Balancing Freelance Life with Maya McBeath 🎥


Balancing Freelance Life with Maya McBeath


Dear Reader,

Last night, we had a roundtable with Maya McBeath, a human-centered designer, user researcher, and workshop facilitator. Maya shared how to maintain steady work without losing your soul.

Freelancing can be tough, but Maya's human-first approach is a way to keep doing the work you love on your terms.

The down-to-earth discussion includes:

  • How Maya started freelancing
  • Cultivating resilience by diversifying income streams
  • Practical work-life balance insights

Source, shared by Linus Mimetz in the Guild


COURSE: Defining UX Strategy
Learn to design a winning strategy that aligns design with business
Basic seats available now
Buy a seat


COURSE: Facilitating Workshops
Learn to design and lead engaging workshops that lead to real results.
Next cohort: Fall 2025
Sign up for the waitlist


To ensure you catch the next event, apply to join the Slack group. Work hard to ensure the group is full of mid-level designers and above!

Apply to the Guild of Working Designers

See you next time! ✌️

Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute

The Fountain Institute

The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.

Read more from The Fountain Institute

When Your Strategy Slides Hit Silence By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, I’ve shared strategy before, and watched it stall. Not because it was wrong. But because the room didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t looking for feedback. I wasn’t asking for approval. I was hoping they’d pick it up and run with it. Instead? Confusion. Silence. They didn’t see what I saw. Not because they didn’t care. But because I’d built the strategy, not the on-ramp they needed to step into it. It’s something I’ve...

Let's Talk about Liquid Glass by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Goodbye, paper-like design. Hello, moving blobs of liquid glass! Play button blunder from Apple Apple's new paradigm in aesthetics is both cool and potentially awful at the same time. "Rather than trying to simply re-create a material from the physical world, Liquid Glass is a new digital meta-material that dynamically bends and shapes light." -Apple Just when you thought skeuomorphism was dead, it rears its realistic head again. I...

Assumption Olympics: Why I Always Win Gold in Overreacting By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, I once pitched a new workshop format to a team of collaborators. One person nodded slowly and said, “Hmm… okay.” That was it. I smiled. Externally, totally composed. Internally? I sprinted up a mental staircase of conclusions: They don’t like it. They’re being polite. They think I’m not strategic. This was a bad idea. I’ve blown this opportunity. Maybe I’m not cut out for this work. I didn’t realize I was...