I follow Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 1st year of my college, I joined the Astronomy club. As a club member in the first year, you get to either write posts, design posters, or market about events.
I chose to design posters, and I learned Adobe Illustrator. A few months later, I started making posters for the club, and they got decent reviews (I have added one below) - This was my introduction to the world of vector-based graphic design.
I used to study machine learning. I found this awesome guy called Josh Starmer on YouTube and I watched every one of his lectures. I could build decent prediction models, but I was unsure about doing this 8 hours a day as work.
I took up a graphic design internship to earn some pocket money to fund my college trips. I gradually realized I enjoyed playing with colors and was obsessed with the iterations, but I wanted something more logical and structured.
Luckily, in my 2nd year of college - I found an opportunity as a product design intern at a startup. They were building a Shopify app for European markets.
I first learned about Figma and designed the MVP in ~ 2 months. Later on, when we launched it, We got solid reviews from businesses on the app store, and people praised its design.
Jul 2021
In 3rd of my college, I took a break from doing internships and started learning about product management. I learnt the nuances of problem identification, jobs to be done, and product metrics.
I participated in and won product case studies, which helped me better understand the problem space.
Mar 2022
In my final year, my metric was to work and learn from designers. Who are already in the field and have built great products, which led to my one and six months stint at Uprasied, where I worked and learned a lot about design processes and craft.
Over these past 3 years of dabbling with the designs, the obsessiveness of making one more iteration to improve it never faded away.