Making a major career shift late in life to follow your passion is scary. Thankfully, becoming a professional creative is now more accessible than ever because of the numerous educational resources available. With so many options available just a few mouse clicks away, how do you decide which option is the best fit for you? In this article, Alec McGuffey has put together a list of the best ways to learn design according to your personality, budget, lifestyle and personal goals. Get out there and find the perfect one for you! If you set your mind to it and immerse yourself fully in the creative world, you’ll be able to learn the skills necessary to build a career in design, no matter which educational route you go down.
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Most BFA and MFA programs don’t cover traditional business skills, and companies certainly aren’t investing in cross-functional training for creative professionals. McLean Donnelly shares his personal experience.
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Paul Boag has been working on the web for over 22 years now, and he feels like he wasted many of those years. To help you avoid making similar mistakes and wasting valuable years of your life, in this article, Paul shares his lessons learned and hard truths at the start of his career.
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Design workflow changes, and it isn’t easy to keep up with all those changes, and that’s where our community conferences come into place! We are looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona, and perhaps months after the conference is over, you’ll look back at your projects and at this very article realizing that it wasn’t far off after all.
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Today, we share our knowledge to get better and more efficient at what we do, like in a guild. What place could be better for a guild of web designers and developers to get together for a friendly conversation, to learn from each other and to spark new ideas at a location that lives and breathes centuries of crafted skills? We are headed back to the Historic Merchants’ Hall in our lovely hometown Freiburg, and we’d love you to join us there for SmashingConf Freiburg 2017!
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Coming up in April next year, we have SmashingConf San Francisco 2017, featuring tasty front-end ingredients, UX recipes and neat design beats from the hidden, remote corners of the web. 1 track, 2 conference days, 8 workshops, 16 excellent speakers and just 500 available tickets, taking place on April 4–5, 2017. We’ve put aside 50 early-bird tickets, and if you book a workshop, too, you’ll save $100 off the conference and workshop price. That pretty smashing, isn’t it?
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We publish articles because we love sharing what we learn and what others learn, too; we love discovering unique points of view and surprising design strategies, as well as just understanding how our colleagues out there solve difficult UX and front-end problems. Every single Smashing article goes through a thorough editorial review, including multiple passes for editing and refinement, before being published. In this series dedicated to our upcoming 10th anniversary we will explain our workflow and introduce the people behind the scenes!
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Validate your fundamental assumptions as early as possible, building a minimum viable product. If the minimum viable product does not work as it should, don’t blame it. Treat the cause, not the symptom. Do customer development before you start. Don’t aim to revolutionize something. Aim to make something better. Don’t start building before you have a clear understanding of your customers. In this article, Yaakov Karda will share a few insights, mistakes and lessons learned, so you know what to watch out for in your projects.
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Jay Kaufmann has written job listings for many organizations over the years and for all manner of user experience roles. When he wrote his first job description, he took other listings from his company as a base, looked around for some examples from other companies and ended up with what he sees in hindsight as being the usual run-of-the-mill hodgepodge of bullet points. Presented with this today, Jay would throw out more than half the content in order to focus on what’s relevant and unique. In this article, he’d like to share some tried and true techniques for advertising your UX opening.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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