Old UI's & Learning to Let Go

Something I'm learning to do is to NOT strive for perfection. I feel like Dribbble is this fun little community, but 99% of the time, you try to post something ~beautiful~ so that everyone can like and comment on how pretty it is. But let's be real. Not all design work is beautiful. The process behind it all (especially the UX design process) is pretty friggin gross. But it's still SO important, because it gets you to that pretty end goal, the beautiful UI on some free mockup you found on the internet.

I've been struggling lately because I'm re-doing my online portfolio so I can graduate with my Bachelors degree in June and hopefully land a UX/UI design job: but some of my old work, I have a really hard time being proud of. This project in particular, Fresca (a food waste reduction mobile application) is one such project where the process isn't pretty; not only that, it's not right. The personas that led to every decision were incredibly biased, and the user wasn't the end goal. Since being in a human-centered program for undergrad, I know how important those things are now, and I have chosen to omit personas/user research etc from my final project write-up for Fresca because I was embarrassed to even slightly try to glorify that skewed process.

Fresca is the first app I've ever designed. It's janky, it's not consistent, and I was 19 years old and trying to make a nice UI in the span of 2-3 days with the wrong materials to start. And it's OKAY! It shows my growth, and how much I've learned since then. SO IM SHOWING IT OFF.

Go check out the Behance project here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/57901425/Fresca-App