How I Mastered UI Design Unknowingly
The events and practices that led me to master UI Design between 2017 and 2019
The year was 2017. I wanted to polish my iOS development skills. I had been coding for about two years before then. Well, in 2015 when I started learning how to code, I was a telecommunication engineering student, which meant that I had to give more time to focus on my major, Bsc. Telecommunication Engineering. Coding had to be a hobby, and the project I was working on at the time was just a side(read: passion) project.
Two years later, I graduated from school and I wanted to properly build an iOS app for a startup I was building with my friends, PicApp — a food delivery app.
I followed a tutorial playlist on youtube. I learned about the app development process, and the first step was to build a prototype before coding. So that’s what I did. I installed Sketch(as recommended by the course) and started designing by following the tutorial videos.
That’s where I learned about colours, how to use fonts, manipulating shapes to create buttons, UI elements and other shapes, alignment, the golden ratio, using icons, masking images, grouping similar elements, and so on. I picked it all up surprisingly fast. I guess I had an amazing tutor. He was an ex-googler so I guess he was amazing.
After designing my first-ever prototype, I started building the iOS app with Xcode, where I learned how to use the storyboard feature that allowed me to drag and drop various UI elements onto the app screen and then code the logic after. I got way too comfortable with dragging and dropping UI elements on the app screen as I was doing in Sketch. Except this was new. In Xcode, while using the storyboard feature, some UI elements simply snapped onto other UI elements. These were iOS design principles that were hardcoded into the software. These features helped me to understand how to design iOS apps better. So I went back to my prototype to tweak a few things in my Sketch prototype in relation to what I was learning from Apple’s Xcode. I was enjoying the learning process and was having a time of my life!
A few weeks later, I was done with the iOS app. As young as I was, I kept getting new app ideas every other week! So applying what I had learned from my previous app, I would start by designing a prototype. I sketched and designed in Sketch. Then I’d move to Xcode, open up the storyboard, and then move UI elements all over the place to the specifications of my prototype. I kept learning by watching Youtube videos every day till I got my UI just right.
Before completing a project, I would get another app idea and then I would design a prototype again. Then another idea leads to another prototype but without the building of the app itself this time. Soon, I would fall into what I will call the “idea → prototype” loop in 2018. Before I could realize it, I was approaching prototype number twenty without any real app.
During that period, I was working on my PicApp startup as the team’s sole graphic designer because of my UI skills. I basically combined shapes, texts and icons to create various flyers for social media marketing and all that jazz. PicApp failed eventually, sadly.
UI/UX Design was not a big deal in my country(Ghana) between 2017–2019. Within that period I kept getting simple graphic design gigs while searching for a job as a software developer. After all, I knew some HTML, CSS and Javascript as I was learning how to build my own portfolio site.
In 2019, I got a job as a software developer at Getinnotized. Later on, I worked on a project that required someone with design skills. I volunteered and to my surprise, my mentor told me how better I was than some UI designers he had hired in the past. I later worked on many more UI projects which I seemed to be doing great as compared to my coding tasks.
In July 2021, I was hearing a lot more about UX design. Apparently, it was more important than UI design. So for the rest of the year, I focused on learning as much as I could about UX Design and UI Design. I focused more on learning its principles and practising them. The rest is history.