I am a creative thinker by nature, a fashion designer by trade. For four seasons, 12 deliveries each year I designed a new collection. Every collection is composed of colors, fabric, inspiration, trim, prints, styles... the combination of possibilities are endless! No two seasons ever look the same - a thousand different combinations make a thousand different creative solutions to the same problem. There is no right or wrong way to do it, there is only your sensibility leading the way.

With Covid came a halt to the fashion industry and a need to reinvent. Asking myself where there was growth and creative potential during a pandemic lead me to coding - maybe that could be my new medium for designing and creating. All the elements of the design life that I knew seemed there, albeit in different form: websites have color stories, they use proportion through layout, each one is different from the others, surely the person who “made” them must have been inspired by something! I could do it! Yes, I knew there would be nitty gritty but I thought, all of these websites look so pretty, I could design them!…

My newbie coder self is already laughing at my pre-coding self. Although I only have two weeks of the Flatiron School’s First Mile curriculum under my belt, already I’m blown away by the thought process that is required to write code. I thought I’d find the parallels in creative thinking and that if I was a good designer, I would also be a good coder. Instead, I’ve found that coding has turned my whole way of thinking upside down! Gone are the endless solutions to a design problem and all the different ways you could get there. Gone is the notion that you’re never right or wrong. So far I’ve found I am varying degrees of wrong until suddenly it’s right. Sometimes it feels magical, other times, like slow torture. There may be different ways of getting there, but in code, your program either works or it doesn’t and the next part of my coding journey will be wrapping my designer brain around the way the computer thinks.

Here’s to hoping I’ll crack the code and creative problem solve my way to bug free programs that run those pretty websites :)