A part of me tells me this post is meaningless because nobody will read it. Why should they? It’s highly personal, mostly unrelated to design or anything else that I usually write about.

But another part of me says that it helps me process how well (or unwell) I spent a year of my life. It helps me realise what I did well and what not. It’s therapeutical in a sense. It forces me to be more mindful of where I spend my time and energy and checks if I’m on the right track towards the life that I want. So unlike all the other blog posts, this one is a post that I write for myself.

In last year’s review, I wrote:

If I had to summarise 2023 in a few words it’d do it with “chaos” and “new beginnings.” I want the 2024 to be about excitement and independence.

Looking back on 2024 I can confirm it was about excitement and independence. I proved to myself that I don’t need a job to sustain my family. This is a huge victory. And I do approach most things with excitement but being too optimistic often turns them into a source of frustration. I need to address that by either being less optimistic about my availability or managing stress better.

My projects and building a personal brand

I had great success with my projects in the first half of the year. I published blog posts like How my dream design job turned into a nightmare and 90% of designers are unhirable? which attracted a huge audience. More than 100k designers read them on Medium alone. I increased my following there from around 7,000 to 35,000! 😮 I also regularly posted on LinkedIn and increased my followers from 4,000 to more than 9,000. These numbers would be even higher if I kept the momentum going but I couldn’t. I had large house projects that I had to work on. So I spent the second half of the year on that and spending the remaining time with our twins. 

I had big plans for relaunching my business but they were way too optimistic so I despaired because I couldn’t do what I had planned. It was a huge source of frustration but I later realised that I don’t need to obsess over my business because my family is financially still ok. I can take my time with the projects on our house and then commit to my business 100%. I’m looking forward to that and 2025 is the year when this will happen.

Finishing our house

Last year I wrote that I want our house to be a beautiful, warm, cosy place that we love coming back to. The house still isn’t finished but it’s slowly becoming that place of warmth that I want it to be. We finished decorating our entrance and the hallway as well as most of the kitchen and living room. Our twins are now 20 months old so they still want to grab everything they see, explore it, and play with it. This means that we can’t have a beautiful, large ficus in our living room. We also had to remove the coffee table and some other decorations (some for the safety of our twins, others for their own safety).

I finished three major projects: Built one of the two decks (see photos below), reseeded the majority of our lawn, and created a workshop in the garage. This leaves me with another (bigger) deck to build in the next few months and re-establish the rest of the lawn come March. This will complete the majority of the work outdoors. Indoors, I still have to furnish the gym and my office. I’m currently furnishing the hallway upstairs which will add a lot of the warmth we’re looking for. It’s just an empty space at the moment and it looks sad.

I wrote last year that I want our house to be fully finished, including the garden and the garage by Autumn of 2024. That didn’t happen. Perhaps I’m too optimistic that it will happen until spring this year. All I can do is try and give my best. But that is often hard, considering the circumstances.

I enjoy these projects, but at the same time, I want our home to finally feel like a home and not a project. A place where we can play, cook, laugh, rest, relax, and recharge. A place that you enjoy coming back to after running errands on a rainy day. A place that shields us from all the negativity and the dangers that lurk outside in the world. I want my family to feel safe and warm in our house no matter what is going on in our lives.

Being a father

I never expected that being a father would bring me so much joy. Maybe because I come from a broken home and a disjointed family and rarely experienced such joy in my childhood. I enjoyed watching our son Lars the other day as he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle. In that brief moment, I saw the grace of my grandmother in his facial expressions, the intelligence of my father in how he approached solving the puzzle, and the stubbornness of my mother in how he never gave up. The more I watch him grow, the more I see how he is a mini version of me in so many ways — mainly his fascination with aeroplanes and letters (so early!).

Our daughter Galia is a mirror reflection of her mother, except for her blondish hair. She enjoys dancing and listening to music. If a song isn’t fun enough for her standards she’ll quickly say “lame” and expect me to change it to something more to her liking. She’s edgy, rebellious, and stubborn, just like her mother. Yet, there are moments when her smile reminds me of my father and her kindness of my grandmother. I like to think that she and Lars both inherited the best things from all these wonderful but flawed people (most of them not with us anymore) and that my wife and I can shield them from that negative past and guide them to a more fulfilling life.

We took a vacation in Bibione, Italy which is just an hour’s drive from our home. After three years of no summer vacation, this was exactly what I needed. Spending time playing with our twins on an infinitely long sandy beach with only one worry on our mind — what should we eat for lunch? I’ll forever remember Galia singing a song she came up with: “Duh, duh, deeee,” as we walked to the beach each day. There was a little forest on the way there and we stopped to listen to an owl hooting every time because they found it so funny.

There was a bittersweet moment on the last day on the beach — the sun was setting so everything was in that deep orange shade of light which has always filled me with sadness. We stayed on the beach longer than other days because we didn’t want to leave. I played with Lars in the sand when he found a small white shell. He handed it to me and gave me a huge smile. I saved this little shell as it’ll always remind me of that bittersweet moment — a moment when I realised that next year it’ll all be different. I’ll never again be in that exact moment with our twins being that age. They were already running around this year but could still be controlled relatively easily. Next year they’ll be able to speak and be more independent. Being a father will be completely different.

Hobbies and reading

I had no time for hobbies in 2024. I guess the house projects could be loosely defined as a hobby but they often have a deadline and little room for errors which makes them stressful. So I really should find some time for my hobbies, mainly painting World War 2 miniatures as I have in the past. It’s a way for me to channel my obsessive compulsions and gives me a sense of control. The latter is the more important here as there’s little sense of control in the rest of my life right now.

Books I’ve read:

• Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• Solaris by Stanisław Lem
• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark
• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

I’m still far away from the desired 20 books per year (once a norm for me) but I read more books than in 2023 which is progress!

Photos

I’m still not posting any photos on Instagram, I just can’t find the time. Here are some of the key pictures of 2024.

2025

Things I want to keep up with:

• Exercise 3 times per week
• Movie nights
• I did read more, I particularly enjoyed a couple of fiction books
• Was able to establish a routine for some time
• Keep spending quality time with our twins
• Be more active on social media

Things I want to start and/or do better:

• I only published 5 blog posts (I wanted 20)
• Restart my newsletter (No progress in 2024)
• I never went out to work from a coffee shop
• I should network more (Little progress in 2024)
• Be more involved with my wider family and friends
• Find some time for my hobbies (None in 2024)
• Join a local swimming club and try to start swimming regularly (I still haven’t done this)
• I did not get involved with a community and still feel isolated

So if I had to summarise 2024 in a few words I would use “excitement” and “independence,” as I expected at the beginning of the year but unfortunately I’d also have to use “isolation” and still “chaos.” I want 2025 to be about growth, calmness, and feeling at home. Let’s see how it goes.

This finding sparked a brilliant idea: Could this “natural” distribution be observed elsewhere? He explored wealth distribution in Italy and found the same pattern. 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population. “Is it just a coincidence?” he wondered. Intrigued by the simplicity of his observations, he inspected wealth distribution in other countries only to find more of the same. His findings gave birth to one of the most common laws that can be observed everywhere, for example (Source):

• In many companies, 80% of revenue comes from just 20% of customers
• In manufacturing, it is common to find that 80% of product defects are caused by 20% of the problems in the production process.
• About 80% of stress is typically caused by 20% of stressors in life.
• In productivity, 80% of your productive output can come from just 20% of your daily activities (Keep this one in mind). 

Named after him, this is now known as The Pareto Principle, The 80/20 Rule, The Principle of Imbalance, or maybe most adequately named in our case The Principle of Least Effort. But why am I telling you the story about Vilfredo and his pea garden? 

Many designers that I mentor are surprised when I tell them that 80% of their success in design job interviews comes from one key part — the case study presentation (which is roughly 20% of questions). It comes in various forms: “Can you tell us about your design process?” or “Can you share some of your recent work with us?” The expectation is always the same. The designer has to go through their work, usually in a slide format, and explain what they did, why, and what the result was. 

Most designers obsess over what questions they will be asked in a job interview and scour websites like Glassdoor to research the company they’re about to interview with. They find some hints and then they practice and prepare answers to the questions they find there. 

The 80/20 rule applied to design job interviews recommends that you should put 80% of your effort into preparing for and presenting your case study well and 20% in all other questions. But why is the case study presentation so important? 

Why are the case studies so important? 

I’ll borrow the words by Jenny B Kowalski to answer this (Source):

A case study allows you, the designer, to show off not just your designs but also your value as a designer. You get to show the whole process from start to finish. People reading the case study get to know how you approach problems and how you communicate. You have the opportunity to tell a compelling story with every project.

The case studies in your portfolio are like movie trailers. They need to make the design managers want to hear the full story. The job interview is where you get to tell that story. This is your best chance to shine and stand out as a candidate!

From an interviewer’s point of view the case study presentation is important because: 

• We get to observe the designer’s communication, facilitation, and presentation skills which are tremendously important in stakeholder management (Source)
• It allows us to learn about the smallest details in their design process. When designers can speak in detail about different parts of their process, they’re well experienced in it. The opposite usually means there’s a lack of experience. 
• When details are omitted, we can follow up with additional questions to find out why they were not there: is it a lack of experience or were they skipped for brevity purposes? 

But why use the 80/20 rule here? Despite the importance of the case study as described above, another strong reason is this: you can be 100% certain that you’ll have to present a case study so it makes sense you prepare for it well. You can’t be certain what the other question will be, so investing too much energy and effort on those doesn’t make much sense.

How to prepare for the case study presentation

Pick a relevant case study

The most important part of preparation is picking the case study that best fits the company you’re interviewing with. This could be a case study of your work from a similar industry or a similar product. It could be relevant based on the type of work you did, compared to what the company requires. Or it could be a similar problem that you solved. Make sure you explain why you picked this case study and how it’s relevant to them before you present it. It might earn you a couple of bonus points with the interviewers.  

Don’t worry if you don’t have a relevant case study. You can still perform well in the presentation, keep reading. 

How to design the slides

Use the 80/20 rule again and focus on the visuals as you design your slides. 80% of the content should be visuals and only 20% should be text. You can always have notes somewhere separate to refer to them during the interview. You don’t need to hide them, no interviewer will be bothered if you check your notes during a presentation. 

Consider including links to the source whenever you show images of artefacts you created — created a user journey map in Miro? Add a link to it so that interviewers can inspect it in detail as they prepare for the interview. 

Use the 20% of text content in your slides wisely, and focus on key information that you want your interviewers to notice. If you conducted user interviews with 5 users, use a photo of yourself performing an interview, a short explanation of why you decided to conduct these interviews, what the goal was, and what you learned. Consider showing a quote or two from the users that you found the most insightful and impactful on your design process.

I’m not the only one recommending an 80/20 visual-text balance. Slava Shestopalov recommends a 75/25 ratio, which is pretty close (Source):

Well-illustrated portfolios are attractive but may not reveal your problem-solving skills; text-rich case studies tell the story but don’t expose your visual skills and may feel boring. That’s why a text-visual ratio from 50/50 to 25/75 percent works so well.

My final recommendation for preparing the case study slide deck is to tell a story. Storytelling is also a soft skill that design managers look for (Source) and if you tell an interesting story of how you struggled with something and overcame the problem in the end, you’ll have the interviewers captivated. I won’t go into many details on this as I already wrote a full blog post on why designers who use cookie-cutter templates instead of storytelling are unhirable. 

Get my UX case study Figma deck template

You can get a free version of my UX case study Figma deck template which has most of the slide layouts that you need for a good case study presentation (Fig 2).

Get it here →

Prepare answers to interviewers’ follow-up questions

This is the most important part of the most important part of the interview: interviewers’ follow-up questions. We love these because we can tear your design process apart and see what’s fake and what’s real. You’d be shocked by how many designers fake their case studies to fit an imaginary perfect design process. 

No designer works in a designer’s heaven where they can execute a perfect design process with unlimited resources and time. So the interviewers need to learn about the details of what you did, why, and what you learned from it.

We, the interviewers, don’t care about your design process, or what methodology you use for it. What we care about is whether you can overcome struggles, collaborate, communicate, and ultimately get things done. Kai Wong elaborates on what happens when designers fail to talk about their impact (Source). The interviewers see that the designers know how to design a feature but perhaps not why it matters. In addition, the main question that they’re looking to answer, whether these skills will translate well to solving the company’s problems, remains unanswered.

No designer works in a designer’s heaven where they can execute a perfect design process with unlimited resources and time. So we need to learn about the details of what you did, why, and what you learned and how you grew from it. Here’s a list of potential follow-up questions you should prepare for:

• What was your role in this project?
• How long did it take to complete?
• What was the goal of the project? Were you involved with setting the goal? If not, who set it and why?
• Where did you start and what was the process?
• Why did you decide to do X? Why that and not something else?
• Who did you work closely with? What was your relationship with them like? Were you able to influence them and lead the design part?
• What was the expected outcome and what was the actual outcome in the end?
• How do you think is this work relevant to our company?
• What skills did you use?
• What tools did you use?
• What would you do differently today? Why?

Remember that a skilled interviewer will review your case study, find weak spots and ask questions about them. These top-level questions may lead to additional, more specific ones.

Practice until you’re fluent and confident

After more than 200 job interviews I had with designers, I also noticed an example of the 80/20 rule. 80% of them performed poorly, meaning that their presentations dragged, were boring, and sometimes incoherent. 20% of them performed really well. The difference? The 20% of them came prepared, were articulate, presented fluently, and brimmed with confidence. That’s good news because all that comes with practice. 

Practice comes naturally as you go from one job interview to another — that’s why you never get the first job that you interview for. But you can and should speed this up. After you have the case study slides finished, make sure to practice your presentation. Prepare a bullet list of notes, go through the slides, and record yourself. Then review it, identify mistakes and problematic parts, take notes, and repeat until you’ve improved. Limit yourself to 15 minutes. You’re ready when you’re on time and don’t need to check your notes. Repeat until you notice yourself being confident in the video recording. 

How to stand out in presenting the case study presentation exceptionally well

80% of a great presentation lies in good preparation. If you practice your presentation as described above, you’ll do better than 80% of designers out there (Do you notice all the 80/20 rules?). But there are things you still need to do to perform exceptionally well. Following this advice may put you in the top 5% of candidates.

Watch your time. Yes, you’ve practised presenting your slides in 15 minutes, but the interviewer may interrupt and ask questions. Try to keep track of how much time you spend answering their questions and stick to the 15-minute limit. This shows your awareness of limited resources and designers always have to work with those, including limited time. 

Skip the least important parts if tight on time. This shows that you have awareness of the situation which is essential for designers facilitating workshops or something similar. If you skip a part, make sure you explain to the interviewer that you’re skipping it for brevity and that you can come back to it in the end if time permits. 

The last part is the one where great presenters do exceptionally well and the poor ones fail completely: Pay attention to your interviewer’s facial expressions and level of interest. Even though you’ve practised your presentation, keep it flexible. If you notice a disinterest in your interviewer when you’re talking about a user journey map you created, move on to the next part quickly. Don’t go on and on about all the details and bore your interviewer to death. Spend more time instead on the parts that seem to pique their interest. 

How do you know when they’re interested? They’ll be looking at what you’re showing them in the slides, paying close attention to what you’re explaining, or looking directly at you. Additionally, look for (Source):

• Strong, consistent eye contact
• Leaning forward while you speak
• Smiling and appearing upbeat

Conversely, if they look distracted and there’s a lack of signs from above, it means they’re not interested. Adjust your presentation according to these signs!

I also advise designers to tell their interviewers ahead if they should interrupt with questions or wait until the end. My recommendation is to let them interrupt. This prevents the presentation from being one-sided and it helps you learn immediately which parts the interviewers find more interesting. 

Conclusion: Should designers only focus on the case study presentation?

Pareto’s principle was mainly forgotten until Dr. Joseph Juran, an American management consultant, discovered his work in 1941. After learning about it, he noticed that 80% of an issue is caused by 20% of the causes to quality issues (Source). Later, Juran rephrased the principle into “the vial few and the useful many” to highlight that the contribution of the remaining 80% shouldn’t be discarded.

So how can designers perform exceptionally well in design job interviews? The key word is “preparation.” They should use the 80/20 rule to put 80% of their effort into preparing for the case study presentation (20%), and the remaining 20% into preparing for the other 80% of questions which aren’t trivial and shouldn’t be neglected. 

Don’t be one of those designers who obsess over the interview questions they might be asked and waste 80% of their energy on that. Get ahead and focus 80% of your effort on the vital 20% of the design job interview — the case study presentation.

Top 3 problems for designers: no research, no design strategy, and no career progression

It’s been a horrible year for design. Mass layoffs from 2023 continued and got even worse. AI is threatening to take creatives’ jobs, designers need to go through up to 11 rounds of interviews to finally land a job. Once they do, they’re asked to perform the work that would take at least two or three designers to complete. 

Combine that with the learning from this report that only 1 in 5 designers have a future at their current company, and it all looks bleak. Is there a future for you in the UX industry? Is there a future for the UX industry itself? I decided to find out how happy designers are at work and unearth their most pressing problems. Only then can we start discussing how to fix these problems, and maybe even the industry. 

My yearly Why Designers Quit report suggested that designers are unhappy with their managers and have no career progression opportunities. I wanted to see why they’re unhappy with their managers so the survey for this report focused a lot on managers and problems at work, alongside the general employee engagement survey questions.

🤫 Psst! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

751 designers responded to my survey. Those who work at medium-to-large companies will recognise most of the questions and their format. They’re statements where participants mark how much they agree (or disagree) with them. 

49.9% of participants were UX/Product designers, 9.1% were web designers, 7.5% were UI designers, and 7.2% were designer generalists (Fig 1). The largest chunk came from the United States (17.6%), followed by 8.4% from India, and 7.7% from Canada (Fig 2). 

The distribution of seniority shows that many designers were high in seniority — senior and lead roles sum up to 68% (Fig 3). 31% of them were intermediate and 11% were junior. 

Top 3 problems for designers

What are the three things you’re the most unhappy about at work? I ask a similar question in Why Designers Quit reports but with a key difference. There, I asked for the most pressing reason for leaving a job, here I allowed up to three answers. For designers, the top three problems at work are (Fig 4):

• Limited ability to conduct research and get feedback on their work (28.2%)
• No strategic approach to design (26.2%)
• No career progression opportunities (23.4%) 

Low UX maturity (22.2%), design perceived as “making things pretty” (20.9%), and designers feeling they could contribute more (20.8%) and grow more (19.2%) are close to the top three reasons. A significant chunk also chose being the only designers at the company (14.4%) and having to work with multiple product/project managers (15.7%) as problems.

Here’s a quote from one participant that explains their situation, which will, sadly, resonate with a lot of designers:

Our designers are split by vertical areas and often left to fend for themselves. Research is severely lacking and the overall design strategy is often pushed back in favour of short term shareholder wins.

Many designers are stuck in producing low-quality design work (pushing pixels) because they work in environments where research doesn’t inform their work and it’s impossible to close the feedback loop which would gradually increase the quality of their product. Instead, a focus on quick, short-term wins is often favoured. Here’s how another designer described their current situation at work:

It’s pushing pixels in Figma when I want to work with real UX problems, new projects being promised and nothing, being asked for some extra graphic work sometimes, there’s just no way to grow and even though it’s been only 3 years as a UX/UI designer, I feel that my passion is slowly dying. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of these problems and their potential causes. 

Design leadership is lacking

The latest Why Designers Quit report showed that many designers are unhappy with their managers, 57% to be exact (source). That’s a significant number so I decided to investigate further. 

Before I go into the report’s results, I want to look at what a good design manager is supposed to do. Hadrik Pandya provides a list of things, which includes (source):

• Ensure a steady stream of challenging and meaningful work for you & your team
• Communicate timely & clear feedback to every team member

There are three more items on his list which we’ll get to later. So designers need timely feedback and challenging and meaningful work from their managers. Let’s see how they stack up. 

50% of respondents said that their manager is not a good mentor and 27% were happy with the mentoring by their managers (Fig 5).  

When it comes to feedback, which is crucial to a designer’s work quality and growth, only 44% of the participants were happy with their managers (Fig 6). It’s more than those that were not happy with them (31%) but design managers really should do better here. 44% looks good at first inspection but because feedback is so crucial for designers, this percentage should be higher. 

When giving feedback to managers, 47% of designers feel confident to give negative (but constructive) feedback and 51% of the managers then take the negative feedback and improve (Fig 7). Again, these numbers seem high at first, but you’d expect more from someone who’s a manager, right? When you consider that giving, receiving, and growing based on feedback are among their main responsibilities, why are these numbers so low? 

Only 1 in 2 designers feel confident to give negative feedback to their manager and only 1 in 2 managers that receive negative feedback will improve based on it. Putting it all together, only 1 in 4 design managers receive the necessary negative but constructive feedback and act on it. 

So many design managers fail at the first requirement for being a good manager — giving and receiving feedback. How well do they do with providing challenging and meaningful work? 

When asked whether their design manager is a good manager of design work, 45% of respondents weren’t happy with their managers and 31% of them were (Fig 8). 

Why do so many design managers fail at two crucial task of giving feedback and providing chances for meaningful design work? Slava Shestopalov provides an answer: 

Design management is a vibrant spectrum, spanning from hands-on designers performing separate leadership tasks to full-fledged team leaders focusing solely on strategic design work.

We assume that because someone is a design manager all they focus on is their designers and leading strategic initiatives and projects. But that’s in theory only, many design managers are stuck in a spectrum somewhere between hands-on designer and design manager roles. And most of them are closer to the hands-on role than the design leader one (Fig 9).

One thing we have to praise the design managers for is trusting their designers and not micro-managing them. 71% of designers are happy with the trust their managers have in them, and interestingly, 74% of them feel they don’t need guidance from their managers and can work independently (Fig 10). I can’t help but think about the hands-on designer vs design leader spectrum mentioned above. Does this prove additionally that many (if not most) design managers are basically hands-on designers with additional responsibilities (and bonuses)?

Lastly, I wanted to look at the hardest parts of being a good manager: being a good manager of people and recognising good work. 57% of designers who participated in the survey thought that their managers were good managers of people (Fig 11). That means they’re professional, empathetic, accountable, and good listeners. The number is relatively high, but if design managers truly were design leaders (instead of hands-on designers with extra responsibilities) shouldn’t they do better? 

Being a design manager entails that you manage strategic design work and people. Looking at the top-level responsibilities, that’s it. So why are there still more than 36% of managers who are bad managers of people? The tech industry’s view of who’s a top performer is primitive — they reward with promotions those designers who are good designers and those who know how to humbly brag about their achievements. The former are unlikely to be good managers and the latter are highly likely to be bad managers. 

Here’s another interesting finding — 60% of designers who answered the survey thought that their managers recognised their good work and gave them credit for it (Fig 12). On the other hand, only 24% of design managers discuss career progression opportunities with their designers regularly (at least once per month). 

How do we explain this paradox? Why are designers publicly recognised for good work but have no career progression opportunities? Does it stem from the design immaturity of the companies? Is it because design is unequal to engineering and product departments? Only 1 in 3 companies have a design leader at the top, 32% to be exact (Left side of fig 13). This is even worse in design-immature companies where only 22% of them have a design leader (Right side of fig 13). This finding hints at an imbalance in the product, engineering, and design trifecta. 

A quote from a survey participant captures clearly what a lot of designers have to deal with when it comes to design leadership — many companies don’t have any of it but even when they do it’s simply lacking. Strategic decisions, even design ones, are taken by product or engineering leaders. 

Just wanted to say that I’m currently a Product Designer II and we have a team of 2 including me. We both have same experience. A design manager would help me guide certain decisions which today is taken by product or engineering specific seniors.

No career progression opportunities

I had anticipated this would be among the most pressing problems because it keeps coming up in Why Designers Quit reports. 

Returning to Pandya’s suggestions on what good design managers should do, the last item on his list was Create a personalised growth path for every member in the team.

He’s not alone in this suggestion. Cap Watkins suggests that design managers should manage every person’s career and check in on their professional goals every week (Source). Every week! When I worked at relatively design-mature companies we were supposed to discuss my career plan every month but we always ran out of time. The situation is dire for designers and their careers. 

We already learned that only 24% of managers discuss career progression with their designers. It’s no surprise to see that only 22% of designers think that they have future and career progression opportunities at their current company (Fig 14). Putting it bluntly, 4 out of 5 designers don’t have a future with their employers. If they want to progress in their careers they’ll need to switch jobs. 

(In)Equality of design

Can you imagine an established tech company without a CTO? Or without a CPO? No, right? So why does only 1 in 3 companies have an equal design leader at the top? 

Inequality of design, compared to other departments manifests itself in the fact that 59% of designers work with more than one project/product manager (Fig 15). The ratio of designers and product managers should be 1:1 to have at least minimal chances of being equal partners (I’ve seen many cases of designers and PMs being 1:1 but designers still not being equal partners in that duo). Instead, only 1 in 3 designers works with a single product manager. 

Ken Norton, formerly a partner at Google Ventures and head of product management at Google and Yahoo! looked into this and concluded that the ideal UX:PM:Developer ratio is 1:1:5-9. He elaborates on why the UX:PM ratio should be 1:1

When it comes to designers, I’ve preferred a ratio of 1:1 with PMs for user-facing product surfaces. Product teams work best when the dedicated triad of PM, designer, and tech lead form the core.

But most designers work with more than one product manager and 36% of them (the majority) work with three product managers or more. How do we expect designers to perform like that? How do we expect them to be equal partners to their product managers and prove their value at the same time? There’s no surprise that only 43% of designers feel equal to product managers and other peers (Fig 16). Considering in what circumstances designers have to work they’re doing ok. But with a lack of equality, these designers don’t feel confident to speak up when it’s time to discuss prioritisation, road map, etc. 

If designers were equal to other roles, that percentage should be way higher. But it gets worse. Only 37% of designers have the privilege to work in dedicated design departments which helps conclude that design is an unequal partner in the tech industry (Fig 17). 

On top of that, only 40% of designers have design leaders (or at least creatives) as their managers (Fig 18). 21% report to a project or product manager, and 6% to an engineering manager. Can you imagine engineers reporting to a design manager? This helps explain why so many designers don’t have good design mentors or managers of strategic design work.

Conclusion: Designers are doing ok but need to ask for more

Designers need to fend for themselves. When they have a design manager, they can’t rely on them for strategic guidance or mentorship. Most don’t have managers with a design background. It all looks bleak when we also consider the inequality of design and how so many designers are stuck in their careers. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Considering all the negative findings of this report, designers are doing ok. They feel respected and valued by other team members and adequately challenged by their work (Fig 19). 

Even more uplifting is the finding that 61% of them feel that their work positively impacts business success and UX maturity (56%). 

We’re not there yet as an industry. We stumbled in the last few years but we need to keep going. Designers need to ask for more from their leadership and themselves. If we want more we also need to show that we’re capable of more. Not more of the same, but more responsibility, ownership, and leadership from every designer, not just the leaders by title.

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🤫 Another gentle reminder! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Common mistakes designers should avoid to make the first cut in UX hiring

I didn’t make that number up. I was probably too generous, it’s even lower. Some sources suggest that recruiters and hiring managers spend around six seconds reviewing job applications from candidates. After hours you invested in writing and polishing your case studies, you get dismissed in mere seconds.

That’s harsh. But it’s the reality. When reviewing designers’ job applications, portfolios are equally important to resumés. That’s why the number of seconds until the first cut is higher. Still, a design manager can only dedicate a small amount of time to reviewing a candidate and their portfolio. 

🤫 Psst! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Try to put yourself in their shoes. They’re busy running strategic design initiatives, managing stakeholders and their designers, and have their calendars filled with meetings. On top of that, they have to dedicate some of their time to reviewing thousands of portfolios. That number isn’t exaggerated, when I worked at a Big Tech company, we received a couple of hundred applications per week. It was mostly the design managers who were tasked to comb through them. 

To be efficient, these design managers start to recognise patterns of “rejectable” portfolios. They don’t have other options but to eliminate the worst in seconds. 

But here’s the main problem I want to discuss today: your current portfolio isn’t a real depiction of you as a designer. You make mistakes because you don’t know better, or even because you were taught wrong. Or maybe you don’t recognise the importance of what impression your portfolio makes.

And the higher your seniority, the quicker your portfolio will be rejected when encountering some of these mistakes. You don’t make that 30-second cut. It’s simple — the higher the seniority, the higher the expectations and the heavier the weight of these mistakes.

Common UX portfolio and case study mistakes that’ll get you rejected immediately

I write these comments and recommendations in the first person so it’s easier to imagine they’re coming from a design manager reviewing your portfolio.

Quality issues

I’ll get straight to the point. Quality issues for designer’s portfolios are small images (that can’t be zoomed in), pixelated images, and grammatical mistakes. Here’s an example from a case study I recently reviewed (Fig 1).

I didn’t zoom in on a small image or alter it in any way. That’s exactly how it was in the case study. Is it a lack of care or no attention to detail that led the designer to include this image? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. When you have 98 other portfolios to review, this alone can be enough to reject a candidate. 

The same goes for spelling and grammatical mistakes. There are so many tools available these days to improve your writing. Before you hit the publish button, check it with a spell-checker or Grammarly. A single spelling mistake won’t get you rejected (it happens to all of us) but many mistakes indicate a lack of attention to detail which is a huge turn-off for designers. 

Generic and boring titles

The title of your case study is the best chance to grab my attention. But what do most of the designers do? They use the project name or company name for the title. At best, they’ll include one specific thing they worked on, like Company name onboarding. 

This is a huge missed opportunity. Your title should be descriptive and tell the story in a single sentence. Most importantly, it should captivate the reader and get their attention. 

You can use the following format to do that:

How I (describe your action) to (describe the result) and (describe a better outcome).

Here are two examples:

Metric-focused: How I ran a design sprint to redesign a chat feature and improved the customer satisfaction score by 20%.

Outcome-focused: How a design sprint I facilitated at Company X communicated the value of UX and established a more collaborative and holistic design process.

Fail to capture the reader’s attention

Imagine the first sentence of a case study is the following: The goal of this project was to help reduce errors made during the manual configuration of leasing products. Interested in what the case study is about? No, neither am I. 

Now imagine this is the first sentence: UX research insights can undermine designers. It’s a simple fact statement but it makes you wonder — how can research undermine designers? Isn’t UX research good? This is why you’d read this case study but not the one before. 

Here’s how you can do this in your case studies — you use a hook.

A hook (or narrative hook) is the literary technique of creating an enticing beginning—the very first line or opening of a story—designed to capture readers’ interest (Source).

All captivating articles use hooks, can you spot it in this article? It’s the title. And the first sentence “I didn’t make that number up” is another hook, in the form of a statement, that reinforces it. I won’t go into details on this, there’s a lot of good advice in the article I linked above. The point I want to get across here is that you need to pay extra attention to the first sentence of your case study. Don’t just write something, think hard about what that sentence should be to captivate the reader. 

If you show that you can captivate an audience in a written report about your work (like a case study), it shows that you can do that in real life when you have to communicate design decisions. 

Fail to establish context

Most designers make this mistake — they fail to explain what situation they were in when writing about their work. They fail to explain the problem that they were solving in a way an outsider would understand. Look at the image below (Fig 2) and compare the introduction paragraphs. Which case study would you continue to read?

You need to tell me about your situation and your problem like you would a 5-year-old, not a coworker. I don’t have an insider’s view of your work. If you worked on some highly technical hard-to-understand stuff you need to explain it in a way that I understand it. Otherwise, I lose interest and notice a lack of skill in explaining hard things (communication) which is so important for designers.

I always recommend using the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) framework for writing case studies. Explain your situation and task in the intro to establish context. You can have a perfect title and a captivating hook, but I lose interest if I don’t understand what you were doing and why. 

Too long case studies

Your case study is a movie trailer. In it, you need to convince me so that I want to hear the full story (watch the movie), which happens later in job interviews. So aim for case studies that are 10-minute reads and strike a good balance between text and visuals. Slava Shestopalov recommends a text-visual ratio from 50/50 to 25/75 percent. I’d say the sweet spot is somewhere around 40/60.

Well-illustrated portfolios are attractive but may not reveal your problem-solving skills; text-rich case studies tell the story but don’t expose your visual skills and may feel boring. That’s why a text-visual ratio from 50/50 to 25/75 percent works so well.

— Slava Shestopalov (Source)

If you go over that 10-minute line, break it down into multiple case studies. Focus on one key problem in each and tell the story of how you overcame it.

Generic fluff

Read the following paragraph: 

Enhancing the flexibility of existing modules through inventive solutions, while creating templates for rapid webpage construction. A key insight gained was that addressing one use case can unlock numerous possibilities, offering users diverse options while minimising engineering requirements.

Do you get it? No, neither do I. I have no idea what that paragraph is trying to tell me. Avoid this type of language at all costs. I know some designers want to use big words and long sentences to sound smart.

But the reality is that this is a huge communication problem. If you can’t write 1,000 words about your work clearly and concisely, how do you communicate your design decisions to others? Especially these days when working from home is commonplace and with it, asynchronous work where written communication is fundamental.

The designer’s contributions are not clear

I’m not hiring the team you work with, I’m hiring you. So when you write your case studies, be clear about your contributions. Don’t use “we” instead of “I” all the time. You need to strike the right balance so that you don’t look like a designer with a huge ego, but also not one who is silent in meetings and does what others tell them to do. Don’t be too humble.

Here’s what a designer learned from committing this mistake:

While it’s appealing to apply the royal “we” — it does make our work sound more important than it usually is — take credit and make sure a recruiter and hiring manager knows what you did and what you’re capable of. (Source)

My problem with overusing “we” is that sometimes designers hide behind other people’s contributions (Fig 4). I’m not interested in what your team achieved but what you contributed that led to those team achievements.

Using a checklist template

They think their work and design process needs to be perfect so they exclude all the messy details and cram only the “good” parts into a cookie-cutter template. If the cookie-cutter template is a real depiction of their process they’re considered inexperienced and might even suggest there’s no potential for growth, adapting, and learning. The opposite of cookie-cutter templates and checklists is storytelling, which I cover next.

Not telling a story

The problem with the checklist/outline approach (left side in Fig 5) to explaining your design process isn’t only that it’s boring, it also suggests that you don’t have the necessary communication skills to be a leader of design (And all designers need to be leaders of design, no matter their seniority). Garron Engstorm, a product design manager at Facebook writes (Source):

The outline format makes for somewhat uninteresting reading. Instead, tell a story, focusing on the most interesting and impactful parts of the project. Grab the reviewer’s attention and convey the major points at the beginning, in case they don’t read through to the end.

The cookie-cutter checklist says that you always use the same design process, no matter what problem you’re solving. The storytelling format combined with the STAR framework (right side in Fig 5) explains the real problems you solved and how you became a better designer through that. I have a printable one-page explanation of this framework that you can download here.

These mistakes can be symptoms of serious underlying problems

Some of these mistakes may seem trivial — a pixelated image or a grammatical mistake. Or things like not using writing hooks, crafting interesting titles, and failing to establish context. These are writing problems, right? They’re tricks to get over that 30-second cut. 
No, not at all, they can be symptoms of underlying problems. Most of these fall into three categories: Communication skills, linear design process, and no attention to detail. These are serious problems, especially communication which is the most important soft skill for designers (Fig 6).

Here’s an overview of all the mistakes mentioned above, listed as symptoms of underlying problems. You can see that most of these fall under communication skills which explains the seriousness of these symptoms that you, possibly unawarely, exhibit in your portfolio.

Symptom	Underlying problem
Quality issues	Lack of attention to detail or care
Generic and boring titles	Communication skills
Fail to capture reader’s attention	Communication skills
Fail to establish context	Communication skills
Too long case studies	Communication skills, lack of craftsmanship
Generic fluff	Communication skills
Unclear contributions	Communication, untransparent about their work, not involved enough as designers (collaboration and leadership)
Checklist tmeplate	Linear design process, lack of growth, adaptability and willingness to learn
No storytelling	Communication skills

An example of a case study that would make the cut

Let’s take a look at a case study, check how many of these mistakes it makes, and why it would make the 30-second cut. 

Published by UX Magazine, this case study is a 5-minute read by Moishy Neulander. We can already see that Moishy got one of the things right — the reading time is less than 10 minutes. 

The title is How Insight from Netflix Profiles Doubled Our Conversions which doesn’t follow our template to the point but it doesn’t need to. It captivates you and makes you wonder how they used insight from Netflix to double their conversion.

The first sentence isn’t a hook but it doesn’t have to be because the title is a hook already. In the first paragraph, Moishy writes:

As a ride-hailing app, learning from unexpected sources, such as Netflix, helped us implement a new profile selection feature that has improved user experience and doubled business orders conversion rate. Our new “Smart Switcher” has delivered outstanding results, making the ride-hailing experience smoother, more reliable, and user-friendly.

This establishes context — even if you don’t know Gett or what they do, you get it after reading this. He got me, I want to learn more.

Moishy elaborates on the situation he and his team found themselves in and what they wanted to achieve at the beginning of the case study. Then he describes his actions. This is where the case study gets brilliant. 

Moishy first took inspiration from common and somewhat similar tools but the results weren’t good enough. He explains the challenges of initially proposed solutions and why he decided to explore other options. 

He found an unlikely source of inspiration, mocked up a prototype and tested it. It was promising but it introduced a new problem, so he had to come up with a solution for a solution. He concludes with concrete results of how crucial business metrics were improved and a personal learning:

My key takeaway is to not solely seek inspiration from the obvious sources but instead think outside the box, even within your everyday products that may not be directly related to your product’s natural field of activity.

Let’s benchmark Moishy’s case study against our list of common mistakes and you’ll see why it makes the 30-second cut. 

• There are no quality issues, images are large and high-resolution
• The title is interesting and captivates the reader
• Succeeds in capturing the reader’s attention and establishes context well
• It’s just right in length and in visual-text balance.
• There’s no generic fluff.
• The case study features Moishy’s design process, his growth, and his willingness to adapt and learn.
• Moishy tells a story of how he found inspiration in an unlikely place
• The only fault with Moishy’s case study is that his contributions are somewhat unclear. He uses “we” a lot. 

Committing only one mistake but doing all other things well takes Moishy to job interviews where he can tell the full story in detail. 

Most designers can make the 30-second cut

I wrote this post and used a provocative title because most designers know how to do these things well. Most of them have good communication skills but fail to translate them into the written word, and so they make these mistakes. Casey Cline confirms that writing is a completely different beast of communication (Source):

Nearly everyone can communicate their thoughts in some non-written way. However, not everyone is capable of translating those same thoughts into writing.

I want to reach and teach all designers who constantly get rejected even though they’re good candidates for the jobs they apply for. I want to help them write case studies that are better reflections of their skills so that they make that 30-second cut. It’s not fair that their portfolios only get scanned for mere seconds, I know. Design hiring relies too heavily on portfolios, but what else can you do when there’s such a surge of job applications? It’s impossible to speak to thousands of candidates.

So if you’re a designer reading this knowing that you don’t have communication skills problems, make sure your case studies reflect that by avoiding these common mistakes. 

If you’re a designer who knows they need to improve their communication skills, use this advice to do so. Craft a story based on your research findings to influence other stakeholders. Avoid writing generic fluff, learn how to establish context, and be concise, both in written and spoken communication. And most importantly, stop copying others and using checklist templates for your portfolio. 

Once you polish your portfolio and correct these mistakes you make the 30-second cut. It’s a game-changer when that happens. Suddenly you stop getting instantly rejected and start receiving invitations to job interviews. You get your foot in the door and anything can happen from there. 

Most designers can make the 30-second cut after all, but will they commit to polishing their portfolios and communicating their skills better? Will you?

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🤫 Another gentle reminder! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Or why your cookie-cutter portfolio doesn’t cut it and how to fix it

Here’s the harsh truth: I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process.

By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made everything beautiful through visual design, created a prototype, and tested it with five users. Everything was perfect so they also created a design system which is not a design system but a style guide. But they call it a “design system” because it’s trendy and a keyword for the recruiters. 

🤫 Psst! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

It’s like finding a product that you want to buy online and it only has 5-star reviews. When everything is shown as perfect it loses credibility — are the reviews fake? It’s the same when I review your cookie-cutter portfolio — when everything’s perfect I wonder whether it’s all fake.

The 90% is my estimation based on the many portfolios I reviewed, I don’t know what the exact number is but it’s high. Most UX and product design portfolios have two case studies that are the same, it’s just the details that differ slightly. 

I posted a much shorter version of this post on LinkedIn a couple of months ago and it went viral. Many experienced designers agreed: 

Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out. (Source)

If I see another case study that walks me through personas, walls of sticky notes, photos of customers being interviewed, and sketches from a notebook… I’m going to lose my freaking mind and pull out my hair. (Source)

When I review such portfolios I can’t help but think that the designer behind them is either inexperienced, lacks a passion for design, or simply can’t communicate the value of their work. Sometimes, all of the above are true but even if only one is, it’s enough to be turned down by design-mature companies. This brings me to the second point.

A shallow portfolio with cookie-cutter case studies may get you a job in UX. But it’ll most likely be a job with a design-immature company that doesn’t fully understand design. You get stuck doing boring design work and your career stalls because the quality of your work never increases so you don’t have anything better to put in your portfolio. You get trapped in a loop. 

When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by design-mature companies.

Design mature companies, on the other hand, look for designers who can solve problems in creative ways. Taking the design process that you learned in the UX boot camp and using it to solve every problem you face just won’t cut it for them. When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by this type of company. 

We teach designers the design process and how their case studies should be structured, but that’s not how design works in practice where it’s a messy, non-linear process. Following this conclusion, there are two major problems when it comes to designers’ processes and how they present their work:

• Designers’ processes are truly linear
• Designers’s processes aren’t linear but they think that case studies need to be linear and perfect

Let’s take a closer look at both of them.

Designers’ processes are truly linear

My assumption, based on interviewing and speaking to designers, is that a relatively small amount of these are truly linear. The rest of them are embellished to seem perfect because designers think that that’s what hiring managers want to see. Or they simply think that’s how case studies should be — a perfect, linear story with a happy ending.

This probably aligns with seniority (or lack of experience), I estimate that 20-30% of designers really use a linear design process. (That’s how many identified as junior or intermediate in my research for Why Designers Quit 2023). I have witnessed such designers. You tell them that an interaction in a UI needs to be redesigned. It’s a small task but they’ll start talking about conducting user interviews and creating personas. 

The design process doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It can start at either of the steps of a design process (so numbering them is misleading, top example in attached image), and it never really ends (so it needs to be a cycle, bottom example). This also means that you don’t have to go back to the beginning of “the process” every time you get asked to do something. 

A truly linear design process would mean that designers are in full control. Eduardo Hernandez explains this beautifully in Death to the Double Diamond.

The more control you have over influencing factors, the more predictable the problem-solving process can be. The less control you have over influencing factors, the less predictable the problem-solving process can be. 

So even the double diamond design process which has been often cited as the design process doesn’t reflect reality. It’s the perfect ideal that designers strive for but rarely achieve. Designers simply don’t have that much control over the influencing factors so a design manager reading through a perfect, cookie-cutter case study, even if it uses the double diamond process, knows immediately that it’s fake. 

Doing the double diamond lacks purpose, continuity and context because the designer isn’t reacting to the unexpected and emerging questions or situations they find themselves in rather the double diamond offers answers to questions designers often don’t have, Hernandez elaborates.

Recommendations for these designers

So what should you as a less experienced designer do? You were taught to use a process but now I’m telling you to scrap it. Here are my recommendations: 

• In the early years of your career, try to find a balance between being assertive and adopting a learning mindset. It’s time to take off the rose-coloured glasses, open your mind, and face the reality of what it means to be a designer.
• Focus on building your communication and leadership skills. Even if you’re not a lead designer, every designer role requires a level of leadership. 
• Build relationships with other stakeholders, they play a vital role in getting things done. Design happens through communication and collaboration.
• Finally, abandon your dogmatic and idealistic view of the design process, and keep learning about how flexible, messy, and beautiful it is. 

Designers think that case studies need to be linear and perfect

When I posted that viral post on LinkedIn, one of the things that surprised me most was comments from designers saying “It’s true that the design process is messy and chaotic, but shouldn’t the case studies be linear?” Here’s an example:

However, when you’re creating a case study, you need to present a linear sequence of slides, following a logical narrative. If you’re trying to tell a story, it must be done logically. I recently completed a UX case study, and the process was quite chaotic. I had to conduct UX research twice, write user stories, and keep making revisions. However, in the case study, I had to present it in a linear fashion. (Source)

Another comment sheds more light on this type of thinking:

There’s probably tons of roadblocks, iterations, and back-and-forth that they didn’t put there because frankly, linear stories are easier to create and consume, especially when you’re making things for recruiters/managers to just skim through. (Source)

Who says that case studies need to be linear and exclude all the messy details? The details are the ones that are interesting and how design managers will rate your design process. Almost anyone can learn the basics of a cookie-cutter design process and complete the steps. Great designers are leaders of design in their teams, they’re great collaborators, and they know how to adapt and use the right tools to communicate what’s needed to find the right solution. Unlike cookie-cutter designers who always do the same thing and avoid risk and uncertainty, they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. This is what design managers want to see and this is what you should put in your portfolio.

Monica’s story

I’ve been mentoring Monica for the past few weeks as part of my UX Buddy mentorship programme. She wrote a couple of case studies and asked me to review them. I spotted this problem immediately. In the case study, she was presented with a problem and eventually came up with two possible solutions. 

One was a minor change to the existing UI, the other one was completely different. She proceeded with the minor change and failed to explain why in the case study. Later on, she wrote that the solution didn’t work as planned and it introduced new problems. They went with the other solution and that one worked. That’s it! That’s not enough context!

She never explained that she lacked the confidence to push for the other solution which she thought was better. She excluded the details of why they picked the solution they did, how when it failed she gathered her courage, took matters into her own hands and pushed for the other one. Instead of trying to minimise the change to the UI, she added intentional friction to the experience in a beneficial way. This friction helped explain the new UI to the users and the user testing proved that it worked much better. 

She failed to explain all that in her case study. She had simplified it to the point it read as a linear story of going from one potential solution to another until something worked. She failed to tell the interesting story of how she faced one of her weaknesses and became a much stronger designer because of it. 

Why do designers think linear and perfect is what design managers want?

I believe that the majority of designers, 70-80% of them simplify their case studies to fit this linear structure. These are the things that convince designers that this is the right way:

• Generic portfolio and case study templates and “checklists”
• They think that a linear process is easier to consume for the reader
• They think it’s what recruiters and design managers want to see (possibly because of the templates)

So the majority of designers are led to believe that they need to reverse-engineer their messy work into linear, simplified depictions. You don’t! Stories may be linear, but the hero of the story faces various challenges and needs to adapt to defeat the monster. Slava Shestopalov explains in 10 Tips to Organize your Design Portfolio that design isn’t linear so neither should your case studies:

As you might’ve noticed, I don’t speak about the “ideal” design process for a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Design is never linear, and all projects are unique. The point is to show and explain your path from the kick-off to the final result in the portfolio.

Here’s how you fix it: Include the messy details and tell a story

This is where we get to the fix I promise in the subtitle. If a cookie-cutter case study was a story about a knight and a dragon, this is what it would read like:

I learned about the dragon terrorising a village and how they were willing to pay great amounts of gold to the knight that slays him. I asked the villagers where the cave was and how to kill it. I found the dragon’s cave, created a plan with pebbles in the sand, and sought out the dragon. It spit fire into me, but I deflected it with my shield, I then thrust my sword into the dragon and it died. I collected the gold, happy days.

Replace the knight with the designer, villagers with users, pebbles with post-it notes, the dragon with the design problem, the shield with the design process, and the sword with Figma and you have a typical cookie-cutter UX case study. But no dragon can be slayed with only a simple thrust of a sword, just like no design problem can be solved only with a beautiful prototype in Figma. 

No dragon can be slayed with only a simple thrust of a sword, just like no design problem can be solved only with a beautiful prototype in Figma. 

Why does your case study need to read like a story? The cookie-cutter knight and dragon story above is boring. Not because it has a happy ending, but because the knight doesn’t face any real challenge, he doesn’t need to adapt or learn anything to slay the dragon. He’s almighty and whatever he does turns out perfectly well. It’s barely a story.

In reality, the knight slaying a dragon would have to face horrible dangers. He’d probably have to drop the shield as it would get too hot to carry as soon as the dragon spit fire in it (abandon the idealistic design process). He would never get close enough to thrust the sword into the dragon on his first try (no point in creating a beautiful visual design in Figma too soon). He’d have to retreat, face self-doubt, gather his courage, learn, adapt, come up with a new plan, try again, and repeat until something worked. These are the details that make the knight interesting and human. You can relate to him.

It’s the same with the design manager when they review your portfolio. If you tell a story, include the details and the things that didn’t work and how you adapted to overcome the problem, the design manager will empathise with you. For the five minutes it takes to read your case study, they’ll be in your shoes. It’ll remind them of all the times when they had similar problems and it’ll make them appreciate you and your struggles as a designer.

Stories have the ability to help us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations.

— Kate Hurst

Storytelling is also one of the key soft skills looked for in designers (Source). The logic is the following. Kate Hurst explains in The Importance of Storytelling and Story Creation that storytelling helps us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations. This means that if you can tell a good story about your design work, you’ll also be able to use your storytelling skills to communicate the value of design once I hire you. 

The argument that the stories are linear is partly true — they almost always follow the same structure, also called the story arc. It has five main ingredients: exposition, inciting incident, action, climax, and conclusion. That doesn’t mean that the hero in the story is almighty and they don’t face any challenges. 

It means that you can use a structure to write your case studies but still include all the messy details. The structure that I recommend is the STAR framework, or Situation, Task, Action, and Result. It aligns well with the design process and the story arc. You can and should describe all the messy details in the Action part (Fig 2). 

Here are a few tips on how to use the STAR framework and how to better present your work realistically, without embellishing everything to the point where it all looks perfect:

• Add enough context so that anyone can understand what you’re talking about (we don’t have your insider’s point of view)
• Tell the story as if you’re telling it to your friend, not your coworker
• Use the STAR framework
  • Situation: how did you learn about the problem, why was it a problem, and who did you work with? What was the goal? Why did you pick this problem to solve or this goal?
  • Task: What did you decide to do? Why? How did you decide? What were your expectations?
  • Action: How many potential solutions did you come up with? How many did you prioritise as possible solutions to explore? How did they work and look like? How did you validate the solutions? Which one was the winning one? Why? What surprised you and why? What didn’t work as expected and why? What did you do then? What did you learn, and how did you adapt? What would you do differently now? What challenges did you face when interacting with other stakeholders? How did you overcome them?
  • Result: How did the solution perform in the end? How did you measure success? What did you learn from it? What would you do differently?

Conclusion: Is the commoditisation of design to blame?

Is the UX hiring the problem? Recruiters looking at portfolios and checking off the “required” parts? Partly yes, there’s only a fraction of them who are specialised in recruiting designers. So of course those who aren’t will have a checklist for candidates to check against. But on the other hand, designers can write a case study that will satisfy both recruiters and design managers. Adding details and explaining how you had to go a few steps back in the process because you learned something doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon a typical structure of a case study. 

Here’s my most important advice, the one where most designers fail. When it comes to case studies and your portfolio, make an effort. Don’t just use a template, put some images in, replace the placeholder text with your own and think that that’s it. Your portfolio is also a reflection of how you design. If I see a poorly designed portfolio and badly written, cookie-cutter case studies, I’ll see that as a reflection of your design skills.

But most of all, junior designers need to learn about the flexibility and the messiness of design work and experienced designers must stop hiding the messy details of their work because they think it makes them look incompetent. The opposite is true. When it comes to case studies tell true stories, not some cookie-cutter fantasy.

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🤫 Another gentle reminder! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Or why you should quit your dead-end job before it’s too late

There I was, sitting in the dark, behind the messy desk in my unfinished home office, head in my hands. The only light in the room was coming from the screen in front of me, I was in another late afternoon meeting, hiding behind my avatar.

🤫 Psst! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Just like so many times lately, I had turned my camera off, even though it was the department meeting with all my design peers and leaders. It was unusual for someone to turn off their camera during this call but I was burned out, had developed a social anxiety, and just couldn’t bring myself to show my face, let alone speak. 

“Where did it all go so wrong?” I was thinking, paying no attention to what was being discussed in the meeting. I had no answers back then, only now, more than a year after getting laid off I finally processed everything that happened in those years. I realised that it started as a dream job but gradually turned into a nightmare. Here’s what happened and my recommendations based on what I learned so that you don’t make the same mistakes as I did. 

I set my baseline too high

I joined this company as a senior product designer but I’d been a lead designer at the previous company. I went from commuting to an office in central London to a remote job at a company with a lot of potential so I was ok with that. 

It was the right thing to do, but looking back now I realise that, combined with other factors described in this article, it set me up for failure right at the start. I guess the “demotion” must have lingered somewhere in my mind as I wanted to prove that I was not “just a senior designer” and wanted to get back into a lead role as soon as possible. But the company’s UX department was so immature at the beginning it didn’t have any design leaders, except the one manager that was in charge of the whole department. 

Because of this desire and willingness to prove myself, I set a baseline of productivity for myself that was unsustainable. I could keep up with it for around three years, but then things started to fall apart, especially when there was still no acknowledgement and recognition of all the effort I put in and I started to burn out. 

My recommendation: tune down your willingness to prove yourself

In my design career now spanning two decades, every designer I saw join a team where I had worked came in with a high willingness to prove themselves. I think it’s something designers especially default to because we’re constantly reminded that we need to prove our value. It happens so often that it has a detrimental effect on our confidence, so when we join a new company we want to do exceptionally well.

Here’s what you should do instead: Take it easy, don’t rush and tune down your willingness to prove yourself. Don’t take your job as a competition of who’s a better designer on the team but as a privilege to design things for people to use. 

There need to be clear signs of growth in your performance to advance in your career. Starting high and maintaining that won’t get you noticed. It’s impossible to improve when you start at your maximum. The only way from the top is down. Save your energy instead and make sure you grow in your performance. 

Anna Saraceno from Trello offers great advice on how to start a design job well. You should focus first on building relationships, then on producing great work and you should observe with a helpful eye and ask questions with an open mind. There’s no “hitting the ground running” when it comes to designers starting jobs. That’s a myth that toxic company cultures perpetuate. Don’t fall for it. 

I wasn’t transparent about my career ambitions

I went from being a lead designer in a prominent British enterprise to a senior designer in a tech startup. This also means that I went from working on strategic initiatives and projects to mostly transactional and reactive work. I could still do strategy when time permitted, but there were just so many fires to put out that I was always running out of time. 

The best way for me to get back to more strategic work with higher impact was to get promoted to a lead designer or an equivalent. That’s also why I set my baseline so high, I wanted to prove that I can do more. 

But here’s what I did wrong: I always assumed that the manager would notice the effort that I put in and eventually recommend me for a promotion. That works when you have a capable manager who recognises good work and the efforts of their team members. My manager wasn’t like that. Looking back I now realise we were both at fault for things going wrong: me for not being transparent and expecting managers to notice my efforts, and them for not recognising all the good work I did. 

Being quiet about your ambitions and expecting your manager to notice promotion-worthy efforts isn’t how things generally work when it comes to promotions. A promotion is something you plan with your manager and it doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why transparency about your ambitions is critical. 

My recommendation: Take responsibility for your career progression

Prepare a career growth plan with them, check in on it regularly, and ask them for feedback as you go. Are you moving along the plan accordingly or do you need to change something? This career plan needs to consist of your mid-term but also long-term ambitions. Do you want to get promoted? Add it to your career plan and discuss with your manager how you can get there. 

If you need a template for your career growth plan, here’s a good one I found by Jen Matos on Miro. Here’s the blog post that explains how to use it.

I was too humble

Every tech company claims to hire humble people who work well with others. But is it possible to be too humble? And how come even in such companies it’s the vocal people who get ahead? 

My work was stellar — I created and led complex strategic design initiatives, unlike most of my peers. I had great results to show for it too. Massive increases in important business metrics. None of the other designers had that, yet when it was time for acknowledgements and recognitions, I was always forgotten about. 

It turns out that the working environment at the company was highly toxic. I didn’t realise this when I was there because they disguised it so well with toxic positivity. Everyone was extremely positive all the time, especially the leaders, so when you wanted to discuss the things that weren’t working you’d be seen as a party pooper. That’s why it was easy to get recognition for average work that aligned with that toxic positivity, but if you did awesome work but exposed serious problems, they’d shush you down and sweep the problem under the carpet. This is a typical symptom of a toxic working environment:

The more toxic your environment, the less you will get the recognition you deserve.

— Bas Wallet (Source)

In feminine countries, humbleness is a virtue. Claiming credit is not done Bas Wallet writes in Why does my UX manager not give me recognition for my work? I was raised by three women, no men were involved in my upbringing. This means that humility is built into me. Showing off for the things I do well feels wrong and I can’t do it even if my career depends on it. So again, I defaulted to waiting for someone to notice my efforts and my good work. Combined with the high baseline I had established for myself, not being transparent about my career ambitions, and my manager being unable or unwilling to notice my efforts, there was only one way this was heading — burnout. 

My recommendation: be a good collaborator but don’t be too humble

When companies say that they want to hire humble people, what they mean is they want good collaborators but for some reason, they package it as humility.

Unless you work in a country or a company with a dominant feminine culture where humility is a true virtue (if you work in tech it’s unlikely you work in such a company), then you will need to find a good balance between being humble and promoting the good work you do. If you did something great, show it to your manager, that’s not bragging. If your manager doesn’t give you credit for a job well done, talk about your achievements to your manager’s manager or share it in public meetings or spaces like Slack. 

My manager was a career chaser, based on Wallet’s definitions of managers and why they don’t give recognition. A career chaser takes credit for your work and is loyal only to the company which means they’ll throw you under the bus if needed. The other types are (Fig 1): Conflict avoiders who give credit but are still loyal only to the company, Self-manifesting rebels who take credit for the good work but without bad intentions, and then there’s the Grassroots ambassador who is closest to the perfect manager. They protect you and give you credit for the good work. 

Dealing with a career chaser is hard. Confronting them doesn’t work because they’ll start to gaslight you. But I didn’t know who I was dealing with at the time and walked right into the trap.

I was gaslighted and let it get to me

Unfortunately, this has been happening to so many designers lately. “Prove your value” their leaders will say to them. “If you did your job better, you’d have the seat at the table” is another common thing designers hear. And that’s not even from other stakeholders, it’s from their managers. Instead of being supported and enabled to do their best work, they’re betrayed by their leaders. 

After I burned out, I decided enough was enough. I confronted my manager and told them how I felt misguided by them and complained about how they never acknowledged my contributions. I expected a mature response but all I witnessed was responsibility shifting. I was to blame for everything. “You never told me that you had problems with productivity or motivation…” was something they said. “You were keeping track of your burnout score but still burned out…” was what they said when I confronted them about burnout and how they never noticed the obvious signs even though it was their responsibility, written explicitly in the handbook of the company. 

As it turns out, it’s much harder to notice the signs of burnout in yourself than it is in others. But you have to know what you’re looking for, and a competent manager should be trained and able to do so.

So we argued for a couple of weeks during our 1-on-1s until I decided to stop. I realised that I was being gaslighted by an incompetent manager with a lot of insecurities. Whenever I tried to confront them about something, they always found a way to blame me in the end. No matter how hard I worked it was never enough. Sara Wacther-Boettcher came to the same conclusion in Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you: you cannot overwork your way into being valued. You cannot explain or fight your way into being valued. You can’t prove your value to someone who isn’t interested in seeing it. This is mostly true for designers’ relationships with other stakeholders, but sadly, it’s also often true for their relationships with their managers. 

My recommendation: Learn to recognise the signs of gaslighting and don’t let it get to you

When you try to confront someone about something you think they’re doing wrong but in the end, they always find a way to blame you, possibly to the point where you think you’re losing your mind, that’s when you’re being gaslighted. The first part is recognising it, so here are a few things that gaslighters do that I think are especially relevant to designers (Source):

• Blame shifting in relationships—saying that if you acted differently, they wouldn’t treat you like this, so it’s really your fault
• Twisting a story to minimize their abusive behaviour
• Minimizing their hurtful behaviours or words by saying something like, “It was just a joke” or “You’re way too sensitive”
• Changing the subject or refusing to listen when confronted about a lie or other gaslighting behaviour
• Saying things like “If you aren’t showing your value to the leadership, you’re failing.”

The second part is not letting it get to you. In professional environments, the person who’s doing the gaslighting rarely does it to harm others. It’s often a way to protect themselves from their insecurities. So it’s not about you, it’s about them. Let it go and move on to the third part.

The third part is to do something about it: speak to their manager if you truly think it can help. It rarely does so you might need alternatives. Switching to a different team is the best one if you want to stay with the company. When that’s not an option, switching jobs is the only thing that remains. Being gaslighted is detrimental to your mental health, it may erode your confidence to the point of ending your career. 

Conclusion: My dream job had turned into a dead-end job but I refused to see it

I managed to switch to a different team and even started to recover from burnout (after more than six months). I had considered leaving the company at some point but I always thought that things weren’t that bad (they were!). 

My wife and I were expecting twins at the time when I burned out. It was a really hard period in my life but at least it made the decision to remain an easy one. If I stayed, I’d get four months of paid parental leave. If I left and joined a new company I’d have to work through the first months after our babies were born. 

My last recommendation: Don’t persist in a dead-end job

Why do most people persist with their job even though it makes them unhappy? According to Seth Godin, “Quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave.” In his book The Dip, he argues that people get caught up in the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested so much time into something, we hate to leave it. 

Quitting our job would mean that we wasted our time because we invested so much of it in it. This thinking isn’t rational, but it is human. He explains it with a Results/Effort chart (Fig 2) — you put more effort into the dead-end job but things continually and gradually get worse. Still, this is easier than finding a new, better job. 

There’s no point in persisting in a dead-end job. No matter how much effort you put in, things won’t get better. They always get worse.

Don’t persist in a dead-end job. First, you have to recognise that a job is a dead-end. That’s the hardest part and it may take a while. Here are a couple of good guidelines for designers: 

• If you’ve been a designer at a company for two years, been doing great work but received little recognition and your manager isn’t talking to you about your potential promotion, it’s a dead-end job. 
• If the design team is small and no designers are being promoted, it’s a dead-end job. 
• If all you are asked to do is transactional and reactive work, with little research, discovery, and UX strategy, it’s a dead-end job.
• If you’re stuck with an incompetent manager who continually gaslights you, it’s a dead-end job. 

Don’t despair, but see this time as a transitional period of your career as Bas Wallet puts it perfectly again. When it comes to your career you always need to think longer term. When you’re stuck at a dead-end job, longer-term planning means you need to do your best possible job in your current situation, build up your portfolio and leave for greener pastures. 

My situation was very particular and I couldn’t leave. I’d jeopardise the precious first few months with our babies. Ironically, getting laid off had the same effect — it pushed my life into chaos as I scrambled to put the pieces back in place. I never got to spend the first few months with them carefree. It was too late for me. 

My job started well and became a dream design job for the first three years but still turned into a nightmare. Chances are you’re sitting at a much worse job, one that is a dead-end job from the start like so many designers do. Gather up the courage, summon all your strength, invest your effort in your portfolio and leave. It’s harder short term, but longer term it’s the only thing that makes sense. Just don’t be the debris on an ocean wave, tumbling around and never getting anywhere.

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🤫 Another gentle reminder! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

I’m restarting my yearly tradition of reflecting on the past year after I abandoned it a few years ago. Consistency has always been my problem when it comes to writing. Now I want to challenge myself and finally write more often. 

I’ve been thinking “This is probably the hardest year in my life so far” for a couple of years in a row now. Something happens every year to make it harder than the one before. This year was no different.

From burnout to laid-off

I recovered from burnout (although not sure if fully — can you ever truly recover from it?) without any help from my employer, my manager, or my coworkers. I pushed through it alone and finally became productive again in January. But then something even more traumatic than burnout happened.

February 9 was a typical Thursday until 4 pm when I was ambushed into a Zoom call named “Role discussion.” There was little discussion to be had. My manager’s manager was there, accompanied by a legal adviser. I knew immediately what the call was about. I was laid off two months from completing my fifth anniversary at GitLab, and more importantly, two months before our twins were due. 

A normal, uneventful Thursday afternoon quickly turned into one of the most traumatic days in my life. It took me months to recover from that, but looking back I’m grateful for it. It taught me so much and pushed me in the direction that I had been wanting to head down for years but didn’t have the courage for it. Sometimes you need to get a kick in your ass to get to do better, greater things and have a positive impact on many more people. Getting laid off was that kick for me. My computer got completely erased minutes after I got laid off so it took me more than a month to get it back up to speed and start working on my projects. A lot of time was wasted there.

My projects and building a personal brand

I panicked after the layoff, mostly because my imposter syndrome went crazy. I’ve never doubted myself as much as I did in the months after losing my job. I jumped the gun on a couple of things and invested time in projects that I probably shouldn’t have. Because of so much self-doubt, I started copying others instead of following my plan. Eventually, I realised that it didn’t work and had to revert to what I was doing before.

I managed to get my shit together by September when I started publishing blog posts on Better Web Type and wrote the Designer Layoff Stories and Why Designers Quit — the 2023 report. I also started posting on LinkedIn daily and it brought results — I went from around 1,500 followers to 4,400 in less than six months. Nothing compared to other prominent designers, but I’m happy with the results so far. 

I also made good progress on Medium, where I went from around 2,000 followers to almost 7,000. I only published nine posts, so I think that’s pretty good. If I manage to publish regularly, I expect that to at least double in 2024. Medium, along with LinkedIn are the platforms that I decided to focus on for building my personal brand and expanding my audience beyond my mailing list which plateaued at around 20,000 subscribers this year. I have plans to scale the mailing list in 2024, but more importantly, improve it. 

I finally managed to break free from Mailchimp in 2023 and moved to ConvertKit. This was the first, fundamental step towards improving the mailing list. Until then, I was sending promotions for my book to everyone, even those who already got it. Now that I’m on ConvertKit, I’ll be able to build better automations and keep the list healthy. I’ll focus on bringing more value to my subscribers and increasing engagement. 

Without panic and self-doubt, this would be an incredibly successful year. But considering that I went through two highly stressful life events, whatever my achievements, they’re a huge success.

I managed to bring my two projects (UX Buddy and Better Web Type) to the point where they’re set up for future success and have the potential to sustain my family fully. I’m filled with optimism fuelled by ideas on how to improve and scale these projects in 2024. I just hope I’ll have enough time and energy to do everything that I want.

I started collaborating with TLDR in August curating their TLDR Design newsletter. A few of my newsletter subscribers told me that they were looking for curators, I got in touch and we decided to give it a go shortly after. I took my family to lunch to celebrate. It was a lovely warm August day that will stick in my memory forever.

I took most of December off, guilt-free. I was happy with what I had accomplished and decided to spend all of the remaining days with my wife and our babies. It was magical, exactly what I needed after a hard year.

Becoming a father and finishing our house

Our twins Lars and Galia were born on April 12. It was the most magical day of my life as we finally got to meet the babies that we had been impatiently waiting for. It’s hard to be a new parent, especially to twins. But I think to myself every day how lucky I am to have two beautiful babies, a boy and a girl, just what I had always wanted, with my wife, the love of my life.

I was planning to have a four-month parental leave after their birth but because I got laid off I had to work instead. I missed out on some of our babies’ key events because of that. I feel that I was robbed of the carefree time with them, but I like to console myself with the fact that I worked on my projects and not for someone else. I decided not to get a new job because that would mean late afternoon meetings and 8-9-hour workdays, and I didn’t want that. With a new job, I’d miss out on even more.

Inflation was crazy this year all over the world and Slovenia was no exception. My mortgage had a variable interest rate which increased a lot because of the situation in financial markets. My monthly instalments increased by more than 40% so I decided to sell some of the GitLab stock and pay off the debt. Now we own our beautiful house. 

Speaking of the house, it’s not fully completed yet. It’ll be two years since we moved in this March but I’ve been too busy, especially since our twins were born, to finish all the little things. But as it is with all design work, it’s the little details that matter most and bring the most joy. I’m grateful for our beautiful house but sometimes it still feels a bit cold and simply unfinished. 

My wife and I moved a lot in the past ten years: Germany, London, Edinburgh, and back to Slovenia. One thing that follows this lifestyle is that you never settle down. You never get to decorate your flat fully. You take care of the essentials, the bed, the sofa, a working desk and a chair and that’s it. You never know when you’ll move again, which is probably soon, so there’s no point investing in beautiful plants, cushions, rugs, or vases. Now we’re finally settled down and I’m fed up with that lifestyle. I want our house to be a beautiful, warm, cosy place that we love coming back to. 

There’s still some furniture missing, mostly in the gym and in my home office and there’s still a lot to do in the garden and the garage. After two years it gets annoying to step out on where the deck should be but instead, it’s just raw, dirty concrete. I want our house to be fully finished, including the garden and the garage by Autumn of 2024.

We got our new car! The Range Rover Velar that we had been waiting for for nine months. I had it custom-built and ordered it in June 2022, well before my wife was pregnant. Initially, we were looking into Range Rover Evoque which is much smaller but decided to go with the Velar because it’s bigger. I’m glad we did. I had to go pick it up on my own because my wife was just weeks from giving birth to our babies. It was a cold, grey February day, I took a long bus ride to the car salon and took the long way back, driving through the beautiful, snowed-in countryside. The car was a pure joy to drive. It was a day that I’ll remember and cherish forever.

Hobbies and reading

The only time that I had to invest in my hobby of assembling and painting miniatures was right after getting laid off. There was the WW2 tank that I had started but never had time to finish — the Tiger tank. I spent a couple of weeks doing just that — researching, watching tutorials online, painting, and listening to podcasts. It was therapeutical, exactly what I needed.

Books I’ve read

• The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
• Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom by William Glasser
• Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini
• Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker — Still reading

Photos

I stopped posting photos to Instagram after the layoff. I’m not even sure why, this is something I’ll need to fix in 2024. Here are photos of some key events from the past year.

2024

Things I want to keep up with:

• Writing a weekly newsletter (shorter form)
• Posting daily on LinkedIn
• Exercise 3-4 times per week
• Solo movie nights on Fridays (I enjoy watching horror movies alone)
• Movie nights with my wife on Saturdays
• Continue my collaboration with TLDR on the TLDR Design newsletter, I’ve been enjoying working on this

Things I want to start and/or do better:

• Become a part of a community (either local or online) and make new friends — people I can hang out with and be less isolated
• Start swimming and do it relatively regularly (at least every two weeks)
• Be more involved with my existing friends and the wider family
• Network more and better
• Publish more blog posts (long form), I’m aiming for 20
• Read more, at least one book per month, ideally two
• Take more time off guilt-free → go somewhere nice for the summer vacation (after more than 3 years of not going anywhere)
• Re-establish a routine but don’t be afraid to break free from it occasionally
• Go out and work from a coffee shop once per week
• Get a camera and get into photography again
• Start tracking my working time

It’s a bit ironic that I’ve been reading the book Why We Sleep, which outlines and emphasises the importance of good sleep and all the health problems that come from not sleeping well, in the period of my life when my sleep is the worst. It’s a hefty book and I still have about 80 pages to read. But I can already recommend it, I learned a lot from Matthew Walker who is the leading sleep scientist in the world.

If I had to summarise 2023 in a few words it’d do it with “chaos” and “new beginnings.” I want the 2024 to be about excitement and independence. Let’s see how it goes.

Last week I published the report on designer layoffs, this week I want to take a look at the other side — why do designers leave? It’s the second iteration of last year’s report but with additional data and insights.

My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Not surprisingly, the layoffs were the biggest reason why designers lost their jobs in 2023. Compared to 2022, where only a fraction of them stated that they were let go, 14.3% of this year’s participants said they were laid off. 

293 designers responded to my survey which is almost double compared to last year’s 159. I also added more questions to the survey. Last year I only asked about the main reason for quitting their job, this year I also asked them how much they increased their salary with their job switch, what the design maturity of the company they left was, about the company and design team size, and their happiness with the work, coworkers and their manager.

49.5% of respondents were UX/Product designers (Fig 1) and the majority, 23.3% of them, were from the United States (Fig 2). Take a look at the full breakdown in the charts below.

I recruited the participants through my mailing list and LinkedIn and I feel that they’re a good representation of the industry.

I asked the following questions in the survey:

• What was the main reason you left your last job?
• By how much did you increase your salary with the latest job switch?
• How would you rate the UX/Design maturity of the company?
• What was the size of the company?
• What was the size of the design team?
• How many years of experience did you have when you left?
• For how many years have you been with the company when you left?
• I was happy with the work I was doing (rate 1 to 5)
• I was happy with my coworkers (rate 1 to 5)
• I was happy with my manager (rate 1 to 5)

Participants could only pick one answer from a range of options. I know, even from my own experience, that there are usually multiple reasons why designers quit a job. And despite receiving a lot of feedback on last year’s survey calling for allowing multiple answers,  I decided to keep the single-answer format because I wanted to learn about the most pressing reason.

Seniority distribution

The seniority distribution is interesting again as there are some major differences from 2022. First of all, something I noticed is that a lot of designers are still quite senior. 34.5% of them were senior, and 25.5% of them were either Staff, Principal, Lead, Manager or Head of Department. See the chart below for the full breakdown (Fig 3).

This leads me to believe that the UX industry is still top-heavy. Here’s something fascinating — compared to last year we see an increase in seniority overall. We see a major shift in intermediate (a decrease from 32.9% in 2022 to 24.6% in 2023)  and senior designers (an increase from 27.7% to 34.5%). The junior and leads are comparable between the years. 

How can we explain that? Not only is the UX industry top-heavy, it’s actually getting heavier. A lot of intermediate designers are moving into senior roles but we don’t see major shifts from senior to lead roles. In fact, there was a decrease in lead roles compared to last year. This could mean that a lot of senior designers are still getting stuck in their careers as there are no career progression options for them where they work. As we’ll see later in the report, this is still one of the main reasons why designers quit their jobs. Let’s take a closer look at those. 

Why do designers quit their jobs?

The first answer is, sadly, quite obvious — layoffs. Designers were amongst those who were hit the hardest in the tech layoffs of 2023. 14.3% of the respondents said they were laid off. Last year this answer wasn’t even an option so only a few of the 159 of last year’s respondents said they lost their job via the “Other” answer. 

Not surprisingly, the layoffs had a huge impact on the other reasons. Being unhappy about the work they had to do received 10.2% of answers when it was 18.5% last year. The lack of career progression opportunities option was the second one (layoffs excluded) with 9.6%. Also a significant decrease compared to last year’s 18.5%. And finally, we have the low UX/Design maturity reason at 8.9%, compared to 11.5% from last year.

Excluding the layoffs, the top three reasons for designers quitting their jobs remain the same:

• Being unhappy about the work they do
• Lack of career progression opportunities
• Low UX/Design maturity

The unhappiness about the work and the lack of career progression saw significant changes in percentages but the problems with UX/Design maturity remain nearly the same. 

Let’s dig in and take a closer look at the breakdown by seniority. 

Junior designers feel they aren’t growing

17.2% of junior designers got laid off, only second to design leads at 19.3%. 13.8% of them quit because they felt they weren’t growing, and 10.3% lacked career progression opportunities. Only 6.9% of them were unhappy about the work they had to do, and an additional 6.9% of them were bothered by the low UX/Design maturity of the company.

Excluding the layoffs, the stats are comparable to those from last year, especially the part where fewer of them are bothered by the low UX/Design maturity. It seems that growth and progress in their career are of higher priority, which makes sense as they’re at the beginning of their careers. 

Intermediate designers lack career progression opportunities 

One of the most surprising findings of this study is that only 8.2% of intermediate designers were laid off. Compared to others, who are all above 15%, that’s quite low. Is this the UX job market regulating itself? We saw a high demand for senior designers in the years leading up to 2023 so maybe companies “overhired” senior designers and now they’re trying to fix that.

13.7% of them lacked career progression opportunities, and 12.3% of them were bothered by the low UX/Design maturity. It’s interesting to see how that isn’t that much of a problem for junior designers, becomes more problematic for intermediate and senior designers, but then drops again with the design leads.

I think that this pattern could indicate that the companies hiring intermediate and senior designers aren’t always mature enough to keep them. The presence of design leads may indicate a higher UX/Design maturity so that’s why it isn’t as much of a problem to them. 

Senior designers and design leads are unhappy about the work they do

Senior designers are mostly unhappy with the work they have to do and are bothered by the low UX/Design maturity. 14.9% of them got laid off which seems to have impacted the major shifts we observed in the other answers. For example, only 10.9% of them were unhappy about the work they had to do, compared to 26.3% from last year. The low UX/Design maturity answer accounts for 9.9% this year, compared to 21.1% from last year.

The biggest change comes with the lack of career progression opportunities reason where we see a decrease from 20.1% from last year to 5.9% in 2023. Senior designers are still unhappy about their compensation but there was a slight decrease compared to last year (6.9% in 2022 to 5.3% in 2023). They, along with design leads, are the only designers in my research who are unhappy with their compensation enough to quit their jobs.

19.3% of design leads got laid off, the most out of all seniorities. That makes sense as they’re probably the most expensive employees. This could also be a sign of the UX job market and industry regulating and readjusting itself away from the inflated needs in the years 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

Just like senior designers, design leads are also unhappy about the work they have to do. 13.4% chose this answer as the most pressing reason for quitting their jobs. However, there’s a significant decrease from last year, when 25% of them picked this answer.  Interestingly, the UX/Design maturity is less of a problem to them as only 6.3% of them picked this answer. 

Poor relationship with their manager is an answer that stands out when it comes to design leads. Far from being among the top three answers with other seniorities, 13.3% of design leads picked this as the main reason. This is quite comparable to last year’s 12.5%.

The last major change with design leads is with career progression opportunities. Only 10.8% picked this as the main problem this year, while 25% lacked career opportunities in 2022. 

Generalists are still happier about the work they do and get recruited more

Conducting this report last year, I found that design generalists are generally happier with the work they do. I ascribed it to the work being more diverse, and more fun because of that. I wanted to check if this pattern still holds this year. Only 19 out of 293 designers who responded to the survey were generalists so take these stats with a pinch of salt.

15.8% of design generalists got laid off. But there’s an interesting spike in how many of them left because they got recruited by another company — 11% which is the most of all designers asked. Still, that’s only half compared to last year’s 22%. It’s probably the “layoff effect” we’ve witnessed with all other seniorities so far. They also seem to struggle with their managers as 10.5% of them said they left because of a poor relationship with them. 

About 10% said they lacked career progression opportunities, and another 10% were bothered by the low UX/design maturity by their employers. 

Design generalists are still happier with the work they do than other designers — only 5.3% of them left because of that reason. And there was a decrease compared to last year’s 11.1%.

Designers leave small teams and design-immature companies

Low UX/design maturity was one of the top three reasons in last year’s report so this year I decided to investigate this further. I asked designers what the maturity of the company they left was, based on NNG’s maturity levels. I linked to that page in the question so that designers could make an informed decision. The results are striking.

I like NNG’s levels of maturity because there’s no neutral option. If we divide the six levels in half we get the less mature companies (levels 1 to 3) and the more mature ones (levels 4 to 6). 77.5% of respondents evaluated the maturity of their companies with levels 1 to 3, meaning they’re more design-immature. 

However we look at these results, UX/design maturity remains a huge problem in the UX industry. If this is in any way a reflection of it, most companies out there are still design-immature and we’ve made little to no progress in recent years. This finding leads me to think — can you think of anyone else working in tech who has to prove their value and justify their work? Engineers don’t have to prove the value of software development, product managers don’t have to justify product management. It’s only designers who are somewhat “expected” to prove their value and justify their worth. It’s only designers who have to work for design-immature companies who don’t understand what they do.

Ok, so designers leave design-immature companies. Let’s take a closer look at the company and team sizes that they leave behind. When looking at company sizes, the distribution is quite equal. Nothing stands out.

But when we look at design team sizes we get to some interesting stats. Designers mostly leave solo positions (22.2%) and small teams (34.8%). These stats may be a reflection of the state of the UX industry. There aren’t that many design teams out there with 20+ designers. I wouldn’t be surprised if most designers work alone and in small to medium-sized teams.

Looking at how many years of experience the designers had when they left we see that it’s mostly the experienced designers leaving.

When we look at how many years they’d been with the company a pattern emerges — most designers make it to three years with a company.

Designers are happy with their compensation but still get an average of 20% increase when switching jobs

Only 6% of participants claimed that they left their jobs because they were unhappy with their compensation. Still, when switching jobs, designers get 20%, 30% and even higher compensation increases. N/A (non-applicable) answers are mostly from the poor souls who got laid off. I’m surprised to see that 13.3% of them received no increase at all and that around 35% of them increased their salaries by less than 20%. Job switches are perfect for increasing one’s salary, but it seems that designers don’t know that.

When we slice this data by seniority, we get to see some really interesting stats.

Junior designers only get minor increases or no increases at all. Intermediate generally get more than 30% increases (18.1% of them). Senior designers generally get 20% increases (25.7% of them), and the distribution is mostly equal for the design leads. 

So intermediate designers get the most increases which isn’t that surprising at all as they’re in the middle steps of the corporate ladder with a lot of room and opportunities to advance. Senior designers also get significant increases, I’d argue mostly because they’re generally the most wanted. 

Designers are unhappy with their managers but happy with their coworkers

Unhappiness with the work they do was, and still is, one of the biggest reasons why designers quit their jobs. So I wanted to take a close look this year, along with how satisfied they are with their managers and coworkers. 

When asking about managers, I asked them how happy they were with them on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being strongly disagree, 5 being strongly agree). “Happiness” can be quite a vague term so I added an explanation: “I felt supported and well guided.” 

Only 25% of designers are happy with their managers. 19.1% feel neutral about them, and 56.8% of designers were unhappy with them.

I expected a similar result when asking them about their happiness with their coworkers but found the opposite. The exact opposite actually. Most designers, 51.9% to be exact, are happy with their coworkers and only around 25% of them are unhappy. By “happy,” I explained that “They well understood and valued design and appreciated my work.”

When asked about their happiness with the work they had to do, meaning that they felt “challenged and were growing as designers,” 47.4% of them felt unhappy. Only about 26% of them were happy with the work. 

When it comes to remote work, 70% of designers can work remotely at least some of the time. Interestingly, the number of designers who left their jobs because remote work wasn’t a possibility is 3.1%, exactly the same as last year. 

Conclusion

Last year, this was just a simple study with only three questions. I expanded it this year and found out that designers are generally unhappy with their managers and the work they have to do. UX/design maturity and no career progression opportunities are the major reasons for quitting their jobs. So when they leave, designers leave smaller teams and solo positions at design-immature companies. It’s mostly experienced designers doing the leaving and they do so after three years at a company. 

This year we also witnessed a shift in seniority, a significant number of intermediate designers moved to senior positions, and 60% of designers were either senior or leads. The UX industry remains top-heavy and got a bit heavier in the last year, despite the layoffs. Speaking of which, it was mostly junior designers and design leads that got hit, intermediate designers being the safest. Generalists also got hit by the layoffs but also get recruited more often and are (still) generally happier with the work they do.

A few key findings to discuss: why are designers so unhappy with their work and their managers? Why does UX/maturity continue to be a problem in our industry? Why are most companies still design-immature and why do designers need to prove their value and justify their work? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and I’ll pick one commenter randomly who’ll get a printed copy of my book and announce it here in the comments on December 14, 2023.

Another gentle nudge for my new course 😊 UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

Retaliation, targeted eliminations, legal disputes, and other horror stories from the tech industry

My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!

I got a raise at 3 PM, at 4 I was laid off. Exactly two months before our twins were due and my wife and I would become parents for the first time. It was just another Thursday afternoon, at 3 PM I spoke to my manager who told me that I got a small raise. At 4 we were both jobless. This paints a perfect picture of how the layoffs were organised in complete secrecy despite “transparency” being one of the main company values. My laptop was remotely shut down just minutes after I learned the news and that was it. After five years, I was no longer a senior product designer at the company where I had helped build the design department.  

I went to the local supermarket the day after and met an old classmate from the university. I hadn’t seen him for more than 10 years and was surprised that he lived in the same area.
“You live around here now?”
“Yeah, we just bought a flat not far from here”
“Oh really? We bought a house in this town last year…”

I put on a smile and kept up with the small talk, but all I could think was “Don’t ask me what I do, please don’t ask me about my job…” We spent chatting for five minutes and I dreaded each pause in our chat, fearing that that question might come up. 

It didn’t. I was safe. Being jobless was shameful enough, I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. But later I was ashamed of being ashamed. Your mind starts to play tricks on you when something so traumatic happens. 

I can’t tell you the details of my layoff, so I decided to be the voice of the many designers who had to go through this traumatic event. I ran a survey and received 159 answers, which is amazing, considering how hard it was to find these laid-off designers. I even got to speak to more than 30 of them and listened to their stories. Here they are, along with the stats from my research. I changed the names of the designers behind these stories to protect their privacy. 

Most of the designers who answered my survey were UX/Product designers (76%), 5% of them were design managers, and 9% were design generalists (Fig 1).

37% of them were senior but if we combine that with those who were lead designers we get up to 52% of all participants. Only 23% of them were intermediate and 5% were junior (Fig 2). This proves that experienced and senior designers were mostly laid off. But why would companies fire their most valuable employees? People with the most knowledge and experience? Let’s dive deeper.

Retaliation

Martin, a designer from The Netherlands got laid off in the same month as I, five months later the company re-opened his position and started hiring again. “They didn’t contact me if I wanted it back, so I think my elimination was targeted. The most disappointing thing was to see how my former colleagues completely forgot how badly the company treated me and gladly reshared the ‘we’re hiring’ post on LinkedIn.”

Matthias, a designer from Germany had proof that his elimination was targeted: “I was told that my role was eliminated but it was clear from the pull request to the code of a page on the company’s website (which is public), that another designer was put in my position. I had conflicts with the department leadership so I’m convinced that I was targeted and retaliated against. I filed a formal complaint but nothing happened.” Matthias was a contractor so there were no laws protecting him. Similarly to me, his laptop was shut down minutes after the news and he was discarded and forgotten about. He was two months from his fifth anniversary at the company. 

Martin and Matthias are just two of the many designers who think that their eliminations were targeted and a form of retaliation. In fact, my research suggests (Fig 3) that 22% of laid-off designers think that they were eliminated based on retaliation. 42% of them said they were publicly vocal about the problems in their companies and that’s what got them in trouble. 

Being a high performer doesn’t save you

Eva, a designer from Denmark was a high performer for years at the company but still got the boot. She was disappointed by the lack of responsibility from the CEO: “The stock of the company where I worked dropped from around $130 per share to less than $30 in just five months. Yet, it’s the CEO of this company who gets to decide to ax 7% of its employees. Why doesn’t he carry some responsibility for the terrible results of the company? Why is he immune?”

Burnout and problems with leadership will get you a priority ticket for layoffs

Lucie, a Senior Product Designer from France, told me her story of how her problems with burnout put her on the layoff list: “I was completely abandoned by my manager and the UX department leadership when I burned out after four years with the company. I received no support and was put under additional pressure to perform better. And that’s at a company where the CEO publicly said “As a company, we should take a lot of care that there’s no pressure to work long hours.” Managers were supposed to keep an eye out for people who risk burning out. Instead, when I burned out, I was blamed and told that I needed to improve. I had to take a full month of sick leave to recover (which wasn’t enough) and was unfairly given a low performance evaluation score at the end of the year because of it. Right then I knew that if layoffs were to happen, I’d be on the list.”

Lucie isn’t an outlier. There are many designers that I spoke with who mentioned similar problems. Constantly being put under pressure, burning out, and conflicts with managers and the leadership. In fact, 19% of respondents said they had conflicts with their direct manager, 41% said they questioned the competence of their managers (some publicly), and 24% of them said they had conflicts with the company leadership (Fig 5). These stats paint a sad reality of how designers are treated in tech companies. 

The “overhiring” lie

Most companies that decided to pull the trigger on layoffs claimed that they had overhired in the previous year. That was the reason stated in my case too so I wanted to ask designers if they believed it. 72% of them answered “no.”

They are right. If you look at the chart showing how many years a designer was with the company at the time they were laid off, you’ll see a spike at one year. That makes sense — they said they overhired in the previous year, combined with those who were with the company for less than a year we get to almost 46%. But wait a minute. This isn’t the majority. The majority — 54% of them have been with the company for two years or more. These weren’t the most recent hires, why were they let go?

Why are there so many designers that were there for two, three, four, five years and more? Why is there another spike at five years? If their reason for laying people off was true, most designers would be in less than a year and one-year answers. I believe this proves that some of these eliminations truly were targeted. 

Layoffs are a great opportunity for companies to toss out the “unwanted” employees. Have trouble burning out? Getting in conflicts with the leadership? Too vocal? Leaving for parental leave on top of that? Off you go! They can replace them with new, fresh, and more eager designers who’ll gladly do more for less. That’s what happened where I worked — the designers that were laid off were all senior. Soon after the layoffs (we’re talking days) several intermediate designers were promoted to senior positions. They probably tried to improve the morale among those that remained but here’s what they missed: A newly-promoted senior designer isn’t equal to a senior designer who has been a senior for years. A change of title doesn’t make them more experienced overnight. 

A newly-promoted senior designer isn’t equal to a senior designer who has been a senior for years. A change of title doesn’t make them more experienced overnight.

And why is there another spike at five years? I spoke to David, a designer who told me his story and could be an explanation for this. In the weeks before getting laid off, the company leadership shared the engagement survey results with all the employees. One of the key findings was that people who had been with the company for longer (five years or more, which included him) were generally less “engaged.” Putting it bluntly, they were unhappier. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar pattern emerged elsewhere and that’s why a lot of senior people were let go. 

I’m confident when I say that most of these layoffs can be attributed to copycat behaviour. After the layoffs at the company where I worked were announced publicly, someone wrote the following on a social media platform:

It’s quite simple: If you don’t follow the herd, you risk being blamed if you fail. But if you follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing, even if the herd runs off of a cliff, nobody points any fingers.

Beautifully put. Now, let’s leave all this behind us and move on to what you can do to prepare for the layoffs.

What you can and should do to prepare for layoffs

Here’s a fact: you will be laid off. It’s only a matter of when not if. Maybe not from your current job, but someday in the future it’ll be you who’ll receive an unexpected email, or get ambushed into a meeting with the manager of your manager and a legal advisor. What are you doing to prepare for that? What can you do? Here are a couple of things.

Launch a side gig

Gladly, I had been running two projects on the side — Better Web Type and UX Buddy. They represented around 30% of my income at the time of layoff and it’s something I have been working on ever since. With two babies and being a first-time parent, I decided I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could and not get a new job, despite being offered many lucrative positions. 

Working on my projects allows me to work a lot less and one day it’ll be these projects that will provide for the financial wellbeing of my family. If you don’t have a side project that you’re monetising and something that you could scale in case of getting laid off, you’re risking a lot.

Keep track of your work

I run UX Buddy, a course and a mentoring program to help designers get better jobs. One of the top three problems designers have is not keeping track of their work so when they have to create their portfolios, they don’t know where to start. If you get laid off, you’ll only have access to your laptop for a few more minutes. You’ll lose all the work you ever did for your company. Don’t risk that.

Start a document to keep track of the projects you worked on and add the following details for each one:

• Short description of the problem and how you uncovered it
• What did you do?
• Challenges & how you overcame them. How long it took to complete?
• What were the results? What about the next steps?
• Links to the design artefacts that you created (wireframes, screenshots of whiteboards in Mural or Miro, sketches, designs in Figma)

I have a template for that which I only share with the students of my course but I’ll share it with you for free here. Check it out. Then create a reminder on your calendar to remind you every month to update the doc. 

Make local copies of your designs

This one should be obvious but it often isn’t until it’s too late. Regularly make copies of all your design files, especially those in Figma. If you get laid off, you’ll never be able to access them again. Create a reminder on your calendar to remind you every month and stick to it.

Start networking now

And not when it’s too late. This recommendation comes from Patrick Morgan who was laid off three times in his career so far. This is also the one that I always sucked at. I just didn’t get how to network or why. It became clear when the layoffs hit. If you start networking now, you’ll be much more likely to bounce back quickly. It doesn’t need to be fancy either, just connect with people on LinkedIn. By “connect” I mean engage with their posts, comment on them, and send them DMs. Don’t just add them as your connections.

Getting laid off is a great opportunity

Remembering that traumatic Thursday afternoon, my wife and I still discuss the layoff sometimes. She recently said to me: “You know why they picked you right? They probably had 99 reasons but the main one is that we were expecting children. They knew that you needed all the cash you could get so you’d be more than happy to sign the termination agreement, collect the severance, and remain silent. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the laid-off recently had babies or were about to. They’re the most vulnerable people.”

Tech companies are great at selling all the benefits, including paid parental leave when they try to lure you in to come work for them. But they’re also quick to forget that you’re a human being once they decide you’re “unwanted.” Patrick Morgan put it best:

Tech companies talk a good game about their devotion to their people but at the end of the day, they’re profit-seeking enterprises that exist to return value to their shareholders. If cutting headcount will help a company achieve that objective, it won’t hesitate.

— Patrick Morgan (Source)

The days after my layoff are still a blur. I remember taking the dog for her morning walk, which I had been doing for months because my wife was feeling too sick to keep at it. But it was different now. I always felt in a hurry on these morning walks, pulling the dog by the leash in all directions as I walked nervously. I just wanted to get it done because I was in a rush to start working.

All of a sudden I could stop. Sit down, enjoy the view, the winter sun, and the brisk air. It was amazing to watch the weak morning sun rays slowly dissolve the mist in the valley below. I heard the birds singing in a nearby forest. It seemed like I heard them for the very first time. Finally, I wasn’t in a hurry anymore. I could process the anger, the shame, and the guilt that had been haunting me ever since the layoff. It didn’t take me long to realise that I was presented with an amazing opportunity, perhaps the opportunity of my lifetime — everything was finally and completely in my own hands. I felt liberated. This quote from Felicia Wu, helped me get through it and see everything more clearly:

Your career is bigger than a single company.

— Felicia Wu (Source)

For every Martin and Matthias, thousands of designers got laid off because of retaliation but were powerless to fight against it. For every Lucie, thousands of others were abandoned because they burned out. And for every Eva, thousands of high-performers feel safe but aren’t. 

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What is your layoff story? Or if you haven’t been laid off yet, are you doing anything to prepare for it? Let me know in the comments below 👇 I’ll randomly pick one commenter on December 11 and send them a printed copy of my book.

Welcome to the 29th edition of Designer’s Digest — my weekly roundup of cool new stuff in design. And welcome to 143 new readers this week! 👋

How are you? I’ve been busy doing some important (and overdue) landscaping work in our backyard, writing blog posts, and maintaining two projects — Better Web Type and UX Buddy. This newsletter sometimes also feels like its own project as it takes a considerable amount of time to create each week.

I’ve been thinking if I should reduce the frequency to biweekly or even back to monthly as it once was — do you have a preference? I concluded that I’ll take a short break from it for two weeks so that I can dedicate the autumn landscaping prime time to the backyard. I really need this to be finished because our twins will learn how to walk in a couple of months!

Some news from me:

• I’ll be doing another round of UX Buddy registrations later in October. It’s my online course to help designers create their portfolios and find better jobs. I’ll announce the exact date but you can already join the waitlist to secure the early bird price.
• You can still vote on my Why Designers Quit survey and win one of the three copies of my physical book that I’m giving away to three randomly picked people who complete the survey. I’ll publish the report on October 23.
• I’ll publish at least two blog posts in October: AI vs Designer and Designer Layoff Stories.

Free font: ​Tilt Warp

Tilt is a family of type inspired by the dimensional lettering found in storefront signage, designed by Andy Clymer. It’s comprised of three related variable font styles that you might find in a shop window. I’m featuring the Tilt Warp here but you can get all three if you follow the link below.

​Download it here →

How to create a colour ramp used in design systems

A colour ramp, also known as a colour scale, is a visual representation of how colours transition from light to dark smoothly and continuously. The steps required to create a colour ramp are: start with your defined brand colours, adjust lightness at each colour stop, adjust saturation as needed, check contrast ratios, repeat for all other colours, and aim for similar lightness and saturation for each stop as the other colours.

​Read the article →

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Other cool stuff

​Textareas with auto-increasing height using CSS (1 minute read)
Textareas are great when it comes to accepting a large amount of text from the user. However, the problem with them is that they have a fixed height, which has a detrimental impact on accessibility and usability. Thankfully, an experimental CSS rule with form-sizing property is coming that will allow the increase of the height of the textarea automatically based on the amount of text the user enters.

​Animated backgrounds (Resource)
This is a really cool collection of animated backgrounds that you can use on your website projects. They loop and they’re 4K quality.

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That’s it for this Monday, have a great week! 👋

Cheers,
Matej