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So You Want to Freelance: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

After finishing a UX design bootcamp, a new designer is eager to get their career started. They’ve been networking, attending meetups, sharing work online, and even landed interviews. But nothing has felt like the right fit yet. So instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity, they decide to try freelancing. The thinking is simple: “Why wait for a company to hire me when I can start working on my own projects right now?” They tell friends and family they’re available for freelance work, and a few opportunities come up. Maybe it’s a local store downtown that needs a website redesign, and they barter services — “ I’ll design your website if you help me with something in return.” Or maybe a cousin needs a simple portfolio site. These early projects are valuable. They provide practice, portfolio pieces, and confidence. But they’re not real client work. There’s no legal agreement, no formal contract, no defined scope. If something goes wrong, the stakes are low. That’s part of the probl...
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UX Isn’t Just Design — It’s Communication

 It’s your first week as a junior UX designer on a small, tight-knit product team — one lead designer, one mid-level designer, and two developers. You’re excited to finally put your skills into practice and contribute to real work. Your first project focuses on improving a section of the company website that’s been struggling with performance. After your first stakeholder meeting, you receive a detailed summary document packed with business metrics: conversion rates, drop-off points, and profitability trends. You scroll through it, trying to make sense of everything. The language is full of business jargon — meaningful, but disconnected from the world of users. Unpacking the Jargon You take the document to the mid-level designer, who’s experienced with the product and can help translate the metrics into actionable insights. Together, you review the spreadsheet. They explain: “When stakeholders talk about conversion rates, they mean how many users complete key actions — like si...
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The Ripple Effect of Messy Layers

 You're excited to join a fast-paced design sprint as a junior designer and have just been tasked with creating a new page. Most of the components you need are already in the design system, but this project calls for a new custom feature. Since your page is the first place this feature will appear, it’s also your responsibility to build it so it can be added to the shared component library for the team. Eager to show your creativity, you dive in—dragging, duplicating, and adjusting elements until the feature looks just right. Visually, everything works, but behind the scenes, your file is chaotic. Layers are unnamed, groups are scattered, and nothing is easy to find. In the rush, labeling layers feels like a small detail you can skip. Soon, the impact becomes clear. A coworker needs the new feature for their own page and searches for it in the shared library, but it isn’t there. Confused, they dig into your page, only to get lost in a maze of Frame 23 , Rectangle Copy , and Image...
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Beyond Color Contrast: Designing for Everyone

You’re working solo with a new client, referred to you by a friend. It’s your first contract project, and the client has already hinted that if this goes well, there will be more work ahead. The design has moved into high-fidelity user testing, and everything appears to meet professional standards for color/contrast, typography, and layout. On the surface, it looks polished and ready to go—proof that you can deliver as a designer. But as testing begins, problems emerge. One participant using a screen reader finds several key images skipped because they have no alt text or captions. Buttons are vague—the screen reader simply announces “button,” leaving the participant unsure which action to take. Navigation feels confusing, and moving through the workflow is slow and frustrating. Another participant, who has dyslexia, struggles with dense paragraphs. They repeatedly re-read sentences to understand the content, and centered text makes it even harder to follow. Tasks that should be simp...
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Life After Graduation: Navigating the Transition Stage in UX

You’ve just finished your UX boot camp. For months, you’ve had structure—assignments to keep you on track, mentors giving detailed feedback, and career services guiding you through resumes and portfolios. By graduation, you had multiple projects and a portfolio you were proud to show. But then graduation hits. Career services wrap up. And suddenly, you’re navigating the transition stage where support ends, new challenges surface, and doubts begin to creep in. At first, things feel fine. But as you start applying for jobs, deeper questions arise: Does my case study highlight meaningful design decisions or trade-offs, or is it just a checklist of steps? Can I confidently explain my projects in an interview without sounding scripted or unsure? Have I practiced enough design exercises to think on my feet during challenges? Am I keeping up with the research and design methods I learned, or are those skills starting to fade? The foundation is solid, but without feedback and ...
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Typography That Works Across Devices

A new designer has just been tasked with handling the typography portion of a project. Excited to contribute, they think, “This should be simple — I just learned this in my Bootcamp!” But it’s not a single screen. The design is responsive, which means typography needs to scale across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. They know they want consistency — common font sizes, a clear hierarchy, and cohesive styling — but as they begin, challenges pile up. They start by setting up headings for the desktop view, feeling confident. Then they move on to the body text, only to discover the gap between the heading and body text is massive. They try to tweak font sizes and styling, but quickly realize that adjusting one screen throws off another. In their eagerness, they pick too many fonts: a serif for headings, a sans-serif for body text, and a quirky display font for accents, thinking it will make the design more interesting. Instead, the result is chaos — nothing feels consistent. Then come a...
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Is Your Portfolio Secretly Working Against You?

After months of hard work, a new UX designer finally completed their portfolio. As a recent bootcamp graduate, they took the process seriously, attending one-on-one mentoring sessions, joining peer review groups, and soaking up every bit of advice they could from more experienced designers. They even revisited resources like the post " Is Your Case Study A Barrier Or A Breakthrough? " to make sure their case studies went deeper than surface-level deliverables.  By the time they hit publish, they felt confident. Their case studies were solid. They had taken feedback, refined their work, and produced something they thought would set them apart. Excited, they shared their portfolio on LinkedIn and with their network. The comments poured in—friends and colleagues praised the work and congratulated them on the milestone. But when they started applying for jobs, the responses weren’t the same. Despite the hard work and thoughtful case studies, interviews just weren’t coming. Frustr...
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From Surface-Level to Strategic: Unlocking Competitive Insights

As the deadline looms for a critical roundtable meeting, the designer flips through the SWOT analysis she's about to present to her team and senior leadership. Almost immediately, her stomach sinks. The analysis feels thin. The strengths and opportunities are nearly identical, while the weaknesses and threats blur together. Instead of highlighting real insights, the list reads like surface-level repetition. Buried in the competitor section, she spots another problem: parts of it have drifted into nothing more than a checklist of features—mobile app here, newsletter there, one has it, one doesn’t. And worse, she realizes she's completely overlooked indirect competitors, leaving a blind spot in how the market is shifting. She doesn't have time to start over; instead, she sketches a plan: pull overlapping items apart so each quadrant speaks to a different kind of insight; add one or two concrete market opportunities that reflect real trends, not internal strengths; reframe the...
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Is Your Case Study a Barrier or a Breakthrough?

You’ve sent out applications for every role you feel qualified for. You’ve tapped your network — friends, mentors, anyone rooting for you. But the responses are the same: silence or “no.” The job market feels tighter than ever, and every application seems to vanish into a black hole. Time feels frozen, and with each passing day, your projects start to feel outdated. The pressure builds. Self-doubt creeps in. Imposter syndrome piles on. Then one day, you ask a trusted friend, not a recruiter, but someone who knows what a strong case study should communicate, to review your portfolio. Their questions sting. They don’t understand your choices, your reasoning, or how you moved from point A to point B. That’s when it clicks. Your case study isn’t telling a story. It’s just a list of steps. Surface-level. You go back and revise. You add context, reasoning, validation, and the connections between your actions and outcomes. It’s not an overnight miracle — you don’t land a job the next day — b...
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The Art of Interviewing

Today’s the day. You’ve been designing for a year or two, with a couple of projects under your belt, but it’s been a while since you’ve done an interview. Your questions are solid, shared with colleagues, refined follow-ups, yes/no paths mapped out, but you know, real people rarely follow a script. Excited and a little nervous, you take a deep breath and get ready for four conversations on the same topic. The first participant is quiet and hesitant. They avoid eye contact, offer one-word answers, and pause before speaking. You slow down, soften your tone, and let the silence settle just long enough to give them space. “Can you tell me a little bit more about that?” you ask. Gradually, their posture eases, their words lengthen. That small act of checking in, paying attention to their comfort, turns the conversation around. The next participant couldn’t be more different, enthusiastic, animated, and easily sidetracked. They bounce from one story to another, and you ride the wave, listen...
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