The DesignPath UX Design Blog

UX design blog for product and UX/UI designers: short, honest pieces on skills, portfolios, and the messy middle of getting better. Written as I go, with the opening of every course lesson alongside them.

Four bars of decreasing width and weight, the longest one marked with a pink dot

Craft5 min read

What Actually Makes a Design Good

You can learn the tools in a month. Knowing whether the result is any good takes longer, and nobody really teaches it.

Read the piece

Career6 min read

Junior, Mid-Level or Senior Designer? How to Know Your Real Design Level

Titles change between companies. Check your design level by scope, five signals and the skill targets for a product designer at every level.

October 2026

Client & Stakeholder Management3 min readMembers

Briefs

A client sends four paragraphs and a link to a competitor. Nobody writes anything down, and two weeks later you each remember a different agreement.

August 2026

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Input Types & Pickers

A text box and a dropdown are the two defaults, and both are wrong more often than they are right. The control decides how many taps the answer costs, which keyboard opens on a phone, and whether the format can be wrong at all.

July 2026

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Multi-Step Forms & Wizards

A team splits its thirty-field application into five steps and the completion rate goes down. Nothing was removed, and the form now announces that the work is five screens long. Splitting a form is a real fix for a real problem, and it only works when the cuts and everything between the screens are designed.

July 2026

Five rising columns, the tallest drawn solid, with a dotted line climbing past them

Members

Career6 min read

Junior to Senior: What Really Changes

It's tempting to think senior means faster Figma. The things that moved me up had almost nothing to do with the tool.

July 2026

A pink card cut into the shape of a speech bubble, lying on a white surface

Members

Client & Stakeholder Management5 min read

Foundations of Clear Communication

Designers want the work to speak for itself. It rarely does. A good idea argued badly usually loses to a weaker idea argued well, so communication is what decides whether your design survives the room.

The DesignPath UX Design Blog

What Actually Makes a Design Good

Junior, Mid-Level or Senior Designer? How to Know Your Real Design Level

Briefs

Input Types & Pickers

Multi-Step Forms & Wizards

Junior to Senior: What Really Changes

Foundations of Clear Communication

Writing Clearly

Argumenting Design Decisions

Presentations & Demos

Communicating as an Introvert

Negotiation & Difficult Conversations

Communicating Across Teams & Org Types

Finding & Bidding for Work

Proposals, Pricing & Contracts

Running the Client Relationship

Dark Mode Is Not Light Mode Flipped

What Makes a Good Typeface

Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics

Using a Pattern Library

Authentication UX

Underlined Text

File Upload

Live Validation

Error Messages

Toggle Buttons

Hidden vs Disabled

Settings & Preferences

Loading & Skeletons

Empty States

Notifications & Toasts

Modals, Dialogs & Sheets

Undo

Tabs & Segmented Controls

Accordions & Disclosure

Back Button

Breadcrumbs

Sticky Menus

Mega Dropdowns

Search UX

Infinite Scroll

Data Tables & Filtering

Onboarding & Activation

Carousels

Pricing Pages

Feature Comparison Tables

Reviews & Testimonials

Navigation Queries

Birthday Picker

Language Selector

Closed Captions & Subtitles

Your Portfolio Doesn't Have to Take Months

The Door That Taught Me About Design