How I taught myself to code as a Designer

As I was getting started as a Web Design freelancer I felt knowing how to code would be a great addition to my skills. So I decided to learn HTML and CSS. This felt like an easy starting point. After some googling I discovered Codecademy and signed up since it was free.

After the HTML/CSS course, I was able to build my first website in the summer of 2013, which was my design portfolio.

Building something I designed meant I was more invested in replicating that in code. I learnt through problem-solving and discovered great satisfaction in being able to build the exact result I desired. I relied a lot on Google and Stack Overflow to discover solutions.

All through this, I continued to work on design projects and one of the developers I worked with introduced me to Bootstrap, the responsive framework by Twitter.

As I had discovered, the best way for me to learn code was to build my own ideas. And so I sought client projects that not only included design, but also gave me the opportunity to build those designs into responsive websites.

Within 8 months I was ready to update my portfolio because I had to make it responsive. Through this self-initiated project I was able to get a deeper understanding of responsive design through lots of tweaking of my design and code to get things right across devices.

I launched my updated responsive portfolio website in January 2014 and showcasing my skills as a designer and a developer helped me get my first full-time job.

Even at my job, I enjoyed collaborating with developers and making contributions to the code and was able to learn new tools like git along the way.

And today (Nov 2020) I am in the process of learning React. A developer friend and I worked on a side project where he set it up using React. I found it fairly easy to pickup and I continue to use it to build this site.

Deciding to learn how to code was probably one of my best self-improvement decisions. I’ve discovered there is great joy in being able to build the things I design. And I believe it just makes me a better designer and collaborator.