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Learning to Code

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I’m a web designer, every day I design stuff from websites, UI’s, iPhone apps, Facebook tabs, emailers. All of these come as second nature to me, I enjoy designing them, I enjoy coming up with the best solutions for the problems and making the dullest of sites look fun. So I must be pretty adept at the coding side of things too right? nope, wrong!

This of course isn’t an issue as such at 383 as I work alongside some incredibly skilled Front and Backend developers, who are amazing at putting my designs into reality. But, it is still something that i’ve always been ashamed of, I can’t really call myself a Web Designer if I don’t have at least a basic understanding of coding myself. So this weekend I decided enough’s enough, its time that I start getting my head around it. 

I sat down properly with ‘HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites’ by Jon Duckett and made initial progress in learning this side of my job. I have to say, from someone coming from a design background, where staring code directly in the face, is usually a very daunting and confusing experience. This book is brilliant. Unlike other books I have looked at it is very visual, full of colours and nice type, all the little things that help keep a designers mind interested. I know there’s plenty of other learning tools out there and Treehouse has also caught my eye, but right now i’m really enjoying working my way through this book.

So I thought i’d keep you guys updated with my progress as I go along and hopefully be able to have something to show for it in the end. 

Right now, im at the very early stages, i’ve learnt putting in headers and body copy, inserting links and images. I have my ordered and unordered lists nailed and dropped in the odd iframe here and there. I’ve learnt how to insert forms, radio buttons and checkboxes and applied first bits of CSS.

Now I understand that to anyone who does have an understanding of code, all of this is the same as someone saying to me, “Hey! I’ve worked out how to type out some text and colour it red Yo!”. But i’m still enjoying getting my head around something that has always seemed alien and scary to me. 

I’ll try and keep you all updated with how I get on!