

Ask HN: Design for frontend developer - igvadaimon

In spite of the &quot;PHP developer&quot; title in my CV, recently I am becoming more and more &quot;frontend-oriented&quot;. That&#x27;s perfectly fine, because I love frontend. The only thing that&#x27;s keeping me uneasy is that almost every frontend developer position out there also requires considerable experience in UI and design in general.<p>Is it a trend now? Are frontend developers required to learn design? And if yes, then which books&#x2F;courses&#x2F;articles would you suggest?
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vldx
Design (UI/UX) can be learned as any other skill. All the necessary
information is on top of your fingers at this moment :)

Do stuff as much as possible and focus on the output, e.g. look for quantity
over quality. [0] It's important to have the proper mindset, so you have to
learn how to ignore the frustration and how to fight your ego. The paradox
here is that if you follow this approach, at the end you start producing more
and more quality work.

Deliberately replicate other people's work. With the time you'll start
noticing different patterns and trends and build on top of them your own
ideas.

[1] Read psychology and have genuine interest in humans - why do we respond to
given things, why these things work and experiment with them.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-
Creative/dp/193689...](http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-
Creative/dp/1936891026) [1]
[http://getmentalnotes.com/resources](http://getmentalnotes.com/resources)

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apunic
A FE dev doesn't need to have design skills per se but it's handy and
increases your market value.

How to get there: just create stuff, start with smaller things (like a simple
blog design or even smaller like a page about yourself) and get inspirations
from other talented designers. Maybe you just copy their stuff 1:1 in the
beginning just to get some feeling for shapes and colors.

