I was a Graphic Design student through Diploma and Degree.

I started off as a Visual Designer in a startup company on 2015. Learnt A LOT from there because the resources were scarce and we had to make do with what we have. Which in return made me even more creative in problem solving.

Visual Designer is basically full-stack of everything that a designer would do in a company I designed packaging, directed some photography, managed socmed posts, a bit of newsletter and last but not least, the website itself. I was quite happy with the exposure given. But my Head of Design saw my potential towards web design stuffs. Partly because it's a part of the company's interest la so I didn't mind venturing myself into UI/UX. So that happened, it's really just self-taught and I was glad I was given the autonomy for trial and error on the website itself.

Then I got promoted to UI/UX Designer where I was heavily exposed/given responsibility for analytics side of things and consideration behind end-to-end journey. But like for most designers coming from visual heavy, we tend to be more heavily interested in UI instead of UX. There's a LOT of things to brainstorm when it comes to UX. Now that I have been almost 7 years in the industry, I am trying to learn more the UX side of things. I am now a Product Designer (UI/UX) in a bank. I earn almost twofold from my initial salary off from my first job.

You can impress people with your badass visuals on a website but it has to work with customer's experience hand-in-hand. If a customer doesn't convert, your product doesn't work.

This post has been edited by xajimx: Feb 11 2022, 10:02 AM

no worries at all man
from Visual to UI/UX wasn't that shocking i think. the transition didn't happen overnight, probably because i've always been interested in how things work in the backend rather than just niceties of the look of things.
i used to compare an Apple's product page with government's website haha im always amazed how nice websites were made. but it's not easy since there are a lot of considerations especially keeping up with available technologies.

yea, those available courses out there will really help you in theories. if you come from design background it'll be much easier since you can grasp a lot of basics like layout/grids/image formats/design jargons etc.
but im a bit old school, i just take up any opportunity i can find, like a project at a workplace. i try to explore something that i havent done before and just youtube the tutorials haha.

to summarise, it's a way forward for graphic designers, we're moving towards digital age and quite sadly that print-based materials will soon be obsolete.
we're digitising things and kinda need to keep up with the demands!