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Fake projects for fake clients make fake portfolio's which don't impress or land you the job. Instead do real work for Not-for-profits and get real life experience and a real project into your portfolio with 'Catch a fire'. These are volunteer projects, but much better for experience and kudos.
Easily create and customize stunning illustrations with collections made by artists across the globe. Try it, it’s kind of fun.
Note that ideally you'd download and use SVG vector files, but only the small png's are free, the SVG's are a paid thing.
Did you know that you can create simple graphs from data on an excel sheet? Well flourish does this on steroids and the infographics can be totally modified to suit your branding desires. Not only that but they're automatically made interactive and animated and can be inserted into any web page by copying the code. A free plan is available if you don't mind your assets being public.
Make sure you know these productivity approaches when starting out with Adobe XD
Quickly and easily create shapes to put into designs with flat colour, gradients or patterns. Download as an SVG which can be further edited, or as code.
Copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are amazing tools, but imagine if you had 50+ of these super-powers under your belt?! Design is a competitive world, and professional designers are fast. You absolutely need these shortcuts - learn them and use them on a daily basis until it's second nature. Best used alongside a wacom tablet (and largish screen)
Article topics include 'ask the experts', 'Career Advice' and a podcast
When running design sprints or other types of team collaboration, this tool is very useful whether in the same room or for an online team. e.g. everyone breaks out to spend 5 minutes coming up with ideas, and work blooms all over the artboard.
UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don't hold true. And you don't have to take our word for it, we'll show you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.
The oldest firm helping build a great user experience. From providing articles to holding conferences all across the globe
Every week there's a new selection of goodies to download - Vectors, Textures, Graphics, Images, Fonts and more!
Create a beautiful mock up of your design on a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop a desktop or all of these. Showcase the designs in your portfolio in context
Real life work examples in your portfolio are impressive to potential employers - here's an opportunity
Make it a habit to back up your work to an external hard drive regularly. During the course, at least once per month so you don't lose your portfolio work
As you progress through the course and create your projects, it's a good idea to keep them really well organised so that you don't have to search through loads of files later. I recommend project folders with a structure inside something like Brief, User research, Personas, Designs, User Testing, Results and more as you see fit.
Keep your best resources and tools organised in your browser bookmarks
Asana is a great way to manage your tasks and keep resources organised.
May not be the best choice, but you can import your audio file and create a video presentation.
For 'intro to UX' task 7, you need to make a presentation. One good way is to write a script, record the audio, edit the audio, then create the visual presentation to match the audio file in Powerpoint or Google slides and record the screen as you change the slides in time with the audio. Then just match up the audio and video file in something like Imovie. To make it easier on yourself and allow you to cut out the odd stumble, you can use something like 'audacityteam.org/' to edit your audio. What I do, is if I make a mistake on a sentence, I just say the whole sentence again, and edit it all later. It's easier than you might think
Huge learning curve plus knowledge of programming logic needed, but you can build almost anything with this, however you need a third party to get an app into the app store, so look into that before using for a native app.
I haven't used this, but it's likely really easy to create a folio, BUT you have to have an active subscription to Adobe (min €11.89/month) - if so, this is a poor option because UX designers don't particularly need expensive Adobe apps, when you have free Figma and free Adobe XD as your main design app. The only reason this would be a potential choice is if you choose to get the subscription of Adobe XD so that you can put more than 1 live clickable prototype into your projects. Even then, Wix is a competitor (with monthly costs to link to your own domain)
Can seem quite technical for beginners, not great user interface, personally I would avoid. If you do use it, try Elementor plugin for drag and drop, plus Divi template for ease of use.
The easiest drag and drop builder, but also the most limited. Responsive. It cannot do different code for mobile.
Medium learning curve. The best for 'Designers' who don't want to code by hand, but have a knowledge of HTML, CSS, CSS Grid and Flexbox. Very creative, you can build almost anything, but limited when it comes to complex sites requiring complex database backends e.g. if you wanted to build a site like Etsy or Amazon, then go for Bubble.io instead
Pixel persona handles photo based elements (Like Adobe Photoshop), Vector persona handles vector elements (like Adobe illustrator)
The old favourite UI design tool before Figma OK, but not as good as Figma or XD, and not used in the industry so much now, in Europe at least
The most popular UI design tool in European companies in my experience because it has more team features, however XD is nicer for individual use with efficient features like repeat grid
My favourite UI design tool, I think better for animations and interactions, but not as strong as Figma for team usage. The free version is the full software, the only limits: one active shared document, two editors and one active shared link. This is okay for trying out the software, but it isn't much good if you want other team members, stakeholders or clients to be able collaborate on your designs.
TOP TIP! Create graphics in Free XD to use in your presentations! Use the free version of XD to create great looking .png elements to drop into your slides/movie. You can give the artboard a transparent background too (artboard = no fill) and then export as a png so there's no white rectangular backgrounds
Sharing and collaboration usage limits on the Starter plan? Share links: 1 active shared link - €11.89/ month for unlimited shared prototype links, PDF Exports and video exports. For students first year, ALL adobe apps (inc photoshop etc = US$239.88/yr.
When you choose fonts for a CV or your portfolio, or for a project, the fonts are very important. One quick way to make an attractive readable choice, is to choose a font pair, one for the headings and one for the body copy. These links are just 2 examples of font pairing sites, search for others. These are good because they have google fonts which are free.
These fonts are free to use in websites, and you can download them for use in your design software too. Generally I only offer google fonts to clients, because other fonts generally cost $ and technical fiddling is necassary
Jumpstart your designs and if you didn't start with a design background, you can disguise it using these kits.
There are so many of these icon sites, just always try to get an svg (vector format) because then you can edit it easily e.g. colours, rather than a pixel based jpg or png file
on user interviews, keep the small window of the user in the bottom corner so it doesn't go over the top of the screen that the user is interacting with. Pay attention to the file format, since some formats aren't good for editing software if you want to edit it later. For presentations you can You can either pre-record your audio, or talk as you click through your slides and record your screen to create your presentation. Probably there are several other ways to do this.
You can upload a photograph and extract a colour palette from it, this is useful to do with clients sometimes. Also good for gradients. Pay attention to the tutorial widget on first entry which teaches you how to generate random palettes just by hitting space-bar and many more extremely useful tips & time-savers.
A good basic grounding for those with not so much artistic or graphic training
1 UI design challenge emailed to you every day, good to put them up onto dribbble.com to extend your folio
Probably the top site to see other designers work. Easy to search for a keyword and get pages of results for inspiration
A very specific, pragmatic and realistic approach to solve the big questions in the early stages of new ventures
Describes how to apply design thinking and lean and agile methodologies together
It's good for a UX designer to be aware of service design because it will often impact on your projects
This book is part of the newer Lean movement, which followed Eric Ries 'Lean Startup' work
80 creative challenges that will help you achieve a breadth of stronger design solutions
Useful book on how to approach your design thinking process
Specific about design for web
Broadly about designing for humans. Raises your expectations about how things should be designed, is quite general and entertaining but has some old-fashioned looking diagrams (still relevant though!)
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