What does the UI designer career path look like in Canada? We gathered our information through anonymous submissions from our global community of over 300,000 designers. Based on this data, UI designers who work in Canada make an average of $65,000 every year, ranging from about $50,000 to approximately $100,000. Let’s break down our findings on average UI designer salaries by experience.

Entry-level UI designer salary in Canada?

Entry-level UI designers are those who are just starting out and have no professional experience in the design industry. They may be recent university graduates or people who have decided to shift careers. If this description of entry-level UI designers matches you and you work in the USA, you can expect to make an average of $42,500 per year.

Junior-level UI designer salary in Canada?

Junior UI designers usually have 1 to 3 years of experience in the field. They are still getting to know the industry, but they can already work in a team setting and produce very valuable work. In Canada, junior UI designers usually make about $47,500 per year.

Mid-level UI designer salary in Canada?

Mid-level UI designers are those who have been working in the field for quite a few years (usually 3 to 8) and have gained significant experience. They are proficient in their craft and tend to produce higher-quality work than junior UX/UI designers. If this description of mid-level UI designers matches you and you work in Canada you can expect to make an average of $67,500 per year.

Senior UI designer salary in Canada?

If you are a senior UI Designer, it generally means that you have upwards of 8 years of experience in your field. By now, you have become proficient in what you do and can often produce the highest-quality work in the shortest time. If you are looking to work as a senior UI Designer in Canada, you should be aiming for jobs offering around $75,000 per year.

What Do UI Designers Do?

A user interface (UI) designer is responsible for creating visually appealing and functional interfaces. While UX designers are busy gathering information and insights about target users, UI designers use this information to craft interactive design elements like buttons, menus, inputs, tabs, sidebars, sliders, cards, lists, and dialogs. When it's a small business or startup, one person can handle both the UX and UI.

UI designers can implement tasks like:

  • Creating low and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes
  • Maintaining consistency by creating a style guide or following it
  • Designing all interface screens users might interact with
  • Analyzing the application and effect of layout, color, typography, and other design elements
  • Ensuring the responsiveness of all layouts
  • Crafting animations

The jobs of UI and UX designers are often interlaced. However, while a UX designer is more concerned about the overall feel of the product's user experience, a UI designer takes care of how the product's interface functions, looks, and feels.

Skills to Increase UI Designer Salaries

A UI designer's salary ranges based on their skills, education, certifications, and experience. Investigate and improve your UI UX design skills that will help you apply for your dream job.

  • The ability to work and communicate with a team, as well as empathy, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, and openness to feedback. Depending on your level of seniority and how many people you'll be working with, team management skills may also be required.
  • Accessibility: especially for UI designers, it is vital to pay attention to the details that can make or break an interface's usability for people with disabilities.
  • Prototyping and wireframing in high and low fidelity, which will help you communicate your designs to developers and stakeholders and allow researchers to test them with users.
  • An understanding of responsive and mobile design, to create interfaces that work an all screen sizes.
  • An eye for detail, which guarantees that you will spot mistakes before launching a product.
  • Very solid knowledge of the core principles of visual design, which will allow you to perfect the look of your product.
  • Awareness of the best practices of the most common UI components and patterns.
  • Overall, the ability to integrate the visual aspects of branding and style guides, or design systems, into your interfaces.
  • Proficiency with some UI design and handoff tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Avocode, and Zeplin.

Pro tip: Earning a UI designer certification can give you a competitive edge in the Canadian market.

Career Paths for UI Designers

UI designers come from various educational and professional backgrounds, but a design or web development background can certainly be a great advantage. There's no specific user interface college degree program, so you can start your journey by learning visual design and prototyping tools (Sketch, Figma, Proto.io, Framer, etc.) and studying design principles.

UI designer career path

By taking Uxcel's UI Designer career path, you will learn composition, UX design basics, accessibility, color theory, typography, and the best practices for building design components — the foundations for becoming a pro UI designer.