My Design Journey

This is mostly for my entertainment because I was looking through my old design files and 💀

Especially because back then I thought the designs were really good too.

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Goes to show that learning skills is all about putting in the work and patience. Will probably do one for webflow development as well because my old websites are even worse.

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Seeing these makes me even more comfortable at just being bad at things, because how else are you supposed to learn?

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Anyways, let's go.

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As a self taught designer I literally did not know what I was doing. There was so much content online but I quickly learnt that I'm definitely more of a hands on learner. So I just started making. At the beginning I would just do copy work. Basically, just copying existing designs I liked pixel perfectly. This, in tandem with reading Refactoring UI (Really, really good book!) helped nail down design fundamentals of spacing, typography, making basic color choices ect.

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Back then I was a big fan of mailchimp and headspace's designs.

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After a couple of these I tried out making my own. Quick fire round.

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Ah yes, the first design I ever made. Looks very...you can tell I kind of gave up on it halfway 😂

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And, we were here for quite a while *covers eyes*

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After this I started posting on reddit and stuff to get back feedback. And man, did I get a lot of shit for this design 💀 People there are ruthless but that's what I needed. Looking at it now I can clearly see the legibility issues and just how everything looks off.

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And we got this lovely monstrosity (⊙_(⊙_⊙)_⊙)

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The folks at reddit were so helpful 😭 I love communities like this.

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I did a tonnn of these

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And designed a tonnnn too

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and eventually I started to see improvements

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(god it's 1AM and I'm really tired. There's an insane amount of files I'm going through right now)

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And step by step I started reaching a level that I was proud of. A couple of people had reached out to me, telling me that they really liked my designs and those comments used to make my day. One developer had actually asked me for permission to use my design to develop and that was an interesting experience.

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I liked that a lot of people routinely reminded me of how important user experience is. How if a site is hard to use it literally does not matter what the site looks like. So I picked up "Don't make me think" (Also a really good book!)

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There's a bunch of designs that I think don't need to be brought up to the light of the world 🤡 They can stay buried in the depths of my figma files.

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Anyway, that's it. Obviously, I'm always improving as a designer and there's a lot I can do better. But it's always nice to see how far I've come. And maybe this can help budding designers on their way.

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Okiee good day! I'm going to sleep.