Ten years of print, five of React

I spent ten years as a graphic designer before I wrote production code. People assume the transferable skill is "taste". It isn't.

What transfers

Systems thinking. A type scale, a grid and a colour system are a design system before anyone called it that. Naming things. Working to a spec someone else wrote.

What doesn't

Print is fixed and final. The web is fluid, interactive and never finished. Describe the habit that took longest to unlearn.

The part nobody warns you about

Reading someone else's code is a different skill from reading someone else's layout, and it took longer to learn than the syntax did.