I'm making a huge gender-related assumption here, but I think you're making a good first guess at what she'll be interested in regarding front-end and design.

I'm making a huge gender-related assumption here, but I think you're making a good first guess at what she'll be interested in regarding front-end and design. People who are more social (and women tend to be more social) are going to enjoy the kind of programming that interacts with people more (front-end, design, html, css, etc). People who aren't very social and are more withdrawn will enjoy the problem-solving of back-end and middleware (java, python). There are tools to help you pick colors if you're not the designy-type (https://coolors.co/ https://coolors.co/ combined with MatrialCSS or Bootstrap). If you are the designy-type, these tools just add to your toolbelt. If you live outside of the US, you should look at Vue instead of React or Angular. Vue is far more popular outside of the states. The popularity of Angular and React is pushed by Google and Facebook more strongly in the US. Another way to tinker is to get a Raspberry Pi and try to think of something you want to do with it. Do you want to control some smart bulbs in your house or something? Make some kind of toy for your kids? Great, do it in Python! You have to have something you want to solve to give your wife the energy she'll need to see this through. If it's purely academic, she'll lose interest like most people.