Design Challenges Workbook

Of course, you can! A lot of people started like that. Some of our team members too! But there always comes a point when you figure out that you’re limping in some aspects, and that it breaks your progress in other things.

Of course, you can go and find a bunch of free resources on the topics you’re less familiar with. But it can make your progress slow, make your knowledge dysfunctional, and instil the wrong routines that are going to be harder to correct later.

There’s also a lot of beating around the bush in many free resources because a lot of them are made by people that have zero experience teaching, and honestly – some of them don’t even have the relevant industry experience. 😱 They’re just great marketers and copywriters that collect content from other places and combine it into their own content. Those resources have a serious lack of insightful information that comes from experience only – and that’s where the real progress happens.

We create our resources to contain just that – insightful information crucial for your progress and understanding of the UX/UI and product design fields.

So can you do it all by yourself? Technically, yes.

Should you do it? Probably not. 👎

Choose your help! You don’t have to choose this resource, but do yourself a favor, and invest in high-quality materials, invest in yourself strategically and thoughtfully, and watch how you supercharge your progress compared to the alternative.

Yes, 30-ish screens designed sounds good, but what screens? What kind of designs? Let’s go over this scenario that I see soo often with beginner UX/UI designers. 👇

They recreate designs.
Okay, good. That’s useful for practicing how to navigate within the design tools and how to implant different visual styles into your brain.

They practice with online-generated design briefs.
I mean, that’s at least a start to learning the project approach.

They solved one brief, second brief… And now in the third brief, they come across a somewhat similar problem to the first two and just apply the same solution and process they applied in the first two. They go over the fourth, sixth, and maybe even a tenth brief. All following the exact same process as there are no true limitations or goals that force you to adjust to the specifics of the product and its audience. Results are just visually different. Taking a look at their portfolio, it’s all more of the same just in different colors and styles.

Why do novice designers keep implementing the same solutions? Because those briefs are so loosely constrained (almost nonexistent boundaries) that don’t force them to truly problem-solve. So they reach for the same “mental tool” (solution to the problem) again and again. And they learn to do things that way. No real project is the same!

Once beginners come across their first real project, it feels hard, confusing, vague, unapproachable, and overwhelming. Why?

Because they don’t have a lot of mental tools at their disposal, just those sorry few they kept reimplementing. And let me break to you something that I learned the hard way back in my beginner days – there’s a pretty low chance that those mental tools work on real projects.

How to develop the required mental muscles? 💪🧠

The first approach involves solving multiple projects alongside a senior designer to see how they do it and learn by watching and participating. That’s an amazing way! It can be a bit slow since it takes a long time to come across many different project types. A product design project can last anywhere up from a few months. Can you imagine how many different projects you’ll see over a single year? Not that many.

The second approach is this workbook! It offers challenging and realistic problems alongside the required guidance in the form of senior tips contained throughout the 150+ pages of our workbook. Yes, as you might’ve guessed, it’s not as easy as sitting and watching someone else solve the problem. But it pays out big time!

However, if you want to watch someone solve a design challenge, you can! Some of our challenges have walkthroughs (in written and video format) of the process, decisions, and solutions made by an experienced product designers.

80% of beginner portfolios are not right for employment. I’ve seen it when recruiting designers for the teams I’ve previously worked in and my own company. There’s a chance that you fall within the 20%, but there’s also a chance that you won’t.

Some red flags 🚩 to look out for

If any of these are true, you might be in trouble and your job hunt might end up taking longer than you planned. Why? This doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have the knowledge or the skills. It probably just means you’re not as good as you can be at applying them and telling the story the recruiters expect.

Companies are not looking for someone who can spit facts, but for someone who can use the facts they know within various scenarios.

What should you do? Try to learn to apply your knowledge in a meaningful, constructive, and systematic way.

How to do it? Well, you can learn that from this workbook! 🤗