Being a designer is being a good communicator first. The rest is applying the gestalt. But it starts with putting yourself in the shoes of the audience and telling a story (visually).
This is why, no matter how much technology changes, from Paint shop pro, to Photoshop, to Sketch, to Figma, etc. Nothing scares a designer, because designing is a timeless skills with very few variants over time (gradients / skeuomorphic design / flat / combination ...) It's like how would you like your water, with a slice of lemon or ice?
Visual hierarchy, grouping, aligning on grids, contrasts, use of colours and tones, that's the part that's easily learnt. The why is where design is interesting.
You seem like you know a thing or two about design (I took a month UX design course where I came to the same conclusion). How would you go about learning design?
I ask this because learning how to code on your own seems -- in a way -- much easier. Just go on the internet, look up the necessary resources et voila, done. But that's not the case with design. So how could one self learn design?
You learn design by doing, being criticised and then thinking about it. The learning pace will be very variable depending on your background and time investment.
Learning design seems easy because the barriers to entry are almost unexistent: no matter how bad it is, most designs will somehow do the job. By the other hand, to get design skills that can land you a job might not be an easy task.
The scale changes the best way to approach design. It matters if it's small scale (web/graphic/product), medium scale (architecture) or large scale (urban) but - with different weights - usability, proportions, trends, psychology/sociology and economics are always relevant. Anyway a good designer will adapt to a different scale within a short time: design is design.
There are tons of articles and books on design. In the same way you build your toolbox with programming with algorithms, concepts design patterns, best practices, you need to build one for design. Ergonomics, color theory, typography, ergonomics, Fitt's law etc etc. Then work on applying them until you develop and intuition for what's the best solution to a problem.
With design, maybe more so than with code, it's a lot about developing good taste. Code can be empirically worse or better but design is a lot of having a point of view and working within self imposed constraints.
One book I'd really recommend is "The inmates are running the asylum" by Alan Cooper. It's more about shifting how to think about design rather specifics, but it's one of those books that puts a voice in your head that will help guide a lot of decisions.
Design is easy... keep it simple... place stuff where it always is.. use modern fonts(one for headers text and other for paragraphs).. proper spacing ... .. color contrasting colors and one color that is opposite of all others used to highlight x. Also find another designers work you love and use it as a template/for inspiration.
I love designing and especially in code. I don’t understand what’s the point of wireframe designers yet I have been rejected by numerous interviews/jobs for being a design coder vs. a wireframe Designer.
Most of the time easy thing is not that easy. It needs proper understanding on user, context, demography etc. Most of the code generating tools creates junk and useless code with random ids which are hard for developers to integrate with logic, he has to change it to make it more semantic. Hence,companies look for specific people when they have a team of html designers separately.
It’s faster to draw a box then to code one. When still getting buy in from the team and testing your ideas with users, the ability to iterate quickly counts
Try Framer [1]. You're still designing in code, but using a tool that "wireframe" designers can more easily understand and appreciate. Might help with the interviews. :)
This is why, no matter how much technology changes, from Paint shop pro, to Photoshop, to Sketch, to Figma, etc. Nothing scares a designer, because designing is a timeless skills with very few variants over time (gradients / skeuomorphic design / flat / combination ...) It's like how would you like your water, with a slice of lemon or ice?
Visual hierarchy, grouping, aligning on grids, contrasts, use of colours and tones, that's the part that's easily learnt. The why is where design is interesting.