Do developers need design skills? Growth, side projects & high performance.

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Hey there!

You already know that design is important.

If you need a reminder of how important, just see how long you can play with this UI before you push your monitor off your desk.

"Ok, design is important. But I'm a developer, I don't need design skills!"

Sure, there are some developers that never want to touch design, but design skills can help you a lot as a developer.

You'll be able to guide UX, provide more feedback on a project, fill gaps within your team and create products that customers love.

Good design is more than just aesthetics, it allows more people to understand, interact with and get value out of a product – and that's a skill worth investing in.

Jump into our series of design books, we promise you'll find value in reading them!

Smashing Book 6: New Frontiers In Web Design

It’s about time to finally make sense of all the front-end and UX madness. Meet Smashing Book 6, with everything you need to know about web design. From design systems to accessible single-page apps, CSS Custom Properties, CSS Grid, Service Workers, performance patterns, AR/VR, conversational UIs and responsive art direction.

Form Design Patterns

On first glance, forms are simple to learn. But when we consider the journeys we need to design, the users we need to design for, the browsers and devices being used; and ensuring that the result is simple and inclusive, form design becomes a far more interesting and bigger challenge.

Designing UX: Prototyping

Make shareable, clickable prototypes in a matter of minutes. Develop user journeys, discover time saving tools, and dive into the detail of the prototyping process to save production costs, engage stakeholders and explore new ideas.

Beginner Usability

There are things coding books can’t tell you. Things that fall between code and design. Sites can use perfect code and perfect design, but still allow zombies to take over the world. These things are all about how someone uses a website. It’s how a user will expect your site to behave.

Design Trends and Inspiration

Improve your effectiveness through design by avoiding common design mistakes, discovering the latest in mobile app, website and email design, and optimising UX for mobile and desktop.

Why Design Matters for Startups

Attract, engage and cultivate customers with beautiful design. Covering startup pitch decks, UX optimisation, brand strategy and personality, website design and more.

Researching UX: User Research

Conduct practical and insightful user research to improve the performance of your product. From start to finish, you'll define your research, hypothesis and its risks, determine the best approach, find participants, run successful sessions, analyze the data, and create actionable outcomes that ensure success!

15 Top Prototyping Tools Go Head-to-Head

A comparison of the best prototyping tools that allow you to create, collaborate and share your designs with others.

Working with Design Thinking, Lean and Agile

Save time, collaborate better and solve problems that are important to your customers with Design Thinking, Lean and Agile concepts.

Conversational Design

Erika Hall explains what makes an interaction truly conversational and how to get more comfortable using language in design. From understanding the human interface, to effectively using the power of personality, to getting it all done, you’ll find out how the art of communication can elevate technology.

Five Simple UX Principles to Guide your Product Design

Learn five simple principles to build what a user wants, keep steadfast in your design and produce great products. In this short book we'll cover digestibility, clarity, trust, familiarity and delight.

Designing UX: Forms

Discover the principles behind building great forms. Design for multiple devices, gather the right information, create balanced layouts, design effective user flow and much more to increase conversion and take the guesswork out of the design process.

Want to see more design content? Visit our library!

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Happy Learning!

The SitePoint Team