Welcome to my corner of the world wide web.
Hi, friends. My name is Artem, and I’m here because I’m itching to share with you some of the more interesting, useful, and occasionally downright exciting things I’ve learned and created in the world of product design.
My goal is to share my knowledge with you — fellow designers — in the hopes of motivating and inspiring you to see what coding can do for your design skills (and maybe even your career!). I’ve learned so many great things from other people who have taken the time to share, show, and teach so I’d like to do the same and hopefully enrich (or may I dare say, change?) your life.
About me.
I’m a senior product designer at Hearst, and I live in Denver, Colorado with my partner and our dog Lola, who is a devout worshiper in the cult of Ball. 🎾
I’ve always loved building things.
As a kid, I loved to tinker with WordPress (mainly as a means to host my now-defunct music blog) and those fun MySpace HTML overrides that allowed you to make a totally custom-looking page. Ah, when things could be "solved" with a plugin 😜
These days, I’m constantly trying to improve on my skill as a designer, but also as a developer.
Now, I would never call myself a dev — what I am is a designer who knows how to and loves to code. My main goal has always been to have as tight-knit a relationship with the development team as possible. It makes everyone's lives easier when everyone in an organization can understand and engage on the same level.
Once I started to see the kinds of things developers were able to create, it really encouraged me to start asking loads of questions and digging into things on my own, without being intimidated by the complexity of it all.
What really helped me build confidence and get into the world of front-end coding was my current job at Hearst.
My introduction to coding, beyond Wordpress
Here at Hearst, our product design team is responsible not only for taking on the role of designer (wire-framing, prototyping, user testing, et cetera), but we’re also encouraged to reclaim our projects from the dev team once the main functionality is in place. We write our own CSS/SCSS, and we’re all experienced with Github and terminal commands.
Getting to work out the new custom homepage system across all our brands using css grid as the core layout was definitely a treat.
I’ve always wanted to try and do some more complex things on my own, and with the skills I learned at Hearst, I’ve been able to dive into the world of templating (twig, pug) as well as the foundational basics (npm, node, markdown, async, package.json, yarn, gulp, etc).
In the past year or so I’ve started to dive more into JavaScript as well, and I really fell in love with the entire Gatsby ecosystem.
Playing around with Gatsby has helped strengthen my understanding of JavaScript tenfold — this approach was much more effective than my previous attempts at reading through some books and doing some basic exercises. I know for some folks this may not be the best way to learn, and many may say this is the wrong approach, but it’s always been a great way for me to learn. 🤷♀️
What's next?.
After a lot of tinkering around with headless CMS options while looking for a way to create and organize content, I settled on Sanity. There are so many great posts on Sanity and I’ll surly be diving a bit more into that in a later post. Sanity does have an amazing community on Slack and a very generous free tier for those looking to explore.
As for my goal — to share with you the things I’ve learned, find interesting, and have been helpful for me — I promise to try my best to be consistent in my writing/posting. I’m still not entirely sure the direction this will take — maybe I’ll work on my portfolio here and document my efforts and workflows or share tips, tricks, and ideas as I go along. We shall see!
I do want to point out that another aspect of this blog journey is really just to help myself to become a better writer in general. I’ve always wanted to try something like this, and for some reason have always just been ... hesitant. Not sure if that has to do with a lack of skill, or just plain old-fashioned fear. Either way, I’m doing it now, and I’m grateful you’re along for the ride!
That’s all for now, folks — but stay tuned for more goodies to come. ✌️
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