CareerFoundry: UX Design course. Things I wish I knew when I started.

Some hindsight on topics I discussed with fellow students.

6 min readMay 24, 2021

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with CareerFoundry in any way.

I attended and finished the course of a Certified UX Designer in the second half of 2020, having a blast doing course-related projects with all stages of involvement.

The whole time I was accompanied by a kick-ass tutor who checked my exercises, gave me advice and which direction to take. It was a fast-paced back and forth exchange and he encouraged me to power through more than once when my perfectionism kicked in and I felt like “not being good enough”.

On every way stone of my journey, my fantastic mentor offered guidance and insights, from portfolio feedback to war stories of her own. The industry knowledge and similar industry background, made me feel right at home. A huge Thank You if you are reading this.

Bird perspective of people doing User Experience related work — Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Table of Content:

Do you need a Mac to finish the course?
Which software do you need to learn?
Is Sketch worth it to buy?
Should you get a Mac as a UX Designer?
Which platform to use for a portfolio?
Do I need to create my illustrations myself?

Do you need a Macintosh to finish the course?

No, you can perfectly finish it with a halfway recent Windows laptop or even Linux, as long as it runs Chrome or Firefox. All you need to do is using Google Docs, Skype the web version of Figma.

Which software do you need to learn?

You need to use slides presentation software such as PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote (Mac). You don’t need Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign. You are not selling user interfaces and graphics design, that's why there is a specialization part and a dedicated course for User Interface Design.

Heck, you can even complete the whole course with just Figma for exercise submission, presentation and everything else. Trust me on that one.

Now I hear myself speaking at the beginning of my course: “But the other examples are looking soooo awesome, I can’t compete with that!”

The good news: you don’t need to, you will be measured by your work, not your graphic design skills. The other awesome looking submissions were most probably done by people who did graphic design for their living and maybe obsessed with a high level of detail and demand for their work.

Another thing to mention: a lot of these fantastic looking submissions are using templates, free or paid. As a novice to the design craft, you tend to think that all of this has to be crafted by hand. In reality, the professionals “Steal like an artist”.

An example of minimalistic layout of my submissions

Although having several years of experience in layouting for web and print, I went with simple white background and black text and had the honour to be featured as a good submission once.

My typography skills and layouting skills further improved over the course, it’s nice to have room for improvement.

All elements in the above picture are taken from Keynote, simple boxes with text and some kind of arrows are basics in this kind of software.

My advice: Go minimalistic and build upon it, your submissions are graded by the content of UX related topics not “cute cat pictures doing yoga poses”.

Is Sketch worth it to buy?

This is a tough one, I had basic experience with Sketch, Adobe XD, Balsamiq and Axure. Although my bets were on Adobe XD, because of the cross-platform support, I went with Figma.

Why? Simple, I asked my mentor on which horse her bet is, she said go with Figma. Sketch is Mac only and Figma had a better collaboration feature at that time. The trajectory of the industry is best known to the professionals, in that case, the mentors.

Looking back it was a good decision because I was able to work in a browser and a native app. I even created all my final artwork composition with it without touching Photoshop.

Is it worth buying Sketch? I bought it, to take the discount and pay half the price but didn’t use it once. I just wanted to be able to open the files if a client is working with Sketch.

My advice: Pick a poison and stick with it, but pick the bigger one. Try to master one particular instead of doing parkour through the recommendations. If you learn the flow of one UX Tool, you will adapt to any other software, they all solve the same problem in a similar way with a huge overlap of features.

Should you get a Mac as a UX Designer?

iMac, the Lamp — Photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash

As much as I hated mac before joining the club.

Yes, get a Mac.

I have this wild theory that your work is only as good as your tools. Having a tool with fantastic UX will force you to at least mimic it and hopefully surpass it at some point. It’s hard to make a clean cut with a dull blade.

My advice: If you can’t get a Mac, get at least any Apple device with recent iOS, you will learn the small design decisions and recognise excellence in User Experience and Interaction Design. If you have the money to dive into the ecosystem with Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and the Apple Watch you will be surprised how well everything is designed for a seamless User Experience.

Which platform to use for a portfolio?

It doesn’t matter, if your quality of work is good, you can apply with a PDF or case studies on Behance or Dribbble.

Do you feel intimidated by all the other portfolio and case study pieces on Behance? You shouldn’t. Most of the beautiful ones are simply big images, some are simply one gigantic picture.

Why is this a bad thing? Accessibility, try to view them on your smartphone and you will find them pretty much impossible to read anything. How convincing is such a piece for the potential employer in regards to your multimedia design skills?

You design for digital content, using the limited possibilities in layout and typography forces you to focus on the content of your case study instead of beautiful-fullscreen-crazy-layout pieces.

Embrace these constraints, your future work may force you to write your content with even less graphical mumbo jumbo. You are a designer not an artist after all.