A little while ago, I had one of these moments. You know, these situations when you somehow stumble upon new people online and all of a sudden you’re unexpectedly hyped, because they’re so cool and passionate?
I had these moments a couple of times throughout my life. Some of them inspired me to do a cool new project and learn something new, some even had a big enough influence to trigger big career changes and some just left me motivated to try and improve a skill I thought I couldn’t ever develop.
The most recent of these moments was one of the latter, when my husband, a very passionate Developer and Statamic Lover, showed me some of Jack McDade’s Website Projects and Designs. I was hooked in an instant. Not only because all of these Websites were literally amazing, fun, creative and bursting with love and little details, but also because Jack itself just seemed like.. I don’t know, a very normal, down-to-earth guy? I like that in people who are legit superstars in their field (at least as far as I’m concerned).
So, obviously I booked the Radical Design Course once it came out.
And I design-coursed the hell out of my weeknights and weekends. But did it work, am I a designer now?
What the course is all about: Structure & Content
When I first bought the course, I honestly didn’t one hundred percent know what to expect. I did online courses on various topics before, but I’m no design girly, so all I knew is “there are some rules and you need to stick to them to make a good design”. For reference, I will share the very first website I designed here, so you get an impression of how bad of a designer I was (it was just a ready-to-use WordPress Theme, but I somehow managed to make it worse).
So, naive as I am, I went in, basically expecting to just learn these rules and then magically being able to do like actually good designs.
Boy, was i wrong.
What the course material contains
Before getting into the content, I just quickly want to touch base on what the course material contains and how it’s structured:
In the ‘basic’ version, you get close to 7 ½ hours of videos, packed with inspiration and information. If you want to read further on the topics covered, you can dive into the lesson notes and find some more context. On top of that, you get a full library of useful stuff, like links to free and paid image libraries, useful tools, book recommendations and even discount codes for some of the cool things that might be helpful for your first designer steps. You don’t need to buy anything, though.
You also get Jack’s infamous icon set. I love it, though I haven’t had the chance to include the icons in my own designs. But you’ll know how they look when you see them.
One other thing I haven’t used by now is the access to the radical design course discord server. I haven’t used it, because.. Well, I’m no design girl. But my husband is fairly active on the Statamic Discord and he loves it, so I’d assume the radical design one might be also worth checking out.
What I did use are the daily design prompts. Jack believes in ‘practice makes perfect’, so he sends you a tiny daily fun task you can accomplish in very little time.
Here’s the first of my daily design prompts:
I was actually quite proud of that one when I first made it. By now, not so much. So I guess the daily design prompts are also a way to track your own progress, which is pretty cool. Who doesn’t want to cringe on their past selves from time to time.
All of the course content (besides the discord, of course) takes place in one dashboard which you’ll get access to immediately after your purchase. I won’t be talking about the dashboard itself, mostly because I don’t want to spoil the easter eggs and surprises for you, but it’s definitely worth spending some time there, clicking around, cranking up the volume of your laptop speakers and just enjoy the experience.
I did buy the basic version of the course for $349. There is a VIP experience for $850 that actually includes a 1:1-Call with Jack and two video feedbacks on one of your designs. Honestly, I didn’t go for the VIP package because I just didn’t expect to even ever finish a design, but in retrospect, it would probably be worth it.
So Jack, if you happen to read this one day. This Blog Page is my radical design course project and I’d love to know what I could do to improve it.
What you learn: Course Content
I basically already said it: The content might not be what you expect from a design course.
This is, because Jack doesn’t actually teach you how to stick to the rules and do what everyone else does and create the quadzillionth website with the same grid and the same boxes and the same boring look and feel. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that. Trends are trendy because a lot of people like the same thing. But trends are also very momentary, so..
Jack does teach you how to break the rules and steer away from trends and hype, so you can find your own style and create designs that are just more “you”.
And that very one-of-a-kind-approach shows in the course content. There is very little about actual rules, but a lot about design process, gathering inspiration, stopping to gather inspiration, learn to appreciate the little details, posing easter eggs… You get the drill. Of course, you still learn the rules, but you actually don’t even quite notice because they are just a necessity, not the center of attention.
If you’re a complete design noob, though, don’t worry: You’ll also get a lot of hidden design theory and tool knowledge, so you will be able to do an at-least-okay-ish design in the end.
This seems pretty unconventional, but.. Does it work?
Well… I think I am no designer.
But even though webdesign certainly won’t be part of my job in the future, I can say, it was quite an experience. You must know, I’m incredibly bad at being really bad at things. And I’m pretty bad at design, really.
It’s safe to say the daily design prompts were the greatest fun. My favorite daily design project was “just play around with an existing design” where I mixed up the ‘Lover’-Cover with the TTPD Style. I loved that so much and I still really like the outcome, but I’m not sure if I can show you due to Copyright-Stuff, really don’t want to be sued by Taylor Swift.
So, instead, I’ll show you my second favorite daily design prompt project:
I was only supposed to do the header section, but I actually had so much fun that I did the whole thing including the copy.
So, yes, this thing was fun. Until it wasn’t. When I first started designing the miralytics Blog, self-induced pressure and the impatience about sucking pretty hard at stuff got the best out of me and after I yanked out a pretty bad design, I started crying.
That sucked. (Both, the crying and the design.)
It is just exactly as Jack teaches, though: You have to get the bad shit on paper first. So after a teeny tiny crying session, I went back to the board and did the second draft of this design. Which I absolutely loved.
This might look familiar. Or maybe not. Honestly I’m writing this blogpost in the very middle of another “on the verge of madness”-moment and the final blog design is not done yet.
I’m deciding on font and copy, because I think the current draft is just a tad too personal. Also, I haven’t decided yet if miralytics blog and miralytics & friends agency should be merged or separated. Because, honestly, having a dinosaur on a skateboard on the front page might not be the professional look you’d normally go for with a business website.
You see, designing is not only about design and design rules.
Sometimes, it’s also about design rules, though. Both parts of the design process are driving me crazy at the moment, please just look at all the font madness. It’s JUST LETTERS ffs.
However, even though it’s crazy and a very wild rollercoaster of emotions, it’s amazing to see the progress and bring your very own ideas to life. And as long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s also great fun.
Conclusion: Don’t walk, run, and buy this course.
Disclaimer: I obviously didn’t get paid for that and I also paid for the course myself. Jack doesn’t even know who I am.
If you don’t want your next website to be boring, if you want to design your own T-Shirts or tote bags, if you just want to get creative with whatever, if you want to click around in a very cool and detailed membership-area on a page that’s been designed by a very creative guy or if you just need a comfying voice for a sleepcast: This course is for you.
I would have never guessed that I actually work through this course and even design something, let alone REALLY take a website with my own design live and loving it. But yet, here we are.
So, obviously I 100% recommend the course.
The only thing I’d wished for was a little more information on the very basic rules, especially on line heights, font readability and stuff like that. My husband showed me a pretty good blog for that, though. Linking it here.
Edit just as i’m finally publishing this: Don’t forget you actually need to code that whole thing.
So, hi! Here I am, a couple of weeks after initially writing this post. I gotta say: I loved the design I did here. And honestly, I still do. But there’s one thing I don’t love: Development.
I am not a developer, but I oftentimes have virtually zero sense of limitation in my mind. I mean, there are so many cool websites out there, why shouldn’t I be able to build mine? Yea well. The answer is „because you can’t fucking code“.
So in the end, I had to admit that.. If you can’t code, it’s not that easy to fulfill the dream of a cute nice sparkly flashy statamic website, at least if you don’t have the budget to afford an actual statamic developer for that project (it’s just a blog, after all).
Which means, I had to rework the whole design and go for something completely different. Something way more manageable, compared to my original design. Which sucks, but might be part of the process. And I kind of like this design, too. So it’s okay.
But keep in mind: Normally, you want to bring your design to life. And coding is something you actually don’t just know by accident without ever learning it.
