<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/2017-a-year-with-big-changes-4ff8d07cee8b?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Dani Andor <img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*5U2TFnE_wepgDzToah--Xg.jpeg"></p>
<p>If you are anything like me, at the end of the year you take some time to review how this year was for you; what went well and what didn’t went that well. Last year, I shared with you <a href="https://medium.com/@daniandor/2016-in-retrospective-cb67466248f7">my 2016 year retrospective</a>, so I thought to keep up with this “tradition” and do the same with 2017.</p>
<h3>So here we go…</h3>
<p>As you might remember, last year I switched from FlipSnack to Cognetik. In 2017, after working as a Product Designer at <a href="http://www.cognetik.com/">Cognetik</a> for almost 1 year and a half, I left the company and started to work as a freelancer. Wasn’t an easy decision, but after I put aside some money — so I won’t have any financial problems for a couple of months in case things won’t work out — I decided to try this out and see how would go.</p>
<p>I have to admit, freelancing wasn’t my first choice, but after sending <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/dear-recruiters-6660bc74468f">a lot of job proposals, a good couple of interviews, emails and calls</a>, I thought that it would be a good experience and also a great opportunity to add some new projects to my portfolio.</p>
<p>Another reason I chose to do freelancing was that I didn’t have to move from Oradea. When I was job-hunting, I received offers from different cities from Romania or even abroad, but all of them involved re-location which I didn’t want to do, so working as a freelancer solved this problem.</p>
<p>In the meantime, while I was starting as a freelancer, <a href="https://twitter.com/Digital_tonic">Manuel</a> contacted me and we started a long-term collaboration on his project, <a href="https://www.effectiveexperiments.com/">Effective Experiments </a>so, in the end I managed to have a stable income, beside other freelance projects.</p>
<h3>Desigsnippet.com — my first side project</h3>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*MqJfJ4j9aois1opfF-khrg.png"></p>
<p>I created <a href="http://designsnippet.com/">designsnippet.com</a> with those people in mind that either are subscribed to a lot of design related newsletters but often they don’t have the time to go through all of them or those that don’t really know what to read because probably they are new in this field. Maybe I will write a more detailed article about this.</p>
<p>You can keep up to date with the articles I curate following <a href="https://twitter.com/designsnippet2">designsnippet on twitter</a> or by subscribing to the newsletter ( still under development ).</p>
<p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fupscri.be%2F69244e-2%2F&amp;src=https%3A%2F%2Fupscri.be%2F69244e-2%3Fas_embed%3Dtrue&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&amp;schema=upscri" width="800" height="400" frameborder="0"><a href="https://medium.com/media/378f5af5a177c72731d281ae0365672d/href">https://medium.com/media/378f5af5a177c72731d281ae0365672d/href</a></iframe></p>
<h3>Projects I worked on in 2017</h3>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*pC8cafUofaNECI-YHQg5-A.jpeg"></p>
<p>This year I worked on a good couple of projects. You can take a look at them on <a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor">my dribbble portfolio</a> , but I will write here a few lines about some of them.</p>
<h4>Cognetik</h4>
<p><a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor/projects/516675-Cognetik"><em>Check out this project on Dribbble</em></a><em> .</em></p>
<p>Before I left Cognetik, I finished some of the work they needed, like their <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3311366-Cognetik-Dashboard">dashboard</a> , card <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3311380-Cognetik-Card-Builder">builder</a> and some <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3399843-Cognetik-Landingpage">landing</a> <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3758920-Cognetik-Landingpage-for-webinar">pages</a>. Also, I worked on one of their <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3653836-Data-stream">new tools</a>.</p>
<h4>DevSea</h4>
<p><a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor/projects/516677-DevSea"><em>Check out this project on Dribbble</em></a></p>
<p>In a nutshell, DevSea is a crowdsourced web development marketplace where lean startups can collaborate risk-free with developers, build technically proficient teams, and get their products and services to market. The platform is still under-development, and they already changed some parts of the design, but the main flows should be the same.</p>
<h4>Doky</h4>
<p><a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor/projects/550831-Doky"><em>Check out this project on Dribbble</em></a></p>
<p>Doky was the first big project I started to work on as a freelancer. It provides cloud based apps for you and your team to collaborate.I worked on their apps for <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3705852-Dokymail-Opened-email">email</a> , <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/4032568-Doky-Chat">chat</a>, tasks, notes etc and we still have a lot to do.</p>
<h4>ClicRecours</h4>
<p>The guys from ClicRecours are planning to offer a platform where customers and businesses can establish a relationship. To achieve this, the platform enables customers to provide feedback, share opinions, discuss about products they use and even negotiate an agreement with the businesses they buy products or services from.</p>
<p>For ClicRecours, I had to design the whole platform, starting with reviewing what they already had at that time and creating a <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/4003499-Platform-for-creating-claims">completely</a> <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/4011690-Claim-details">new style</a>.</p>
<h4>My portfolio</h4>
<p>Because I never really had a portfolio, in 2017 I tried to design one. I went through multiple variants ( <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3125234-Personal-website-Portfolio">version 1</a>, <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3291895-Personal-website-Portfolio">version 2</a> ) but I think I will <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3856049-daniandor-com-Personal-website-Portfolio">stick with this one</a>.</p>
<h4>Effective Experiments</h4>
<p><a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor/projects/578651-Effective-experiments"><em>Check out this project on Dribbble</em></a></p>
<p>Effective experiments is a platform developed with conversion optimization in mind. I started to collaborate with Manuel on redesigning their <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3835481-EE-Admin-dashboard">admin section</a> first and after that we moved on <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/3853897-EE-App-V1">the dashboard</a> and <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/4015620-EE-website-2">website</a>. You’ll see more screens in my portfolio from this project, for sure.</p>
<h3>Mentoring</h3>
<p>In 2017, I started to mentor some junior designers. It was an interesting experience, that I’ll definitely continue in the next year too. Through mentoring, I managed to get in contact with people from all around the world, with very different backgrounds that wanted to learn about design either just because of curiosity or to get started to work in the field. I’m still in contact with some of them and try to help them as they progress in their career.</p>
<h3>What I wrote about</h3>
<p>Some of the articles I wrote this year:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/dear-junior-ui-ux-designer-30b1058c73da">Dear junior UI/UX designer …</a></li>
<li><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/dear-recruiters-6660bc74468f">Dear recruiters,</a></li>
<li><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/the-designer-and-his-design-part-2-d665491007ef">The designer and his design — part 2</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Conclusions</h3>
<p>So, this is it for 2017. It was a very interesting year, with new challenges and possibilities. For 2018, I hope to work on some new and interesting projects, to continue to help other designers to learn more about design, ux, ui or freelancing and also to write more.</p>
<p>If you want to connect, you can find me on <a href="https://dribbble.com/daniandor"><strong>Dribbble</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/daniandor_uiuxdesigner/"><strong>Instagram</strong></a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/daniandor"><strong>Twitter</strong></a> or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniandor/"><strong>LinkedIn</strong></a>. Also, if you are looking for an <a href="http://bit.ly/2t04ta2">UI/UX — Product designer</a> for your awesome project, don’t hesitate to <a href="mailto:dany.andor@gmail.com">contact me</a>. 🙂</p>
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<hr>
<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/2017-a-year-with-big-changes-4ff8d07cee8b">2017 — A year with big changes</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


2017 — A year with big changes

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