Lecture 4

Front-End in Practice

From "a page that works" to "an interface that's designed."

Hour 1 — The front-end as a design material

  • Responsive design: one design, every screen (viewports, breakpoints, mobile-first)
  • Design systems in code: components, tokens, why engineers keep saying "reusable"
  • Frameworks in one slide each: what React/Next.js actually are and why AI tools default to them
  • Figma to code: what translates cleanly, what doesn't, and why "make it look like the mockup" fails
  • Accessibility as a design responsibility, not an engineering checkbox

Hour 2 — Studio

  • Exercise: Exercise - Figma to CodeExercise - Figma to Code
    Get an AI to build your design — then judge it

    Take a screen you have designed in Figma (from any past project) and use an AI tool to turn it into a working web page. Document faithfully where the...
    — take one of your own Figma designs and get an AI tool to build it; document where it diverged
  • Crit: compare generated results across tools (v0, Lovable, Claude, Figma Make)

Homework

  • Iterate your build until it matches your design intent. Keep a log of the prompts that worked.