Week 0
Pre-work and cohort intros.
You get the syllabus, the reading list, your cohort's Slack channel, and 60 minutes with your assigned mentor. Most cohorts meet for an informal kickoff happy hour the Friday before.
Live cohorts · Self-paced tracks · Real outcomes
Design and product education that ships work, not just knowledge.
Twelve-week live cohorts taught by working senior practitioners. Real client projects. A hiring partner network of 47 product orgs. Self-paced tracks too, if your schedule needs it.
Next cohort: October 6 · Applications close September 18 · Twelve spots, twelve practitioners
What 12 weeks looks like
From pre-work to alumni network — every week mapped.
The Atlas cohort is built around four phases. Each phase has a clear deliverable and a clear point at which you can drop or pivot if it isn't working.
pathway
Week 0
Pre-work and cohort intros.
You get the syllabus, the reading list, your cohort's Slack channel, and 60 minutes with your assigned mentor. Most cohorts meet for an informal kickoff happy hour the Friday before.
in your cohort
12
Weeks 1–4
Foundations: the actual craft.
Two live sessions per week, 90 minutes each. Lecture-then-critique format. Weekly assignment grounded in a real (anonymized) client problem. Office hours every Friday with one of the instructors.
Weeks 5–10
Projects: build something that ships.
Six weeks on one real client project. Your team of four owns scope, research, design, and handoff. The client reviews your work. Critique by senior practitioners. Stakes are intentionally high.
Weeks 11–12
Portfolio + presentation.
Two weeks to turn what you built into the case study version of your work. Final presentation to the cohort, the instructors, and a small panel of hiring partners. Recordings are yours forever.
After
Lifetime alumni community.
Slack channel for 1,400+ alumni. Job board where partners post first. Quarterly virtual reunions. A real network of people who shipped together, not just sat in a Zoom together.
Programs
Six tracks. Live or self-paced. Career-aware.
We picked these six programs because they're the moments in a designer's career when education compounds the hardest — and where most existing options either oversell or underdeliver.
Product Design Fundamentals
A 12-week live cohort for designers moving into product. Twelve students. Two instructors. One real client project per cohort. Held twice a year.
Senior Design Systems
An 8-week intensive for designers building or maintaining design systems at scale. Tokens, primitives, governance, contribution flows, and stakeholder politics.
Design Engineering Crash Course
A 6-week self-paced program for designers learning to ship in React. Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Framer Motion, and the parts of TypeScript designers actually need.
Research Operations
A 4-week live workshop on the boring-important parts of research: participant ops, panel hygiene, repository, archive culture, and proving research's impact.
Portfolio Studio
A 4-week 1:1 portfolio rebuild. One senior practitioner. Three case studies. The version of your work that gets hiring managers to reply.
Career Coaching
Six 1:1 sessions over three months. Salary negotiation, interview prep, scoping new roles, and the conversation about whether to stay or leave.
A typical week as a cohort student
Live instruction, async work, real critique.
Four hours of live class. Four-to-six hours of assignment work. One office-hour Friday. The rest is your life — we built this for working designers.
story
layered story
Live lecture — 90 minutes, recorded.
Instructor walks through the week's topic with real examples. Q&A baked in. You can attend live or watch the recording the same night.
proof
1
active layer
1/5
Monday 7pm ET
Live lecture — 90 minutes, recorded.
Instructor walks through the week's topic with real examples. Q&A baked in. You can attend live or watch the recording the same night.
Tuesday–Thursday
Assignment work, in your own hours.
Most students spend 4–6 hours across the week on the assignment. Cohort Slack stays active — students unblock each other constantly.
Thursday 7pm ET
Live critique — 90 minutes, your work on the screen.
Half the cohort presents each week. Critique is rigorous but kind. You'll watch four critiques and present in one, then alternate the next week.
Friday office hours
Open Zoom with an instructor.
Drop in for 1:1 help, a deeper conversation about your work, or just to ask 'is this normal?' (it almost always is).
Weekend
Optional: cohort study groups.
Self-organized. Some cohorts meet at coffee shops. Some do virtual coworking. Some don't. All formats valid.
Alumni
What 1,400+ alumni say a year after graduating.
Survey data from the most recent 200 alumni, plus selected quotes from longer conversations. Salary and title bumps are the headline; the alumni network is the quiet long-term value.
“I was at a senior level and stuck. After Atlas, I was leading a design systems team three months later. The hiring partner network was the unfair advantage no one talks about.”
“I expected the cohort to be a glorified course. It was the most intense and most rewarding twelve weeks of my career. The critiques alone were worth the price.”
“Career coaching paid for itself in the first negotiation. I went in asking for 15% more; I walked out with 38% and a level promotion.”
“I'm an intro and the live format scared me. I was wrong. Twelve people, twelve weeks — by week three you know everyone's work and they know yours. Tiny is the feature.”
One student, one year
What Atlas actually looked like for Sara.
Sara K. graduated from the Spring 2024 cohort. We tracked her career through to four months after graduation. The arc is typical — but every cohort student writes their own.
01
02
03
04
Before
Sara was a senior product designer at a Series A.
Five years of experience. Strong execution. Stuck on systems thinking and zero exposure to the platform-level decisions her CTO was making.
exp at start
5yr
Before
Sara was a senior product designer at a Series A.
Five years of experience. Strong execution. Stuck on systems thinking and zero exposure to the platform-level decisions her CTO was making.
Week 6
Sara is co-designing a token system for a client's e-commerce rewrite.
Her team of four is shipping spec, the critiques from senior practitioners are landing, and she's reading the design-systems writing she used to skim.
Week 12
Final presentation. Hiring partner panel.
Sara presents the rewrite. Two of the hiring partners ask her follow-up questions. The case study is on her portfolio the next day.
Month 4
Sara is a Staff Designer at one of the hiring partners.
Salary up 38%. Scope expanded to lead the design-system practice. She still attends the alumni Slack three times a week.
Pricing
Pick the format that matches how you actually learn.
Cohort, self-paced, or team — same content, different structure. We do not offer scholarships at the Atlas pricepoint, but our hiring partners reimburse cohort tuition for most full-time roles.
Self-Paced
For learners on their own time. Lifetime access, video lessons, written assignments, and Slack-community support.
$890/one-time
- Full course content (all tracks)
- Lifetime access to materials
- Slack community access
- Written feedback on portfolio submissions
Most popular
Cohort
For learners who want live instruction, real client projects, and a high-accountability environment with a small group.
$3,400/per cohort
- All self-paced content included
- 12-week live cohort with 11 peers
- 2 senior instructors, 1 mentor
- Real client project (paid externship)
- Hiring partner panel + lifetime alumni access
Team
For 3+ designers. Volume rates, custom client-project alignment, and an internal showcase at the end. Most enterprise teams sponsor 4–8 designers per cohort.
Custom
- Volume pricing (10–40% off)
- Dedicated cohort if team is large enough
- Custom client-project alignment
- Quarterly check-ins with our team lead
The Atlas Note
One essay a week. About design careers. From working practitioners.
Long-form essays from instructors and alumni. Real career stories, real critique tips, real industry shifts. 18,400 subscribers. Tuesday mornings, no promo.
No spam. One-click unsubscribe. We send less than we should.