Recap: Design for Developers

Chad Mazzola

We ran our first Design for Developers workshop this week. Kyle and I had a great time teaching it and were really pleased with the quality of the work the students were able to produce by the end of the workshop.

The main project the students worked on was a page for a fictional furniture company. We gave them a completely unstyled page and asked them to slowly transform it using grid systems, refined typography, and effective color schemes. The students sketched out their ideas on paper, then worked directly in HTML and CSS to implement their ideas. At the end of the last night, we had a group presentation of all the pages, where the students talked through their approach and we offered our critique.

We asked a few students to let us share their work with you.

This page was designed by Javan Makhmali:

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And this page was designed by Chuck Vose:

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At the end of the workshop, students walked away with a solid grasp of some fundamental principles of design along with practice building a well-structured, good looking web page.

If you’re a developer who wants to improve your design skills, consider taking our next Design for Developers workshop, which we’ve scheduled for Feb 21-23.