DEV Community

Cover image for How to Become a UX/UI Designer
Mark Vassilevskiy
Mark Vassilevskiy

Posted on

How to Become a UX/UI Designer

This blog post will provide you with tips on how to become a UI/UX designer. UI stands for user interface, and UX stands for user experience. Designing is about understanding people's needs and wants so that the design process satisfies them. You should have an eye for both UI and UX in order to be successful as a Designer. This article includes information on how to get your foot in the door of this field, what it takes to succeed, helpful tools, and more! You also, checkout my Behance Portfolio and see at my works


UI Design Deals With How Things Look

such as buttons and images. UI is about making the user's interaction accessible and easy to use. You should know what colors work well together or fonts that can be read easily on a website so people don't get frustrated when trying to navigate your site. Good UI design makes it clear where you are located on a certain page and provides an intuitive flow within pages of content. This takes practice but is one of the most important parts of the Design! If people cannot figure out your UI, they will leave immediately which means less users for you!

An example of UI would be when you go on Facebook, see your friend's post in the top right corner with their name and picture next to it which tells you who posted something. You then click on that person's profile where there are big buttons instead of small ones (which makes them easier to find) under their photo along with other useful information such as how many friends they have or if they're online/line status etc... This provides a UI that is clearly set up and easy to navigate.

UX Deals More With How Something Works Than Just Looks Like
The goal of user experience is to create positive customer experiences by considering the user's perspective. UX designers need to know what works and don't work for users so they can design accordingly. UI Designers should have some knowledge about UX because it is important that everything flows smoothly together - UI without UX will lead to a poor experience and vice versa!

An example of UX would be if you were using a new social media platform with no friends on it, but see many ads about accounts people can follow or how someone's friend found this site through another link and the UI was not designed well at all! This could lead to frustration as there may be more pop-ups that make it hard for users to find what they're looking for within the app so they quickly leave which impacts your business' success/income from advertisements etc.

UX deals with the overall design - UI deals with specific elements such as buttons or colors

In order for Designers to succeed in their careers, both UI and UX are key components necessary. Learning UI will help you understand how to make things look good and learning UX will help you understand how something works and what might not work well for users. Keep in mind that UI is more about looks while UX is more about functionality, but they both play a role in the overall design of a product!

Some Helpful Tools To Start With

Once you have some knowledge about UI and UX, start playing around with these tools to create designs. They are all very popular among designers and can be used to mock-up websites or apps. Having a strong portfolio will show employers that you're serious about becoming a Designer and gives them a glimpse into your skillset. It's also important to have a Portfolio because UI and UX Designers need to have good visual design skills!

Figma

The first tool I'd want to discuss is Figma, which is without a doubt the greatest solution for creating Web Design. You can use it to create anything from complicated UI designs to prototypes and user testing. The nice thing about Figma is that it offers a free plan, which is ideal for novices!

Alright, so with Figma you can do almost everything that you want, starting from logo and ending with a complete design for a fully working website with different pages.

One of the coolest features in Figma is that it doesn't require any powerful computer, in other words, you don't need to have good hardware for working with it, everything that you need is RAM, however, if you have the slowest PC on this planet it will run Figma anyway. By the way, you don't even need to download something, you can use it easily in your browser on any device that you want, and as I said it's absolutely free.

Also, there're many alternatives like Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision Studio, and many, many others, but personally, I think that Figma is the best one!

Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator

Photoshop and Illustrator are both industry-standard tools used by many Graphic Designers. They can be used for print layouts, web designing, photo editing, and more. However, they can also be quite expensive, but if you're serious about designing and want to be a UI/UX designer they are worth the investment.

Both of these tools can help you create UI designs for websites or apps as well as UX mock-ups and wireframes (well, Photoshop more). I would definitely recommend learning one first before trying to learn both at once because it is quite complicated. Illustrator is also a great option for creating Logo, because of this vector graphic technology

You can use Photoshop and Illustrator in combination with UI & UX design tools like Adobe XD, which is a great option for beginners!

Practice, Practice, and Again Practice!

The most important thing on the road to becoming a great UX/UI designer is Practice. You can ignore all other advice and concentrate only on Practicing, and trust me, the results will make you happy.

You can ask me, "Where can I get ideas for my designs?" and the answer will be simple. You can go surf the internet a little bit and find services that you're personally using or some interesting websites/ideas. After that, you should attempt to create the redesign for them yourself. Of course, you should not look for sites like Apple or YouTube because there is way too much information, animations, and other things that would be difficult for novices.

This technique is best used by someone who doesn't know where to find design ideas but the ideal approach is if you were working on your own project and creating a design from scratch. It will teach you to utilize your creativity and build things from the ground up.


Conclusion

In conclusion, UI and UX Designers need to have a number of skillsets to be successful in their careers. These include visual design skills, an understanding of user experience principles, technical knowledge about UI standards and coding languages as well as other things.

The first step for becoming a UI/UX Designer is creating your own Portfolio website so that you can showcase your UI designs and UX/UI projects. You should definitely upload all of the work to a portfolio website like Behance, Medium, or Dribble (there are many others).

You need to make sure that your Portfolio is not only filled with UI designs but also contains some other types of UI such as wireframes, sitemaps, and prototypes.

After that, the next step is to improve your skills by practicing and learning new techniques. The best way to do this is by attempting to redesign sites/apps that you are familiar with or finding inspiration from other sources.

Last but not least, continue reading articles and watching videos on UI & UX. Also, checkout my Behance portfolio

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
marcellahaller profile image
marcellahaller

Here is another article about the profession of a UX designer gapsystudio.com/blog/what-does-a-u.... I recommend this material for reading for beginners in this field, this material reveals in detail the aspect of the required skills and tasks of a UX designer in the development process.

Collapse
 
diana75082290 profile image
Diana

Thank you. Very interesting information.

Collapse
 
metamark profile image
Mark Vassilevskiy

Thanks you too! :)