How I learned to design at 12 with no instruction

Struggling with how to gain skills in a complicated subject because you want to be self-sufficient? I didn’t need formal training. I only asked myself one question, What if?

When I was a newbie in web design and web development, there was no weight on my shoulders. I got into because I thought it was an entertaining way for me to kill time as a very young student.

Instead of having a syllabus in front of me, I had a group of websites that looked interesting and I wanted to do something similar. I started my design career with a “what-if” mindset. What if I could design a header, what if I could create a cursor with butterflies trailing after it, what if I could add a chat widget to my sidebar. You know, the basic needs of a 2008 website on Wix. ;)

Wordpress caught my attention around 2010 and I hopped on the bandwagon with my friends in web design. My process did not change. I still wasn’t in a formal classroom, but here I was learning about PHP and SQL databases because I needed comments and automatic archiving — the essentials for a new website that could operate itself by 2008 standards.

By the time I was 17, I had begun to build my own web design business and taking in real-world clients. Web Design was not my path through college, which became Mechanical Engineering, but it did pay for my first year in the dorms.

My keys to gaining skills under this approach are the following:

• Find #goals to inspire you instead of making a list of things you must learn from a website or syllabus This way you know those goals are possible but you only learn what you need to and keep you learning at pace.
• Break up your goals into little chunks If you can’t articulate the question you are trying to solve (i.e., make a website header play a video) then you need to look for the smaller parts (i.e., make a header)
• Learn how to read Stack Overflow or similar message boards The answers to your questions are somewhere on the internet. But you have to get good at reading documentation, even if it wasn’t written for the explicit purpose of documentation. With coding projects the majority of your clues are going to be contained on message boards, with someone asking the question you have, sometimes years previous, but on your same path.
• Work with others in a similar learning journey If you don’t have the benefit of an experienced mentor, or you keep getting told to pay money for an expensive course, try group learning. I did this and it was a wonderful experience on my way up. I learned with students who were the same age as me and lived all over the world. It taught me the benefit of collaboration that works well.

PC: Jonni Armani