Designlab

I really enjoyed this course to begin my design career journey. Each unit was a perfect combination of reading and then actual doing! I noticed with other courses there was way too much reading, and not enough of doing. Every unit had projects which ended... Read More up being amazing practice. If there was anything I was confused about, I was able to ask my mentor. One of the reasons I chose Designlab was the mentor aspect of it. I don't know anyone in my personal life who is in the UX Design field. So it was helpful to have someone to go to and have someone approve and critique my work. Overall, I think it was a great experience and I would recommend it to others interested in starting their design career journey!

I do not recommend Designlab. I ignored the comments that warned me about it but after wasting my money, I realized that it was a complete waste of money. Yes, you will learn some stuff. But most of the stuff you can learn for free...If you need a mentor... Read More to look at your design, look into ADPlist.

Before Designlab, I took a lot of free online courses, but none of them gave me practical teaching on how to use software and actually design. I appreciated that in conjunction with all the informational lessons, there were many projects that allowed... Read More me to get comfortable with the software and actually practice design principles and hierarchies. I liked how all the information in the course was developed by Designlab, meaning I was paying for unique material. I also really appreciated the mentor program. It really helps to have real feedback from a real professional. I will say, I don't necessarily feel like I got that much more connected with people in the UX/UI field in terms of making connections and networking, but that could be due to my own struggle with using the Discord networking community. Overall though, I do feel more equipped and prepared to develop my portfolio further.

For a foundations course, there's not any cons that I could think of when it comes to the overall course. The dashboard was very user friendly, which allowed me to easily follow along what lessons were next and when my next mentor meeting was. The course... Read More provided some amazing reads that really helped teach me a lot of key factors that prepared me for the unit projects.

I wish there was at least some focus on civic/gov't UX/UI or the idea of using UX/UI for social justice/good. It all felt very marketing, branding, capitalism driven which was a big source of demotivation for me. As a complete newbie to design and not... Read More what I would describe as tech-savvy, I would suggest not making any of the curriculum optional. I think everyone is busy and always looking for the thing they can cut from their to-do list, but I realized early on I NEEDED to do all the Figma tutorials and other optional practice lessons or I would have never gotten to where I was able to get by the end of Foundations. Also, there is content in the optional lessons that is then used in assignments and/or is on the quizzes! Every assignment took me twice as long as the time DesignLab said it would. I could not have stuck to those time limits in a rigid way - I wouldn't have been learning what I needed to learn if I didn't complete all the projects, no matter how long it took me. The Discord community was great. I was nervous about my mentor not being a good fit, but he was so knowledgable and really helped me, even when I would feel super frustrated. I kept telling myself it's like starting an immersive language program - it's just not going/supposed to make sense at first. It's hard to know what part of that is me just being a total newbie and what part of that is unclear curriculum. I found the videos extremely hard to follow, trying to watch what the mouse was doing at the same time I was trying to watch what is being created on the Artboard and whats happening in the left hand column of Figma was tricky, even when I watched the videos at slower speeds.

One pro would be the opportunity to learn a new skill that I was interested in learning. I like the creative freedom that I had while completing my projects and the course work was easy to understand. One con would be Adjusting to learn Figma. I had a... Read More hard time learning a few aspects but overtime and with practice I overcame these challenges.

I've had a great time in the Designlab UX Foundations course. I am currently waiting on feedback on my final projects before applying to the UX Academy, and am expecting to have everything finalized and my application to the UX Academy completed by the... Read More end of the week. The course has taken me 5 weeks going at about 20 hours per week. I was not rushed through any of the reading, was able to complete the projects thoroughly, and feel like I have learned a lot. My mentor was great, she always had tips and feedback for me, was able to answer any questions I had, was flexible with scheduling our meetings, and was all together a great person to work with. This is a course designed to give you the base knowledge to succeed in the UX Academy, so there hasn't been any job support yet. I'm hoping that my experience in the UX Academy will be as enjoyable as Foundations has been.

I've got to say that learning the foundation course here in Designlab has been super smooth. Everything's straightforward and easy to understand, and having that one-on-one with a private mentor? Absolute game-changer. Plus, the cost is pretty affordable.... Read More Totally worth it!

After a lot of research, I settled on DesignLab's Foundations course because I wasn't ready to spend thousands $$$ of dollars for a full-on Bootcamp. The Foundations course was the perfect in-between, it was a $500 course that was divided into eight units... Read More and a ninth optional unit. I enjoyed each unit but most of all I LOVED the mentorship program, I think this is very unique to Designlab and it's genius. At first, I got matched with a mentor that I wasn't vibing with so I asked to change. Once I got rematched it made the course so much more enjoyable. I think the beauty of this course is that you're doing the work and then you get to present it to the mentor that gives you immediate feedback. That closed loop really helped me to learn.

The pros of this program are the mentorship, user friendly experience, and good pacing to the provided lessons. I don’t have many cons to provide, besides the fact that uploading projects can be a pain when the max file size capacity was lower than what... Read More my projects turned out to be, so I had to compress almost every one.