A new challenge

When I was first approached by Starweaver to do this course, I did some research on the tool and quickly realized it would be hard to fill an entire course (14 videos) just on the AI features of Motiff. Because Motiff's interface is so much like Figma, an experienced designer can figure out these features simply by experimenting and then also finding out that the basic features aren't as advanced as Figma.

This is why I suggested we make it a course for beginning UI designers, people making a switch from Sketch and XD but have never used Figma, and design students who would be interested in Motiff's easy (and currently quite budget friendly) tool.

My goal in designing the course

• Teach the basics of the tool, which is essentially Figma 1.0 with AI
• Caution new designers from getting ahead of themselves in the design process with all these features
• Note that AI is for cutting down on repetitive tasks, not for doing the design work for you
• Teach good practices for designing things in the right order
• Emphasize Motiff's best AI features for creating and maintaining a design system

Designing the course, writing the scripts, designing the decks and sample files was much more time consuming than I expected. The sample files alone took about 12 hours. The fact that this tool is still so new and has some bugs to work out, also had me on an email thread with one of their devs, to make sure I'm only demonstrating features that are working great now, so there are no surprises when it's time to record.

Next steps

Now that I've opened this Pandora's box and learned about course creation, I'm going to go ahead and create some how-to's on youtube. My channel is called Visual Design Essentials and there is literally no content there yet as of this writing. My goal is to create some short videos, 7-12 minutes to support this Coursera course and any future ones I may be involved with. One of my pet peeves with consuming youtube videos has always been all the preliminary chitchat at the beginning. After so many times yelling "Omg cut to the chase" at my screen I almost named my channel "omg cut to the chase design training"

I'll also be blogging here and creating more content for teaching and sharing on LinkedIn.

‍