Hey all,

I've been studying programming for about 10 months now, starting to get the hang of OoP, algorithms, data structures, etc. And I'm really interested in working on some personal projects in addition to my academic studies. I've come up with a handful of ideas and even got some of them fairly well along, however, I find what happens is I have some semi-formed idea of how I'd like the program to function, and I eagerly start writing code to make that happen, before I either realize some issue with how it's arranged or come up with better ideas of how I'd like it to behave. Additionally, I'm pretty much only working with terminal / command line applications now (plus some discord bots and a little web app that doesn't do anything yet), but I'd like to start incorporating graphical interfaces, and with that comes even more consideration of exactly how you'd like things to look and to flow.

So all that being said, the big thing I wanted to ask is what tools people use for the design phase of developing applications. I would think typically just writing code is probably not the best first step in design. Of course there are flowcharts, and I like working with pencil and paper, but are there any applications that you enjoy for app design, or which are industry standards? Or in the case of a web app, for instance, is the design prototype just what the developer creates, and adjusts on the go? Is a mobile app designed in Android-Studio, or should it be "storyboarded" elsewhere prior to the actual implementation?

Secondly, I guess this leads into the broader question of how one studies and learns design. Is this basically what UI/UX is about? Any particular resources or perhaps courses that people might recommend for studying application design / ui / ux?

Thanks in advance, I know my post is a little wordy, which is a something of a bad(?) habit of mine, but I'm really hopeful that some of the folks here might be able to make some good suggestions for me to follow.