53 percent of designers who responded to my survey were UX/Product Designers, around 17 percent were graphic, 9 percent web designers, 6 percent design generalists, 6 percent UI and visual designers, and around 4 percent were design managers. I have to admit that I’m surprised by these numbers as I didn’t expect such a large chunk of UX and Product designers.
Category: Blog
Website redesign: How I evolved my website
My personal website used to be on the matejlatin.co.uk domain and consisted of mostly personal articles. I had only written a few of those in the past few years so it didn’t get a lot of traffic. Long gone were the days when I published an article every week. So the website was updated only every now and then. It was running on Jekyll and was hosted on GitHub Pages. That made a lot of sense when I designed and built it because I wanted to improve my Front-End developing skills, as well as Git.
Remote work is not for everyone
It would take me years to find out that the open-plan offices suck. It would take me even longer to understand that a designer doesn’t need to be collocated with the team they’re working with to do their job well. Working remotely doesn’t hinder collaboration. Ok, that’s only partially true. Let’s dig deeper into this.
New era, new website!
After more than 10 years of living in flats and paying a rent, after spending six years living abroad, and after saving every Euro through all these years, we finally have our own home. I wrote how I needed a break in the last blog post because I had to many things in my life at the time. Building a house, a full-time job, personal projects, new pets… it was all too much.
I need a break
It’s almost one year since I “broke down” and I have been struggling ever since. A good week is always followed by two or three bad ones. It’s exhausting. So I decided to take a break. Or at least try. Me and my family depend on my full-time job so I can’t just stop working. But I need to take a pause and find a new balance. And that means stopping the work on my personal projects for a while.
My favourite books of 2020
2020 was a shitty year, there’s no arguing about that. So when I looked back and tried to remember good books that I read in 2020, I had a feeling that there were few. I thought that I wouldn‘t have enough for my annual list of favourite books. But I was wrong. With my latest… Continue reading My favourite books of 2020
Why I decided to sell my book on Lulu.com
Going to a bookshop is a magical experience. Book prices are even higher there, I know, but there’s a magical feeling when you walk out with a new book in your hands. I can recollect most of such moments from the past, the one when I bought Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport in Edinburgh is the most memorable. It turned out to be the last book that I bought there before moving back to Slovenia so it’s a bittersweet memory. That’s what makes it even more special. Unlike an eBook, a physical book is an object that can be admired. It’s tangible, you open it up and it has a gentle smell no matter if it’s new or old. The smell changes as the book ages, but it’s always a lovely smell.
Why I don’t do Black Friday sales
Black Friday is often referred to as the “consumerism holiday” and I can’t help myself but this sounds so wrong to me. The level of consumerism that we got to in the world today is absurd. Maybe I think that because of my minimalist mentality and lifestyle. Minimalism is something that has attracted me for years now and it became a fundamental part of my life. This doesn’t mean that I never buy anything on Black Friday sales, I do. But it’s usually something that I have been thinking about buying for a while. When you adopt the minimalist mentality, a buying decision is never an impulsive one. I think 10 times whether I really need something before I buy it. This is the complete opposite of what the whole Black Friday thing promotes and what it means to most people.
My favourite books of 2019
I continued with my habit of reading for at least 30 minutes a day in 2019. It’s now such a fundamental part of my life that I can’t imagine spending a day without it. If someone told me this when I was a teenager, I’d have a good laugh and go back to playing video… Continue reading My favourite books of 2019
Would you do your job for free?
I remember telling this to the CEO of the first company that hired me as a full-time UX designer: “thanks for the raise but it really isn’t about money for me. If I could, I’d do this for free.” They were really happy with my performance so they gave me a raise just a couple of months after I started working there. Until then, I had a full-time, non-designer job which I hated and I freelanced doing design work on the side. Being able to do it full-time literally was a dream come true.