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Laying the Groundwork for Your Freelance Business

The new business cards arrived last week — thick matte paper, clean typography, and your latest title: EdTech App Designer. It feels good. You’ve reworked your portfolio, aligned all your social media, and even updated your email signature. Everything finally fits the story you’ve been building — your brand, your niche, your vision. This week, you’re at your monthly designer meetup, showing off your new cards and talking about your focus in EdTech app design with friends and colleagues. Everyone’s impressed — and for the first time, you feel like your hard work is starting to pay off. But as the conversation continues, reality hits in the form of questions you’re not prepared to answer. “So, what do you charge for a typical project?” “Do you have a contract template you use?” “How do clients usually pay you — upfront or in phases?” You smile, trying to sound confident — but inside, there’s a flicker of panic. Because while you finally look like a business, you realize you don’t quite ...
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Designing with Purpose: Building Your Freelance Brand

After weeks of reflection and research, you finally feel confident about where you want to focus your freelance career: EdTech app design. It's a space that excites you, connects with your strengths, and builds naturally from the projects you already have. But once the excitement settles, it hits you. Deciding your niche was only the first step. If you want clients to see you as an EdTech designer, everything you show and say about yourself has to support that story. Refining Your Portfolio You start with your portfolio. The EdTech app you designed during your bootcamp instantly feels like the anchor, a project that fits exactly where you're heading. But as you read through the case study, you notice that it mostly focuses on final designs, not the reasoning behind them. You go back in and refine the story, explaining why you made certain design decisions, how your research informed the direction, and what outcomes your design led to. You want potential clients to understand no...
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Finding Your UX Niche

It’s been a few months since you decided to go out on your own as a UX designer. You’ve updated your LinkedIn headline — UX Designer, Product Designer — built your portfolio, and started applying for small freelance projects. You’ve joined a few UX meetups, maybe even jumped into an online community or two, hoping to connect with other designers. You’re doing everything you’re supposed to. You’re networking, getting your name out there, and following all the advice about how to get started. And then, at one of those meetups, it happens. You’re standing in a small circle of designers, chatting about tools, projects, and career paths. Most of them work full-time at companies. One’s a UX researcher in healthcare, another designs enterprise dashboards, and another is deep into usability testing for e-commerce. Eventually, someone turns to you and says, “ Oh, you’re freelancing now? That’s awesome. What kind of UX designer are you?” You freeze for a second. You know you do UX — but wha...
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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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