After the course launch and the recent Q&A post, I've had a few questions about whether the Mindful Design course is a good option for developers who want to get into design.
Now, a pinch of salt here, because obviously I'm going to say yes, but if you’ll indulge me for a few paragraphs, I want to lay out the reasons why I think that’s the case.
I am a developer
HTML, CSS, JS and accessibility are my areas of expertise outside of design. I’ve spent my career writing code, and I will always write code. I design in the browser, I build prototypes and products, and I am absolutely in love with the web and creating for it.
I spend my days building shit, building out design engineering functions for clients, improving designer-developer collaboration, and I’d go out on a limb and say I spend probably twice as long in a text editor than I do in a design tool.
While none of that guarantees that I can do a good job of explaining and exploring design for a developer audience, it does make me part of that audience. I know the struggles and the joys and the chaos of front-end development super, super well, and it’s framed my entire design career.
It’s an end-to-end course
More times than I’d hope, I’ve seen courses or other educational material frame themselves broadly into something like teaching developers how to design, and the cross-discipline hype is usually pretty alluring. Then you dive into it and it’s something like random fragmented advice that helps developers make stuff that looks slightly less shit than they’ve made before.
I don’t want to shit on those types of courses or articles, because if that’s all you want or need, then they deliver. But I don’t take that approach. Here’s my angle on this:
Developers already have so many of the requisite skills to be good designers. A developed understanding of layout, the box model, browser defaults, global conventions and accessibility to name a few. Anyone who wants to then maximise that by learning design should be taught the right materials, in the right way, to maximise that baseline they already have.
Typecasting these devs into a bunch of folks who just want to make their shitty little interfaces look nice is more than a little bit insulting.
Most of what I think developers need to learn about design is pretty much what I think every designer needs to learn about design: how to understand, speak to, and build shit for the people — the real humans — that we’ll be asking to use our products or sites. You don’t learn that through getting really good at shadows.
My goal with this course is to distill what I think are the most important factors that help people grasp that. The basics of UI design do fall into that. We shouldn’t be making products that look bad just as much as we shouldn’t be making products that work badly. We will learn good shadows, we’ll just learn them in the context of all of the other stuff.
If you just want to jazz your work up with good design basics, then there’s a module for that. But there’s also probably a bunch of YouTube videos that’ll get you there for free. If you want to learn why that stuff is important, and how to start applying all the stuff you’re already good at to create lovely, calm, and valuable work, then yeah, the course is for you.
It’s (kinda) designed for you
Early on, we actually toyed with the idea of calling the course Design for Developers. Part of that was, honestly, a little bit markety. It felt a bit more targeted and focused than just rolling with the Mindful Design brand. Eventually we decided against that, because it’s not specifically and uniquely for developers, and we might have been pigeon-holing it a bit too much.
Having said that, trying to make this the canonical design course for developers was an overt goal of the whole project. It’s not the only driving factor, and there are plenty of examples of decisions where we could have gone way more specific to front-end, which we pulled back on a bit. However, fundamentally, a core audience for this course was, and is, developers who want to build a deep and career-defining grasp of all the stages of design.
I get paid to do this
A huge part of my work involves positioning design strategically within orgs and startups. One of the first things I do is look to the front-end team and figure out if there’s a desire and a benefit to having them do more design and design-adjacent work. Most of the time that’s true, and so much of the work I do comes from breaking down the implicit barriers between design and engineering functions.
I also speak about this quite a bit. If you want to check that out, you can take a peek at my Mindful Design For Developers talk at State of the Browser earlier this year. I think it does a good job of explaining just why I think it’s not only possible, but optimal for developers to start thinking of themselves as designers already.
You’re ready for it
If you’re passionate about front-end work, you have everything you need to jump in and learn design. It’s not some enigmatic craft that only a select few can grasp. It’s just as rigorous and oftentimes just as systematic as any other technical skillset. We don’t need to gate-keep design via obtuse esoterica, it’s learnable and teachable and doable.
Like anything else, it also takes time, experimentation, and lots and lots of hard hours of practice to get good at. What you get out of learning design is roughly a function of what you put into it, provided you actually know how to be purposeful with your practice and provided you’re learning the right things.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that all you need to do is buy the course and from day one you’ll be making amazing stuff and putting UI designers out of jobs.
I’m not even going to tell you that you’ll instantly out-design that weird shitty AI tool your boss is trying to convince you to use. What I will give you is the best baseline possible to design for real people, and a whole bunch of purposeful ways to practice those skills. The rest is up to you.
I’ve spent my career building my front-end skills directly alongside my design skills. Both of those disciplines are far, far closer than most people are led to believe, and for me, the line has blurred to near invisibility. When I say this course is a distillation of a career’s worth of work and knowledge, I’m not talking just design. Everything I know about semantics, convention, accessibility — even typography and animation — has come from living in a browser for 20+ years.
All of that shapes my work to this day, and I believe anyone can do the same. I’m past the point of even trying to separate the skillsets or mindsets into ‘design thinking’ and ‘dev thinking’ — it’s just about figuring out what people need, and choosing the best tool to make that real.
If any of that resonates, the course exists, if you’re willing to put the hard yards in, it will pay off.
Much love,
Scott and the Piccalilli team xoxo