Happy New Year! あけましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします 🥳。We hope 2024 will be a great year for you all! We would like to apologize for the extreme delay in our new episode as our life has been getting busy lately. But we have an exciting 2 part episode to kick off the new year! Our guest on this episode is the loveable Teresa Fong! Teresa is a senior product designer at Skydea, an agency in Tokyo. As a designer, she builds apps and websites. But she most enjoys building community. She manages Creative Tokyo, a community with over 3,100 members connecting and finding friends with similar interests.

With Teresa, we act as a 24/7 hotline, eagerly awaiting your inquiries about UX/UI Design, tech trends, and the Japanese work culture. Special thanks to Teresa for curating YOUR burning questions! Let's jump right in and kick off our hotline extravaganza with part 1.

Some questions we got asked:

1. For someone wanting to get into UI/UX design from zero, where would you recommend they start?
2. What advice would you give yourself, looking back at your own journey?
3. Could one get a job as a UI/UX Designer with only a portfolio and no design experience?

Useful links:

Join Creative Tokyo: https://creativetokyo.com/

Connect with Teresa Fong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresalafong/

Notion templates for portfolio: https://www.notion.so/templates/category/design-portfolio

Connect with us:

Twitter - DesignerSushi

Instagram - designer.sushi

Our content has been heavily focused on UX in Japan, however, some listeners have reached out to us because they were curious to know about the UX industry in Canada too, especially as a foreigner or newcomer! We invited, Mosope Adebowale, a very talented Product Designer at Meta located in Toronto, Canada. Mosope was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and then moved to Toronto a few years ago to further his product design career. We learned a lot about his drive and ambition to move to a new country and culture, not to mention the number of talented designers in Nigeria as well.

Some topics we discussed:

1. The growing tech industry in Nigeria and Africa
2. Experiencing cultural shocks in both personal and work life in Canada
3. Navigating the job hunting process and overcoming “the Canadian experience” (a barrier for newcomers or immigrants requiring work experience in Canada).
4. Discussing any challenges or differences in being a Product Designer in Canada compared to Nigeria

We hope Mosope’s story inspires and resonates with the listeners who have experienced the challenges of career switching or job hunting in a different country!

Learn more:

🖥️ Connect with Mosope here

Connect with us:

Instagram: designer.sushi

Twitter: DesignerSushi

Some UX mentors and educators recommend you freelance to gain experience for your first role when starting out as a UX Designer. But what if you want to do it full-time and even start your own company? Entrepreneurship and freelancing are one of the many career options you can pursue and it can be a very rewarding (or challenging) experience. We talk with Raphael Hodé, ex-Design lead turned Designer Entrepreneur who has his own design studio in Tokyo called: nowthen.

Some topics we talk about:

• The journey from working at a company to entrepreneurship and freelancing
• The differences between working at a product company, to actually running your company
• Exploring the overlapping skills between a UX Designer and a Founder.
• Recommendations and advice to UX Designers that are thinking of freelancing full-time or starting their own design studio

Learn more:

🖥️ Connect with Raphael here

🟦 Check out the design studio nowthen here

Connect with us:

Instagram: designer.sushi

Twitter: DesignerSushi