Design Software For Developers
Enough design skill to be dangerous: fonts, hierarchy, and color theory, then real builds in Photoshop and Sketch, including HTML email designs.
Ask a developer to build anything and they start typing. Ask them to design it first and many of them freeze. The gap is rarely ability. It is that nobody ever taught them the small set of rules designers lean on, or how to drive the software those designers use. This course covers both, in that order.
Rules before tools
The design basics section is short and load-bearing: what design actually is, the categories of fonts and how font hierarchy works, and color theory made simple. These few lessons do a disproportionate amount of work. Most "bad developer design" is just violated hierarchy and clashing color, and both are fixable with rules you learn once and apply forever.
Photoshop and Sketch, hands on
The software half opens with the honest question, Photoshop versus Sketch, and then teaches both rather than picking a side for you.
In Photoshop you learn the tools you will actually need and no more, get comfortable with layers, and then put it to work designing an HTML email across two lessons, finishing with exporting images and styles, the handoff skill that makes design useful to a developer.
The Sketch section goes deeper: artboards, grids and layouts, aligning and grouping, styles, symbols, combining shapes, plugins, and transforming elements. It culminates in a complete landing page design built across two lessons and exported properly. Then a bonus project: a transactional email designed in Sketch from start to finish.
You may have noticed the email theme running through the projects. That is deliberate. Email developers constantly receive designs as flat files and have to slice them into assets, and being able to work both sides of that handoff is a genuine edge. If that pipeline interests you, the email development course teaches the coding half, and the Email Developer career path shows the whole route.
What you'll learn
- ✓ Understand core design basics, including font categories, hierarchy, and color theory
- ✓ Choose between Photoshop and Sketch for your own workflow
- ✓ Learn the Photoshop tools and layers you will actually use
- ✓ Design an HTML email in Photoshop and export the images and styles
- ✓ Work in Sketch with artboards, grids, groups, styles, symbols, and plugins
- ✓ Design a complete landing page in Sketch and export it
- ✓ Design a transactional email in Sketch in the bonus project
Course Curriculum
5 sections
1
First Section
0 lessons
2
Design Basics
0 lessons
3
Photoshop
0 lessons
4
Sketch
0 lessons
5
Bonus Project: Transactional Email
0 lessons
Before you start
- ✓ None on the design side. Being a developer helps you apply it, but is not required
