Once you’ve learned how to use the tool, how to set up a project, how to find inspiration, and how to perform different design methods, you have the basics down.
But now comes the fun part, to practice creating UI designs and becoming more and more skilled. UI design is best learned by doing, observing, creating, and gaining experience.
Experience can come in the form of professional work, but it can also come from your own passion projects, doing daily design challenges, and getting feedback from mentors.
As UI design is a multidisciplinary skill, your continued education can be a combination of both theoretical and practical skills.
You will benefit from learning more about different surrounding skill sets such as UX design, visual design, and front-end development.
I suggest you try out many things in the beginning and observe where you’re natural talents and inclinations lie.
What is most enjoyable to you? What do you have a knack for? What puts you in a flow state? And that’s the direction you will most likely find joy in pursuing.
5.1. Daily UI Design Challenges
One of the most common beginner challenges you’ll find amongst the design community on social media such as Dribbble and Instagram is the Daily Design Challenge.
These challenges are popular within all fields of visual and graphic design and a great way to get started.
As the name implies, the Daily Design Challenges involves creating at least one new UI design per day. This is a great way to get into the habit of creating designs and normalizing that behavior in your daily routine.
Another great benefit of doing Daily Design Challenges is that you can post your results on social media such as Instagram and tag them.
You will find that countless other beginners are doing the same thing around the entire world, which allows you to find and connect with others learning the same thing. This is the beginning of joining the design community.
There are many pre-made Daily UI Design Challenges that you can follow, where you will get a design prompt each day to follow.
Examples of common challenges can be designing a login and sign-up page, an invoice receipt, a digital ticket, a drop-down menu, or a set of interactive buttons.
Apart from getting into the habit of designing every day, this challenge also exposes you to designing components you may not have chosen yourself.
Similar to working life, where there will be cases when you will need to design things depending on the project needs and not your preferences.
5.1.1. The 31 challenges
- Sign Up Form
- Credit Card Checkout
- Landing Page
- Calculator
- App Icon
- User Profile
- Settings
- 404 Page
- Music Player
- Social Share
- Error/Success
- E-Commerce Shop
- Direct Messaging
- Countdown Timer
- On/Off Switch
- Pop Up/Overlay
- Email Receipt
- Analytics Chart
- Leaderboard
- Location Tracker
- Dashboard
- Search
- Ticket
- Empty State
- Dropdown
- Log in/Sign up
- Blog Post
- Calendar
- Notifications
- Header Navigation
- Loading screen
Note! While doing this challenge, you can learn a lot from finding inspiration from more skilled designers’ work.
However, try not to mindlessly copy the inspiration you find, but think about what it is you’re doing and why.
Don’t just see each daily challenge as a to-do item to check off, but rather see every challenge as an opportunity to learn. By reflecting, thinking, and analyzing, you’ll learn ten times more than mindlessly doing.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- Why is a certain color, size, or shape used?
- Are there ways to improve the design you’ve made? Try making a few different iterations and versions
- What can you learn from this?
- What type of grid, whitespace, padding, or consistency can you identify in the inspiration you’re using?
- Can you add more states and interaction designs to your design?
- Try putting your design element in a bigger context
5.2. Copy Work
Copy work is a practice where you find a UI design mockup that is above your current level of skill, and you copy it.
By copying someone else’s polished UI designs, you’ll need to closely study it, and think about each little detail in order to recreate it.
You’ll notice things you might not have picked up otherwise, such as how the colors in the color palette relate to each other, the character and technique used for shadows, consistency in border-radius, and different layouts.
It’s similar to how artists learn how to paint by studying and copying masterpieces.
To find work above your level of skill, you can browse design social media such as Dribbble, Behance, and hashtags on Instagram.
You can also choose an application or website that you think has a good design for example Spotify or a polished calendar app.
It’s important however to not steal someone else’s work. Do not post or share it as your own without giving credit to the original designer.
5.3. Feedback and iterations
One of the best ways to get objective feedback to improve is to show your designs to more senior designers.
As a beginner, you won’t have enough background experience and knowledge bank to validate your designs properly. This, senior designers have.
In addition, multiple minds can most likely come up with more ideas and reflections in a shorter amount of time than a singular.
Working together combines the knowledge of different people, and will give you the insight you wouldn’t have thought of yourself.
5.4. Mentors
When learning something new, it’s always a good idea to have a mentor or multiple, that can help and guide you in your development.
A mentor can be a trusted teacher, a more experienced friend, or an internet connection.
How to find a mentor
There are many ways of finding a mentor. You could for example use specific mentor-student programs that help match mentors with students.
However, the best types of mentor relationships come from authentic interaction. A mentor-student relationship works best when both the mentor and the student get something out of it, such as stimulating and interesting conversations and discussions.
If you ask someone to become your mentor, just to send them a bunch of questions, what is the mentor getting out of it? And why would a great designer spend time investing in such a one-sided relationship?
I’d advise that the best way is to try to learn as much as you can on your own and create projects around your ideas and knowledge.
Post your projects on the internet, for example on Instagram or Dribbble, and then connect with more senior designers. Engage them in conversations, thought discussions, and ideas. This will create a much more natural relationship.
You could also actively engage in conversations surrounding more senior designers’ work, and build relationships that way. Great mentor-student relationships build on shared interests and stimulating exchanges.
5.5. Passion Projects
Design is best learned by doing, and creating your passion projects is probably one of the most enjoyable ways of learning.
Passion projects are projects that you have chosen yourself, not with the primary purpose of earning money, but to create something you want to create.
It can for example be an app or product idea you’ve thought about for a long time or something you’d wish existed. So, you create it!
By designing concepts or things you’d like to create, you also develop your sense of product design and innovative thinking. You get to practice how product founders think when coming up with ideas for new products, apps, and systems.
You can of course also include your own projects in your design portfolio, which is especially beneficial if you haven’t had any real work experience yet. If you do it properly, you’ll be able to articulate your design thinking thoroughly through your projects.
Even if you already have some portfolio projects, your additional passion projects may show your interests and abilities that you may not have gotten the chance to apply to a paid project yet.
For example, you may dream of working with healthcare products but only have experience with e-commerce. If you then create great passion projects with healthcare ideas instead, that may be your way into more healthcare-oriented work.
Who knows, perhaps your projects may even come to fruition and become real apps, products, and software!
5.1.1. Creating your design projects
1. Generate an idea
To begin creating your project, you can use your full imagination! You can allow yourself to dream about what type of app or product you want to use yourself.
Is there an app or service that you wish existed?
If you can’t come up with anything, try spinning off from existing apps or products that already exist. Perhaps there’s a personal finance app, health tracking app, exercise app, or a cool website that you think could be even better? Use that as inspiration for a better version.
Doing personal projects can be very enjoyable, so I’d recommend you to pick an idea that feels exciting for you!
The best part is that you don’t need to think about how to develop it in code or any such things, just allow yourself to dream freely and pick an idea.
2. Identify the problem space and needs
After finding an idea for something you want to create, dive into this idea deeper. Imagine – or find out for real – the target user group of this product, app, or design.
What are the needs of these potential users? You can either do some real market research or make up your imagined user group by assumptions and fantasy.
Your target user group probably has some specific characteristics, interests, needs, wants, and desires that you’ll design for.
You can use these points to create personas, draw up potential user journeys, and use these points to empathize with them.
3. Create a design system or visual guidelines
If you want to, you can also practice creating your first simple design system or visual guidelines for projects. This can be good practice for future cases.
Think about what the target group might respond to for visual languages, such as colors, tone of the copy, how used they are to digital products, and so on.
Further in the process, you can use these guidelines for creating mockups and visual details.
4. Brainstorm, find inspiration and sketch
As we’ve gone through in previous chapters on the design process, begin by brainstorming, finding inspiration, and sketching out various ideas.
Remember to take pictures or document the process along the way, so that you can use the material to put together a project for your portfolio or if you may want to present the design process to someone in the future.
Then, use those bases to create your first mockups and prototypes of an app, website, service, or product that can solve the problem or need you started with.
5. Perform usability tests and get feedback
If you want to add an extra touch of user experience (UX) design, you can perform usability tests or evaluate your design according to usability heuristics.
Another way is to ask for feedback from senior designers or post your design on social media to ask for feedback.
From these usability tests or other evaluations, create iterations of the design to improve it. This can also be documented, to show that you know how to iterate on design solutions.
You have now created a real design based on your own idea!
5.1.2. Putting it all together
Thereafter, you can collect your notes, personas, user journeys, visual guidelines, sketches, wireframes, mockups, and learnings into one file.
In this file, describe a narrative around your design process. Try to use proper methodology as well as your own words to describe the work process.
You can also include what software you used, how you evaluated your solutions, learnings from feedback or usability tests, and how you landed on the decisions that you made.
The file can be made and saved as a text document, PDF, video format, or a website, uploaded to Behance or Dribbble, or any other form you may feel comfortable with. From this, you now have a complete design project that you can showcase!