When I Learned UI Design

Early-stage startups require generalists, not specialists.

Early stage startups should hire generalists

I came across this tweet recently and realized how true this is! And, I can proudly say that I am a generalist.

I was working with my friend Bikash on a project, our work mostly revolved around coming up with ideas for marketing and growth hacking. Everything was going great and smooth until one day when we decided to redesign the UI of an application that was going to be our new side project.

To discuss the matter, Bikash called me sometime in the afternoon, we discussed and decided to start working from the next morning. I can’t explain the level of excitement that I was feeling.

The same evening, I went ahead and bought the Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan eBook for $99. Almost finished the book the same night and gathered a bit of information about Figma and other aspects of UI design on the way. Before that I have only used Canva and Gravit to design some graphics for my blog, I had no idea about UI design.

Morning happened and we, both newbies, joined a call at 10 am and started working on the project from scratch. It took hours to figure out how to actually get started but by the evening the design was taking shape and we had created the design for at least one screen — yay!

We took a small 1-hour break at 8 pm and resumed the work from 9 pm and continued till 2 am. The next day, we repeated the same schedule from 10 am to 2 am, and guess what… our project was done, we had something to show to our colleagues.

Even though I worked like a machine for 3 days but I never felt this happy in my entire life. We both were able to learn a completely new skill and design a whole UI for an app.

Yes, that’s a different thing that we didn’t go with that UI but the experience taught me so many things. If you’re willing to do something, you can. You can learn anything at any point in time, you just have to want it so hard that you can’t live without doing it.


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