Hey and welcome back to a new week!

I wanted to share a survey with you by Carlo Friscia who is currently building a design learning tool specifically tailored to juniors and of course I support that.
Fill out his survey here to help him out!

In this issue:

• How To Get Into Product Design In 2026: The landscape has drastically changed. Bootcamps, university or self-leaning? Find out what I think about all of them.

• Join Me For A Portfolio Roast This Thursday: I’m doing it again! Showing you what works and what doesn’t portfolios straight from the community. RSVP here.

• Pradeep’s Portfolio: This portfolio is A LOT but I still think it’s very strong.

Thank you for reading!

🔥 I’M ROASTING PORTFOLIOS AGAIN!

I’m picking apart portfolios from community again - LIVE!

Join me for this free live event that is always tons of fun and insights!

I will (nicely - you know me) roast portfolios from the community to talk about what works and what doesn’t. I’m gonna apply a hiring managers lens and tell you what would cause me to close the tab and what keeps me scrolling.

If you want your portfolio reviewed, you can submit it ahead of time in the Uxcel Discord community discord.gg/uxcel. We’ll review as many as time allows during the session.

​Even if yours isn’t selected, the feedback shared will help you see portfolios through the same lens hiring managers use.

Thursday, April 9, 5:30PM (CET)

Which Path Into Design Still Makes Sense in 2026? 🧭

A few years ago, this question felt easier.

There were multiple ways into design, and while some were better than others, it still felt possible to take different routes and arrive in roughly the same place.

That no longer feels true in the same way.

There are still multiple paths in. People still break in through unconventional routes. I’m living proof of that. But the tolerance for spending too long on the wrong things has gotten much smaller.

So if you’re trying to get into design in 2026, or you’ve already chosen a path and want to make the most of it, I’d break it into three lanes:

1. self-learning

2. bootcamps

3. university

And I’d think about them very differently now than I would have five years ago.

1. Self-learning can work. But only if you learn the right things.

Self-learning is still viable.

Not because it’s easy, but because it gives you freedom. You can move at your own pace, choose your own material, and spend more time on the areas where you’re weak.

What makes this path fail for many people is that they focus on the wrong layer of design.

They start with tools.

They start with Figma.

They start with AI.

They start with vibe coding.

They start with making things look like design before they understand what good design rests on.

That catches up with you.

So if you go the self-learning route, go much harder on fundamentals than most people do.

And by fundamentals, I do not mean software.

I mean:

• typography

• spacing

• hierarchy

• color

• layout

• composition

• contrast

• visual balance

• interaction basics

Hammer those into your head.

Take courses. Rebuild things. Compare work. Practice until your eye starts catching what used to slip by.

One thing also needs saying very clearly: self-learning is not a shortcut that lets you surpass university students in a few months.

Can you be more targeted and more deliberate than a university program? Yes. You can cut fluff, focus harder, and build around your actual weaknesses. But then you also have to plan that path yourself, manage it yourself, and stay on it yourself. That’s exactly where many people drift. They jump between resources, overfocus on tools, keep changing direction, or mistake activity for progress.

So if you choose this route, build in regular correction.

That could be:

• a mentor

• a critique group

• a course with feedback

• someone more advanced checking your work now and then

You need something that interrupts your blind spots.

Without that, self-learning can become a very polished form of drifting.

Which courses to take and which path to tread exactly is highly personal in my opinion. However there are some top notch resources out there that I can generally recommend to learn and harden the foundation.

• Uxcel is one of the best self-learning platforms that make learning fun, engaging and have a good focus on what matters. It also is a steal compared to most other options. Check it out here.

• DesignerUp was created with the gap that many bootcamps leave when it comes to the fundamentals and that makes it an excellent course in general. The 1-1 guidance that is included in the already generous pricing is making this one one of the best options around. Check it out here.

2. Bootcamps are the path I would warn people away from now.

This one is awkward, because for a while bootcamps did look like a shortcut that could work.

The market was softer, the bar was lower, and it was still possible for some people to come out of one of these programs, build a few projects, and get into the field.

That era is gone.

So when I say bootcamps here, I mean the multi-thousand-dollar guided programs that promise some compressed route into design. Job guarantees, career support, fast-track transformation, all of that.

I would not recommend that path anymore to someone who still has the choice.

And I should be transparent here: I entered the industry through a bootcamp myself, more than half a decade ago. So I’m not saying this as someone who always looked down on that route. The bootcamp I did was genuinely good, fairly priced, and for its time a viable way in. It shut down a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, other programs that charged much more while offering less support are still around. That tells you quite a lot about where this space is at. And I don’t think it’ll be the last closure we see.

Too many of these programs still sell a version of the market that no longer exists.

And too often the output shows it.

If I had the same budget today, I would much rather split it across strong self-paced courses, focused practice, critique, and maybe some mentorship where it’s most needed.

Now, if you are already in a bootcamp, that’s a different conversation.

Then the move is not regret. The move is extraction.

Use it to:

• tighten your fundamentals

• finish the projects as well as you can

• get the credential if you’re already close

• but do not rely on the default output to carry your portfolio or your future

That’s the key part.

Bootcamp output, left untouched, often still looks like bootcamp output.

That’s a problem.

If you graduated a bootcamp in the recent past and see absolutely no traction you most likely are not fit for the market just yet. Without wanting to drag you into another course I advise to look at the section on self-learning above and see if anything might help you to catch up to the level of other designers hitting the market such as the people I regularly feature in my portfolio segment.

3. University has aged better than many people expected.

A few years ago, I would have answered this very differently.

University often felt too slow, too expensive, too dated, too detached from the industry.

Some of that criticism is still fair.

But something has become hard to ignore: university has aged much better than people thought it would.

Not because every program is brilliant.

Not because every graduate is strong.

Not because a degree on its own solves anything.

What it does do, in the better cases, is give people time.

Time to build fundamentals.

Time to experiment.

Time to try things, fail, refine, and keep going.

Time to develop craft in an environment that encourages creativity rather than treating it like an optional extra.

That matters a lot.

When I feature strong portfolios, a huge number of them come from university grads. Not because I have some bias there. I’m not a university grad myself. You can simply see it in the work.

Often there is more craft.

More visual maturity.

More confidence in fundamentals.

More development that feels like it had room to breathe.

That doesn’t mean university is automatic. Some students still come out with work that feels barely stronger than bootcamp output. That can happen for all kinds of reasons. Weak programs, shortcuts, lack of time, life pressure.

Still, if university is a viable option for you today, I’d take it very seriously.

Especially if you can do:

• an undergraduate degree when you’re early on

• or a Master’s in HCI if you already have adjacent education like architecture or something similar

Internships are where university pulls away hard

There’s another reason I’ve become more positive on university.

Internships.

Internships are not the same as full-time experience. But they are one of the best things you can put into an early-career portfolio because they give you something many other people struggle to get:

real work inside a real company.

That changes things.

If you do a good internship, turn it into a strong case study, and can clearly talk about your contribution and impact, you move much closer to having something hiring teams take seriously.

That’s one of the better cards you can hold early on.

And this is where non-university paths have it much harder.

For people outside university, internships are often nearly locked off. Not impossible, but hard enough that I would not plan around them. University students, meanwhile, often have direct access to this lane.

That’s a massive structural advantage.

So which path would I choose?

If I were thinking about this in 2026, my answer would be fairly clear.

If university is a viable option for you, and you can make it work financially and personally, I’d look there first.

If university is not realistic, I’d go self-learning, but with much more rigor than most people bring to it. Strong courses, repeated fundamentals, regular critique, disciplined practice, and far less obsession with tools.

Bootcamps would be my last choice by a distance.

That may sound harsh, but I’d rather be harsh here than have people burn thousands on a promise that no longer holds.

No path saves you from the fundamentals

This is the most important part to end on.

People often ask which path is best as if the path itself is what does the work.

It isn’t.

Path matters. Environment matters. Access matters. Time matters.

But none of these routes exempt you from doing the hard part.

You still need to build your eye.

You still need to understand the foundations.

You still need to practice.

You still need to make work that holds up.

Some routes make that easier. Some make it harder. Some open doors that others keep closed.

But in the end, the field still asks the same thing from everyone:

show me that you can do the work.

And right now, the people with the best shot are usually the ones who spent enough time learning the boring foundational stuff well enough that the rest of their work stopped feeling flimsy.

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Pradeep Yellapu

Pradeep Yellapu is a US-based product designer with a strong background in research and data. And you can feel that immediately. This is not someone who stumbled into product design. There’s a clear layer of analytical thinking sitting underneath everything he shows.

At the same time, he brings the full product design skill set with it. So this is not a “research-heavy but design-light” profile. It’s someone who can design, but does so with a different kind of depth.

Now, one thing to say upfront. This portfolio is a lot.

There is a lot happening, a lot of interaction, a lot of ideas, a lot of features. It’s a showcase of what’s possible when you fully lean into building and vibe coding an experience. And honestly, a lot of it is impressive. There are genuinely novel ideas in here that show both thought and execution.

At the same time, with a bit more focus and curation, this could land even harder. Because the raw material is very, very strong.

Let’s get into it.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video review? Or do you require mentoring to figure out a proper strategy for your job search?

I got you!

• Book an in-depth portfolio or resume review with me

• Book a mentoring session with me

• Book a quick 15 min chat to ask a question and see if we vibe

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian