Designer Sushi Lori Chai & Mikah Razon

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:
For someone wanting to get into UI/UX design from zero, where would you recommend they start?
What advice would you give yourself, looking back at your own journey?
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:
The growing tech industry in Nigeria and Africa 
Experiencing cultural shocks in both personal and work life in Canada
Navigating the job hunting process and overcoming “the Canadian experience” (a barrier for newcomers or immigrants requiring work experience in Canada).
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
 

“To work at a product company you have to love the product. To work at an agency you have to love the process.”
Have you ever wondered how many industries you could work in as a UX Designer? We have always wondered this ourselves and we’re here to discuss this with you all! And, to help us with this conversation, we have brought in our FIRST guest! Our good friend Nicole Ha from Canada is our guest for this episode! Nicole is currently working as a Senior UX Designer at a digital agency in Tokyo, Japan! She will represent the agency side of UX while Lori will discuss the consulting side and Mikah will cover in-house as a UX Designer!
Some of the topics we discussed in the episode:
•Our design process and general overview of our work
•Our team structure in in-house vs consulting vs agency
•Pros and cons of working in-house vs consulting vs agency
We hope this episode will help you get an overview of the types of industries you can work in as a UX or Product Designer!
 
Connect with Nicole here
Connect with us:
Instagram: designer.sushi
Twitter: DesignerSushi

Welcome to Season 2 of Designer Sushi! First off, we’d like to make a huge apology to our listeners for the delay in releasing the new episodes. Life got in the way for both of us and Designer Sushi had to take a back seat. But now that 20% of 2023 has gone by, we really wanted to get the ball rolling to release more episodes for you! 🚀
This episode was inspired by Mikah and Lori having discussions with friends in the industry if they felt prepared to work in UX after their education (self-study and boot camp). We both felt there was a huge learning curve we encountered as we started our first UX jobs. 😵‍💫 
We hope this episode will help UX or Product Designers that are starting out in their career to get a real-life perspective on what they might encounter as they transition from being a student to working professionally in UX.
Some topics we talked about:
•We never followed the cookie-cutter design process that was taught in our education in our working experience
•We didn’t have practical experience in a collaboration environment (working with developers and product managers)
•We needed more practice with the UI and visual design skills
•The similarities/differences between self-study and boot camp education in how we felt prepared for the real job
 
Connect with us:
Instagram: @designer.sushi
Twitter: @DesignerSushi
 
Resources:
The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide by Leah Buley
Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams