At the beginning of 2020, I was thinking about applying for a masters degree in Public health. I would write the GRE, get a very high score and apply for a scholarship, that was the plan. But then I came across the tweet that halted my plans and pushed me in a new direction.
This is the tweet:
A few years back I heard about user interface design and since I had a background in graphic design, I believed photoshop and Illustrator were the tools I needed. When I designed a few mobile screens and I noticed they didn’t look like the screens I saw on Behance and Dribbble, I gave up and focused on something else. Fast forward to 2020 and after seeing (reading and studying) Chrystal king’s tweet, I decided to start again.
On the 6th Feburary 2020, my journey into product design began. I started by taking a course in Coursera: Ux Principle and Processes. I learnt about components of User experience, Ux research methods, principles, processes and Jakob Nielsen’s Heuristics.
After the course, I moved to learning a tool for user interface design and Figma was my best choice. I spent time watching YouTube videos, reading articles, staring at designs on Behance and Dribbble and then replicating screens. The first screens I replicated were sign up screens and I felt good about myself, they were not perfect but it was progress.
These are links to the first screens I replicated:
For weeks I focused on replicating mobile screens and website pages and I felt good about myself until I showed a senior designer my work. He looked at them and all he said was that they looked cute (the nicest thing he could think of). He became my Obi wan kenobi and I his Anakin Skywalker, (if you are not part of the Star Wars fandom, he became my teacher).
He taught me about grid systems, buttons, drop shadows, typography to name a few. He let me stare at his designs and on some occasions I watched him design. He made me replicate website pages within a timeframe and as I designed/replicated more pages I was able to design faster with more precision.
June, I started a remote internship (HNGi7), I didn’t make it to the final stage but I learnt a lot about team work and collaborating with designers and engineers. It was during this internship that I discovered what industry I would want to design for, during the internship I designed website mockups for a hotel, restaurant, bakery, and a mobile screens for an app that lets a user carry out a face scan and get recommendations for skin ailments detected. The lifestyle industry ( if that’s what it’s called) became my dream industry.
Fast forward to August I volunteered/freelanced for a startup company, was super excited about the opportunity to work with other designers and engineers. My role was to design responsive website pages and admin dashboards. I watched a lot of tutorial videos and stared at samples of dashboards so I could understand the structure of an admin dashboard. I had many discussions with my team mates about the task given and with a lot of feedback and reiterations, we designed usable and functional dashboard pages.
You won’t understand my journey unless you see how I started, I kept a journal where after every 2 weeks, I wrote about my product design journey so far
11 November, 10 months into my product design journey
I believe I have grown as a product designer, there is so much I am yet to learn and I believe the best is yet to come.
P.s I’m still volunteeringat the startup (update: moved on to something else) while searching for a product design role that suits my skills.
If you have any questions, you can ask in the comments or message me eneabu8@gmail.com and you can view more of my designs in my Behance portfolio https://www.behance.net/gallery/105264087/Library-Website
