I was definitely out of my depth with Codecademy's color design course, but I was happy to absorb what I can and move on to another topic of novelty: Codecademy's "Learn Navigation Design" course. Just as color could give subtle hints to the user on how to best interact with the site, so does applying good design to navigation elements. It's something that we would rarely consciously notice until we encounter a poorly designed page, which is of course how this course started: by showing us an intentionally badly designed page and go up from there.

I was surprised that the first topic was how to show links on a page. After all the link styling in previous CSS courses and speaking of the user agent (browser default) stylesheet as a source of problems, this course presents the other side of the story: Hang on, guys, there are good reason they're the way they are! And if we arbitrarily toss out all of those traits, site usability will suffer. Hover states are discussed here, and this time we're reminded of their absence on touchscreen devices. We also get a link to MDN on pseudo-classes, information missing from the color design course!

Moving on from links to buttons, it started with an explanation of skeuomorphism vs. flat design for user interactive elements like buttons. This course covers examples for both styles. I'm personally a fan of the flat school of design. If somebody wants to do skeuomorphism on a button, I demand that they look like keys on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

After buttons the course talked about secondary navigation in the form of breadcrumbs on the page, usually found at the top of a site just before the header block. I appreciate an overview of the concept, but some of the examples get into fancy CSS tricks. I don't think they'll be generally applicable to all sites and I'm wary they degrade a page's accessibility.

This navigation design course barely scratched the surface of User Experience (UX) design, but of course there's an entirely separate Codecademy course "Introduction to UI and UX Design". Looking over its syllabus, it doesn't feel like the material would be useful in my personal tinkering projects. There's also the fact that course was "Built in partnership with Figma" and the final section of the course is "Prototyping with Figma." Is this course just an extended ad for Figma? I don't know and at the moment I'm not terribly interested in finding out. At least Figma offers a free starter tier, if I decide to come back to this later.

Right now, I'm more curious about checking out Codecademy's "Skill Path" offerings.