UX design mentorship is a path that not everyone wants to select. When you’re experienced enough, you have huge knowledge.

It’s a perfect chance to help other people who are just starting their design journey.

I was a junior once as well and remember long sleepless nights. My knowledge and skills weren’t enough to land a job, my portfolio wasn’t ready…

To get my first job and understand what improvements I need, I spent long hours searching and analyzing.

I was looking for support, but unfortunately, mentorship wasn’t available 8 years ago for free.

This is why all I could do was search, read, and watch the content from other professionals to learn.

Today I am a Lead UX/UI designer and founder of UX Designers Club. This is my own community where I help designers learn about UX and UI design.

Nevertheless, I own a small circle of dedicated designers, I also decided to become a mentor to find more people who are just starting out.

Among all UX design mentorship platforms, I selected ADP List. This is where my UX design mentorship started.

Professional Growth

When you join ADP List as a mentor, you go through the review process. It’s really cool to know that UX design mentorship is not for everyone there, but only for people with relevant experience and knowledge.

Once I was approved and my public ADP List profile was online, I started to mentor designers immediately. By the way, ADP List is a free mentorship platform.

When I started to connect with my first mentees, I realized that most of the questions are more or less the same. People were asking for a portfolio or CV review, and they wanted to check their case studies.

But sometimes I have really hard questions. For example, one of my mentees asked about long-term career planning specifically for her needs.

UX design mentorship became a challenge for me. I started to read more about different design areas to fill some gaps.

It doesn’t mean I couldn’t answer some questions, but I believed that I need to improve some parts of my knowledge to provide even more constructive advice.

After all, people rely on my suggestions to plan their careers.

I started to read more design articles, watch design YouTube channels, and connect with senior designers.

UX design mentorship made me learn more and more again and again.

I would say that becoming a UX design mentor was a trigger for my professional growth.

As you know, technology is an industry where everything changes fast, so my advice needs to be up-to-date.

You might be wondering how UX design mentorship could improve you as a designer.

Well, this is simple. When you start to learn more as a mentor, you start to improve your own design skills.

For example, I had general advice on how to plan someone’s design career for 5 years.

But what if my mentee wants to stick to the educational industry? It means that the long-term career roadmap would look differently according to her own goals.

This is just one small example of when small details need to be counted for more accurate solutions.

After all, being a mentor is a responsibility that you need to be careful with and provide constructive solutions only.

Personal Brand

Another amazing thing that happened to me once I became a mentor was my personal brand.

Working as a designer for over 8 years, I never thought about personal brand.

I heard about this term but was never curious to learn more about it.

This was until I became a lead designer and started to do UX design mentorship.

There is much advice on how to become a UX designer, how to build a CV, portfolio, case studies…

But unfortunately, no one speaks about the personal brand of a UX/UI designer. Why?

Is it a secret?

I want to reveal the benefits of a personal brand and how to build it.

Think about your 9 to 5 job. It's cool if you have it. You earn enough money for yourself and your family, but you rely on the company you work at. Imagine the next situation. You’re fired. Yes, you’re fired right from this day.

What would you do?

You’ll start to search for a new job. Ok, but how can you stand out from other designers? What is so special about you?

This is where the personal brand comes into the game.

Your personal brand is your individuality. This is not only your experience but your unique achievements.

UX design mentorship is your chance to get one type of achievement for your personal brand.

You can add to your CV that you’re a mentor or design influencer. You can add volunteer experience as well if you choose the ADP List platform as your major tool.

When you have a UX design mentorship experience, you can stand out from the crowd. Your name will be associated with teaching others, but not a designer only.

This is your chance to go beyond the standard level of most designers.

Your personal brand needs to start with something. Apart from design contests, hackathons, and other achievements, you can consider UX design mentorship.

This is a very interesting path that opens many doors and opportunities for you.

Products and Communication

If you’re interested in helping other people, this is great.

But there is another hidden benefit behind UX design mentorship. It’s your chance to build a community, communicate with your members, and learn about their needs.

Why do you need to do these things?

It’s your chance to start a business! Seriously, imagine being free from your 9–5 job. You can start your own thing and rely on yourself only. Isn’t this amazing?

But in order to start your business, you need to build a dedicated circle of your readers, subscribers, or followers. You need to gain trust as a specialist and UX design mentorship is perfect to do so.

Today, I have mentored 50+ people from 17 countries with 2000+ overall mentorship minutes.

Do you know what it gave me? I know about people’s pain points, so I can provide valuable products or services for them.

During my career, I was always wondering about one thing. How influencers sell their products. I was looking for a magic stick that could help make sales.

The magic stick doesn’t exist. Gaining trust from people is your only tool.

You need to show your expertise, so people will believe in your talent. Try to communicate with people as much as you can.

Once they trust you enough you can start selling your products.

But the most important part of your business is communication. You need to learn from your audience first.

Once you have enough data, start creating products. Don’t create products first and then sell them. It’s a wrong strategy.

UX design mentorship is a perfect chance to know everything about your target audience. Talk to people and ask questions.

Final Thoughts

UX design mentorship is something that not many designers are considering. Especially for free.

It is worth spending your free time helping others. There are multiple things you can get from it.

First, you will support starting designers. This is already a great thing.

Second, you’ll create more opportunities for yourself as a designer. Your UX design mentorship increases your personal brand and the surrounding opportunities.

Third, being a mentor gives you a chance to build your own thing. You can start a business, become a design influencer, and do even more non-standard activities.

So what are you waiting for? Start mentoring today and see the amazing things that will happen to you.

UX and UI design skills can be learned and improved through practice, but it’s important to know what skills. Your skills are essential if you want to have a long UX design career.

We are living in a world that interacts with technology every day. Technology changes all the time. This means that there is a high demand for UX/UI designers.

But to stay in the industry and be up-to-date, you need to have relevant skills and knowledge.

You need to understand what skills are vital for your UX design career, and which aren’t. After all, it’s impossible to learn all UX or UI skills, and you need to have a solid plan on what to learn next.

If you are aiming to boost your UX design career, here is a list of skills that will help you to grow. Check and see what is the next skill you want to start learning today.

Communication

Every design project starts with finding a user problem. You can’t create a product because you want it. You can’t make a product that doesn’t resolve any pain points.

UX/UI designers create products to help people with concrete problems.

You’re responsible for solutions for your users, not vice versa.

Our first task is to identify the issue. Everything starts with a conversation with your target audience. It’s a perfect time for communication skills to boost your research stage.

At the beginning of my UX design career, I was shy to communicate with people. I didn’t want to talk to them and learn about their problems.

I was waiting for the ready results from researchers or clients. My biggest wish was to fully concentrate on the project only. I felt that I wanted to be a solo designer and I don’t want to talk to anyone.

My mistake early in my career was huge.

When you communicate with people, you can ask what they like and dislike about the products they use. You can ask for any details during your 1–1 very powerful interview.

Even if you don’t talk to people, but create surveys, you are responsible for the questions in the survey.

It’s your chance to ask and learn any data during any type of communication with people.

Communication skill isn’t technical, but are something that you can use in the research stage. Let’s call communication a soft skill. If you conduct user interviews or work with surveys, it’s important to improve your communication skills.

Having a high level of communication with your target audience is a base for the whole design work.

Analysis

Once you’re done with your research, you get the data. You get a lot of data in most situations.

When I do any type of research and talk to people, I get many suggestions and ideas. There may be only 5 questions in my survey. However, with 15 participants, they might propose 20, 30, or more improvements for the same question.

The next problem arises. How do you structure the information you’ve received? It is something that I faced during my whole UX design career.

Once you have such huge feedback, your immediate wish would be to improve everything and provide a solution to every pain point you’ve heard.

While it’s good that you’re creative and can brainstorm immediately, it’s the wrong strategy for product creation.

You need to focus on what problems are the most important to users and which are additional ones. This is where analysis skills will be needed. Learn how to work with priorities.

For example, users need to create a booking functionality, but you’re concentrated on small features, like dropdowns.

Understanding what to do in the first queue helps you to deliver proper expectations for users.

When you deliver a value, it’s important to give from the most important areas to the lower ones. This is how your users will be satisfied with your products and would want to use them more.

Illustrations

Unlike traditional art, UX/UI designers are not very creative. During our UX design career, we create products with those components and solutions that were already created.

The only creative part of our job is the visual side of the product, which is the UI.

When we talk about UI, most people think that we apply colors and include some branding only. But you can go beyond these limits by using something unique, for example, illustrations.

If you want to make your UI solutions unique, you can consider illustrations.

There are many ways to use this skill. For example, you can draw individual icons for your clickable elements. Or you have broader artistic skills and can draw characters and scenes. Think about it and feel if it’s something that interests you.

If you check some inspiration on Behance, there are many examples of web and app products that are fully illustrative.

If you’re not ready for such impressive design elements, consider smaller ones. For example, you can design infographics.

When you have a lot of text, it makes sense to transform it into a storytelling layout with illustrative elements.

This is a huge benefit for your UX design career. Being able to create unique solutions can help you increase your paycheck because of your individuality and the skills you have.

Animation

When we talk about products, do we mean the images as our end products? Yes, you can create prototypes, but these are static images with some clickable functionality for the preview.

How do you make your designs more engaged?

There is a way to do so. Learn animation and micro interaction skills.

When you open a website and immediately see some actions with elements or background, isn’t it amazing?

Yes, it is. And this is why you can consider learning those things to make your design solutions even better.

I love design contests, and I am participating in them now. What I love about design contest platforms is the ability to see the very impressive works of other designers.

Design contests can benefit your UX design career.

For example, Awwwards is one of the most popular contest platforms. Every day you can see incredible solutions there.

Designers do their best to impress judges with their parallax effects, scenes, typography, and other methods. But animation with micro-interactions is tool #1 for them.

So, if “live” products are something you consider advancing your career, the animation is a great choice for it.

Voice Interface

I am a big fan of everything innovative that happens today. It’s already enough to advance your UX design career. I’ve already mentioned so many cool things to you, but there is something more.

Have you heard about the voice interface? I think you have.

So what is the voice interface? To explain voice interfaces in simple words, this is a product that makes some actions with your voice command.

It reminds me of Google Assistant or similar products.

When you want some action to begin, you will say a keyword, and the process will start immediately.

Voice interfaces were created to help people with some kind of limitation, but quickly gained popularity in product design.

People love to save time, so it’s faster to say words instead of typing them.

It’s always cool to interact with products in new ways, so people love to try such things.

When you think about innovation and leveling up your skills, voice interface is something you can add to your skill set.

Along with animation and interactive elements, the voice interface can be incredibly impressive for people.

Typography

What type of web and app can exist without good typography? The right answer is none.

Content is a factor that can change product screens or sections I work with.

Depending on the amount of text and paragraphs, I decide what font size I need to use. But apart from the size, the most important question is what typography to use.

Regarding font family selection, there are some rules on when you need to use a particular font.

As a designer, you need to pair two or more fonts and create a perfect combination to showcase your content.

Based on the typography quality, your users will either love or hate your product.

This is why it’s super important to select the proper font and understandably present your content to visitors.

If you work with data, you might be considering learning more about typography, since it’s your major tool for dashboard or CRM systems.

Directly presenting information is one of the major UX design tasks, so typography is the only skill that you need here.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking to advance your UX/UI design career to the next level, you can consider the skills mentioned in this article.

It doesn’t mean that you need to learn all skills at once. Absolutely not. All you need to do is create a plan of what skill you’re going to learn next and follow your strategy.

The ongoing learning is vital for you as a UX/UI designer. This is your only way to stay up-to-date with skills and knowledge.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, it’s time to learn something new today!

UX designers are not just expected to be experts during the UX Job interview. They are also expected to be able to articulate the importance of their work and demonstrate that they can solve problems in the workplace.

Interviewers want to know if you’re a good fit for the company’s culture. They are interested if you have an eye for design and if you understand what UX design is about.

Preparing for a UX job interview can be a daunting task. You need to know the best way to showcase your skills and knowledge of UX design. Also, you need to demonstrate that you are the perfect fit for the company.

“Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.” — Chris Grosser

It is important to prepare before going into a UX job interview. This will give you more confidence and help you answer any questions that come up during the interview process.

Preparing for a UX job interview is not always easy, but it is worth it in the end. It will help you land your dream job and make sure that your skills are showcased in the best possible way.

This is why I want to share my strategy on how you can prepare for your job interview in the best way.

Find a Mutual Fit With the Company

Ok, so you found a job you want to apply for. Or maybe a recruiter reach out to you and consider you a great applicant. What steps do you need to take before going with the interview rounds?

Of course, you need to prepare your CV and portfolio, and check your case studies, so everything is aligned. But these are the basic steps.

This is something you can find online and there are tons of materials on how to improve your portfolio or CV.

But what if I tell you that this won’t work for you? Yes, you can prepare tech materials, but it’s not enough.

It seemed like a great strategy to look perfect for every company.

Unfortunately, you can’t be a perfect candidate for everyone. And there is a reason behind it. You need to have a mutual fit with the company.

Yes, this is what I’ve never heard of in my early career, and something I understood way later.

When I just started my career, I applied to as many positions as I could every day. I had a template with a cover letter that I used every time.

Yes, I found a job, but I got so many rejections, because of one thing I’ve heard from recruiters. They told me that I don’t have anything in common with the person they are looking for.

I was wondering what that means. I started to research what recruiters are interested in during UX job interviews. As a result, I found that I need to have similar projects, industries, or interests.

I need to be a perfect candidate for every job that I applied for too.

This is why I started to craft my cover letter for every position manually, again and again, I stopped using the template.

When you are preparing for your interview rounds or applying for a job, start with the research.

Find out what the company is looking for and what recruiters wrote in the job descriptions. You don’t need to be the best candidate, but you need to say proper keywords for a recruiter to be considered a perfect candidate.

For example, when a recruiter is looking for a designer with startup experience, you need to have some project or relevant experience.

If you want to get a job in a big company, check your relevant experience and knowledge in your portfolio and CV.

You can take additional projects or volunteer in order to be closer to the perfect fit that recruiters are looking for.

So even if you don’t have anything, you can always do some preparation to look perfect.

Learn How To Market Yourself for a UX Job Interview

Okay, so every interview starts with your introduction to a recruiter. They want to hear more about you.

Recruiters start asking about your previous experience, your roles, the type of projects, and your interests. It basically seems like a professional conversation between friends. But there is a small difference.

You need to showcase that you’re a cool professional.

You might think that telling about your relevant design experience and relevant projects is the best solution. Yes, there is, but there is something more you can do.

I know that you’re not a marketer, but you need to understand the basics of marketing.

Your major task is to learn how to “sell yourself”. Literally, when you’re looking for a job, it means you trade your time for money, your salary. This is why it’s a deal that you need to win.

Once you understand the goal of your interview, let’s enhance your chances of being hired.

Let’s start with your projects and work experience. Analyze what type of companies you have been working with and what type of projects you have created.

For example, you could create web or app projects only. Or maybe you worked with heavy products, like dashboards.

Understanding your previous type of projects will help you articulate to a recruiter with relevant projects in your previous experience.

Now let’s check your previous companies. What type are they? Are they startups, agencies, or corporate ones?

For example, when you apply for an agency and say that you’ve been working with agencies before, you’re a relevant candidate.

And the most important part is the digits.

When you speak to a recruiter during your UX job interview, try to use as many digits from your previous work as possible. Digits are a powerful way to increase your credibility.

For example, you can say, that you created 25+ products. You have increased onboarding users by 30%.

Just remember any type of achievements from your previous experience, projects, and anything related to your design career.

The easiest example of using a digit is when you talk about your years of experience. Start with this and then mention the relevant digits in your conversation with a recruiter.

Stand Out From the Crowd With Your Individuality

You found your mutual fit with the company and prepared an impressive self-introduction with powerful digits. What else can you do?

There will be so many “perfect” candidates within these criteria, so how can you stand out from them?

Fortunately, there is another way how you can be a better choice for a company.

Let’s talk about the individuality term. What do recruiters mean when they start asking about your interests during a UX job interview? Are they curious about your hobby? I don’t think so.

They give you a chance to say something more besides your 9–5 work. They are curious how else you stand out from other candidates.

Here is your chance to impress recruiters with your individuality. The best term for individuality in such a way is your personal brand.

A personal brand is your unique experience and achievements that only you have.

You might not even know it, but you start to build it from the very first day of your career.

The most popular ways to build your brand are video, audio, and text formats. What? Ok, it means, for example, YouTube, podcasts, and writing.

If you write articles, like me for example, you can say that you contribute to a design community by writing helpful articles. Bam, here is your first achievement.

If you have a YouTube channel, this is super cool! You can say that you’re a design influencer. And by the way, you can earn from your extra activities in the long run.

I am a big fan of doing too much because apart from the money your professional level will grow as well.

But apart from these kinda big achievements, you can have smaller ones.

I understand that starting a YouTube channel is time-consuming. You can start with way smaller milestones.

For example, you can participate as a volunteer in some projects. Or maybe you will be a speaker on the webinar, you can win a design competition, become a mentor…

Just try to think about what extraordinary things you can say about your design career. There is always a space for it.

These things will make you look more professional. You can add achievements to your portfolio or CV. In both cases, you make your name more established.

But if you don’t have any achievements yet, you know what to do to get them fast.

I really advise working on your personal brand name the earlier the possible. This is your chance to learn something new, connect with people and land the job of your dream.

Being able to build your personal brand helps you to stand out from other designers. It helps you to increase your chances to land a job and build your career in the way you want.

There will be more opportunities that come to you. Your personal brand will attract new jobs and all you’ll need to do is to find a time slot for your next interview.

Final Thoughts

Getting ready for your interview seems to be mentioned a lot of times already. There are standard ways that can help you to prepare your CV and portfolio.

But there are some things that are not popular too much, like a mutual fit for a company, your personal brand, and your achievements.

Unfortunately, not many designers and recruiters are willing to share this experience. You either need to understand this with experience, or you need to pay for this knowledge.

It took me many years to understand the working strategy to prepare for every design interview in a way that works.

Today, I am continuing to build my own name and job opportunities come to me without any effort from my side.

I know how to prepare for a UX job interview each time because I hear the same questions again and again from recruiters.

This became possible because of the strategy that I told you about here, so I am real proof that it works.

It’s time to prepare for your next interview in a new productive way that will help you to land the job of your dream.

When I started my design career, I was a big fan of those designers, who won design awards. I saw design contests everywhere. There are websites like Awwwards, Red Dot, Indigo…

There were so many design platforms to participate in. But I didn’t know if I am experienced enough to start getting into them.

I continued to work for many years and didn’t enter any design competitions.

The feeling that I needed to participate in design contests didn’t go for years. When I started my personal brand a few years ago, I decided that it was time to participate in design contests as well.

That being said, I entered a few competitions and was excited that it’ll be an amazing journey. But the reality was different.

Experience That Inspires

When you want to join a contest, you expect amazing things to happen to you. Maybe you don’t expect to win, but your work will be seen by thousands of people.

This is already amazing, and you are starting to prepare for your amazing design contest journey.

My major trigger in design contests was my ability to be creative and innovative. I wanted to show the whole freedom of my mind. I was pretty tired from my routine job, so design contests were like fresh air to me.

This is why I began to check the most popular websites and their participants. The very first website I decided to start from was Awwwards.

Awwwards is a super popular website where you can publish any type of website and showcase your creative ability. They accept submissions year-round, so it was a perfect choice for me.

Unlike Awwwards, other design contests that I found had strict deadlines. Apart from that, in most cases, the fee for the submission was higher on other platforms.

As a result, I decided that Awwwards will be my first platform where I will participate as a designer.

It was a coincidence that my personal website needed an upgrade, so I decided to redesign my website and submit it to Awwwards.

If you’re curious about my redesign story, you can check out this article.

Once my redesign was ready, I started to prepare a presentation. It was very easy to prepare additional images for my major cover.

I believe that the most important part was to create short videos that could show animation and interaction on my website.

The problem was in the video ratio. I recorded a part of my screen only so my bars won’t be visible, and the result was unacceptable.

So I played with inspector mode to record my website in a proper resolution, edit it and upload it to Awwwards.

I found this the only downside of the general presentation of my website.

Other than that, I was happy with my experience. I submitted my website and waited until it’ll be reviewed and published.

Designers Who Want To Demolish Your Work

I was checking other designers’ work on Awwwards when I got a new email that hit my email suddenly. It said, congratulations, your work is reviewed and published.

It was an amazing email! I was waiting for that email for about a week. I quickly checked my submission and it was online! Here is my website submission if you’re curious to check it.

So I expected that I might win some awards. Every day I check my work to see how people vote on my design. After a few days, I understood that some votes are under 6.5, which means I can’t get an Honorable mention.

But that was fine for me since it was my very first experience and my personal website was just a try. I created this website for other needs, and it wasn’t creative enough for a design contest.

Nevertheless, I was curious about how people would vote on my design. During the week, I saw different marks, like 5, and 6,7,8,9…

And that was fine. I just needed to understand what other designers think about my work.

And suddenly I saw a 2.10 mark! Can you imagine? Someone voted my design 2.10 out of 10!

I immediately was curious about whom this person was. Maybe he or she is a designer who won a lot of awards on this website or someone cool?

How I was surprised when I saw that this was a young designer with no awards at all. Literally, his profile doesn’t have any awards. But he is an active voter on Awwwards.

It’s something that was unacceptable to me immediately. How can he judge the work of others if he doesn’t show his own expertise?

Once I checked his profile furthermore, I found another interesting thing. He votes for almost every design with low marks. I checked those designs and they are awesome!

After more research, I got another idea. Maybe he just doesn’t want that people will win an Honorable mention? Like literally, it was the only explanation for his actions.

Unfortunately, there are such people on Awwwards who can’t show their own expertise apart from judging others will low marks.

I think this is something Awwwards can work on. If someone might want to vote, he or she needs to show expertise before taking any action. Money isn’t everything.

What Are My Future Plans

After my first Awwwards experience, I started to think about what should I do next. Should I give up on this website or give it another try?

Since my first submission wasn’t too cool. I decided to create another concept specifically for a design contest.

My new submission is more creative and has higher design quality.

I will see how it will do once it is published.

You can’t expect with design contests anything for sure. My experience proves it. Yes, it’s very exciting to participate in them, but there are two downsides to expect.

First, all design contests are paid. If you’re serious about participating in them, prepare a good submission. Standard design solutions aren’t good enough.

Second, don’t expect to win. I know that design contests were created with a specific goal to give you a design award. But it’s better to expect nothing from them.

Think about design contests as an exciting journey for your designs. It’ll help you to not be upset if you get nothing.

I personally decided to continue my design contest journey, because I love to enter them.

There is a huge downside that I need to spend money to submit my designs, but I think about it as my self-improvement investment.

If Awwwards doesn’t work for me, I have other platforms to try, so I’m not giving up.

Besides, I’m not trying to impress someone but just grow as a designer. This is something that I personally need this is why I will continue to enter more contests in the future.

Final Thoughts

If you want to enter design contests, give yourself a favor and prepare a strategy. First, select your best work only, because standard solutions don’t work.

Second, participate in design contests not for your personal brand, but for your design growth. Keep calm if you don’t win anything because it’s normal not to win at all.

Third, learn from others. When you enter open design contests, you’ll have the ability to check other works. It’s your chance to see what is trending and what other designers create today.

Don’t give up and follow your heart.

Designing is a hard and confusing process, especially when you have no idea how to start or what to focus on.

Designing products can be a difficult and overwhelming process. It includes a lot of theory, knowing what best design practices are, and includes even psychology.

Some of you might think that you must have a design degree to start a UX/UI design career.

We all know the importance of education. Your design can be the difference between success and failure. Everything depends on the knowledge that primary education gives.

Luckily, if you don’t have a design degree, you still can start your UX/UI design career.

The best way to do so is to start your self—education journey. Today, it doesn’t matter if you have a design diploma or not. Your knowledge, portfolio, and skills decide everything.

If you want to launch your UX/UI design career, it’s important to plan your self-education.

You don’t want to spend days and weeks on relevant skills. You just want to start learning today and get results after X time.

This is why I want to help you with my 3-step strategy of self-education for UX/UI designers.

Self-Education With Online Materials

When you want to start your educational journey, it’s important to learn skills and knowledge with the proper materials.

Your strategy should include high-value sources only.

Unfortunately, there are millions of videos, articles, and podcasts on the Internet.

When I was just starting to learn UX/UI design, it was very hard to find valuable materials.

Video format seemed to be the easiest way to learn. I was able to see the immediate theory implementation and replicate this experience.

What seemed like a good idea, translated into hiatus in real life. My major problem was finding well-structured resources.

Since I decided to learn for free, my major option was YouTube.

When I started to learn, I couldn’t find a strategy for my self-education. One YouTuber was talking about wireframing, another explained product creation, and so on.

It felt like I was learning a piece of skills here and there, but I don’t have a general understanding of UX/UI design work.

I decided to try another source and switched to Udemy. There were so many free courses, so I thought they would work better for me.

When I started to check free courses, I often found that course authors don’t create too deep courses, or they are focused on specific directions.

Again it wasn’t something I needed.

It took me a long time to figure out what skills I need to have as a UX/UI designer.

Once I had this list, I started to find relevant skills and knowledge. Every YouTube video or free course was specified for a concrete need.

I developed a roadmap for myself with the concrete skills I need.

By creating a career roadmap, I had an understanding of where I am currently, and what I need to do.

This is why I believe modern boot camp is a great paid alternative because you’ll get all the basic knowledge and save time on your personal research.

But not everyone has money to pay for a boot camp. You can use my strategy and boot camp strategy.

Find boot camp programs and specify concrete steps in your UX/UI self-education. Research specific sources to fulfill your learning steps and start your educational journey.

Design Challenges You Might Face

While self-education is absolutely free, it also has challenges.

When I started my self-transition from graphic design to UX/UI, I didn’t have any support. No tutor could answer my questions.

Instead, I researched the answers myself. The downside is that you spend enormous time finding a concrete answer.

As a result, you can’t be sure about how long it will take you to learn all the things you need to start your career.

Time is the most obvious problem, but there is also a mental issue with your self-education.

When you face a problem and can’t find a solution quickly, you might start thinking about giving up.

You can’t be brave that it takes so long to find an answer.

What’s even worse is when you didn’t find an answer at all.

This situation can make all your efforts invaluable. One time it’s OK, two times, probably fine. When you didn’t find an answer, again and again, there is a stopping point in your mental feeling.

You start thinking is it worth spending time on your self-education at all?

Maybe you could spend it on other things.

Yes, it’s a price you pay for free learning. So you should be ready for such a challenge and be prepared to feel like you’re ready to give up.

When designers work at companies, they work with other team members, including other designers.

Staying in touch with other designers is important to grow your own skills.

When you start your design self-education you’re alone in this journey. You might feel that there is no support and no one can handle your problems.

Luckily, there are online and offline communities.

You can find local UX places or join online groups. For example, I run a design community on Facebook for all UX/UI designers.

In my group designers ask questions, share their work, and network.

It gives a chance to save precious time while connecting to professionals worldwide.

By staying in touch with other designers, you can find out about new trends, learn about recent technology changes, and even more.

Find your own community on Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, or any other platform you love using every day.

If you have a question, don’t hesitate to ask the community.

We are all human beings and make mistakes.

The important thing from mistakes is to find a solution and continue your design career.

Self-Taught Pros & Cons

When you learn everything on your own, you save a lot of money.

Instead of paying for courses or boot camps, you learn UX/UI design with free resources.

While it sounds like a perfect solution to save money, you need to understand the difference between paid and free learning.

Let me start with the pros of learning design with free resources.

As I mentioned before, the major benefit is saving money. You don’t need to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get knowledge.

You just open free resources on YouTube, read blogs and practice your skills immediately.

Another benefit of self-education for free is that you’ll need to really understand solutions to your questions.

When you have a question, you start to search for a solution.

As long as there are no mentors or tutors, the only way to resolve your design question is to understand the solution you found.

Until you can’t explain the solution with simple words to yourself, you can’t move on.

This makes your learning process valuable because you get a deep understanding of the problem and how to handle it.

Now let’s talk about the downsides of self-education for free and what you need to know before moving on with it.

Your self-learning process will require way bigger time to become a UX/UI designer.

This is the major aspect you need to be aware of.

In a boot camp or course, you get structured knowledge and ongoing support from mentors.

By learning design by yourself you find all information on your own, and structure it into your learning path.

It may take a long time for a newbie.

Another problem you’ll face is no support for ongoing learning. In case of any questions, you have no one who will immediately answer.

This is why you’ll need to search for information on your own. It might be hard sometimes because this process requires hours and hours.

This is something that can motivate you on your learning path.

There are forums and other free places to get support from professionals you can use to find answers. This is not an immediate response to your question.

Sometimes you need to wait the whole day to receive a response.

Sometimes no one will answer at all.

To sum up, you need to be prepared for both sides of self-education. There are pros and cons, and you need to decide whether it’s a good fit for you or not.

Final Thoughts

Starting the learning process is very exciting.

When you decide that you’ll be learning UX/UI design by self-education for free, you need to be prepared for challenges.

There is a huge basis for free materials online, but it might take time to figure out how to structure them.

You’ll need to find communities that can support you. Further other steps will be required from you.

But once you plan your learning path and prepare for it, your educational process will go smoother. In the end, you get a career you were always excited about — UX/UI designer.

My New Personal Website Design Took Me a Complete 1 Month

I’ve been working as a UX/UI designer for over 8 years. During this time I created many products, starting from simple landing pages to complex CRM systems. But during this period I couldn’t find time to create a personal website.

“The first word in the phrase, “personal brand” is “personal.” Now add an “ity” to it, drop the “brand” and that’s what it really means. That’s the secret.” — Adam Ritchie

This was hilarious because I used Behance as my major platform for my designs. While I believe in Behance power, I felt a need to go beyond its limits and create my personal brand.

If you want to have a brand, you need to have a solid personal website. You need to tell people about your achievements. All your awards, publications, courses, and other materials need to be in one place.

When I started to collect everything on one website, problems started to arise.

Personal Brand Improvement

You start to build your own personal brand. The starting point is your website with all the information until this very moment.

Working on your website structure, you can ask yourself a question. What elements should be on your website? You have portfolio pieces, a section about you, and contacts on your Behance page. What else can you share? Which sections are important for your website visitors?

I was at this place. I didn’t know where to start or how to compose things. During the last 3 years, I focused on achievements that could help my name become more recognizable.

For example, I started a blog and founded my own publication which you can read now. Apart from that, I created 9 design courses on Education Ecosystem and won a few design contests.

Being an active speaker, I participated in multiple online events as a major speaker. My goal was to share my experience and help aspiring beginners.

It was good that I placed all my achievements into a Google spreadsheet. But every aspect is so different. It’s a challenge to compose all achievements in one place.

When I started to think about my website structure, it was a big problem. I used to think about presenting my work first. But now, I needed to showcase how my skills, knowledge, and achievements could help other designers.

And still, I need to show my design skills to recruiters and companies who are interested in collaborating with me. This was a new experience for me.

My website is a presentation of all design services and coaching experiences.

When you plan your brand, you need to impress recruiters with your website and demonstrate your value among other experienced designers.

For example, one of my website pages is about my design community on Facebook. It's super cool for recruiters to see that I am a founder. But designers who would like to join my community are interested in benefiting from a design tribe.

Instead of being proud of my achievement, my goal was to explain the value. There are so many design communities on Facebook, that every new member asks me why he or she needs to join it.

Because of my new personal website, I explain the benefits of getting into my community. I highlight that all benefits are free. Which is a kind of magic in this greedy world for designers.

One of my strong community benefits is a restriction on portfolio or project promotion. I analyzed the other communities and found that 90% of them are focused on work spam. People want to promote themselves and start to post their works.

Such communities have no value. That’s why I focused on providing value over promotion. Also, the engagement is pretty high in my small but dedicated Facebook group. Again, people aren’t interested in digits, but in value. My community confirms this theory.

But let’s go back to website creation. Every page that you make, tells unique information. Recruiters can learn about my experience. Designers can get lessons and knowledge from me. It’s a win-win.

This double-goal strategy is the basis of my website. I will explain and provide information to both parties and stay on track with them.

To be honest, I spent one week on design. During this week, I ordered food from cafes to save time on cooking and spent it on my website.

While it was a pretty expensive and unusual experience for me, I have a live website that works and brings results.

Today I’m starting my brand-new website. I concentrate on what you can get from me. This logic is fresh air in my design journey. I am looking to add more content to my website to increase value for designers.

Webflow Experience

As a designer, you work with many design tools every day. It can be Figma, Sketch, or even Photoshop. It doesn’t matter where you design your website, because your final result will be online.

When it comes to the online stage, you need to find a perfect fit for your website. There are dozens of free platforms, and you can start thinking about them. For example, my initial platform was Behance.

Behance was my favorite place to stay during all my 8 years of design experience. It was free and easy to use with a lot of professional resources and tools.

My personal website requires me to go beyond the standard Behance page. I immediately remembered Adobe Portfolio and checked the paid plan.

There were pretty cool features, but in general, it seemed like a better version of Behance, but still Behance.

Even the paid Adobe Portfolio option wasn’t a good fit for my brand new website. Yes, I could have a section with information about myself, and tell more unique stories. But it’s not what I wanted to have.

When you create your website, you need to have a domain. Also, multiple pages with unique content are required. Preferably more engagement opportunities with your website visitors would be great.

Behance, Dribbble, and similar places aren’t a good fit for such goals. You can use these platforms to post your design projects and tell us about yourself.

When it’s time to build unique sections and have counters on your website, free platforms are helpless.

During my mentorship sessions on ADPList, I met with other designers who created their websites on free builders. One of the most popular solutions was Wix.

When I saw websites, I understood how limited they were. Yes, it is already a website with multiple pages and unique sections. But the builder limits the designer.

My mentees weren’t able to create unique elements, sections, and personal identities.

It seemed like a very cheap solution. Considering this experience, I decided that I need to have a more complex platform.

A few years ago, I tried to create a personal website on WordPress. While I worked a little bit with this platform, I couldn’t understand how people benefit from it and why it’s popular.

I checked many bloggers and influencers on YouTube, and most of them were inspired by WordPress.

If you’ve never heard about the WordPress theme business on the Envato market, you’d be surprised how much people earn from it. This is a separate industry where people earn thousands of dollars by creating one WordPress theme.

I thought that being a designer at FAANG company is my level of dream. After learning about Envato market and stories from WordPress theme creators, I was seriously interested in creating WordPress theme with a developer. Unfortunately, my dream didn’t became true.

Anyway, let’s go back to your website. When you want to have it, it’s important to select a platform where you’ll host it. Why do people choose WordPress?

Well, the very first reason, is it’s the super popular and widely used solution for a personal website. There are tons of resources where you can adjust your website from scratch.

Even though it’s a very complex CMS, you can easily start your website from the free templates that are available on the platform. You can even start with a free domain and upgrade later.

Because of this, WordPress is a common solution for newcomers to the website world. There are alternatives, like Squarespace, but unfortunately, I don’t have experience with other platforms.

The second reason is that WordPress is a perfect choice if you want to have a blog on your website. WordPress was first created for bloggers and transformed into other directions and needs.

When I started my career 8 years ago, all bloggers had their websites on WordPress. I can’t remember someone who had a blog on Joomla, for example.

One of my first jobs was also connected with WordPress themes. My company concentrated on theme editions for clients and I supported the design part.

After some time I edited themes on the front-end editor on WordPress. Maybe because of both these factors, I decided to start my website on WordPress afterward.

Since I wanted to have a blog on my website, I decided to choose WordPress. In the beginning, I was only able to create a home page. I couldn’t find time to finish all the pages, because it took me long hours and days.

As a designer you probably experienced times when you created products for your clients, but not for yourself.

This is why I decided that it was time to find a simpler solution and finish my website. I found a great alternative to WordPress that gave me full control over the design with immediate website results.

I was happy about it until I figured out that Webflow isn’t good for having a blog.

WordPress-Webflow Dilemma

It was a nightmare. I was able to finish my website and was ready to launch it. But even with a paid Webflow plan, you can only have 500 items in your CMS.

I have a big question for the Webflow team. Are you serious? Like 500 items for my blog? I have 500 articles that I wanted to transfer to my new website, but now it’s impossible.

So my major question was how to keep up with my ongoing publishing. How to create articles every month, week, or day?

Ok. I came down and I was upset. Furthermore, I couldn’t believe that I needed to go back to WordPress. I started to imagine how much time I’ll spend on re-creating every page from Webflow to WordPress again.

Even with a front-end editor, it takes time. I need to create it, adjust it, and update it. Checking results on the live website while working on the front-end editor takes a long time in comparison to Webflow.

In Webflow you create a design and immediately see an online result.

It seems like I love Webflow for design control, but I need unlimited article options for my blog, like on WordPress. What if there was a tweak that allowed me to combine these things?

And there is such a thing! When I started to re-create my first website page on WordPress, I found a plugin called Webflow Pages. When I checked it, it was like thunder.

This plugin allows you to build pages on Webflow and integrate them into your WordPress website. Finally, I was happy about it. It was the solution I was looking for.

I constantly get updates or new achievements that I need to add to my website. Finally, there is a solution to keep my Webflow website inside WordPress.

What is even more important, I could publish my articles on WordPress without any limitations. It was my dream which came true.

So if you’re currently struggling between WordPress and Webflow, you can combine these things and live happily.

The only thing that you need to consider is SEO, which I know nothing about, but hope to learn within the next few months.

Final Thoughts

The road to your personal brand includes a must-have step — your website. When you’re serious about building a strong name in the industry, free options won’t work for you. You need to have authority, so your website needs to be solid and trustworthy.

This is why you need to spend enough time on your website creation. Probably you’ll spend sleepless nights because you have a full-time job, and you have evenings and nights free only.

But the result is definitely worth your struggles. When you can present your skills, identity, and uniqueness, you stand out from other designers, and potentially can increase your paycheck.