Karen Juliana is 24, lives in the Netherlands, and runs a marketing agency with her husband. She thinks about brand and marketing strategy for clients, and she designs their websites. She started at 17, during her studies, because she could not wait for the certificate.

A wireframe the boss said yes to

Her first job in design was not a design job. She was social media marketing manager at an IT company that built websites in code, and she did not like how their own site looked. So she made a wireframe in Adobe XD, showed it to her boss as her vision for the company, and he liked it enough to build it.

She led that project with the developers, and two things became clear. She loved designing websites. And she did not want to keep explaining to developers why the design mattered.

Squarespace, Wix, then Framer

She built her own client sites on Squarespace, then Wix. Framer arrived because one client refused to use Wix, so she had to find another platform. She chose Framer over Webflow because it felt like Adobe XD and Figma. Then she made a call: every new web project would go in Framer, nothing on Wix, even though she did not know the tool yet.

It worked, mostly. But she saw Dutch designers on TikTok and Instagram making sites that made people say wow, and she knew she was using about one percent of Framer.

“Framer used to be like a plane for me, and I’m the pilot. There were a lot of buttons I didn’t know how to use. Now because of the course I know how to use them.”

The basics she skipped

She found the course through YouTube, Reddit and Google, looking for both skills and confidence in her own work. The surprises were small and practical. Viewport sizing for a hero that fills the screen. Effects that turned out to be simpler than she feared. Building her own ticker instead of reaching for a component.

The CMS was the big one. It used to feel very difficult, and now it is easy. Responsive design changed too. Using relative sizing instead of fixed values made her sites hold up on mobile and large screens.

Strategy first, then Framer

Everything at her agency starts with a strategy meeting: who the site is for, what it needs to do, what the conversion is, what the customer journey looks like. Her husband, who came from cybersecurity and turned a photography hobby into millions of views, handles video and the code side. He picked up the lesson on writing custom code with ChatGPT and they now use it on client sites.

She is also going back to old clients with what she has learned, giving their websites a refresh because she can now see what she would do better.

Just buy the course

She times everything she does. At the e-commerce section, she was at 26 hours and 14 minutes of watching and building. Her advice to her past self is to stop teaching herself the slow way.

“Just buy a course to learn it faster. And just create, because only watching videos won’t work.”

What she would add next is web design theory: how much white space is too much, how big body text should be on mobile, and how to design commercial sites that convert, not just sites that look beautiful.