In 2019, I started my personal project which tells my real stories about being an international student to explore my career potentials in the Australian creative industry. This project is designed for inspiring more international students to stand up and fit in (or at least thinking about if we should fit in), and also as a thank-you gift for people who helped me along the journey.

Here is the website. You can also have a play below.

It did not look like this for the whole time, it actually started like a mess.

I was busy putting everything there, so I picked a template and changed it into the one I need - showing stories, numbers, the info of myself and the ones what I want to appreciate.

In June, I began to redesign it.

The initial reason was just because it looks messy and I have some motivation to do the change - have some spare time, have the passion learning coding and have a story called “A Whole New World” coming.

I started from the sketches on my notebooks and applied that into Sketch in the further steps (Big thanks to Sophie Diao for the example image and all the time inspiration).



And it works on mobile like this.

I did not spend too much time making protypes, instead, I used some simple codes to have a quick test (which is good for myself in this project but not a good idea for any bigger projects).

Feedback from my friends was collected after the testing. Most of them are more focus on details and that is somehow dangerous, because I began to realize that I was wrong at the first place, I was stuck into the all-the-time thinking - how to arrange all the parts and what is the relationship between different parts might be the right questions that I need to think about at that stage, and that all goes to “what do I want to express and who am I communicating with”.

Compared with how it looks, the structure and strategy is more important - the brand needs a clearer message, also shows the personality of me - it is still a personal thing.

With these things in mind, I highlighted the core information and hid all the details behind the colorful blocks and playful numbers.



With the experience coding the previous one, this version was finished in just one week (using nearly all my free time). But in the process, I learned a lot.

It is my first self-coded project, from zero to everything. I challenged myself learning HTML,CSS and JavaScript. I also practiced Sketch. But overall, it is still a UI/UX design process, it is hard to do that alone, especially at the beginning, it is so easy to get lost.

But luckily, it is all worth it in the end.