Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Liu Xiaoyu

I am Xiaoyu. In English, it is “Little Corn”.

My parents thought I had an inborn talent for design. So did I.

I took everywhere in my house as my drawing workplace once I was able to crawl. “My routine work every day at that time was to check if I need to repaint the furniture again”, said my dad. As I recall in childhood, there was always a bucket of wall paint in the store room, awaiting orders.

As what I wished, I was sent to a drawing class before I destroyed our house. I arrived earlier than the teacher, sat in the first row, and I was always the most vigorous student in the class until one day. We were to draw smiling faces on that day, and I, unfortunately, was chosen to stand in front of everyone and, smile. I had nowhere to escape as my dad “encouraged” me by carrying me on his shoulder to the stage. I gave a big cry instead of smile and quit the class after that. I was 5 years old.

I started my self-learning journey from that on. Sometimes I could get satisfactory results, but sometimes I strove in a wrong way. I still remember once I was to design a cover for the story — Little cats go fishing. After finishing the work, I insisted on adding mice beside the cats regardless of the theme — to me, cats were always together with mice. It might be too hard for me to understand the difference between design and pure drawing at that time. I was 9 years old.

The first time when design brought me “financial benefit” was a volunteer trip. To raise money, I designed a set of postcards telling the story our program in drawings and printed 500 copies. To my surprises, all the copies were sold out. “It might be a right thing for me to be a designer in the future”, I thought. That success encouraged me a lot. I was 16 years old.

Two years later, I became a university student. My major is a mixture of computer science, engineering and design. “I can be a UI/UX designer as I gain knowledge in both computer and design!” I was excited. However, things did not go as what I expected. Only when I started to systematically learn things about design with principles applied, I realized it was not as easy as creating anything I want. Sometimes my work could be terrible but several days later, a sudden inspiration brought me back to stand up.

This lasted until this summer. I had an offer for summer intern as software engineer, but I got to know they were recruiting UI/UX design interns as well. “I should keep going for what I really want.” This thought supported me to reject the offer without hesitation regardless of the discouragement from the HR. Filled with hope and the imagination of my future career plan, I prepared for a month and applied for the design position. You might have guessed it, I failed. “Well, we rejected each other once. That’s fair.” I comforted myself.

I told myself that was not even a thing. I continued to learn design; I took three web design courses at the same time; I did projects days over nights; I worked with my teammates and I felt happy. However, the result was not always as good, and I might not always implement my ideas into the webpages. I have overturned a cover page for 5 times at two o’clock in the morning; I once created 3 totally different styles of design within 2 days; I tasted the bitter of sitting in front of my computer for a day without typing one line of code; I had to accept the truth that I had to redo everything again… Everything reminded me of this summer. They made me fear. They made me deny myself. “Seems like I am going to be an engineer in the future already.” I tried to forget but I know I was hit.

I am now typing all these words with my friend sitting aside. “You just lack of experience and confidence.” She told me like a senior. I laughed at her pretended mature, but I have to admit that she is right. I never give up, or why am I still reading those design books? I was never afraid, or why am I still working on those design projects? I never fail, or why am I still striving to make better designs? Just better, and slightly better.

I never know what will happen next, it could be up or down. But I shall take every experience as a precious class to grow up in the path of learning design.

My Winding Journey of Learning Design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Winding Journey of Learning Design

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