Learn UI/UX design to a portfolio app redesign in five months
Five months in Figma — about an hour a day learning the tool, then learning what actually makes interfaces look designed, then redesigning one real app end to end — gets a beginner to a single defensible portfolio project. Roughly 150 hours total. You will not be a senior product designer. You will be able to take a real screen, explain what is wrong with it, and rebuild it so it looks like a professional made it.
5 months · ~150 hours · one real app redesigned: 8–12 screens, a small component system, and a case study explaining every decision
1.Figma + the official "Figma for Beginners" course
Figma is the industry-standard interface design tool and the free Starter plan is permanent — three design files, unlimited personal drafts, two editors, no time limit. That is plenty for one learner and one project. Start with Figma's own four-part "Figma for Beginners" series, then rebuild three screens of an app you use daily, pixel for pixel, just to learn frames, auto layout, components, and constraints. Do not design anything original yet. You are learning the instrument.
Free (Starter plan); paid Professional is $16/editor/month and you do not need it
Figma →2.Refactoring UI — Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger
This is the book that closes the gap between "I can use Figma" and "my work looks designed." Wathan and Schoger teach the concrete, repeatable rules beginners never get told: spacing systems, limiting your type scale, using color and weight instead of borders, designing the content first. The Essentials package ($99) is the 218-page PDF plus three video tutorials and is the only paid thing on this path. Read it once through, then keep it open beside Figma. Apply one chapter to your practice screens each session.
$99 (Essentials) one-time; $149 for the Complete package with components and icons
Refactoring UI →3.Redesign one real app, end to end
Pick a real app with obvious problems — a local government site, a clunky banking app, a niche tool you actually use — and redesign its core flow. Eight to twelve screens. Build a small reusable component set in Figma. Then write a case study: what was broken, who the user is, what you changed, and why, citing the Refactoring UI rules you applied. The project is the crux. Nobody hires from a certificate; they hire from one thoughtful redesign with the reasoning shown. Publish it on a free Notion or Framer page.
Free
Figma Community files to study →If this doesn't fit you
If you need external structure, deadlines, and a credential to show — or you are not confident self-directing a project — take the Google UX Design Professional Certificate on Coursera instead ($49/month after a 7-day trial, finishable in 4–6 months, so roughly $200–300). It walks you through the full UX research-to-prototype process with graded assignments. It is heavier on research and lighter on visual polish, so still read Refactoring UI alongside it.
Why this path
The bottleneck for almost every beginner is not the tool — Figma takes a week — it is that their work looks amateur and they cannot say why. Refactoring UI fixes exactly that with rules you can apply the same day. Courses tempt you to consume forty hours of video and produce nothing portfolio-worthy; this path puts the tool and the taste in your hands fast, then spends the bulk of your hours on the one artifact that actually gets you hired: a real redesign with the thinking made visible.