• Written by Rich McNabb • Proofread & Edited by Claude AI
Some practical tips and resources for junior and intermediate designers looking to grow their UX and UI skills, without spending a fortune.
Image credit:
I graduated from Natcoll Design Technology (now Yoobee School of Design) in 2009 with a Diploma of Interactive Design. Project-based modules and assessments were what I loved most about Natcoll, learning by doing rather than sitting a big exam that tests knowledge you could just Google.
The timing could not have been worse. New Zealand’s economy was already deep into the aftershocks of the Global Financial Crisis by 2009, and nobody was hiring designers straight out of study with zero real-world experience. It felt a bit like Ready Player One, the moment you take the VR goggles off and there’s this jolt, the world you’d been picturing in your head suddenly colliding with whatever’s actually unfolding in front of you.
Any advice, no matter how small, would have made a huge difference. So I emailed a handful of designers around the world whose work I admired, people whose skill was far beyond anything I was doing at the time. I was not asking for ongoing mentorship, just hoping for a few paragraphs, some words of wisdom, or a direction to explore.
Most never replied. Looking back, I get it. Everyone is busy, juggling deadlines at work and family life at the end of a long day. Still, I know how much even a handful of bullet points and a couple of links would have meant to me back then.
That is why I reply to every single junior designer who messages me on LinkedIn or sends me an email now. I remember what starting out felt like, and it sucks. Hopefully this article makes it suck slightly less.
For a while, that meant writing a slightly different version of the same reply each time, tweaked to whatever the person had asked or whatever I could remember in the moment. Better than nothing, though not the most considered or useful way to help someone. This article is my attempt at a more structured answer, one you can take what is useful from and pass forward yourself one day.
To be clear, this is not a formula or a straight line. Design is messy, and that is where the best breakthroughs happen. Like most things in my life, it has been a lot of trial and error with a handful of wins along the way. It is what has worked for me across almost 20 years as a UX/UI designer.
There’s a name for that in-between stage too. Ira Glass calls it The Taste Gap, the space between the taste that got you into design in the first place and the actual skill needed to make good work. Every designer I respect has lived in that gap far longer than they’d like to admit.
Most of what follows in this article comes down to one thing: volume over perfection. One of my favourite parables from Art & Fear is The Ceramics Class, a story about why quantity often leads to quality. A class was split in two, one half graded purely on how much they made, the other on producing a single perfect piece. The quantity group made the better pots, every time, simply because they kept their hands moving and learned from what broke.
Your version will and should look different, since there is no one size fits all. Try what makes sense for where you are starting from, adapt the rest, and see what resonates.
Question the responses you get back when something feels off. Push back with the same confidence the AI showed, even if you need to do that a few times over. Cross-reference the important stuff. Trust, but verify. Work through it as a collaborative brainstorming session. That’s a real skill, one worth developing on purpose rather than leaving to chance, and it only works if you stay in the loop.
I rebuilt my entire portfolio website this way. Six weeks of nights and weekends, hundreds of prompts, one very old custom-built WordPress website replaced with something I’m actually proud of.
Somewhere during that process, and in the articles I’ve written since, I stumbled onto a technique that changed how I approach complex problems: reverse prompting, where the AI asks the questions instead of me. It’s a genuinely good way to get ideas out of your head and onto the screen, and your voice stays intact the whole way through.
Grids, responsive breakpoints, padding, margins, gutters, and typographic scale are the cornerstone of good design. They add structure and give method to the madness, even when nobody browsing the finished product ever notices they’re there.
I use a 4px/8px baseline grid alongside a traditional typographic scale to keep things consistent across web and mobile. Sounds like a small detail. It shows up everywhere once you know to look for it, including on a networking dashboard that needed that structure just to stay usable.
Typography carries more emotional weight than people give it credit for. Think of it like a well-tailored suit, it should dress up your words to match the tone and feeling behind them, not just make text legible. On this site I lean on Inter, a workhorse of a typeface that stays legible at almost any weight or size, paired with a proper typographic scale rather than guessed-at font sizes. If you want more options beyond Inter, I’ve put together fonts the professionals use for web and mobile work.
Standard breakpoints work the same way at team level. Everyone starts from the same page, aligned on where a layout shifts and why, instead of guessing at different numbers for the same problem.
The same principle applies at platform level too:
Each one is a rulebook the developer sitting next to you already knows by heart. Design inside those conventions rather than around them, and a lot of the back and forth over what’s actually feasible disappears before it starts.
Building with those components made it far easier to design and build a mobile banking app that had to feel native on both iOS and Android. iOS came first, then we looked at how the same experience needed to adapt once it moved onto Android. Following each guideline also meant accessibility and gesture handling came built in, rather than something we had to invent and test from scratch ourselves.
Start building, and start small, with something that barely counts as a commitment. That’s the whole trick.
Sometimes the side quest is a genuine real-world problem hiding in plain sight. Organising a work team’s night out around Wellington’s craft beer scene turned into an app for craft beer event, working out the shortest walking route between bars, letting the group message each other using the phone’s own calling and texting rather than building something new from scratch, and adding badges people could earn for checking into each stop along the way. Bigger scope than 30 minutes a day, but the same principle underneath it, start with the actual problem in front of you, then build outward from there.
From there, raise the constraint slightly and commit to it properly. My own rule is 30 Minutes to Mars, just half an hour a day, and that’s the whole idea. It never needs to be a big time commitment. It’s the same logic behind Kaizen, the idea that small, consistent improvement beats occasional bursts of effort. One percent better most days adds up to something real a lot faster than people expect, and it never demands the kind of willpower that burns out by week two.
Some projects took weeks, others took months, fitted in around work and everything else going on in life. Thirty minutes a day, slowly working towards the quest, got me there anyway. Two free geometric fonts came out of that habit, one inspired by modular Lego-like shapes, the other by Herbert Bayer’s 1925 universal typeface.
Ideas for a project can come from anywhere, including places that have nothing to do with design. My SimpleTimer stopwatch app started life as a hair product bottle, the circular shape on the packaging turned into the timer’s core interaction. Illustrator Christoph Niemann works the same way, turning a hammer into a footballer’s boot or a red pencil into a megaphone using nothing but objects lying around his desk. Different field, same instinct, and it’s exactly the kind of thing covered in documentaries I love.
A small project can turn into something much bigger too. What started as a search for a turntable stand became a full custom built Hi-Fi furniture, foamcore prototyping and all. Briefing a builder turned out to raise the same communication questions as briefing a developer.
Sign up at dailyui.co and a new interface prompt lands in your inbox most weekdays, spread out over 100 days. Nothing fancy, just a one-line brief and total creative freedom on how to solve it, then you share what you made on Dribbble or Twitter under #dailyui. Designers at places like Netflix have credited it as a genuinely good way to test interactions and visual styles without the pressure of a real client brief.
I ended up designing an actual currency converter instead of the standard calculator prompt, a 404 page, a social share button, and a full settings screen and landing page, both built around the craft beer event app I mentioned above. You can see 100 days of design if you want more examples of what the prompts actually look like day to day.
Dribbble is where I post finished work and rough concepts alike, a place to demonstrate your skills, explain your design thinking, and build an audience over time. Building your own WordPress site, like this one, works just as well, and gives you full control over how your work gets presented.
WordPress isn’t the only option though. Squarespace suits designers who want something polished without much fuss, clean templates and solid typography out of the box. Webflow feels closer to designing in Figma, with more control over layout and interaction, which suits detailed case studies well. Framer leans on AI-assisted building and tight Figma integration if you want something quicker to stand up. Wix gives you the most creative freedom of the bunch, with a genuinely gentle learning curve.
With so many free platforms out there, there’s no excuse not to share what you’re making, whichever one you land on.
“What’s your design process?” It’s one of those simple sounding questions people trip over, because until someone actually asks it, you might never have stopped to think about it properly. I hadn’t. I knew I had a process, I just hadn’t taken the time to write it down or acknowledge it as one, until I read Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job. One line stuck with me: there’s no magic “make pretty” button hiding in your design tools, and you can’t keep pulling a rabbit out of a hat for every project. That’s when it clicked. I already had a process. I’d just never bothered to name it.
Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things shaped this just as much, long before I’d have called any of it a process. It’s the book that made me notice affordances and friction everywhere, not just in interfaces, and a lot of how my brain naturally sorts a problem still traces back to it.
Mine breaks into four phases, Discover, Define, Design, Deliver, across 10-step design process from the first brief through to final delivery. It’s not a rigid set of rules carved in stone. It’s something to push against when a project gets complicated, and it means you’re never starting from a completely blank page.
Have your answer ready before someone asks it in an interview, or before a real project forces the issue. You’ll walk in ready rather than figuring it out under pressure.
Not every lesson worth learning comes from a UX article. Documentaries, comedy, album art, even books that have nothing to do with design, all feed back into how you think about your own work in ways a textbook never will. It’s also a great use of the downtime between applications.
Stand-up comedy: joke writing shares real DNA with a well-crafted headline or a tight piece of UX copy, cutting everything back to the smallest number of words that still land. Eddie Izzard’s Delirious is the one I keep coming back to, filmed at just 22 and still held up decades later as close to the gold standard for stand-up, all instinct and confidence commanding a room that size. I’ve pulled together stand-up comedy specials worth watching, less for the laughs alone and more for how differently each comedian sees the same ordinary world everyone else walks straight past.
Album covers: I put together a list of album cover art work, purely from a graphic design angle, composition, typography, colour, concept. David Bowie’s Legacy compilation is a good example of restraint doing all the work, stark white type on black alongside a single silhouette, released right after his death and somehow landing as a memorial rather than a cash grab.
Design documentaries: I’ve also pulled together design documentaries. Helvetica traces the whole history and politics of a single typeface, and Abstract goes wider, eight different designers across totally different fields, including the Christoph Niemann episode that introduced me to his everyday-object sketches mentioned earlier.
Books outside the industry: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is nearly 90 years old and every principle in it still holds. Atomic Habits and Extreme Ownership taught me more about consistency and accountability than anything written specifically for designers ever has. None of these are design books. All of them shaped how I design. You’ll find my thought provoking books if you want more.
A university assignment doesn’t have to stay a university assignment. Mine was designing a police dispatch dashboard for my User Experience paper at Victoria University, and I documented it properly, week by week, right from the first sketch. Persona sketches, wireframes, mind maps, screenshots of every iteration, even a user-evaluation form at the end. None of it was precious or polished at the time. It just meant that by the time the project was finished, all I had to do was build the case study, not reconstruct anything from memory months later.
It’s not just the police project either. My early sketches for an origami-building app started the same way, rough shapes on paper before anything got near a screen, so the thinking behind a decision is still there months later instead of lost to memory.
That’s really the whole point. Reading about process is one thing. Building something real, brief through to prototype, teaches you things no article can, mine especially. It’s the same instinct behind most of what’s on this site: rough notes, voice memos, half-formed ideas, shaped by AI reverse prompting into something worth reading rather than left as a draft that never goes anywhere.
Once you’ve got a few case studies behind you, curation becomes the skill. What you leave in shows as much as what you take out. I’ve pulled a lot of logo and web design work off my own site over the years, keen to attract more app and mobile design work instead. Add more of what you want to be hired for. Subtract what you don’t.
Side projects and self teaching build real momentum, and pairing them with structured, consistent learning takes you further still, without needing to cost a fortune.
After almost 15 years in UX/UI, I wanted some formal qualifications behind the practical experience, something to balance instinct with time-tested theory. I’ve worked through 32 UX/UI courses with the Interaction Design Foundation, true to their name, they focus on fundamentals rather than trends, which means what you learn stays useful for years rather than going stale in a season. Multiple choice questions, short essays, video lessons, peer discussion, optional exercises, a genuine mix rather than video after video.
Same 30-minutes-a-day habit as everywhere else in this article, just aimed at study instead of a side project. For the price, it’s been one of the better investments I’ve made in my own career.
Money isn’t the only thing on the table. I’ve taken pay cuts to work on projects that were a better fit or taught me new skills, almost treating it as paid training. Project type, a four-day week, flexible hours, training, all part of the package worth weighing up, and how much any of it matters depends on your situation and where you’re at right now.
Knowing your own values makes those trade-offs so much easier to weigh up. A core values exercise I did using Think2Perform’s Values Cards made mine a lot clearer, and measuring job offers against them instead of just the salary number has made deciding easier ever since.
Understanding your strengths does similar work. My own strengths and personality point at the same thing from two different directions, and having both written down somewhere makes it far easier to explain what you’re actually good at when someone asks.
Have an updated resume on hand at all times too, so you’re always ready to send it the moment a recruiter calls or emails, rather than scrambling to bring it up to date first. It’s doing the same job as your portfolio, just in a different format, so give it the same care and keep it tight.
Have a number in mind before anyone asks for it. Whenever I get a recruiter call, I ask what the market rate looks like for my experience, so when someone tries to lowball me later, I’ve got actual data to push back with. This has saved me more than once moving between contracting and in-house work too. Coming back to contracting after time away, I’ll say it straight: I’ve been out of the contracting world for a while, so based on my skills and experience, what does the current market rate look like right now? Asking directly, rather than guessing or underselling myself out of nerves, has never once worked against me.
They’ll usually ask how I landed on that number. When I say it’s based on the market rate from recent conversations with recruiters, that changes the conversation. If a client comes back with a lower number based on what they “feel” is fair, I point out that feel isn’t a metric, it’s qualitative, mine is quantitative. At that point I’ll politely suggest the client needs to reset their expectations on price, or consider hiring a junior or mid-weight designer if that’s closer to their budget.
Researching live roles does more than tell you your rate though. It shows you the gaps, the skills or experience keeping you from the jobs you actually want, and that becomes your plan for what to focus on next. Sometimes the market’s tough enough that you just need the work. That’s fine too, so long as you’re going in with your eyes open.
None of this is the answer, only what’s worked for me across almost 20 years of doing this. Some of it will land for you straight away. Some of it won’t fit at all, and that’s exactly how it should be, since your situation, your strengths, and your starting point are all different from mine.
If you take one thing from this, let it be the process, not the specifics. Find what helps you improve, stick with it long enough to see results, then keep adjusting as you go. The tools will change. The advice will age. The habit of actually doing the work won’t.
That’s really why this exists in the first place. I never got more than a line or two back from the designers I emailed all those years ago, and I’ve tried to make sure this turned out to be more useful than that.
Go build something. Whatever shape that takes for you, that’s the whole point.