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It helps a designer to be able to speak code with a developer in the production process. While we have more robust tools that allow a creator to be abstracted away from coding through drag and drop interfaces, a designer eventually reaches a point where he/she picks power and flexibility over convenience and abstraction. With the advent of python and other ‘pythonic’ languages like Swift, coding has become much simpler and more standardized. In most cases, a designer who can code will have greater value to a production flow than one who can not.

Consider the ARKit as an example, as a designer there is no drag and drop way for you to design an end to end AR experience. You will need to code enough to be able to import your 3D assets into Xcode and set it up so that you can test it on a real device.

Animations are highly desirable for any product that wants to grab attention. While it’s quicker to learn a drag and drop animation prototyping tool, it is a better idea to learn to prototype animations in code. This way the time that you spend prototyping animations helps production since you don’t need a developer to implement your animation from scratch.

Xcode

Xcode is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that you would use to write native code for iOS and other Apple platforms. With the newest version 9, Xcode now has features like Dynamic Type, Safe Area guides, and a much smoother experience when previewing your build on a simulator or a real Apple iPhone device.

That Implementation Feel

There really is no feeling like seeing your designs spring to life. Learning and trying to implement your own designs can be rewarding as well as very informative. Knowing how to implement your designs in code, to whatever extent, can also let you know what are the technical limitations you are working with. This will prevent you from spending copious amounts of time designing something that can not be implemented into the final product.

Storyboard & Prototyping

Xcode also lends itself well to the implementation of simple interactions. These can be used to set up hot-spots on the designs you import into Xcode, which then enable you to have a facade of an app that is interactive. This prototyping can be done in Storyboard, which is a great visual interface building tool for designers and developers alike. It is very visual and similar to the way most designers work using applications like Sketch.

Design Once For All Screen Sizes

Auto Layouts and Stack views are a blessing for designers and devs, these features allow you to set constraints on your UI objects in a way that they adapt to the screen size of the device. This ensures that you design and set constraints once and these features do the work based on the device screen size.

iPhone X

The Safe Area layout guides is a new feature that lets a designer know what areas to avoid for the UI objects. The notch and rounded corners are the areas that your UI elements should avoid to make sure they are not cropped out.

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Swift Playgrounds

Apple has provided a way for us to get started coding without needing to worry about project setup and file structure. You can practice here to experiment with the creation of UI elements through code and to prototype animations. Playgrounds does not allow for testing on a real device but the code that you write here can easily be transferred to a live project. This is where you want to get your hands dirty learning things like classes, functions etc.

Next: Design For The iPhone X Like A Boss

How to code for iOS as a designer: The why and the tools was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.