Final project, first year. Integration 1 was the moment where all three pillars of Devine (experience design, visual design, and development) had to come together in one project, from scratch, in one month.

The stack: HTML and CSS, not responsive, some vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no libraries. Now that sounds manageable but at the time it absolutely was not. You're designing something and building it simultaneously, making decisions in both worlds, and they don't always agree.

What I remember most is that this was the first time a project felt complete in that way, design and code as one thing rather than two separate steps done in sequence. It wasn't perfect. Definitely not responsive. Definitely some CSS choices I wouldn't make now. But for end of first year it was a real thing.

What I learned

Building something you designed yourself is a completely different experience from implementing specs. The decisions compound: a design choice creates a development constraint, a development constraint changes the design. Working through that loop from both sides, even at this level, is something you have to do once before it starts to make sense. This was that first time.