Before the code, there was the design

I was passionate about design long before I started building JobTag.

In high school, I was designing websites and building animated projects with Macromedia Flash. Later Adobe Flash. Now a moment of silence. :)

At university, I was designing and building complex shopping cart websites for freelance clients. Somewhere between moving things around a screen and getting an actual checkout to work, I learned how much design matters. Websites, products, packaging. It shapes how people understand and experience what you’ve made.

Then I bought my first iPhone, a 3GS, and became fascinated by apps.

Getting an entire experience onto that little screen was something else. Every button, every transition, every detail needed thought. For me, making that journey smooth and clear was a much bigger challenge than laying out a web page.

So when I started JobTag, I started with the UI and UX. I wanted to see how the app would look and how people would move through it.

And no, I didn’t start with wireframes.

Sorry, wireframe fans. Grey boxes do absolutely nothing for me. I’d spend more time wanting to colour them in than thinking about the app.

Give me colours, typography, proper buttons, and screens that look like something I’d actually want to use. That’s how my brain works. I need to see the design to think through the experience.

That was the first thing I built for JobTag: the design.

Then came the small matter of learning how to make it work.