#123 How to Become a Pro Designer in 2024 with Gary Simon [DesignCourse Founder]

The freeCodeCamp Podcast

Quincy Larson

Education, Technology

5.0 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2024

⏱️ 118 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Gary Simon, a developer and designer who started DesignCourse.com and has published several courses on freeCodeCamp.org over the years.

We talk about:
- Growing up in rural Ohio, marrying young, and staying out there despite his success as a developer and entrepreneur.
- Early client work, and how he designed thousands of logos for clients before becoming an all-out web developer.
- Using his skills to help his wife start her own lactation consultant business online
- Gary's guitar shredding chops.

I recorded this podcast live and I haven't edited it at all. I want to capture the feel of a real live conversation, with all the human quirks that entails.

Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1995s Nintendo game.

Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.

Also, I want to thank the 9,331 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

Links we talk about during the interview:

- Gary's Learn UI Fundamentals course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-ui-design-fundamentals-with-this-free-one-hour-course/

- Gary's freeCodeCamp live stream series: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/design-course/

- Gary's tool for memorizing the Guitar fretboard and it's 49 notes: https://fretastic.com/

- Gary's Retrowave Guitar music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDc2OvReYh0

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the Free Coat Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of
0:24.9	Freecodecamp.org. Each week, we're talking with developers, founders, and ambitious people
0:30.6	getting into tech. This week, I'm joined by Gary Simon, founder of designcourse.com, designer, extraordinaire, guitar, virtuoso,
0:42.6	and just amazing all-around expert on freelancing, on web design, on using contemporary tools,
0:53.9	just getting things done.
0:55.8	And he's got like more than a million YouTube subscribers on his channel.
0:59.8	He's been at this for a very long time and he's carved a path for himself.
1:04.6	And I think there's a great deal we can learn from him.
1:06.1	Gary, welcome.
1:07.7	Thanks for that awesome intro.
1:10.3	Yeah.
1:12.1	We're so thrilled to have you here, man.
1:19.7	I'm a long-term, like, long-time admirer of the work you do, the production of the videos, the level of insight.
1:28.2	Just, you know, how it's great watching you do like a tear down of a website and like look at like the different design decisions that were made. Yeah, thanks. No. And the feeling is mutual, of course. I mean, nine million
1:33.0	subscribers on YouTube. I mean, you can't be at that. So yeah, I'm very excited for this,
1:38.2	to have this conversation. Yeah. Well, I want to start off by just talking like a lot of people
1:42.8	have heard the term web design. It used to be the main term that people talked about in terms of getting things on the web.
1:49.3	Now you heard the term web development.
1:51.0	But web design and web development are kind of two distinct disciplines.
1:55.6	Right.
1:55.8	You know, web design still exists.
1:57.5	It's completely different set of skills, right?
	...

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