Sticky Example
"No pain, no gain" they say. Well, I have not truly understood this saying until I decideed upon taking a shift in my education and learn code. While I have been coding as child, the struggles of higher level programming classes have challenged not only my brain, but my inner designer immensely.
May I offer you a small tour through my struggle? it may be entertaining!
The idea of integrating functionality and beautiful design "gave me the boot" as my favourite teahcers tend to say.
You start with an excellent project in your head, project it onto paper and find yourself at a melancholic realization that it will definitely not translate to code and dafinitely not stack! (you know, reposnive web?)
This is a screenshot of my first responsive design (you can find a full version in my navigation links). I find this work to be a monument of painful learning! I tried to use variety of different tags and functions so that I understand the mechanics and the idea. As a result the zombie arised!
After that bootcamp had been survived, personal criticism understood and mid-term crisis overcame, I began to work on some javaScript plug-ins. With tight timelines and a lot to understand, the designer in me cried like a sheep once more!
It is significantly better than my first set ofp rojects, but nowhere near my high-end, scandinavian aesthetic that sits somewhere deep inside of me crying to be let out-- meanwhile the programmer Mei is terrorizing the entire array insisting to come first (as it should be though)
I'm not trying to say that my early work was bad in every meaning of the word! The value of throughly learning programming is invaluable -- I also believe that creating something that works in html, css and JS combined is something that not everybody visualizes doing.
I feel like my further work began to make more sense as I progressed in understading the code commands and later the entire code logic. It is quite difficult to stay motivated and inspired when you have to sacrifice your passion in order to learn how to develop "the other side of the brain"
There came the point I didnt expect..my passion had shifted! It was no longer about forcing design upon code and struggling to make those two meet. I let go of fighting with windmills and my work began to jsut naturally look better than before! My passion truly became the web.
I changed my major to web design and decided upon this path in life. While it was a little too late for me to take a full advantage of my class (I got quite behind because of initial issues), I decided to work on my own to catch up to my personal web design goals.
Layout just did not stimulate my brain sufficiently anymore. I decided that code is the way to go for me. It was (and is) a daily new challenge to addres programming issues--providing an excellent brain exercise and wonderful feeling of daily accomplishment
