Only a few years ago, the reasons for rejecting a design candidate were varied:
“A lack of complexity in their portfolio”
“Not enough examples of mobile designs”
“A lack of industry specific experience” to name a few.
Nowadays, common rejections tend to center around visual design:
“Lack of visual polish”
“Lack of craft or attention to detail”
“Not a good looking portfolio”
They’re infuriating messages to deliver to design candidates because aesthetics can be incredibly subjective, nuanced, and difficult to measure or define. The top candidate response? “OK show me a portfolio that looks good and hire-able.” The truth is some hiring managers aren’t good judges of visuals and relied on brand names attached to the work or indexed for flashiness.
I was never a strong visual designer in my past design career, and wouldn’t even know where to start. When it came to research, strategy, politics, staff leveling, I knew exactly where to go for advanced course materials and experts. But for visual design, I was at a loss, so I asked for help on LinkedIn and Reddit posts. I’ve collected some of my favorite responses here, including a few over DMs.
Helpful folks gave varied answers that fell into a few buckets:
Paid courses - MDS’ Shift Nudge and Elizabeth Lin’s courses are popular choices.
Learn by doing - Use a tool like Mobbin to learn by tracing over other UI designs.
Learn through inspiration - follow other designers who are known for creating great visual works.
Take traditional routes - visit art and design museums, read about the masters, dig into typography and graphic design. Learn about why a good composition works.
These are all viable options and we all learn in different ways. I had initially defaulted to the paid course route due to the tight deadline of 180 days, but I decided against it for the following reasons:
None seemed advanced enough. Many will get you form bad to OK or good but none will get you from OK to great.
They’ll likely be cost prohibitive ($700-$2,000 USD) for many people to follow along on the live streams I’ll be doing next month.
None of the top visual designers I know have taken visual design courses outside of college. Instead, they consistently pushed me to learn by observing and doing.
If I’m targeting roles at top companies like Airbnb and Stripe, it would make sense for me to reverse engineer the UI design decisions they’ve made. I’d have to create designs that look as good as, if not better than what they’re currently producing.
Copying works will only get me so far, and without understanding the foundations that underpin why I think something looks great, it’s difficult to make something different or better. I likely have to simultaneously study the foundations of typography, layouts, color theory, etc. I plan on going to art museums more often, taking more film photographs, and reading more art history books. If you’re based in NYC and would like to join me on these excursions, hit me up on LinkedIn and keep an eye out on the Designer Friends Luma for upcoming senior designer events.
People like Tommy of UXTools.co also gave me a list of some incredible “visual” designers. I use quotes because virtually every top visual designer recommended weren’t just producing static visual designs but coded prototypes that were interactive and animated like this one by Marcus Eckert:
Added ze button to @RiveoApp as a template. Give it a go! Just be careful, it's fragile...
— #Marcus Eckert (#@marcus_eckert)
3:44 PM • Jun 24, 2025
(Also, are all the top designers on X? Where is everyone these days? Let me know!)
This was also reflected in my experience as a recruiter; hiring managers often conflate the definitions of visual design, craft, animations, and interactive prototypes. Things automatically looked better if it moved and interacted with the user. What the hell happened to accessibility and legibility?
The concept of “top 1% of designers” grosses me out, but it’s sadly the current hiring agenda at many companies, “is this candidate the top 1-5% of talent?” gets asked often in different ways even if it’s an entirely subjective construct based on cultural hiring trends as opposed to skill level, experience, or even output/outcome.
Getting to that top means not just making aesthetically pleasing designs, they also want to have something ‘extra’ like animation or interactivity. This forces us to incorporate design tooling as part of our learning process as the shortest path.
I recently purchased a $200 subscription to Lenny’s List, not to read his newsletter but to get access to a bunch of tools (mainly Mobbin) that came with the 1-yr subscription.
Tommy also just put out a similar bundle for designers which I’ll be getting as well to experiment and learn. We’ve certainly got our work cut out for us even before September 1st.
Lastly, this is the first newsletter I’ve ever sent in my life (!) so any feedback and ideas to improve it is super welcomed; just DM me on LinkedIn, it’s free even if we’re not connected.