Skill Labs

Practice the writing that makes a portfolio work: turning "here is what I made" into a narrative of problem, decisions, and evidence a hiring manager can follow in three minutes.

Practice finding the interaction failures that never show up in a mouse demo — the missing focus states, the trapped modals, the tab order that jumps like a pinball.

Practice the workflow AI research help actually requires: generate fast, then verify every claim against the sources — and learn firsthand where the tool quietly makes things up.

Practice the interface work probabilistic features demand: an AI feature that is sometimes wrong is WORKING AS DESIGNED — so the wrongness needs designing too.

Practice turning a solution-shaped request into a problem statement sharp enough to design against — the framing step that decides whether everything after it is aimed right.

Practice designing a usability test that answers a real question with a small budget — the plan is where most tests are actually won or lost, long before anyone watches a participant.

Practice building visual hierarchy with the quiet tools — size, weight, and spacing — so emphasis survives color-blindness, dark mode, and bad monitors.

Practice the core of interface typography: a small system of sizes and weights that carries a whole product's hierarchy legibly, on a phone, at arm's length.

Practice the unglamorous majority of UI work: a component is not designed until every state it can be in is designed — including the ones that only appear when things go wrong.

Practice the due diligence that separates using data from being used by it: before a dataset informs a design decision, someone has to establish where it came from and what it can't say.

Practice synthesis a skeptic can audit: findings that trace to sources, uncertainty that's labeled instead of smoothed over, and an explicit account of what would change your mind.

Practice explaining a real project's reasoning clearly and concisely under time pressure — the single most common design-interview format ("walk me through a project you're proud of").

Practice redesigning a real, common failure state (a bad form-validation error) to be clearer and more inclusive, not just visually nicer.

Practice giving specific, actionable critique on a real multi-step flow, not just surface-level opinions.