How I became a UX UI designer with no experience or design degree.

At a very young age, age 10 I started my first Anime fan-based website called Saiyanz Web. This was during the dial-up internet days which most people don’t know what that is or hadn’t experienced it. Don’t worry that’s a good thing.

Everything for my website was created by me — The design, code and programming. This gave me the opportunity to learn how a website works. I was fascinated! Saiyanz Web had free downloads for movies, tv shows and mangas (comics), eventually, I added other popular Anime and that generated over 40,000 visits per day with a loyal fan base. Every day I would spend hours and hours making the site better. How? By learning a new code, or making it more user-friendly, new design skills on Adobe Photoshop (5.5), finding ways to be searchable on Yahoo, and more.

Dragonball Z fans; Vegeta is my favourite character.

I knew at that age my goal was to convert my hobby into a career. That’s exactly what I did.

Fast forward — During my college days, I started freelancing because I needed it to gain experience. The best way to do this was to contact companies for small design gigs, intern roles, and help local shops.

The chances of getting intern roles and design gigs were 1/10 because I decided to drop out of college. I got rejection by literally every company. Every day, I would go on Craigslist, Yellowpages, and Kijiji to contact every small business owner possible. I asked them if they need a 5-pager, website redesign, logos, banners, business cards, and print work. Anything that I can get my foot in the door. Remember, my goal was not to earn revenue it was to gain experience and have a portfolio.

Eventually, I was able to land a few projects. Most of them were designing 5-page websites which I coded myself and 60% of the clients didn’t pay me. In the beginning, it did bother me a lot but at the end of the day, the projects were live which is what the companies will look for when I start applying for full-time design roles. I kept doing small freelance work for about 1 year.

I landed my first full-time web design gig — My portfolio had all kinds of work. Print, branding, web, and…