Developing Design Skills for Developers

In a previous article, I discussed the skills necessary for developers to transition into entrepreneurs. Today, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into design. What exactly are the design-related tasks when creating a product? There aren’t too many, and they can be grouped like this:

Interface design
Graphic design (logos, app page layouts on Product Hunt, etc.)
Landing page creation
Let’s break down each task and the tools needed for them.

Interface Design

The most crucial skill here is having an eye for good design. In short, we need to be able to assess the quality of an interface after looking at it for a while. This skill is quite straightforward to develop—just requires some self-discipline. Spend some time every day browsing sites like https://dribbble.com/ and https://www.pinterest.com/. Pick 1-3 interfaces from there and analyze them.

Next up, tools—once you’ve developed an eye for design, it becomes much easier to create interfaces using various building blocks. Look for a template that suits your needs and piece together what you require using UI kits and templates.

Graphic Design

This has become significantly easier recently. I believe any graphic design task can now be addressed by appending "AI" to your search. You can effortlessly create app designs and more. Basically, all the work boils down to entering different prompts and getting what you need.

Creating a Landing Page

Here, templates and AI tools for illustrations come to the rescue, and possibly ready-made landing page creators, like Tilda, for example. Using these builders, you can take advantage of pre-made designs and just tweak the content. This saves us from having to worry about composition, color schemes, and many other rules that professional designers use.

Additionally, I want to mention something that has been a lifesaver for me lately—illustration kits. It turns out you can simply find ready-made illustration sets, tweak them in Figma, and get illustrations for your landing page.

That's about it, really. The main takeaway here is—there's no need to spend money and time hiring a designer or doing everything from scratch right away. Try to make the most of ready-made tools first.