Hey and welcome back to a new week!

In this issue:

• Some Are Stuck, Others Fly—Why? It’s crazy to see how some people have been running in circles while others just go out get hired. Let’s explore why.

• Want To Learn More About AI?: Then check this conference! I’m raffling 2 tickets for it so you can attend for free! Check how to win below.

• Amy’s Portfolio: Nailing positioning and concise case studies.

Thank you for reading!

🎟️ WIN 1 OF 2 TICKETS TO THIS AMAZING CONFERENCE

Forget the FOMO around AI and learn what matters at Prompt to Product

AI is exciting, dizzying, and radically changing how we create products. Prompt to Product is an AI skills week that cuts through the hype by focusing on practice and honesty. We counter FOMO with empowerment. Join design and product experts to share real experiences, tangible skills, and emerging best practices for both ICs and managers.

Prompt to Product kicks off on Monday, 18th May with a half-day conference, featuring speakers from Google, Delivery Hero, DeepL and others. You’ll hear from senior practitioners who are building AI products within their organizations, as well as managers figuring out how teams and roles should adapt. The rest of the week is about going hands-on with expert-led AI trainings by Anna Arteeva, Vitaly Friedman, Aswin Ranganathan and Daniel Liss. Each split into 2-4 hour lessons.

And with Open Doors you can win 1 of 2 tickets for the main conference!

Just reply to this email with “I want in” and you’ll be part of the raffle!

Winners will be chosen at random and announced in the newsletter next week!

Why Some Designers Improve Insanely Fast and Others Stay Stuck for Years ⚡

After more than three years of Open Doors, one pattern keeps showing up: the biggest difference is rarely effort alone. It’s where that effort goes.

Over the years, I’ve seen the full spectrum.

Some people spend years trying to break into design and barely get first-round interviews.

Some stay stuck for a while, then eventually find the recipe and move fast.

Some get hired straight out of university and seem to skip a whole layer of struggle.

And some do land something after a long grind, only to end up in a role that doesn’t really make them happy or turns out to be only loosely related to product design.

One thing keeps standing out to me.

When people stay stuck for a long time, it usually isn’t because they’re lazy. Quite often, they’re working very hard. The problem is that their effort is going into the wrong layer of the problem.

And once that happens, you can spend months or years moving without going anywhere.

The people who stay stuck are often optimizing the wrong things

I’ve seen this a lot with people coming from very different careers outside tech and design, especially in the post-COVID market.

That shift mattered.

The bar moved up hard, especially in visual craft. Bootcamp-level output that might have been enough a few years earlier stopped carrying people. A lot of people coming through that route needed to improve their visual execution, their judgment, and the overall level of their work.

Most didn’t.

What happened instead was something much more seductive.

They started optimizing the wrapper.

The resume.

The portfolio platform.

The wording.

The formatting.

The tool stack.

The ATS tricks.

The endless little adjustments around the work.

A classic example is when someone rebuilds the same portfolio on a different platform and hopes that this will change the outcome.

Squarespace to Webflow.

Webflow to Framer.

Whatever it is.

That almost never solves the real problem.

If your execution is weak, the portfolio will still be weak on the nicer platform. If your execution sharpens, the work would already look good on the simpler one.

That’s the painful bit.

Because I understand why people do this. You finish a bootcamp, maybe take another course on the side, and in your head the education part feels done. So when things don’t work, the conclusion becomes: okay, then it must be the portfolio, the resume, the website, the application strategy.

And yes, those things matter.

But your portfolio does not improve in any meaningful way unless you improve.

At some point, many people need to stop optimizing the packaging and take a step back. Not forward. Back. Back into practice. Back into fundamentals. Back into building the skills the market is still asking for.

That is where movement tends to restart.

A lot of juniors are also aiming at the wrong kind of role

There’s another factor that matters a lot here.

A huge number of aspiring designers want to work on consumer-facing mobile apps.

That’s the dream for many people. Beautiful interfaces. Polished motion. Cool brands. The kind of products people love to screenshot and share.

And that’s exactly why it’s such a brutal place to aim if you’re early-career.

Everyone has some redesign of Spotify or another consumer app in their portfolio. Often not done especially well. And the problem is not only that these projects are repetitive. It’s also that the visual and interaction bar in that space is incredibly high.

On top of that, many of these companies barely hire juniors at all.

So you end up with a double problem:

• you are aiming at one of the most competitive corners of the industry

• and you are doing it with work that often doesn’t meet the quality bar that space demands yet

That is a rough combination.

Sometimes the issue is not that you are untalented.

It’s that you are targeting the wrong direction for your current strengths.

Your existing skill set might be much better suited to a different type of role right now.

Maybe that is B2B SaaS.

Maybe enterprise software.

Maybe a more systems-heavy web product.

None of that sounds as sexy as consumer mobile.

But it might be your way in.

If your current strengths are more aligned with structure, workflows, data density, or problem-solving in more complex interfaces, then forcing yourself toward flashy consumer mobile work might be exactly what is slowing you down.

Sometimes progress doesn’t only come from getting better.

Sometimes it also comes from aiming better.

The people who break the cycle usually do one hard thing

They admit that the issue is not solved by more surface-level optimization.

That sounds obvious when written like that.

It is not obvious when you are the one living inside the problem.

Because taking a step back feels awful. It feels like lost time. It feels like failure. It feels like admitting that the things you already did were not enough.

Still, I’ve seen people do exactly that and come out much stronger.

A very good example is Richard Du.

When I first saw Richard around, he was in that difficult transition phase, moving from healthcare into design. That kind of shift is hard enough on its own. Add a harsher market and a rising quality bar, and you get the exact situation where people often freeze or keep circling the wrong fixes.

Richard didn’t stay there.

He broke the cycle.

He started landing contract work and now works full time, which was the goal all along. And when you look at his portfolio now, the result is sitting right there: the work is strong visually, strong in storytelling, and strong in how it connects to business value.

That growth was not random, not a numbers game, and not some lucky streak. It came from leveling up in the areas the market was pushing on hardest.

That’s the part people often want to skip.

They want the better outcome without the uncomfortable recalibration in the middle.

Usually, that’s not how it goes.

Persistence matters, but persistence alone doesn’t save you

This is one of the more uncomfortable parts for me.

I’ve had people under my guidance who did a lot right and still didn’t get where they should have, at least not in the timeframe I thought they might. That bothers me. I still can’t fully explain every case.

Then there are others who looked close to giving up, disappeared for a while, came back, tried again, and suddenly something clicked.

So yes, persistence matters.

A lot.

But persistence only helps if it stays tied to the right kind of change.

If you keep repeating the same weak loop for another year, that is not the kind of persistence that gets rewarded. That is simply more time inside the wrong system.

The people who eventually move tend to do both:

• they keep going

• they change the substance of what they’re doing

That second part is where the real shift happens.

The people who move fast are often doing the opposite of busy work

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum.

The juniors who seem to accelerate at a completely different pace.

The ones who haven’t even finished university and are already getting attention, getting traction, getting shared around.

People like Andrea Da Silva come to mind. You see work like that circulating on LinkedIn and X, and it’s obvious why it travels.

These cases aren’t all identical, but they usually share a few things.

First, they nail the visual and interaction side to a level that immediately makes people stop.

That part is massive. I really can’t overstate it.

Sometimes there’s natural talent in the mix. Sometimes it’s years of practice inside a good educational environment. Usually it’s some combination of both. But when that part is there, the work starts creating trust quickly.

Second, they experiment relentlessly.

They don’t sit around polishing the same safe project forever. They build side projects, small tools, interactions, concepts, experiments. They try Claude Code, Lovable, Framer, whatever helps them push the work further. And they use these tools to amplify craft, not to dodge it.

A small but sharp side project can tell people a lot before anyone even opens the full portfolio.

Third, they don’t force the wrong things.

They are not spending their best energy on ATS paranoia or endless tactical hacks. They put the work in, yes, but the work goes into craft. Into output. Into signal. Into things that are visible in seconds.

That’s a very different use of energy.

University helps because it gives people time to get good at the right things

This connects closely to what we talked about in the last article.

One reason university still gives many people an advantage is not the degree itself. It’s the focused time.

Two or three years of building, trying, failing, refining, and repeating around core design skills creates a lot of room for growth. That kind of environment helps people build visual judgment, interaction instincts, and confidence in a way that short, compressed paths often struggle to reproduce.

That said, I’ve seen people from other routes compress a lot of growth into a few months too.

So this is not a “university or nothing” point.

It’s more blunt than that.

People improve fast when they spend concentrated time on the skills that matter most. People stay stuck when they spread their energy across everything except those skills.

That’s the split.

If you’re applying into a void right now, do this instead

If you are consistently applying and getting nothing back, stop for a second.

Not forever. Just long enough to interrupt the loop.

Take a step back and ask a harder question:

What skill gap is your portfolio still exposing every time someone opens it?

Get feedback on that.

And yes, the answer is often less glamorous than people hope.

Most of the time it’s things like:

• typography

• color

• spacing

• hierarchy

• general UI quality

• pattern knowledge

• interaction judgment

In other words, the craft layer.

So spend a month there.

Not casually. Not in the background while still doing everything else. Really crack down on it. Take a course. Practice in a structured way. Rebuild things. Make new things. Build small projects. Repeat until your eye starts to shift.

In a recent post I highlighted DesignerUp and Uxcel as excellent options to upskill in the above (and more). Both courses don’t treat these things as learned-once-and-forgotten but use repetition to make sure these things are engrained into you which is exactly what you want.

If you want, combine that with modern AI-era tools so you get stronger output at the same time. That can be a great setup. But that only works if the tool is supporting skill growth rather than replacing thinking.

You can also do fantastic work with Framer, Figma, or whatever you already use.

The platform is not the story.

Your level is.

The gap is rarely motivation alone. It’s usually direction and focus.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to after years of watching people try to break in.

The people who stay stuck are often not less motivated.

They are not less serious.

They are not even less hard-working.

They’re often simply trapped in a loop where the effort keeps flowing into the wrong places, or aimed at the wrong target.

And once that changes, things can move much faster than they did before.

Sometimes the answer is not “try harder.”

Sometimes it’s “stop decorating the problem and go improve the thing underneath it.”

Sometimes it’s also “point your current strengths at a market that can actually use them.”

That’s where the jump tends to happen.

MY FAVORITE SOURCE OF NEWS 📰 

Smart starts here.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!

👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Amy La

Every now and then, a portfolio comes along where you don’t need to “get it” first. It just clicks. Amy La’s is one of those.

She’s a student at the University of Washington, about to graduate, already building serious momentum with internships and an incoming stint at Adobe. But more importantly, she’s carved out something that most early designers struggle with for a long time: a clear point of view.

And she didn’t get there by copying what everyone else is doing.

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