Top 16 Free 'Portfolio-Ready' Capstone Courses to enroll in for Creatives Transitioning to a UX/UI Career This Year
Hey there, creative soul! So, you're looking to make the leap into the exciting world of UX/UI design. You've got the eye for aesthetics, a knack for storytelling, and an intuitive understanding of what makes people tick. But there's one giant hurdle standing between your creative past and your UX future: the portfolio. It’s the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem—you need a job to get experience, but you need experience to get a job.
This is where the magic of a "portfolio-ready" capstone project comes in. It’s a project-based course designed to simulate a real-world design challenge from start to finish. You’ll go from a vague problem statement to a polished, high-fidelity prototype, creating all the essential UX artifacts (personas, user flows, wireframes) along the way. This isn't just about learning theory; it's about doing the work and creating a detailed case study that screams "hire me!"
The best part? You don’t need to spend thousands on a bootcamp to build one. The internet is brimming with incredible, high-quality, and completely free resources that can give you the experience you need. We’ve done the digging for you. Here are the top 16 free portfolio-ready capstone courses and projects to kickstart your UX/UI career this year.
1. Google UX Design Professional Certificate (Final Capstone)
Platform: Coursera
This is the big one. While the full certificate costs money, you can often audit the individual courses for free, including the final capstone project. This project is a beast in the best way possible. You are tasked with designing a complete mobile app or responsive website from scratch, covering the entire design process. It's an end-to-end experience that mirrors a real-world junior UX designer's first project.
You’ll choose from several prompts, conduct foundational research, create user personas and journey maps, sketch wireframes, build high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, and conduct usability studies. The course material provides a fantastic structure for building a robust case study. Building a portfolio is a topic Goh Ling Yong often emphasizes as the single most important step, and this project gives you everything you need for that first crucial piece.
Pro-Tip: Don't just follow the prompts. Pick a topic you're genuinely passionate about. Your enthusiasm will shine through in your work. Document everything—your messy sketches, your "aha!" moments during research, and the feedback that made you pivot. Your process is the real star of the show.
2. Volunteering for a Non-Profit
Platforms: Catchafire, Democracy Lab, Taproot Foundation
Want a portfolio piece with real impact and real stakeholders? This is it. Platforms like Catchafire connect skilled professionals with non-profits that desperately need design help but lack the budget. You can find short-term projects ranging from designing a new donation page to a full app redesign. This isn't a simulation; it's a real project for a real organization.
Working with a non-profit forces you to practice some of the most critical skills in UX: stakeholder management, communication, and working with technical or budget constraints. You'll learn to defend your design decisions, compromise, and deliver value. The resulting case study is incredibly powerful because you can show tangible results and talk about navigating a real team environment.
Pro-Tip: Look for a project with a clear scope and deliverables. Schedule a kick-off call to align on goals and expectations. Treat it like a paid gig—be professional, meet your deadlines, and over-communicate. You'll get a killer portfolio piece and a glowing recommendation.
3. The Odin Project (Full Stack Path)
Platform: The Odin Project
Wait, a coding course? Absolutely. For creatives who aren't afraid to get a little technical, The Odin Project is a goldmine. Their curriculum is entirely free and project-based. While it’s focused on web development, the projects (like building a restaurant homepage, a to-do list app, or even a full-blown social media clone) require a ton of UI/UX thinking.
You won't just design the look; you'll have to think through the user flow, information architecture, and interaction design before you even write a line of code. This is an incredible advantage. Designers who understand the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are highly valuable because they can create more feasible designs and communicate more effectively with developers.
Pro-Tip: Before you start coding each project, spend a day or two in Figma. Create wireframes and a simple UI design. This forces you to separate the UX/UI process from the development process, giving you two distinct skill sets to showcase.
4. An Unsolicited Redesign (The Right Way)
Platform: Self-Directed
Redesigning a popular app is a classic portfolio project, but it can easily backfire if done poorly. Simply giving Spotify a new coat of paint isn't enough. A strong unsolicited redesign identifies a real, specific user problem and uses the UX process to solve it. It's about improving the experience, not just the aesthetics.
Start by identifying a friction point in an app you use daily. Is it hard to manage playlists on YouTube Music? Is the checkout process on a local e-commerce site confusing? Then, conduct your own mini-research. Read app store reviews, survey a few friends, and create a persona based on a frustrated user. Frame your redesign as a solution to a specific business goal, like "Improving user retention by simplifying the checkout flow."
Pro-Tip: Clearly state your assumptions and constraints upfront in your case study. Acknowledge that you don't have access to the company's internal data. This shows maturity and an understanding of real-world product design.
5. Sharpen.design Challenge
Platform: Sharpen.design
Stuck for an idea? Sharpen is a brilliant, free project generator that provides you with unique and often quirky design prompts. You can get a challenge like, "Design a booking app for a dog-friendly hotel" or "Create a dashboard for beekeepers." It's an endless source of inspiration that pushes you out of your comfort zone.
The beauty of Sharpen is that it gives you a starting point, but the rest is up to you. You define the problem, the users, and the solution. This is a fantastic way to quickly build multiple, diverse projects for your portfolio. You can tackle a new prompt every couple of weeks to practice your skills and showcase your versatility.
Pro-Tip: Use the "challenge" mode to add a constraint, like "Design it for a smart watch" or "Design it for a user in rural India." Constraints are a designer's best friend—they force creativity and lead to more innovative solutions.
6. Goodbrief.io Generator
Platform: Goodbrief.io
Similar to Sharpen, Goodbrief generates realistic design briefs. The difference is that it provides a more structured prompt, often including a fictional company name, a target audience, and specific business objectives. This more closely mimics the kind of brief you might receive from a client or a project manager.
This is excellent practice for translating business requirements into design solutions. The briefs force you to think not just about the user, but about the business goals behind the project. A case study based on a Goodbrief prompt demonstrates that you understand that UX is about finding the sweet spot between user needs and business viability.
Pro-Tip: Take the fictional company seriously. Spend 30 minutes creating a mini brand guide for them—logo, color palette, typography. This adds a layer of professionalism and UI polish to your final design.
7. Contribute to Open Source Design
Platforms: Open Source Design, Figma's Community
Contributing to an open-source project is an incredible way to gain real-world, collaborative experience. Many projects are actively looking for designers to help with everything from UI kits and icon libraries to full feature redesigns. The Open Source Design community is a great place to find projects that need your help.
This type of project shows you can work with a team, accept feedback, and navigate the technical constraints of a real product. You’ll use tools like GitHub and Discord to communicate with developers and other designers. It's as close to a real job as you can get, and it shows recruiters that you're a proactive team player.
Pro-Tip: Start small. Don't try to redesign the entire app on day one. Find a small, well-defined issue, like "The login button has poor color contrast." Fix it, submit your design, and use that as a stepping stone to larger contributions.
8. freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design Certification Projects
Platform: freeCodeCamp
Another fantastic resource for the technically-inclined creative. freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design curriculum is a deep dive into HTML and CSS, and it culminates in five certification projects. You’ll build a survey form, a tribute page, a technical documentation page, a product landing page, and a personal portfolio.
While the prompts are for web pages, not apps, they are the perfect canvas for practicing your UI design skills. You have complete freedom over the visual design, layout, typography, and color. This is your chance to show you can create beautiful, functional, and fully responsive UIs that look great on any device. As I've learned in my own journey, a sentiment often echoed by experts like Goh Ling Yong, demonstrating both design and a little technical skill can make you a much stronger candidate.
Pro-Tip: For the "Product Landing Page" project, create a full UX case study around it. Define the target user, sketch some wireframes, and explain the "why" behind your layout choices in a separate document or blog post.
9. Adobe XD Daily Creative Challenge
Platform: Behance/Adobe Live
If you're short on time but want to build a consistent design habit, the Adobe XD Daily Creative Challenge is perfect. Every day for a week, you'll receive a new, small design prompt. One day you might design a settings screen, the next a music player widget.
While one daily challenge isn't a full capstone project, a week's worth of related challenges can be bundled together into a compelling mini-case study. This shows your ability to work quickly, think on your feet, and execute high-quality UI design. Plus, you get to engage with a massive community and get feedback on your work from professional designers.
Pro-Tip: Pick a theme for the week. For example, if the challenges are for a travel app, create a consistent brand identity and UI kit that you apply to each daily design. This ties everything together into a more cohesive project.
10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to User Experience Design"
Platform: Coursera
This is one of the original and most respected UX courses on Coursera. It's a fantastic, academically rigorous introduction to the fundamentals of UX design. While the full specialization has multiple projects, the very first course (which can be audited for free) walks you through the initial stages of a design project.
You'll learn about user research, ideation, and creating a solid design brief. The assignments guide you through the process of defining a problem and understanding your users. This is perfect for building the "Part 1" of a major case study, focusing heavily on the research and strategy that informs the final design.
Pro-Tip: Pair this course with a more UI-focused project. Use the research and strategy you develop here as the foundation for a design you create using a tool like the Sharpen generator.
11. Georgia Tech's "Introduction to UI/UX Design"
Platform: Coursera
Another excellent university-backed course, this one from Georgia Tech provides a strong overview of the entire UI/UX landscape. The free audit version gives you access to lectures and readings that cover the design lifecycle, from requirements gathering to evaluation.
The course is structured around key concepts like affordances, signifiers, and mental models. The assignments challenge you to apply these theories by analyzing existing interfaces and proposing improvements. This is a great way to build your design eye and learn how to articulate design decisions using established UX principles.
Pro-Tip: Use the concepts from this course to write a detailed critique of an existing app. Turn it into a blog post or a case study that analyzes what the app does well, where it fails, and how your proposed design solutions would fix the core issues.
12. CalArts "UI/UX Design Specialization" (Visual Elements Course)
Platform: Coursera
Coming from a creative background, you already have a strong visual sense. This specialization from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) leans into that. The second course, "Visual Elements of User Interface Design," is particularly valuable and can be audited for free.
This course focuses on the "UI" part of UX/UI. It dives deep into typography, color theory, iconography, and layout in the context of digital interfaces. The assignments challenge you to create style guides and UI kits, which are fantastic, tangible assets to include in your portfolio to showcase your visual design skills.
Pro-Tip: Create a full UI kit for one of your other capstone projects. Show how you applied the principles from this course to create a consistent, beautiful, and accessible design system for your app.
13. Figma Community Redesign Challenge
Platform: Figma (Self-Directed)
The Figma Community is an absolute treasure trove of design files, templates, and UI kits. A fantastic self-directed project is to find a popular but slightly dated UI kit or app template and give it a complete modern overhaul.
Your challenge is to improve its usability, update the visual styling to be more current, and, most importantly, ensure it meets modern accessibility standards (WCAG). Document your process: perform an audit of the original file, identify areas for improvement, and explain the rationale for your changes. This shows you have a critical eye and can improve upon existing work.
Pro-Tip: Record a short 5-minute Loom video where you walk through the "before" and "after" of your redesign, explaining your key decisions. Embedding this in your case study is incredibly engaging for recruiters.
14. Coursera Guided Project: "Create Mockups in Figma"
Platform: Coursera
If a full-scale capstone feels too daunting, a guided project is a perfect first step. These are 2-3 hour projects where an instructor walks you through a specific task in a split-screen environment. This one focuses on translating wireframes into polished mockups in Figma.
While short, this project gives you a tangible deliverable: a set of high-fidelity screens. It’s a great way to get comfortable with the primary tool of the trade (Figma) and practice your visual design execution. You can then write a mini-case study explaining the (hypothetical) project goals and user needs.
Pro-Tip: Once the guided project is over, take it a step further. Add two or three more screens to the user flow on your own to show initiative and expand the project's scope.
15. Participate in a Design Hackathon
Platform: Devpost, TAIKAI
Hackathons are intense, 24-48 hour events where teams collaborate to build a product or solution from scratch. While many are code-focused, almost every team needs a designer. This is an incredible opportunity to experience rapid prototyping, cross-functional collaboration, and high-pressure problem-solving.
You won't sleep much, but you'll come out the other side with a finished (or nearly finished) project and a fantastic story for your portfolio. Case studies from hackathons are compelling because they highlight your ability to work fast, adapt, and focus on delivering a minimum viable product (MVP).
Pro-Tip: Don't go in trying to win. Go in with the goal of learning, meeting people, and creating one solid user flow that you can document for your portfolio. Focus on quality over quantity.
16. The "Feature Add-On" Project
Platform: Self-Directed
Instead of redesigning a whole app, focus on adding a single, well-researched feature. This is a very common task for UX designers working on established products. For example, how would you add a "group grocery list" feature to a popular recipe app? Or a "split the bill" function to a banking app?
This project shows you can think critically about an existing product ecosystem. You have to design a feature that feels seamless and consistent with the current design system. It requires you to analyze user flows, information architecture, and UI patterns to ensure your new feature fits in perfectly. This demonstrates a level of product thinking that is highly attractive to hiring managers.
Pro-Tip: Create a prototype that specifically shows the user flow for your new feature. In your case study, explain how this feature would benefit both the user and the business (e.g., "by increasing user engagement and creating social hooks for virality").
Your Portfolio is a Journey, Not a Destination
There you have it—16 powerful, portfolio-ready projects you can start today without spending a dime. The key to a successful transition into UX/UI isn't about having the most prestigious certificate; it's about demonstrating your ability to solve problems through a thoughtful, user-centered design process.
Pick one of these projects that excites you and dive in. The most important thing is to meticulously document your journey. Show your messy sketches, your user feedback, your pivot points, and the "why" behind every single design decision. Your portfolio is a collection of stories, and these projects are the perfect way to start writing them.
Now, go get building! Which one will you tackle first? Let us know in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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