How To Start a Career in UX Design
User experience designers were among the most in-demand professionals in 2020, according to a LinkedIn report, and the profession remains on the rise in 2021 as organizations continue their hiring sprees to support their digital transformations. But while the demand is high, the competition has also gotten tough—newcomers to UX design have to compete with thousands of recent graduates of design degrees and boot camps to land coveted roles, and it can be especially hard for those who are just starting out to get noticed when they lack industry experience.
Why UX design?
I kind of got lucky. At the time, there were no UX design degrees, so I studied media systems design when I was in Germany, which was sort of interdisciplinary and a mix of design and computer science and economics. It’s the perfect thing to study for people who can’t really decide what they want to do with their lives. But I very quickly figured out that I was just good at the design part. And then I just started growing that. And as I discovered that the user experience field was growing and that type of design was growing and that I had a knack for it, I just stuck with it.
1. Familiarize yourself with UI principles.
Before practicing design, the first thing you need to do is learn some design principles. From this, you’ll be able to enter the design world and start thinking “creatively”. You will learn the psychological aspects of design: why it can look good and why it can fail.
Here are some basic principles you should know about.
1. Color
Color vocabulary, fundamentals, and the psychology of colors.
Principles of design: Color
2. Balance
Symmetry and asymmetry.
Principles of design: Balance
3. Contrast
Using contrast to organize information, build hierarchy and create focus.
Principles of design: contrast
4. Typography
Choosing fonts and creating readable text on the web.
10 Principles Of Readability And Web Typography
5. Consistency
The most important principle, creating intuitive and usable designs starts here.
Design principle: Consistency
Here are some great do’s and don’ts to design a good UI.
2. Learn the creative UX process.
The next thing is to understand the creative process. UI/UX design is a process of specific phases that every creative person goes through.
Divided into four distinct phases — Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver — the Double Diamond is a simple visual map of the design process.
3. Develop your eye for design
Knowing design principles is great, but sometimes it’s not enough, you also have to train your eye to see good design and bad design and to identify strengths and weaknesses in designs.
Here are my favorite websites for inspiration:
- onepagelove.com One Page website designs for your inspiration.
- awwwards.com Awards website that promotes design talent.
- dribbble.com A community of designers sharing their work.
- pttrns.com A collection of mobile design patterns.
- uimovement.com The best UI design inspiration, every day.
4. Read design articles every day
To make ourselves get familiar with design, the best way is to read a few articles each day.
5. Design fake projects.
Make time to pick a website or app you already use and redesign it. It could be anything you think can be better. You can also design your own app idea. From this, you’ll build your design portfolio and you’ll practice design.
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