Design Details

308: Learning Design as a Developer

Episode Summary

This week, we answer a couple listener questions, including how to get started learning design as a developer and how to reconcile icons on different platforms. In News, we discuss the launch of Figma Plugins, and as always, we share a couple cool things, like gourmet junk food and vaporwave jams.

Episode Notes

This week, we answer a couple listener questions, including how to get started learning design as a developer and how to reconcile icons on different platforms. In News, we discuss the launch of Figma Plugins, and as always, we share a couple cool things, like gourmet junk food and vaporwave jams.

Follow-up:

• Pro Tip: Listen to Design Details at ~1.25x speed. It's more tolerable, we promise :)
• Divya Tak is Marshall's kindred internet spirit
  • Jeff Cannata got his start on the Totally Rad Show on Revision 3
• Turns out our questions about iOS 13 Beta 4 were premature because—wait for it—it's a damn beta
  • Grouped TableViews on iOS6 vs iOS 12 vs iOS 13 Beta 4 and Beta 5
  • Screenshots: Safari Modes: Public/Private and Light/Dark
• Nick Dika told us about Nielsen Norman Group's line of It Depends merch
  • Video: "Vanilla Ice denies ripping off Queen and David Bowie's Under 'Pressure'"

News:

• Introducing Figma Plugins
  • Featured Plugins, built by the Figma community
  • Article: "Smart Distribute, Cloud documents and Sketch for Teams — What’s New in Sketch?"
  • FigPlug by Rasmus Andersson is "a small program for building Figma plugins"
  • Some notable plugins: Unsplash, Autoflow, Stark, Mapsicle, and Google Sheets Sync

Listener questions:

• Q: "What advice do you have for a developer with no design experience getting started with design?" —Dolee Yang
  • A: "Listen to our "Principles of Design" episode, check out Laws of UX and Refactoring UI, then read the Apple HIG and/or the Material Guidelines, paying attention to the thinking behind the systems. When in doubt, fall back to system defaults. But most importantly, get into the mindset of a designer and, as you use products in your daily life, start asking, 'Why did they do it like this?'"
• Q: "How do you reconcile icon systems between platforms? Do you have different icons for web, iOS, and Android? Or do you try to make them all consistent with a brand icon set?" —Anonymous
  • A: "Actually, both are valid strategies. If you use the default glyphs and styling for icons on each platform, you can have high confidence your users will understand them. If you have a strong brand identity, you can style those glyphs to fit in with your icon set. If you use unique glyphs, consider including labels to make their meaning clear to users who are only familiar with system glyphs."

One Cool Thing:

• Marshall shared "Gourmet Makes", a video series on Bon Appetit's YouTube channel in which a pastry chef attempts to create gourmet versions of junk food
• Brian shared Poolside.fm, which (according to The Verge) is "a retro digital oasis for your summer"

Design Details on the Web:

• We are @designdetailsfm
  • Brian is @brian_lovin and hi@brianlovin.com
  • Marshall is @marshallbock
  • @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
• Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

BYEEEEE!