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How Laura Elizabeth Created Design Academy and Her Journey in Creating Beautiful Designs in UI (User Interface)

Laura is a designer and entrepreneur who studied design at the University. After completing her studies she worked in an agency. She would later branch out from the agency to work as a freelancer. Laura worked from home for approximately eight years. In her quest to make design easy to understand, the idea of creating a course crossed her mind. Throughout her learning years, Laura had struggled with converting simple designs into attractive ones. She wanted a course that would help transform simple designs to make them professional and good looking. Listen as Laura tells Geordie how she went about creating a portal for her clients.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • What Laura disliked about working from home
  • What problem did Laura’s portal help solve?
  • How Laura found out the impact of her portal
  • How Laura went about the minimum viable product (MVP) process
  • Navigating a WordPress hosted portal setup
  • How long do aspiring developers take to master Laura’s design course?
  • Importance of copywriting in design
  • Leveraging Google Docs to come up with a landing page
  • How to enhance your design skills
  • How to design a compelling website with minimal hustle
  • Why a minimal website is better than an eye-catching one
  • Where to get good quality designs, illustrations, and icons for your website
  • What is design fundamentals?
  • What to consider when hiring a designer

In this episode…

Today, customers want the best website experience, and service providers have no choice but to satisfy them. Often, knowing how to offer the best services can be challenging as Laura found out. While she knew her needs, she did not understand how to articulate it until she created a portal for her clients.

At some point, Laura spoke at a conference where she discussed her client portal to fellow freelancers. Listen as she explains what happened after the conference. The feedback Laura received from the conference compelled her to launch her product immediately. She still pursued her dream of creating a design course.

How was Design Academy established? Laura says that during her time as a freelancer, she interacted with many developers. They wanted to venture into development but did not know how to go about achieving their dream.

What does Laura’s design course entail? She reiterates that she hardly teaches her students how to master the course. Instead, she strives to ensure that learners can move from novice level to a complete attractive website. Laura shares the strategy she uses to teach her students with Geordie Wardman in this discussion.

According to Laura, developers can enhance their design skills through research and viewing other websites. She says the best way to gain experience is by saving sites that you like. Often, remembering sites you have encountered can be a difficult task. That is why developers should leverage tools that help them save sites for future reference.

Minimal and simple website design works best, especially for beginners. Laura says developers can always change websites in the future. What about drawing? According to Laura, drawing can be challenging, and many novice developers may not be in a position to do it on their own. However, they can solve this by using an illustration set. Laura explains how to go about it in-depth in this podcast. She also talks about using icons and combining them with colors.

What colors work best for a website? Listen in to find out how colors can transform the appearance of your site. Laura explains that at some point, you may need to hire a designer to handle your development needs professionally. However, she explains that there are various factors to consider before collaborating with any designer.

One of the main things she recommends is taking a look at the designer’s website. You can be sure that a designer won’t outsource their website development as they would their portfolio. Listen to Laura as she explains to Geordie why you need a designer that can match their website development to copywriting.

What approach does Laura use on a personal level when choosing a developer? Does she prefer developers from a specific region? What is the importance of hiring an all-rounded developer? Laura talks about all this comprehensively in this podcast.
Laura discusses the importance of working with professional developers and designers. She also reiterates that she spends a lot of her time teaching on design academy than she does on her client portal.