Update: The next Design for Developers workshop is being held February 21-23 at our Boston office.

In the past six months, we’ve hired three new faces to our design team: Kyle, Phil, and myself. Along with perennial favorites Kevin and Fred, we now have an excellent team of five designers. We want thoughtbot to be synonymous with not only great Rails code, but great design. With this in mind, we’ve been holding internal workshops over the past few months that present the fundamentals of visual design to our developers. Our goal is to make everyone more knowledgeable and attentive to the design of the projects we work on as a company.

We’re now ready to start offering these workshops to the public. Starting Monday, December 6th, we’ll be holding the first installment of a 3-day, evening workshop we’re calling Design for Developers. This workshop is aimed at developers who want to better understand the language and practice of visual design, both to improve their own design skills and better understand the design process for the projects they work with on a day-to-day basis.

The workshop will begin by providing an overview of the basic concepts that underlie all visual design. From there, we’ll move to topics that are of special importance for visual design on the web: grid systems, typography, color, along with the latest and greatest tricks using HTML5 and CSS3. We’ll mix short lectures with extended period of hands-on practice on real-world problems. We’ll have in-workshop critiques of the work students produce, so they can get feedback right away on what they’ve done.

We won’t be using any design software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator. The focus will be on pencil and paper sketching and then implementation in the browser. The only pre-requisite for the course will be a solid working knowledge of HTML and CSS.

To learn more and sign up, visit our workshop page. If you have any questions about the course, feel free to send us an email with your thoughts. We’re very excited about these workshops and think they’ll provide a lot of value to developers who want to become better designers.