What this Course Is & Setup

[00:00:00]
>> Sarah Drasner: Okay, so lets talk quickly about what this course is not and what this course is. This course is an course, it's not a replacement for design school. Design school is four years long and then people often go to grad school. And its not a replacement for spending many, many, many years in the field.

[00:00:18]
In fact each thing that we touch on today, every single deck that I show you could be a course of it's own that I could just devote. I could devote an entire day to color, well I could devote an entire, well, I can devote an entire semester to layout.

[00:00:32]
So, what am going to do is I'm going to give you lots of resources to work from.but am also gonna try to hit all of the major points so that you at least have some foundations, and you can work off of them, right? This course is also not a way to feel superior to people who are designers, so don't go to work and be like I know more than you now or something like that.

[00:00:55]
You know, people don't like that I hear, especially if they've been working in the field forever. If, you know, a designer took a course on Java Script for a day, you wouldn't want them telling you how to write the code same kind of difference. You all know that I'm just putting it out there so that, everybody is at the same understanding about this.

[00:01:15]
So, when we setup our projects what I'm gonna ask you to do today is to set it up in a folder. And, you know, if you're not using something like along these lines, you can create a new project, dump it into the sidebars so that it has easy access.

[00:01:29]
And then we're going to make a couple of folders here as well. So one of the folders that we're gonna make is going to be called insp or inspiration. That's where we're gonna put things that kind of feed our brains and, get us excited about making something than we're gonna put have a filter called source that's where we're gonna put the actual source images and, actual fonts that we're gonna be working with.

[00:01:51]
And then we're also going to have depth which is where we start to maybe you use the CLI tool to create a project in there. That can eventually become a GitHub repo. So the nice thing about this setup and you don't have to keep using the setup or anything but I encourage you to try using a set-up like this, because then everything is so easy to work with especially if you're working on a side project.

[00:02:14]
That's one thing I should mention. This course should be used for jazzing up some of your side projects. A lot of times developers are working on something where they wanna show a dev concept and nobody cares because it looks not great or it looks very bootstrappy or, you know, what have you.

[00:02:31]
So hopefully this class gives you enough kind of foundational concepts to work off of where you're like, you know, I can actually take this side project and I can start from concept all the way to execution and a published project. And that's so exciting, right? The idea that you don't have to collaborate with someone if you don't want to, you can work on something all on your own, can be really, really freeing.

[00:02:57]
There's a whole piece of communication that you don't have to have this like whole back and forth between what your intent and intention is and how that's created, that can all be you. So in creating this you can kind of see the setup for an entire type project start to finish.

[00:03:15]
So it's a nice way to kind of keep everything right at your fingertips. So, what this course is? This course is definitely a place to understand some base concepts especially if you're communicating a lot with the designer and they might reference something or, you know, you're not exactly sure why they're making decisions they're making.

[00:03:37]
It gives you some concepts for that. We talked a little bit about side projects. This course is definitely a place to get some of those concepts so that you feel like you know where to go from here and you know how to build things on your own. This course is definitely a place to get resources, so if there's stuff you're like, how do they even start from here to there?

[00:04:00]
You have all of these extra materials that tried to chalk it full of other reading materials, other sites, other things that you can look at and ways that you can develop on your own.