Designlab

My personal experience with Designlab, an online platform for learning web and mobile design skills. 🎨

Name

Designlab - Design 101

Location

Virtual

Date

August 28, 2015 to October 9, 2015

Role

Online student

About

Designlab is the best way to learn UI/UX design skills online — through project-based courses and 1-on-1 mentorship from expert designers.From August to October 2015, I was enrolled in a 6-week online web design course offered by Designlab.I was part of the less than 30% of enrolled students who finished the entire course.

Learned about fundamentals of color theory, typography, and layout in web design
Gained expertise with the design tool Sketch
Worked with an expert mentor who provided written feedback on all my work

Overview

What is Designlab?

Designlab is the best way to learn web and mobile design skills online.Practice the principles of visual design, UX (user experience), and UI (user interface) design with our project-based, mentor-driven online courses.Learn concepts and theory from our curated resources, practice with hands-on projects, and get expert feedback on your work from design mentors.Design is the difference. Set yourself apart.

I decided to take the Design 101 course on Designlab to get a better understanding of how design can be incorporated into my work.You can view the syllabus here.

Date & Times

Start Date = Friday - August 28, 2015End Date = Friday - October 9, 2015Actual End Date = Sunday - October 18, 2015Even though it ended October 9, it took me another 9 days to finish everything up.So, finally, on Sunday, October 18th, I managed to finish all the required coursework - woot, woot!

Swag

I received a few items in the mail August 31st - ooh la la. The book “Steal Like An Artist” was included as part of the package and even though I had read it already, it was nice having a physical copy. Even my mom ended up reading it and will quote from the book now and then.

My Mentor

My mentor, Chad was pretty cool. I checked out his website and he has some killer work, like this pepper

But to be honest, we only ended up Skyping each other once because I was always busy or had something going on that was of higher priority. This was on me.Regardless, becoming the marvelous mentor he is, Chad always made sure to give me helpful feedback, even after the course was technically over for me! :)

The Lessons

These are already on their website, but I will share again here.

Getting to Know Design
Visual Hierarchy
Layout
Typography
Color Theory
Process

Each unit had designated projects and with each project, there were several articles that were optional to read. Most of the articles were pretty helpful and were all available for free online.

The Projects

I’m still pretty new to the world of design. Even though I already knew the difference between UX/UI, how a wireframe is different from a prototype, and how important design is in general, Designlab was still made me realize how much more complex design can really be even when your only goal is simplicity.I explored each project more in depth on this page.

The Difference

The difference, I believe, between something like DailyUI challenges and Designlab is the amount of feedback you’re going to get. I feel the main thing you’re paying for is the community and feedback. The articles they provide as mini-lessons before each project are all actually free online somewhere, but, nonetheless, they were very well selected.

The Aftermath

Upon course completion, I received a nice online certificate which I promptly added to my LinkedIn (they made this really easy to do).The certificate itself is actually nothing more than a showcasing of all the design projects I completed for the course.