Frontend Unicorn is almost here!
By: Michal Malewicz
Tags: Frontend Development, Developer, Startup, Frontend, Front End Development

While Designing User Interfaces is breaking new grounds of scope (500 pages) and popularity (thousands of sales) we’re not stopping. It’s currently used by both designers and large teams, and we’re happy to see copies in the biggest US Universities as well. The feedback so far has been amazing, and we love hearing how designers leveled-up with this book, got a promotion and a pay rise. Keep ’em coming!

We want to do the same for Developers!

The team has been hard at work on the Frontend Developer oriented book since mid-April 2020. The reason for this book, just as with our first one, is to improve communication between team members.

Then it grew to all the ways you can make yourself useful and awesome. That directly leads to earning more and being WAY more satisfied with what you do.

Have impact!

As a Unicorn Developer you’ll be an invaluable addition to any company. And with that — as always — come fame, money and success.

Albert — one of our co-authors talking on stage why it’s cool to be an unicorn developer.

A True Unicorn

That’s possible when you understand people around you better. But to understand them better you need to understand what they do. This is why we wanted to build a bridge between developers and designers, product owners, marketers and others.

Using that bridge you can be well on your way to becoming a true unicorn. That means you’ll be an invaluable addition to any company. And with that — as always — come fame, money and success.

Another Albert writing about the typical mistakes developers make. We’ve also hidden some easter eggs on the website.

Why?

The idea that’s behind this book has been circling in our heads for at least seven years now. HYPE4 started as a design-oriented studio initially, working with outside developers. This wasn’t an ideal scenario. The biggest problem we faced was the quality of execution.

In short: our designs were butchered by developers on implementation.

And they weren’t even that complex. Those external devs managed to do pretty much everything they could the wrong way. Bad alignment, random paddings and margins, random fonts etc.

In many cases we couldn’t even share a project we had worked on — we were too ashamed of how the “real” website looked like.

Szymon working on chapters on Time Management — super useful stuff.

Does it have to be this way?

No. Seven years ago we started hiring our own developers. Before giving them any actual coding work they were put through a super intensive design bootcamp internally. They did exercises to grasp our part of the work, while we were also learning from them.

That mutual understanding led to some amazing successes we had together (like making an app so popular that it crashed the servers of a huge corporations that ordered it — they simply weren’t ready for that much traffic).

But it doesn’t stop with design

As a unicorn developer you need to know how to learn in an efficient way. You need to be on top of the trends. Pick the right ones, skip the wrong ones. Explore new ideas and concepts. Communicate.

And also know how and why your work matters to the bigger picture. If you’re building a startup, everything counts. Little tweaks can hugely influence user adoption and understanding business and marketing side of things will help you spot them and be a hero!

Not all heroes wear capes. Some are unicorns!