Designlab Blog

It’s September UX Academy launch day, and time to welcome the Doves cohort to Designlab! 38 UX design students strong, the Doves cohort take their name from one of the most bizarre and intriguing stories in the history of typeface design. It began in 1900 when business partners T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker founded The Doves Press in Hammersmith, west London.... Read more

To coincide with the launch of Designlab Talent, we talked to Andrea Garvey and Christine Pizzo from Intrepid, one of Designlab’s first industry hiring partners. Founded in 2010 and recently acquired by Accenture, Intrepid is an end-to-end digital product strategy, design and development company with offices in Cambridge, MA and Union Square, NYC.... Read more

This month, we welcome the Clarendon cohort to UX Academy! The first version of the Clarendon typeface was designed in 1845 by Robert Besley, a partner in London’s Thorowgood & Co. type foundry.... Read more

This month we welcome the Bodoni cohort, the 28th group of students to have started UX Academy since the program launched! We’re currently naming cohorts after fabled, famous, and forgotten typefaces (until we get back round to “A”).... Read more

In June we launched the 27th cohort of UX Academy, which means we’re starting our second trip around the alphabet. Our first 26 cohorts were named after our favorite designers, artists, and architects. This time, we’re taking inspiration from classic, iconic, and underrated typefaces!... Read more

In part 4 of her series on UX Academy Group Crits, course alumna Robbin Arcega explains her expectations of everyone who participates in a session. TL;DR: Be prepared, be specific, and engage actively with everyone's work.... Read more

Following up on her guides to the goals of Group Crits at Designlab, UX Academy alum Robbin Arcega presents her cheat-sheet of questions and themes to explore when offering critique to fellow students... Read more

In this piece, UX Academy alum Robbin Arcega presents the next installment in her guide to Group Crits at Designlab! In part 2, she's covering what you can expect from her as a session facilitator.... Read more

Hello, students of UX Academy! New and old! Students in general! Or to anyone who happens to be reading this for some reason! I’m Robbin and I run design critiques for Designlab’s UX Academy program on the weekends, and I love this gig. It is my hope that you’ll find the hour we have together in Group Crits useful. In this article, I'm going to explain what the goals of a Group Crit are.... Read more

This month, we’re talking to Ava Yazdani, a student in UX Academy’s Eames Cohort. She combines part-time study on UX Academy with a full-time job in software sales and consulting. Ava's advice to new UX Academy students? "Make sure you look after yourself, and keep things in balance. In the long term, to reach your goals, you need to maintain your wellbeing and energy."... Read more

Welcome to members of our new UX Academy intake, the Norman Cohort! They're named after Don Norman, a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone who inspires us. Our April cohort is named after the great Japanese animator and film director, Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941), celebrated for films such as Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro and The Wind Rises.... Read more

Revamped curriculum, Career Services, Group Crits: today, we’re pushing the button on a *huge* update of UX Academy. UX Academy first launched in late 2015 as an experiment — to see if the Designlab online platform, which we’d pioneered for short courses like Design 101, could be extended to train full-time designers. Just 18 months later, the experiment has been a resounding success — with huge value delivered to students, and many graduates landing a UX design job within six months of completing the course.... Read more

“But will I get a job at the end of it?”—that’s often the priority question from prospective students when they’re weighing whether to enroll in a program like Designlab’s UX Academy. Over the past few months, we’ve been piloting Career Services in UX Academy—a new feature we're incredibly excited about. Students are assigned to a Career Coach at the end of the course, and they then work together for up to 3 months to improve their portfolio, job applications, and interview techniques. In this article, we explain the thinking behind Career Services, outline how it works, and explore some of the ways that it’s already benefiting students.... Read more

In his Commencement Address to Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs told students: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” If you're dissatisfied with your current path and are passionate about design, programs like UX Academy offer a portal to a new career. But retraining can be tough going, as you learn and apply new skills, complete demanding coursework, and often hold down the day job as well. To help, we've put together 10 tips to help you excel as you study, including advice on how to manage a packed schedule, eat right, and dispute self-doubt.... Read more

UX Academy is an intensive, rigorous program – requiring at least 40 hours of coursework each week on the full time track, and 20 hours part time. We want students to succeed, not struggle – and that’s why we enforce strict admission criteria for the program. We’ve received over 500 applications to UX Academy in the past year, and in this article we’re sharing with you the 5 qualities that set apart successful applications.... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone who inspires us. Our March cohort follow in the footsteps of the great twentieth-century pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), famous for his humorous, high-impact paintings that mimicked the forms of contemporary popular culture.... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone that inspires us. February’s cohort takes the name of contemporary designer Susan Kare, famous for making the original Apple Mac icons, and a succession of other pixel graphics including the card designs for Microsoft Solitaire (Windows 3.0).... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone that inspires us. January’s cohort is named after the type designer Nicolas Jenson (b. 1420, Sommevoire, France; d. 1480, Venice, Italy).... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone that inspires us. December’s cohort takes the name of Sir Jony Ive, Chief Design Officer at Apple.... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy intakes is named after someone that inspires us. November’s cohort takes the name of Zaha Hadid, the British–Iraqi architect who passed away earlier this year at the age of sixty-five.... Read more

Each of Designlab’s UX Academy cohorts is named after someone that inspires us. October’s intake takes the name of Eileen Gray, a prolific twentieth-century designer who was forgotten for much of her career but has achieved widespread recognition in the decades following her death.... Read more

Paige Saez here, Creative Director of Designlab, with an update about recent developments in the UX Academy community. In amongst many larger developments, we’ve also begun to focus on the smaller, more experientially significant process changes too. One of these small but significant changes is the names we give to our UX Academy cohorts.... Read more