Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Brian Meschke Sadly, this doesn’t work.

The First Is The Worst

Trying to get your first design job is intimidating. You spent a long time building a portfolio and writing your resume. Now you have sent them out to various hiring mangers and recruiters.

What are the things that you should be thinking about? What are the things that you should be focused on?

If you aren’t getting positive responses, maybe I can help.

The number one, most important skill that you should work on is:

Drum-roll, please.

Visual UI Design

Sounds obvious? It’s not. I see a lot of new designers or people who want to break into the industry with, at best, mediocre visual designs. They spend a lot of time learning HTML and CSS. Like, a ton of time.

They invest so much effort into coding, but the site just isn’t visually exciting. If the first impression a potential employer gets when visiting your site isn’t “Wow! That looks great,” then you are wasting your time. So the first piece of advice I would give to a newcomer is “STOP!”

Don’t even learn how to code. Leave that for later.

Improve your visual UI design skills. Make this your number one focus. Practice and practice until you can make beautiful, aesthetically pleasing interfaces. This the number one thing you have to nail first. Okay?

I don’t want to get too into the weeds with how to go about this, but basically, mimic good designers. Look at their designs and try to make a copy of it yourself. You learn so much by recreating another’s work. It’s how they teach art. Start by imitating a master.

Simplify Your Portfolio

Another common thing I see from new designers is an overly busy portfolio. With their site, they are trying to imitate businesses or design agencies. Don’t. I understand the desire to look professional, but you aren’t a company. Take a personal branding approach.

Your portfolio only needs three parts: about, work, and contact. That’s it. And that’s not just for beginners. I’ve been doing this for years, and those are still the only sections I have on my portfolio.

Cut The Fat

Similarly to simplifying your portfolio by removing extraneous pages and info, curate your work. Don’t put up every project you have worked on. Choose your best.

You only need to showcase 4–5 projects. That’s it. Quality over quantity. It’s nice if you show a range of skills and styles, but that’s less important than only showing work you are proud of. If you only have 3 projects that you are happy with, then only show those 3.

Interactions, Baby!

Once you have a firm grasp on visual design, move onto projects with more interactions. Software, mobile and web applications, websites that are highly interactive. The days of simple, nice looking template websites are gone. The classic 5 page website is almost non-existent now.

When hiring managers and recruiters are looking over your portfolio, you can’t only have that type of stuff. Simple brochure-like sites. Those are great projects to start with, but as you progress you need to be working on things with deeper, richer interactions. Those are the types of projects where you will grow and learn the most and also the ones that will get the best responses.

Summary

Focus on visual design first. Stop coding, start imitating great designers.

Keep your portfolio simple. You only need about, work, and contact.

Curate your work. Only put your absolute best in your portfolio.

Design projects with user interaction. Don’t just design online brochures.

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Landing Your First UI Job was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Landing Your First UI Job

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