You're interested in design? You may have some of these questions:

Top questions you might be asking:

• Do I need a certification or degree from college to get into Design?
• Will big companies like Google/Facebook/Zomato, etc. hire me without a degree in Design?
• Will design bootcamps/courses/cohorts (non-college options) help?

Getting Started in 3 minutes

Read below or watch this 3min video

Read below or watch this 3min video

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Complete Step-by-Step Guide

1. Learn the tools 🛠

   1. Most designers use Figma or Adobe XD (both are free) and some use Sketch (paid) for UI Design or User Interface Design
   2. You can start by trying to replicate UI of your favourite apps and later inspirational shots from Dribbble, Pinterest, Behance, etc.
   3. We do this as the first step to ensure:
      1. You can create what you can imagine 🧠
      2. You will start to pick-up some of the standard UI patterns 😎

2. Solve Some Problems 🧪

   1. Pick an app you use and try to recreate and then modify it's design to solve a problem you have
   2. UI design is the skill you have to create an experience or User Experience or (UX) in products — that's why learning to solve problems using your skills is the next step
   3. Turn this into a case study (See this guide on How to write Case Studies)

3. Talk to the Users 👂

4. So far you've tried to solve your problems. But designers working in the industry are focused on solving users problems. Users problems can be very different from our own!

5. Pick a category of users and an app they use — example: Students using Google Meet or Old people using Whatsapp, etc.

   1. Make sure you can get on a call with at least 5 people from this category to understand how, why, when, etc. they use the app

6. Prepare a set of questions that can help you conduct a user interview, learn about asking non-leading questions

7. Pick the most common and interesting problems and create/modify designs to solve this problem

8. Build a prototype and see if you can observe at least 5 people from the target user group using it (you can use Zoom/Google meets with screenshare for this)

9. Document your observations and language customers use, and make modifications to designs

10. Repeat the process from 4 to 6 till you see evidence that you've solved the problem / or you conclude that this cannot be solved with design (both are fine, not all designs work — that's alright and part of the learning process)

11. Build a Portfolio 🧳

12. Take the work you did in step #2 and #3 and turn them into case studies (See this guide on How to write Case Studies)

13. Combine all your case studies to make a portfolio

    1. You can make it on Medium or Notion for free
    2. Have at least 3 elaborate case studies in your portfolio
    3. If you have more than 3 case studies — highlight the best 3