Fun The Treehouse Social Thread

I work from 5 pm to 12 am tonight.

 

Sup hope everyone has liked the new forum as much as me

 

Warm greetings everyone

On the squirrel scale, how do you feel? I'm somewhere between 2 and 8.

 

3

 

I’m between 5 and 6 today—just kinda bleargh

 

6. Night class is about to start and I ate too much

 

6

forever a 6

 

@Healer_Leona After a few years with a liberal arts bachelor, I’m taking an associates program in digital user experience design- which I sometimes liken to as the feng shui of software development- at my local community college. I’m coming into it with a year’s worth of online, at your own pace Interaction Design Foundation classes, and I’m hoping the college’s connection to the local industry is strong when time comes for an internship. Right now I’m taking classes on Design Ideation, UX Tools, Responsive Design, and a general survey course. I’m also coming into it with experience as the web designer behind my non-profit’s website through Squarespace- but it’s not clear to me that that experience will mean anything when it’s time to apply for jobs since I just did it myself without developers or a team. The classes are really fun so far!

I saw somewhere recently that @DarkGingerJedi is in the same field so that’s cool.

 

Seems pretty neat @Bacon164


Any idea what jobs you want to apply for?

 

What a lovely Treehouse!
Thank you @Healer_Leona .

Ah, what a nice place. Hope you're all doing well. Peace and love.

 

Very nice new thread here, my compliments to the OP.

Is it OK if we expand the squirrel scale?

10.


11.


12.


13.


Most days, I feel like 13. When I was younger, I could be 10. Right now, I'm on the edge of Hurricane Teddy and feeling like 12.

 

UX designer. There’s a lot of tech companies here but junior UX designers seem to be pretty saturated, so it’ll be tough.

 

My offspring recently told me that they have never seen The Sound of Music. That's just reminded me to set a movie night up!

 

I was either 11 or 12 when I first saw it. Saw it again pretty recently.

 

Yeah, I originally was in print - newspapers/magazines - and then when that all died in the late aughts, I really wanted to do games, or something fun and interactive, fusing my concept illustration background, and design skills. Luckily got an internship for a mobile agency, who was willing to take a chance. I had to relearn my entire design-thinking and everything in 3 months, but it was the best decision I ever made. I feel like I got in at the right time, when a lot of the industry was still figuring itself out. (Which allowed me to make way more mistakes)

With your experience as web designer for your non-profits's website ... definitely include it in your online portfolio. Make a case study out of it. In this line of work, we like to see the organized thought process (or an agile framework if you did that in college). The time of showing off 12 of your best design images are gone. Choose 3-4 best projects and go into details about the changes you've contributed, the before and after, your role in the team, how you iterated, wireframes, and dealt with feedback or user testing, and finally if you can...actual results (more page clicks, less user conflicts). Even if it's not a lot, or you don't have much to show off at this stage, present it as best you can in this framework. It'll get attention. I'm tired of seeing super polished Dribbble shots that are super pretty, but basically unusable.

 

Good morning everyone

 

I've been up for 5 hours. It's almost lunch time here lol

 

Morning/afternoon/evening everyone wherever in the world you are!

 

There definitely seems to be overlap with print, and it also seems to overlap with many disciplines– that's what I love about the field and its possibilities, even if I'm probably coming into it a little late.

Thanks, it's helpful to see that a Squarespace website can be a legitimate entry– in an ideal portfolio, would my 3-4 'best projects' be specific features added to the site, or would it be best to do one master case study on the non-profit website and feature other work as separate case studies? In my case, this other work doesn't exist yet, but there will be loads of projects in this course load, I think. But it's not client work. The non-profit is weird because it was my entry into web design in general, meaning I had no UX design education when ideating the site and I was learning as I went– I guess there's an element of imposter syndrome tangled in it.

 

Unless I was creating a site/app from scratch, where I designed the entire flow, start to finish, and made mockups of every page, I probably wouldn't do a case study for an entire site/app. That's just too big. In most cases, I'd sectionalize my work based on features, this way you can really dig into the pieces and show specific results.

For the company I work at now, which is a global non-profit, if I was redoing my portfolio, I might have case studies for 'redesigning account sign up flow' or 'redesigning checkout and cart'. Since those are very different things, even if they all live in one site. At a company, you'd rarely be in charge of 'everything', unless you're product director lol, or you work for a start up and you're the only designer. If you were redesigning the entire site, it wouldn't happen all at once. More likely, you'll be given small areas to work on throughout the year. So showing that you think in small/big picture, is good. Show how your specific features helped the rest of the site, or fit in with the rest of a designed site, that sort of thing.

You can still show off that full site too, but maybe in less detail. Show the look and feel throughout an entire product, the flow, the interactions, how it connects that sorta thing. But...not just as single images that mean nothing.