Audience
- Empathy Mapping: This article is a quick primer on what exactly goes into the empathy mapping approach.
- User Personas: Here's a quick primer on what they are and how to start making them.
- Lean Personas: These are basically mini personas. Here are some tips on when and how to use them.
Context
- Thinking about your medium: Each medium/media you use had different design pros and cons. For example, here's a great comparison of the things you need to consider when designing for print versus digital media.
Simplicity
- Typography Basics: If you want to learn some quick and simple tips to make your typography cleaner, this article is well worth a read.
- Pre-made Colour Palettes - : If you're looking for colour scheme inspiration, check out Design Seeds. This site showcases a huge selection of colour schemes based on existing photographs.
- Color Palette Generators: Colour palette generator websites are also quite useful. On these types of sites you choose an image that has colours you think work well with your project, upload it to the site, and the site quickly generates a palette based on predominant colours from the image. For a basic palette generator, I find this one from DeGraeve works quite well. For pre-made palettes as well as ones you can customize yourself, try Coolors. Looking for even more colour palette resources? Check out this excellent article on 15 tools for generating colour schemes.
- Play With Color Combos: The Color Supply app is a fun site for helping you explore how different color combinations work together.
- Typography Games: There are three mini games I love for building your skills with designing with text. I Shot the Serif helps you practice recognizing the difference between serif and sans serif fonts though a fast-paced shooting game. KERNTYPE helps you learn to adjust the spacing between individual letters through activities and feedback. TypeConnection is a design "dating game" where you try to find compatible fonts to pair together harmoniously.
Flow
- Layout Ideas: If you're stumped for how to layout a page or screen, get some great ideas from this PDF poster. Leveraging the grid method for layout, it shows ALL 892 unique ways a 3x4 grid can be used for layouts.
- Twitter Brand Guidelines: If you want to investigate the Twitter brand guidelines I previewed in this presentation, you can find them here.
- Style Guide Examples: This article curated a wide range of corporate style and brand guidelines, which are great for browsing to get inspiration.
- Designing a Style Guide: This article walks you through the basics of what you might want to include in your own style guide for a project or organization.
Some more general design resources
- For more help with the basics: I curate a Design 101 Pinterest board that I'm constantly adding new design basics resources to on a regular basis. Be sure to check it out for resources that can help you keep building your skills.
- Email Newsletters: It may seem a bit old school, but newsletter content is a handy, bite-sized way to learn about design. There are two short newsletter series that I'd recommend checking out: Design by Numbers and Design by Hackers.
- Podcasts on Design: It's amazing how much you can learn about design from a medium that isn't visual at all. While there are tons of great design podcasts out there to choose from, two great places to start are 99% Invisible (one of my all-time favourite podcasts) and Design Matters.
- Find Even More Tools and Resources: One of the best sources I've found for keeping on top of new design tools and trends is just following fellow design nerds on Twitter (and then looking at who THEY follow to get even more great sources for info). Accounts I regularly get great design stuff from include:
Want to know more about design?
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