Blog

Designer Tools

I've Never Been Much of an Artist, But I Am a Designer

I've never been much of an artist. But that doesn't hold be back from being a graphic and UI/UX designer.

ui/ux

The Most Ingenious Way To Create Your UI/UX Portfolio in 2019

Finding it hard to finish your UI/UX or product design portfolio? Not sure if you should make a website, a pdf, a slideshow or send via courier pigeon? Well, I'm here to break down the pros and cons of the different portfolio formats and show you why Notion is the answer.

careers

How To Go After UI/UX Jobs WITHOUT Experience

I'm gonna show you some useful and some crazy ways you can start gaining experience and going after the jobs you want even with little or in some cases no experience at all by taking a targeted approach.

User Interface Design, User Experience Design, UI/UX

UI Problems: How to Choose Colors for UI Data

Choosing colors for more complex data, like maps, charts, diagrams and other statistic visualizations is different than choosing branding colors. I this series, I explore some of these UI/UX problems and my process for working through them as a product designer.

careers

Where To Work as a UI/UX Designer

Who you work for and the stage of the product you're working on has the biggest impact on what your role as a UI/UX designer will be. So who do you want to work for?

UI Design in Practice Series

UI Design in Practice Series: Images

Choosing images for your design projects can take forever. With an exhaustive amount of options, the trick is curating images that fit your brand and project and coming up with creative ways to customize it to your content. It's all about making the images work for you.

human-centered design

Is human-centered design causing us suffering?

Is human-centered design causing us more harm than good? How cold showers and Pete Holmes taught me to rethink product design.

User Interface Design, User Experience Design, UI/UX

Notion for UI/UX and Product Designers

In this article/video, I'm going to take you through my workflow as a UI/UX and Product Designers and how I use Notion to manage my product design tasks and UX research.

Product Design

Essential Tools for Product Designers [Summer 2019]

Product Design often encompasses a variety of roles including UX design, UX research and UI design. In this roundup we'll explore a specific blend of tools that have a real impact on the way product designers structure their workflows.

Podcast

[Podcast] Ep #2: The Practice of Empathy in UX

Today, I’m talking about Empathy in User Experience Design. What it is, how we can practice and cultivate it and how we can begin to move from empathy to compassion within ourselves and our work.

User Interface Design, User Experience Design, UI/UX

Best Books for Learning Product Design [2019]

There are a few great books that are talked about over and over again by UI/UX and Product Designers and they tend to pop up again and again for good reason.

color theory

UI Design: Choosing Color Palettes [VIDEO]

Color, we hear a lot about it from color theory and color harmony to saturation and brightness but what does it all mean? I pretty much design 80% of my apps with one. single. color. Maybe two if I want to go crazy and I want to tell you about that in the form of a little animated video.

Mindful Design and Interaction Series

Mindful Diversity and Inclusion in Tech

Diversity, inclusion, equity and equality; these terms are often used interchangeably, especially in the tech world, but they are not the same.

User Interface Design, User Experience Design, UI/UX

Need vs Solution and the 3 biggest reasons your freelance projects go wrong

Often times client conflate needs with solutions, your job as a freelance designer is to listen, research and ask the right questions in order to get at what the client truly needs so that you can present your most effective solution convincingly.

Mindful Design and Interaction Series

UX Design and Empathy, are we doing it right?

We hear the term 'user empathy' floating around the design world a lot these days. But are we really clear on what exactly that means? How many of us are really confusing empathy with sympathy or even pity and are we doing it right?

Podcast

[Podcast] Ep #1: Mental health stigmas and finding a balance between our digital and mental space

Join me as I interview Dr. Munn Saechao and discuss how we can break down barriers to seeking mental health help and striking a balance between our digital and mental spaces.

Mindful Design and Interaction Series

Mindful Design and Interaction

At DesignerUp we practice mindfulness and meditation. We practice in order to allow compassion and empathy to guide our work and interactions with the world. The tech we build holds great power and influence and with that, comes great responsibility.

UI Design in Practice Series

UI Design in Practice Series: Dividers

Separating content is a crucial part of designing layouts and information architecture. It allows us to delineate different groups of content and better manage areas of dense information. We can accomplish this with a simple UI element called: dividers.

Clients

Managing your client design project: 5 workflows to live by

So you've just scored that client contract you've been negotiating for weeks and you're finally ready to jump into the "real" work, right? Sounds great! But before we surface from the seemingly endless

buttons

UI Design in Practice Series: Buttons and Selection controls

All buttons are not created equal, but they can all look equally as good.

Freelancer

The real reason clients won't pay you to design their website

Many of my students are just starting their careers in design, others are a bit more seasoned but find it hard to attract new clients and compete. There's one big reason you might not be landing more work. Hint: It's not your portfolio...

UI Design in Practice Series

UI Design in Practice Series: Containers, Boxes and Borders

Boxes helps us create organization, separation and relationship. Here are a few tricks to grouping your content into containers and how to style those containers to deliver impact and quality of aesthetic.

Product Design

Designer thinking vs Developer thinking: How tech support taught me to build better products

No dev or designer is an island. Whether or not we all become unicorns and full-stack engineers is not the point or the goal. It's about better communication and better problem solving and figuring out what it is you need to figure out in the first place to build better products.

color theory

UI Design in Practice Series: Color

There is much to be said on the topic of color, color theory and color psychology. Our focus here isn't the fundamentals and principles of colors, but rather a few tricks you can use to improve your designs and get some practice applying color to your user interfaces.

UI Design in Practice Series

UI Design in Practice Series: Typography

Really good typography is like a good magic trick in the hands of a magician. The magician knows all the nitty gritty details involved in the trick but the viewer just experiences delight and fascination. Let's get into those details.