Harish Kumar is a student of MES College, Marampally, Kerala. At the beginning of April, he was one of the 2.5k applicants of the Learn From Home program.

A complete beginner, he rose from newbie status to professional designer in less than a month. Currently, he is a UI Designer at Wanders, an IT firm in Kochi.

Let’s ask this talented guy what encouraged him to take up the UI design course and how he created those brilliant designs that were widely appreciated in the social space.

Hi Harish! Tell us a bit about yourself :)

Hello, TinkerHub community! Thanks for choosing to tell my story. I am a BCA student at MES College, Marampally. I love illustrating, digital art, sketching, and doodling.

Those are some impressive sketches. Since when have you been drawing?

I have been drawing since I was 6 — 7 years old. At that age, my cousin was an artist. She was always drawing. And I was curious about her drawings. My first inspiration and learning came from her.

It was after twelfth grade that I resumed drawing after a long break. That’s when I got to know that it was possible to draw on a phone or computer — digital art. Since I did not have a computer at the time, I started working on digital art on my phone. Later, a cousin offered me his computer.

Then, I started working on digital art in Photoshop. Now I can create illustrations in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Some of Harish’s digital art — check out @kochiboy on Instagram for more!

How did you stumble upon TinkerHub’s UI design course?

Before learning about UI at Learn From Home, I didn’t know what UI designing was. Our college has a TinkerHub chapter — TinkerHub MESM. I am a part of the team, although our seniors are the main organizers.

One day, an Instagram post announcing a Learn From Home program was shared in the TinkerHub MES community.
The seniors recommended it to me as a good experience for an upcoming designer. I scrolled through the courses quickly.

That’s when my eyes locked on a UI UX design course. Since I have loved drawing and designing for a long time, I took it up.

“Before learning about UI at LFH, I didn’t know what UI designing was.”

How was the mentoring and learning curve at the program?

I was a little nervous about attending a “big” video session — LFH was my first time.

After an introductory session by Niyaz Ashraf, I was moved to one of the 5 batches, headed by Lazim Aslam. He is a very cool person and a good mentor. I also started getting to know my co-learners.

The tool we learned for UI/UX design was Figma. Sometimes in the live classes, we worked on Figma together like a team.

First, Lazim walked us through some basics of UI design. The next day, he introduced Figma and also taught how to make mock-ups and documentation. Every day he would give some tasks to learn about.
In effect, I explored Figma quite well.

What were your projects?

The first project was creating a UI design for a learning application.

Towards the end of that project, I fell in love with UI designing. Then I made a Dribbble account to explore designs for inspiration. It’s a great way to learn and grow.

The final project was to redesign the kindle app. I had so much fun designing it. I captioned it Dare to Read. You can see the light mode and dark mode here.

That’s so much growth I see there! So what’s the story of the UI Design Challenge?

After the LFH course was complete, there was a 10DaysofUIDesign challenge hosted by TinkerHub on their Instagram handle. I took part every day. Some of my designs got featured in their story and were widely appreciated. After completing the challenge, my Instagram followers grew in number very quickly.

Harish’s entries at 10DaysofUIDesign Challenge

I am currently working at Wanders, an IT company based in Kochi, as a UI designer. I’m really indebted to TinkerHub and my mentors for everything ❤️

Thank you, Harish! It was a pleasure talking to you. You are an inspiration to everyone who dreams.

This article was originally published by Amrin kareem on medium.