Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Dani Andor

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 my 2016 year retrospective, so I thought to keep up with this “tradition” and do the same with 2017.

So here we go…

As you might remember, last year I switched from FlipSnack to Cognetik. In 2017, after working as a Product Designer at Cognetik 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.

I have to admit, freelancing wasn’t my first choice, but after sending a lot of job proposals, a good couple of interviews, emails and calls, I thought that it would be a good experience and also a great opportunity to add some new projects to my portfolio.

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.

In the meantime, while I was starting as a freelancer, Manuel contacted me and we started a long-term collaboration on his project, Effective Experiments so, in the end I managed to have a stable income, beside other freelance projects.

Desigsnippet.com — my first side project

I created designsnippet.com 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.

You can keep up to date with the articles I curate following designsnippet on twitter or by subscribing to the newsletter ( still under development ).

<a href="https://medium.com/media/378f5af5a177c72731d281ae0365672d/href">https://medium.com/media/378f5af5a177c72731d281ae0365672d/href</a>

Projects I worked on in 2017

This year I worked on a good couple of projects. You can take a look at them on my dribbble portfolio , but I will write here a few lines about some of them.

Cognetik

Check out this project on Dribbble .

Before I left Cognetik, I finished some of the work they needed, like their dashboard , card builder and some landing pages. Also, I worked on one of their new tools.

DevSea

Check out this project on Dribbble

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.

Doky

Check out this project on Dribbble

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 email , chat, tasks, notes etc and we still have a lot to do.

ClicRecours

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.

For ClicRecours, I had to design the whole platform, starting with reviewing what they already had at that time and creating a completely new style.

My portfolio

Because I never really had a portfolio, in 2017 I tried to design one. I went through multiple variants ( version 1, version 2 ) but I think I will stick with this one.

Effective Experiments

Check out this project on Dribbble

Effective experiments is a platform developed with conversion optimization in mind. I started to collaborate with Manuel on redesigning their admin section first and after that we moved on the dashboard and website. You’ll see more screens in my portfolio from this project, for sure.

Mentoring

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.

What I wrote about

Some of the articles I wrote this year:

Dear junior UI/UX designer …
Dear recruiters,
The designer and his design — part 2

Conclusions

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.

If you want to connect, you can find me on Dribbble, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. Also, if you are looking for an UI/UX — Product designer for your awesome project, don’t hesitate to contact me. 🙂

2017 — A year with big changes was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2017 — A year with big changes

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