Sure, the project actually started off as a personal project so there's no "client". It was inspired by a conversation of mine with a client who's an interior designer and we were at her place. She mentioned it was hard for her to be able to grab colors from around her and she'd love to be able to share those colors for future projects. A few weeks after, I was meeting another designer friend of mine when we were talking about the interior decor and paint of the wall and that scenario came up again. Led me to want to work on a color tool that can inspire all kinds of creatives to easily grab colors and create color palettes from there to be shared with others.

Freelance UI/UX Designer here currently working a 1 year contract at a Telco.

Freelance-wise : Personally, I used to think the same way a long time ago but have since then, disciplined myself to take on the approach of always including that into whatever client project I am working on. As long as your wireframes are "rough" enough to give them an idea of how things flow and the general idea of content, it shouldn't get them too attached to it. The idea of wireframes is to help with quick iteration and brainstorming without putting in too much time and effort into the visual side.

For my personal projects that I actually sketch on paper and whiteboard, I can always refer to it to do the design and iterate from there, unless I plan to display the behind the scenes progress shots of wireframing on my website portfolio. One example of project that I didn't actually do wireframing but hi-res concepting is for my project here:

www.huesnap.com

In this project, I mapped out user journey and flow with the developer and accounted for features but because the design was straightforward enough, I could just jump right into designing, while making iterations quickly.

To be honest, it's totally easy to feel discouraged if you feel like the amount of time spent didn't land you the job you were hoping for.

Based on how I'd look at this, I think you just need to find the passion for doing what you originally set out to accomplish. I know it's easy to think that you want a good job that's why you got into Interactive Design, but I'd like to think that you like it to some degree and didn't get into it just to get a solid paying job. I took a look at your website and I think it'd be a good idea to update it with more recent works. Even if you don't have solid work to show, find an idea for a project that gets you motivated and excited.

What are you passionate about? Is it gaming? Travelling? Maybe it's animals? Finding something you're interested in and trying to design something around it or finding some problems to solve within that space will really get you digging deeper into a design problem, which will in turn give you good design pieces to showcase on your portfolio and have a higher chance of scoring interviews and jobs.

Keep your chin up!

I was looking around for something like this when trying to launch my product. I ended up using GIPHY Capture which did the trick for me, but in terms of having the gif appear in a mockup, that is a lot trickier.

Huge foodie,ex-food blogger and designer here too. Love the concept of your website and the color palette!

The coffee lemonade was such an interesting idea haha

Love the concept and the simplicity of getting a paper drawing scanned vs having to scan it with the scanner. Definitely going to be giving this a shot!

Haha we might! What can you offer? :P

This is a project my partner and I spoke about and have in our pipeline after launching our utility tool for designers!

Great question to consider,I'm not as old (lol don't know how to phrase this without sounding rude) and don't have as many years as you guys seem to have but it's something I've considered myself.

I got into the industry really early at 18 with no formal education and just pretty threw myself into taking on side projects and things to learn. Having done this for 8 years, I do see younger and "hungrier" designers who are getting into the field through bootcamp experience and such.

My end goal as a designer has always been to open my own agency, working with client projects to fund my own side projects. I haven't stopped freelancing and doing short-term contracts every now and then to gain the experience and network, and work on my side projects in the evenings and weekends so hopefully that allows me to get to where I want to be about 10 years or so from now.

Definitely to showcase things I've done on sites like Dribbble/Behance/instagram! I don't know too much about HTML export, but does it support being hosted on personal websites based on Wordpress?