How do I build confidence as a new designer?
Confidence comes from evidence, so collect it: keep a list of decisions you made that turned out right, present work to someone senior once a month, and ask for the harsh version of feedback on purpose. Impostor feelings shrink when you've been told the truth and survived it.
Most new designers hide their work until it's perfect and get feedback too late to use it. Reverse that: show rough work early, to one person you trust, and let the correction happen when it's cheap.
A mentor is the fastest source of evidence. Being told by a design lead that your case study is good, with specifics, changes how you walk into the next interview.
From Hop mentors who've been there
“Laid off and got a job less than 4 months! I can share my journey if you need a help from layoff!”
Chuck Shin · Senior Product Designer at Microsoft AI · on their Hop profile
“I went from running my own thing for a decade to the advertising industry and from agency into in-house product design within fintech, and I've done everything in between.”
Craig Jamieson · Creative Advisor at CR—G · on their Hop profile
“When the 2020 pandemic killed my plan to move into front-end dev, I was working retail with some self-taught UI skills and no design degree. I bet on a UX certificate and spent almost two years getting rejected before landing my first role in 2023. What I took from it: your "unrelated" background isn't the liability you think it is. The years I spent reading people across a sales counter and walking them through setting up their mobile devices turned out to be user research and usability tests that I didn't even know I was doing. I can help you find and name those transferable threads instead of hiding them.”
Stephen Carroll-Keene · Product Designer at EverDriven · on their Hop profile
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