Designlab Blog

During our recent team retreat in Breckenridge, Colorado, members of the Designlab team shared their experiences of traveling and working remotely. In this post, we’ve put together 10 of the best tips. Whether you're already a digital nomad, or just have the occasional day working at home, we hope you find this advice useful!... Read more

Back in August 2018, the Designlab team met up for their second ever in-person retreat, in beautiful Breckenridge, Colorado!... Read more

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to completely overhaul our Help Center. Today, we’re pleased to announce that the new experience is live! Whether you’re a current or prospective Designlab student, UX Academy graduate, career coach, or mentor, it’s the one-stop shop for answers to all your questions.... Read more

Today, we officially launched a whole new Help Center experience here at Designlab! Austin Basallo, Ops Associate at Designlab, led this project. Read on for his take—which is a case study in how a solid process can allow both business and customer needs to be met more effectively and efficiently, ultimately working to everyone’s benefit.... Read more

Amid much excitement here at Designlab, today we announced a huge update to our most popular 4-week course, Design 101. If you’re still on the fence about learning design, read on for an in-depth look at the new course. This piece covers many of the ways our bespoke learning platform combines with top-notch Design 101 curriculum and 1-on-1 mentoring to deliver a unique educational experience.... Read more

Today we’re delighted to officially launch the new version of Design 101, our most popular 4-week design course. The new Design 101 offers students a huge step up on three fronts: the depth of the curriculum, the number of projects, and the industry-relevance of the skills it teaches.... Read more

Hey there! I’m Manuela, and I lead Business Development here at Designlab. Today I’m super excited to tell you all about the official launch of Designlab Talent. It’s a new way for UX Academy graduates to access opportunities with companies in our Talent network.... Read more

Today, we’re excited to announce the biggest set of improvements to UX Academy since our massive revamp of the program in 2017. Designlab is already in a class of its own when it comes to career support—but we’re now adding to that through an expanded Career Services program, portfolio panel review, and—most exciting of all—a new opportunity called Designlab Talent.... Read more

Designlab is growing, both as a company and as a community. One of the exciting opportunities this brings is: IRL MEETUPS!... Read more

At Designlab we pride ourselves on offering mentor-led design education that is both rigorous and affordable. However, we recognize that the cost of UX Academy—an intensive program offering extensive 1-on-1 contact time with a global community of professional design mentors and career coaches—still represents a significant investment for many of our students. Over the past year, we have been working with Climb Credit to develop course financing options for those enrolling in UX Academy.... Read more

Here at Designlab our most popular course is Design 101. It's a 4-week introduction to design fundamentals, with a focus on the skills needed to create high-quality mobile interfaces and web layouts. Each month we're blown away by how far our students come in just a few weeks. In this post we've collected some recent examples of excellent coursework that students achieved through applying their new skills and working closely with an expert designer as their mentor – enjoy!... Read more

Recently Elliott Davidson of Despreneur took Design 101 and sent us the following review, which he’s kindly allowed us to reproduce here. We’re stoked that you found the course so valuable, Elliott!... Read more

When you’re new to design, it’s a challenge to know what to learn first, and how much reading up to do on each topic. In this article, we explain the thinking behind our short course curriculum, and also give specific tips on how to make the most of the 1-on-1 mentoring and project work that, each of which is a crucial part of our learning model. Read on to find out 5 ways you can maximize your learning and personal growth on a Designlab short course!... Read more

Back in May, we launched our revamped UX Academy program. It included a major update to the course curriculum, as well as the addition of Group Crits and Career Services. But there were also more granular improvements to the Designlab platform, including the introduction of two new assessment features: a course rubric, and project approvals.... Read more

When I decided to get serious about learning design a couple of years ago, one problem I definitely didn’t have was a lack of information. However, my experience of learning design changed when I started working on projects—small-scale design briefs that allowed me to learn new skills incrementally by challenging me to solve specific problems.... Read more

Harish Venkatesan co-founded Designlab in 2012. In the past year, the company has begun to scale up–expanding its core staff from 3 to 12, growing its mentor base to 400 designers, and serving over a thousand students around the world in 2016. I talked to Harish about what motivated him to start Designlab, the mission and values that drive the company’s work today, and where he sees the future of design education... Read more

As an online education platform devoted to teaching design skills through hands-on practice and 1-on-1 mentorship, we think a lot at Designlab about what it means to be a good teacher. Faced with increasing demand for our courses, we recently realized that we needed to answer an important question: how can we provide quality mentorship experiences at scale? We took this design problem and, applying our UX design thinking process, undertook a product sprint to find the right solution.... Read more

In this post, we’ll outline how we applied the design thinking process to Hangouts in UX Academy — how we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses, our findings, and the resulting updates that will be coming soon.... Read more

Since Christmas we’ve been working hard on creating a clearer workflow process for students' projects.... Read more

As an engineer, Alicia Jackson’s day-to-day design experience was mostly technical drawings and blueprints over typography and color palettes. But, she says, “I’ve always had a love of designing more creatively.” For the past 10 years she worked on her graphic design skills and developed her talent into creating invitations, flyers, and web designs. So why would Alicia choose to take a design course after her success with self-study? She says, “Although I heard many good things about my work and have done some independent study, it was not until taking Design 101 that I really got a chance to work with someone that is a professional in the industry.” Read on to hear more about Alicia’s experience as a Design 101 student and first-time online learner.... Read more

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While working as a Support Engineer for Atlassian for the last eight years, Jesse Yowell had an urge to pivot his career from engineering to user experience. After talking to designers at Atlassian and reading books about UX, Jesse knew it was time to enroll in a course to start building his skills and his portfolio. “I found the Design 101 course on Designlab, which seemed like the perfect starting point,” he says. Here’s Jesse first-hand account of his experience as a Designlab student!... Read more

As design becomes an increasingly crucial part of the DNA of tech startups, we see a lot of product-focused founders thinking about whether they should learn some UI/UX skills. We were excited when the founder of one of our favorite products, a news-sharing site for professionals called Quibb, took our Design 101 course on Designlab. We took a few minutes to chat with Sandi... Read more

Dalton Mitchell is a programming extraordinaire and former Designlab student. We sat down with Dalton to chat about his aspirations, artistry, and pursuits in design.... Read more