart amounted to a lot of manual redundant work. So I think that the great outcome of the Rose Compass is in a major way because of our developers who where willing to prototype a lot together with me. I really enjoyed working on those visualizations and love what we created. Something that goes far further than the standard dashboard bar chart. From a design perspective the time invested here provided much more value for product and brand than many other tasks. It would be awesome to do such things more often, but for that I need to be more independent and able to develop a little bit myself.
Third: Because I love the challenge of learning new things and because I am jealous of the wide range of tools that developers can use and what they can achieve with that. I have implemented tailwind styles and components manually multiple times into figma now, and even tried plugins like tailwind tokens, to come closer to the original. But it never felt quiet right. So I start wondering what happens to the quality and innovativeness of my design, when I am restricting myself less with design tools.
I am curious how good I will have to get at coding for things to be easier. Maybe I will soon find it easier to do some styling or prototyping work directly in the code? How great would it be if I learned how to use d3 and code some dynamic visualizations myself?
My dev skills are still rusty and the landscape has evolved dramatically. Enter Node.js, React, Next.js and a whole new world of tools and frameworks that I have never touched before. Well one step at a time and maybe I can make a larger leap soon.
In the end, the process of getting back into coding is one of the most rewarding challenges I’ve faced in a long time. To anyone out there thinking of doing something similar—whether it’s building a personal project, learning new tech, or diving back into something you’ve left behind—don’t be discouraged by the obstacles.