web designer

Class Friday, March 31, 2017

 Today’s goals:

  • Learn about pursuing web design (and related fields) in college and/or as a career
  • Prepare for our April 13th class speakers from a professional design firm

 Today’s featured site:

 Questions to explore

  • In groups of 2 at your tables, please find answers to the following questions:
    1. What is a web developer? What is a web designer? What is a graphic designer?
    2. What is a front end developer? What is a back end developer?
    3. What is a full stack developer?
    4. What is user design (or UX/UI or user experience design)?
    5. What could you study in college to prepare for one of these positions?
    6. What do web developers study in college? What about graphic designers?
    7. How else could you become a web designer or developer if you don’t do it in college?
  • For everyone: what do you prefer? Why? Who is potentially interested in studying these subject areas in college? What about design or development of games or apps?

 Stack Overflow 2017 Developer Survey

  • Stack Overflow is an online community of web developers who share code and help each other out by posting questions and answers. They do a developer survey every year and thousands of people from their community provide responses from all over the world.
  • Let’s find out where developers live, how they learned how to code/program, how much they make, how they like their jobs, etc. Survey results here.
  • Key things to look for:
    1. What percentage of developers are self-taught?
    2. What did developers study in college?
    3. How much do developers and designers get paid?
    4. What are the top programming languages?

 Professional Tips for You

  • Tips for creating a portfolio and a resume
  • Details on choosing a career path
  • Skills you’ve learned in this class that you can add to a resume or LinkedIn profile: WordPress, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and graphic design

 Prepare for Our Class Speakers

  • Cara and Dave from Jackrabbit Design, Thursday, April 13
  • To prepare: review the website and read Cara and Dave’s bios. Then, prepare questions.
  • Everyone should write down 3 good questions after reviewing the website and reading the bios. Save these questions somewhere- in Notepad on your computer, a desktop sticky note, a Google doc, wherever.
  • Website: https://www.jumpingjackrabbit.com/
  • About Cara
  • About Dave
  • For fun: design games (curated by Jackrabbit)! I got a perfect score on this one; can you??