"UI/UX" gets said as one word so often that the two halves blur together. They are related but genuinely different jobs, and knowing which is which changes what a designer actually spends their day doing.
UI is everything a user actually sees and touches: buttons, colors, typography, icons, layout, spacing. It is the visual and interactive surface of a product — the part a screenshot can capture.
UX is the whole experience of using a product to accomplish a goal: how easy it is to find something, how confusing a checkout flow feels, whether an error message actually helps. UX is judged by outcome and feeling, not appearance — a beautiful screen with a confusing flow is bad UX with good UI.
| Question | This is... |
|---|---|
| Is this button the right shade of orange? | UI |
| Does the user know what happens when they click it? | UX |
| Is the type size readable? | UI |
| Can a new user finish signup without getting stuck? | UX |
This site's Graphic Design course covers visual fundamentals — color theory, typography, layout — that both UI and UX design lean on. Its Figma course covers the tool used to actually build screens. This course sits between them: the process and thinking that turns visual skill and a design tool into a product that actually works for the people using it.
In practice, most people do both
A good UI designer and a good UX designer overlap enormously in practice — most people doing this work daily call themselves just "a designer" and do both. The distinction matters mainly for understanding what problem is actually being solved at any given moment.