Gary Simon is a prolific developer and designer. He runs the DesignCourse YouTube channel. Over the years, Gary has given feedback to hundreds of developers through his live critiques of their website designs.
Gary is famous for his design review live-streams, where he critiques developers' website designs and rates them on a scale of 1 to 10.
Some of the aspects he considers are:
- Accessibility
- Performance
- Aesthetics
- And overall cohesion
And starting this week, Gary will do a series of 3 streams on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.
Here are the streams:
How Gary Specialized as a UI Developer and Designer
Gary has worked as a front-end developer for more than 20 years.
Back in the early 2000's, Gary says his website design process consisted of "creating a mockup in Adobe Photoshop, then using Adobe Fireworks to 'splice' up the PSD, which I then used to create HTML tables to structure the layout."
"There was no such thing as 'responsive' design!"
About a decade ago, he started teaching design and development, with a special focus on UI design and identity design.
"Digg.com was the first popular social bookmarking site back around 2006. I liked designing logos at that time, and decided to write a logo design tutorial to see if I could hit the front page. I was able to do so, and it ended up bringing a ton of traffic from Google."
After this initial success, Gary became hooked on the rush of helping people learn new tools and techniques. "I realized there was an opportunity for teaching the skills I'd developed."
Gary's YouTube channel has grown quite a bit over the past 10 years, and now has more than 664,000 subscribers.
"In 2010 I created my YouTube channel. I decided to record a few tutorials throughout the first several years. I never checked stats or took it seriously.
"In 2014, I saw I had around 6,000 subscribers and decided to get really serious by uploading regularly. In the first 100 days of 2014, I uploaded 100 videos. This helped me grow considerably. Since then, I've uploaded content teaching UI/UX design, frontend development, and more on a weekly basis."
To date, Gary has create nearly 100 courses and has published them on Pluralsight, TutsPlus, LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and his own platforms.
I have spent a lot of time talking with Gary over the past few months. He is a pretty down-to-earth guy who spends most of his time taking care of his 2 daughters and shredding on the guitar.
Join us on September 30th at 10:30 a.m. EST for Gary's first stream. You can view the stream here and join early so you can get a reminder when he goes live.
And if you want to submit a design for him to review, you can tweet with the hashtag #LiveUIUXReview and he may choose it to review live on stream.
See you there.