5 Steps to Become A Remote Designer

From self-learning to working with a global remote studio

After six months of working as a product designer with Airfoil, I thought to recapitulate the steps from learning the ropes to getting hired by a remote design studio. This took 6–8 months — only by God’s grace is this possible!

My daily remote working environment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1. Mapping Your Unfair Advantage

Duration: 1 day to 1 week

When I first took an interest in digital product design, I was tempted to jump straight into an online design course, meander through streams of YouTube tutorial videos or start hacking case studies. But I found it extremely practical to be mapping where I was in closest connection to UI/UX as an industry.

These are three areas I think are worth mapping out:

1. Experience: Identifying my past acquired skills (graphics/websites, mapping business proposals) and searching for UI/UX volunteering opportunities in my previous job, which helped launched Sedunia.
2. Personality: Understanding my core personality traits. Embracing my comforts, e.g. loving time alone to get designs just right, and discomforts e.g. communicating with clients and users to align on the same page.
3. Excitement: Finding out what actually delights me at work. Is it satisfying to know what users actually want (research)? Is it being able to craft a brilliant strategy/roadmap for others to follow (strategy)? Is it crafting pixel-perfect designs that give me more energy (design)?

You may find yourself simply admiring certain aspects of the industry, but not actually loving to do that on a daily basis. For instance, I respect well-thought out detailed research, but in reality, I find myself leaning towards crafting beautiful interfaces that excite my teammates and clients instead.

2. Be Excellent at One Thing, Learn the Rest

Duration: 3 to 4 months

After mapping the above, I came to a needed realisation that it was just impossible to become a well-rounded, unicorn product designer in a short time. So I divided my time between these two main activities: creating more based on my strengths and learning what I obviously suck at.

✍️ Creating

Strengths: Find what you’re good at and sharpen to be the best at it.

Are you good at critiquing UX weak points? Write posts about that. Are you naturally good at tracing a product’s step-by-step process? Sketch, map and publish that frequently. Repeatedly do what feels the most natural to you.

For me, designing interfaces was my one thing. I simply started copying designs from Dribbble, with little context to a specific product, like building muscle memory by repetition in a sport until it becomes a reflex. I’d open up Figma and try to recreate or reimagine interfaces and publish them.

🤓 Learning

Weaknesses: Picking up skills you’re bad at to round you up as a designer.

Knowing my research and strategy skills are fairly poor as I am more intuitive by nature, I bought an affordable UX strategy course by Anfisa, specifically tailored for freelancers. This was honestly dreadful. I don’t apply everything now but it helps me know where I fit in a standard UX process and provides some guidance for when I’m stuck.

Books I’d recommend reading are Just Enough Research and Refactoring UI.

Remember when people see your work, there’s a higher chance to be noticed with one unique strength than a fairly balanced portfolio because recruiters will immediately know where to put you in their team.

3. Consolidate, Publish and Brand Yourself

Duration: 2 to 3 months

The next step is fairly obvious — helping others understand your work and what you’re great at. For us designers, it ranges from personal branding, website, copy, and putting design case studies together. Specifically on publishing your work, here are some of my strategies:

1. Redesign products & experiences used daily: I tackled three unique challenges that I encountered and cared about. One was redesigning an urban experience, the other was a productivity app concept I’d love to see in the market and the other was rethinking a real local food delivery app that had clear UX improvements (was offered a job!).
2. Stick to the same writing format: For all case studies, my format is as follows: 1) problem/observations, 2) user personas, 3) solution, 4) mapping flows & lo-fi wireframes, 5) visual design and interactions, 6) project takeaways & future improvements.
3. Invest in articulating your brand: Consider how to introduce your background experience, location and setting, unique traits, value, work style, and aspirations in two sentences or less. Once this is done, you can replicate this across your social media platforms.

It’s worth taking some time on this to prevent course correction. At this stage, you should be ready to tell the world you’re open to getting hired.

4. Sticking Yourself Out Into The World

Duration: 2 months

The first big challenge was convincing myself that it is possible to work remotely with global projects despite being new to the UI/UX industry. This is the most important step — you must not give up and concede to readily available, familiar opportunities around you.

Here are some ways I tried or considered before landing a contract job:

1. Create & share profiles on freelance portals: Write a script to sell your skills and value in portals like Upwork, Working Not Working, People Per Hour, and elsewhere. I spent 2–3 hours every day hunting on Upwork and eventually landed my first remote work opportunity there.
2. Excessively research and scout on product design job boards: This was helpful in getting to know what the remote industry is looking for at large. The job boards I hunted at were Remote Hunt, Remotive, Nodesk, RemoteOK, Design Remotely, Remote Design Jobs, We Work Remotely, Jobpresso and Remote.io.
3. Pay some money to get tailored remote jobs: I used Remote Leaf as a service for $10/month and got 1–2 interviews. It’s worth the money!
4. Get curious on Product Hunt: Another method using Product Hunt to find and email early-stage founders to see if they need some volunteering or paid design work to polish up their newly launched product.
5. Cold-emailing remote studios: Ultimately, I landed at a job through this. It started by finding a product I found interesting in PH called Newsletter Stack. Learning more about the founders, I discovered that one of them runs a remote design studio and the rest is history.
6. Join design student fellowships: This is fairly new to me but there’s a rise of design fellowships that offer to grow your design skills, tap into a network of creatives and enable work opportunities like Modu.

5. Demonstrate Consistent Value At Your Job

Congratulations on your first remote working opportunity! Now you’ve got your foot in the door, it’s all about building and maintaining high levels of trust between everyone.

• Establish clear async communication: Work with your supervisor on the best way to receive feedback and explain work updates on both sides. We use Slack, Loom, and Sunsama for both. No one should feel worried that work is not going to be delivered due to timezone differences.
• Be on standby for impromptu changes: Always ask a week before for next week’s expectations, but be ready to switch gears to different projects or ramp up your workload at any given time.
• Provide options if you’re unsure: Don’t sit and wait for every detail before getting down to business. If the brief isn’t clear, create something to show initiative so stakeholders can work with something on the table.
• Quality work speaks for itself: My favorite rule! If you’re consistently creating great work, you’d save a ton of back-and-forth communication and be entrusted with more freedom and flexibility with your work.
• Set clear contract and payment terms: Be upfront on how you charge (by hour or day or week) and make sure payment on time is a clear expectation. Review your rates based on the value you’re giving.

Lastly, remember that the opportunity you land on is probably not the one you planned for. Stay nimble and keep working on honing your design chops 💪 Chances are someone from another corner of the world is looking for a perfect fit — and that could be you. Email me your thoughts here. Or learn more about my work here. Thanks for reading!