I'm mostly teaching myself from various ebooks, articles on UX websites, following industry people on twitter. I've been meaning to pick up some books from Amazon as well, but just don't want to dish out the money right now. I come from a design background (about to finish my Bachelors of Landscape Architecture), so luckily I already have Photoshop and Illustrator skills (I'm learning After Effects so I can show some basic gesture animations, etc.). I'm mostly making a career switch because I'm disillusioned with the LA field, and my program as well. It sounds interesting, yes, but long hours-little pay and in UX I can get paid a lot more, especially starting out. My interests changed halfway through my degree, so I've been scrambling about the past 6-8 months trying to determine what I really want to do. I love the idea of UX / UI, I thought originally I wanted to dedicate myself fully in becoming an iOS developer, but alas, my strong suit remains on the creative side. I think what I may end up doing is hopefully getting a job in the field, but still have that knowledge of programming languages so that help steer me into making correct design decisions.
The problem I'm having right now is building up my portfolio. I'm working on a personal project or two and will put up case studies for those, but it's really hard starting out. Most jobs I'm seeing say 2+ years of UX / UI experience, but when you're teaching yourself, it can get kind of hard to reach that point. I want to contact some companies and ask about maybe potential internship opportunities, or even job shadowing, which I think might be a good approach? It's just hard to get noticed when you're first starting out and don't have that sweat equity built up from having, say, an interaction design degree.
Sorry, meant to reply earlier!
I'm mostly teaching myself from various ebooks, articles on UX websites, following industry people on twitter. I've been meaning to pick up some books from Amazon as well, but just don't want to dish out the money right now. I come from a design background (about to finish my Bachelors of Landscape Architecture), so luckily I already have Photoshop and Illustrator skills (I'm learning After Effects so I can show some basic gesture animations, etc.). I'm mostly making a career switch because I'm disillusioned with the LA field, and my program as well. It sounds interesting, yes, but long hours-little pay and in UX I can get paid a lot more, especially starting out. My interests changed halfway through my degree, so I've been scrambling about the past 6-8 months trying to determine what I really want to do. I love the idea of UX / UI, I thought originally I wanted to dedicate myself fully in becoming an iOS developer, but alas, my strong suit remains on the creative side. I think what I may end up doing is hopefully getting a job in the field, but still have that knowledge of programming languages so that help steer me into making correct design decisions.
The problem I'm having right now is building up my portfolio. I'm working on a personal project or two and will put up case studies for those, but it's really hard starting out. Most jobs I'm seeing say 2+ years of UX / UI experience, but when you're teaching yourself, it can get kind of hard to reach that point. I want to contact some companies and ask about maybe potential internship opportunities, or even job shadowing, which I think might be a good approach? It's just hard to get noticed when you're first starting out and don't have that sweat equity built up from having, say, an interaction design degree.