My self-taught career switch into product design

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Bootcamp

9 min readOct 29, 2020

John Mulaney saying, “You have your law practice, and me, I have all these fucking markers.”

After I graduated from New York University in May of 2017, you could find me sitting at my local library during the humid summers that suburban Michigan brings, flipping through my LSAT study books in the hopes of scoring at least a 172 and getting into a top law school. Becoming a lawyer was something I’d decided to do after high school because my parents said they thought I’d be good at it (shocker). I hadn’t really honed in on any passions at that time, so I thought, “Sure, why not.”

I ended up declaring a major in political science thinking it would be well-suited in helping me figure out what kind of law I wanted to study. My friends also convinced me to declare a programming minor for my fourth year because I finished my major credits early.

The thing is, I never really did end up enjoying any of my politics classes. They were interesting enough, but I never felt like I belonged there. That all changed when I took my first programming class. We were going over Python and writing simple functions, but it ended up being the first time I enjoyed learning since I started college.

Looking back at my childhood, it kind of made sense why I enjoyed it so much. When I was young, I loved playing with LEGOs. I haven’t gotten my hands on them in a while, but during those classes when I would be designing and building things — not just for myself, but for others — is the closest I’ve come to feeling that joy again.

So after graduation, I faced a dilemma. Do I continue studying for the LSAT and go to law school because it would be safe and predictable? Or do I take the leap of faith and start over?

I think you can guess what I chose.

Miles Morales jumping from building — scene from the movie “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse”

My leap wasn’t quite as graceful as Miles Morales’s. I personally faced over 50 rejections and received only a handful of callbacks and interviews before I landed my first design job, so don’t be too discouraged if you’re in the same boat.

I consider myself very fortunate and blessed to be working as a full-time product designer now, and the steps that I took to get here won’t serve as an exact game plan that will work for everyone. But it’s my hope that, if you’re thinking about making a career switch into design, you’ll find a couple of things from my experiences that can help with your own process.

I’m going to cover the things I did to transition from having no design background to becoming a full-time product designer in three months.

Know your tools

When I say I had no design background when I made the switch, I mean I literally knew nothing about design. Like, actually nothing.

I had no idea what RGB stood for, what kerning was…I’d never even used Photoshop or any design tools.

Realizing that these were the bread and butter for designers, I decided to start there. I taught myself the Adobe suite of products, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I knew I wanted to focus on designing interfaces, so I also decided to learn Sketch (which I eventually replaced with the far superior Figma). As a product designer, I definitely use Figma more than anything else, but it’s still good to know the basics of all the other tools.

I then taught myself Origami Studio, which is a prototyping tool. It provides tutorials and examples, and these resources really helped me familiarize myself with the tool and prototyping standards. Figma’s built-in prototyping tool is generally good enough to convey basic flows and interactions to get the job done, but if you need to present something more complex, Framer and Principle are tools I also recommend.

Read and study

Since I did not have any more money to spend on education (thank you, NYU, for putting me $250k in student debt), I could not afford to take more classes or attend a bootcamp. Instead, I just read a lot of articles and case studies online. By far, the articles that helped me the most were written by Julie Zhuo. The reason I found them so great was that she talked about what it’s like to work as a designer in the field and how to work with other people, which was really valuable to someone like me who had no actual work experience at the time.

Here’s a list of some articles that really helped educate me on design:

Interviewing & Hiring

Working with a Team

Traits of a Designer

Design Execution

Career

Lastly, this might seem an odd piece of advice, but I recommend creating a Twitter account. I’ve surprisingly had a lot of success networking on there, which has allowed me to connect with designers whose work I admire. This also provided the opportunity to check out their portfolios and read through their case studies to see how they approached real problems at their companies.

Research and practice designing screens

When learning design, there’s a popular practice of designing a UI every day for 100 days. I think I only did it for a few weeks before I stopped, but I did find that it helped me a lot in several different ways. Here’s what it might help you to do:

Get familiar with design patterns and intent
Get creative with a variety of explorations
Turn designing screens into a reflex

Get familiar with design patterns and intent

I started by designing simple login and signup screens, then eventually worked to more complex views like profiles or feeds. Doing this repeatedly helped me grasp the common patterns and layouts for certain views.

What I found even more helpful was taking apps that I really like and simply trying to recreate them. Not only did this help with learning industry patterns, but it also allowed me to really study the designs and try to analyze the “why” behind them. I love Kathleen Warner’s article, “How to develop an eye for Design,” which goes into greater depth on this very topic. By studying the designs, you get closer to the intent behind them and how a particular solution was executed.

Get creative with a variety of explorations

When you design your first few screens, they’ll probably look pretty simple and basic. However, after a couple of weeks, you’re going to get bored designing the same thing and start experimenting with different styles. This is where the magic happens. You’ll not only move beyond exploring different styles, you’ll eventually develop your own style. This is also where you can try to apply all the patterns you learned when studying other apps, and try to design your own app with your unique take.

Turn designing screens into a reflex

If you stick with it and complete the full 100, one thing you’ll hopefully notice is how much more quickly you’re able to design screens. Speed isn’t what creates the best designs, but what it does help with is faster iterations and brute-forcing more explorations to arrive at the best solution. I find that some of the best design is a lot of designing the wrong thing to get to the right thing, so speed helps you get through a lot of bad ideas quickly.

Practice interviewing

This is pretty obvious and there are plenty of other articles out there that better analyze the design interview process, so I’ll just keep this brief.

I learned that, for someone trying to break into the industry with no background, recruiters and other designers will want to look at how you approach a problem and if you are someone who they would want to work on a problem with. They’ll look for how well you respond to feedback and if you can actually execute on it. Incorporate the feedback you receive without getting defensive and see how you can continue to build upon it. One thing I learned from iteration is to not get too attached to one idea. So instead of iterating on A as A.1, A.2, A.3 (though that will be needed at times), try exploring A, B, C. You’ll start seeing more breadth in explorations and it will actually allow for other designers to build off these new ideas. With this approach, you’ll eventually arrive at a more well-thought-out design.

Your portfolio will also most likely be a collection of fake projects, and that’s okay, as long as you can clearly explain how you analyzed the problem and arrived at your solution. You will be questioned on some of your projects in your portfolio or your take-home assignment if there is one. It is also really important to not get defensive when you receive feedback. Remember, the people interviewing you just want to know your thought process. They are judging your work, not you as a person.

If you have friends who are also designers, try interviewing with them. Go as far as even doing whiteboard examples. I found this site to be a fun tool to practice design challenges.

Lastly, have your portfolio reviewed by many people. It’s hard not to be biased with your own portfolio, so make sure to get an extra set of eyes on it.

You’re on your way

Making a career change is scary. You’re starting from the beginning, wondering if it will be worth it. For me, it definitely was. It’s a privilege that I get to enjoy the work that I do while also being able to constantly learn and have fun with it.

I’m not saying it won’t be difficult and a lot of work to get there. I put in at least 70–80 hours a week studying and practicing for three months before I got my first design job. Again, my personal experiences aren’t going to be the recipe for everyone, but I hope you were able to take away a couple ingredients that will help with your own journey.

If you ever get stuck or discouraged, just remember why you burned your LSAT books in the first place, and go play with some LEGOs.

“Do you like to draw with crayons? I’m not very good at it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the fun of doing that’s important.”

Special thanks to Joshua Clayton, my favorite professor at NYU who changed my passion for learning. Daniel Park, who if I could be as half a cool designer as he is, I’d be happy. Skylar Challand and Oak Studios, for taking a chance on me with my career. Josh Mandilk, for proof-reading and editing this article because I suck at writing. Lastly, everyone else who took me under their wing and taught me what I know today. Thank you.

I am currently a product designer at Betterment in NYC. I love talking with people who are thinking about a career switch into design. If you’d like to chat about my experiences in more detail or anything else on your mind, feel free to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn. Hope to hear from you soon!