Hello,
I am new here and to coding. I am a graphic designer / art director. My background is mostly in print design, some graphic animation and video edition(basic),layouts for social media and a couple of website layouts. For the past 4 or 5 years I’ve been working remotely for a small advertising agency and doing my own projects.
I know absolutely nothing of coding. I just started here in FCC and I am doing a course on Udemy too. I am interested in working with front end dev in the future (maybe 4 years in the future) or at least learn html, css and java to improve in the design field.
My question is: Can I learn what I need from here and other online resources to get a entry level job with front end? Will my background help in anything? And since I work remotely, it is possible to get a front end job remotely too?
PS: Sorry if I wrote something wrong. What I learned from English I taught myself and I am still learning.
PS2: Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. I am very new to FCC and I thought that was the right place.
Thanks to anyone who can give me an advice.
You should check out some of the inspiring stories in the Getting a Devloper Job section. It’s a lot of hard work to teach yourself something without formal structure, but all the resources that you need are freely available online. A background in graphic design will definitely help make your projects look more professional and appealing when you add them to your portfolio.
Remote jobs do exist, but they do tend to be much harder to find and not to pay as well.
Yeah, go through the curriculum here, HTML/CSS should be fine for you, JS is likely to be painful.
Regards transferrable knowledge: CSS is the thing that most obviously transfers across from print and animation. It’s more constrained in most ways, and a lot more manual. You have a lot less control, and this is really important — it’s going to be painful, but I’d advise looking at how responsive design works as soon as possible. With HTML/CSS you can’t really just place things on the page exactly where you want them to be, because you can’t guarantee what size that page will be, or whether a user has increased/decreased the text size and broken your carefully laid out page, or a multitude of other factors.
Random notes:
- styles map across from character/paragraph/etc styles in InDesign/Illustrator/PS. You have a style you apply to an element, you set some attributes on it etc.
- layout used to be, umm, horrific, but flex (for 1 dimensional sets of elements - think a nav menu) and grid (for 2 dimensional layouts - think the overall page) make things a lot more sensible coming from a design background. They’ll be difficult to grok at first though (grid in particular).
- positioning rules are a bit of a pain — you can’t just have layers of stuff, by default the browser renders each element as a rectangular block that comes after the previous one, things like overlapping elements can be difficult.
- the above point about each element being a block is p important: with HTML you will need to keep wrapping content in other blocks to keep things together. This won’t make much sense at first, but if you’re trying to build a web page, this is v useful, it outlines every element in a different colour: https://gist.github.com/addyosmani/fd3999ea7fce242756b1
- animation is fairly sensible and pretty fun to play around with. This could be a good way to start playing around with JS - there are libraries like Greensock and Anime that allow you to quite easily do complex animations using JS, and they’re great to play around with.
- SVG is basically the graphics version of HTML, so if you’re ok with Illustrator you can dump SVGs from it directly into pages and play around with them (note you can just copy paste between code editor and Illustrator afaik - copy code and paste into Ill. and you get the image, copy image in Ill. and past into editor and you get the code.
- HTML is just a way to wrap unconnected bits of text up in tags that tell the browser what they are. CSS is just a way to apply styling to those. JS is an actual programming language, so be prepared for it to be much more difficult to learn.
- minor thing, but if you’re using InDesign and you make use of its grep functionality, you should breeze through the regex sections here (which most people find extremely confusing).
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