01. Design Thinking

Insightful articles/videos to help you become a better problem solver

Featured – IDEO Design Kit Methods, great design thinking and UX design methods to add to your tool kit.

Design Thinking and process 101

Design Thinking Video

The Double Diamond

Design Thinking & Ethics

IDEO Design Kit Methods (Featured above)

Design Sprints

How to conduct your own Google Ventures Design Sprint

User Experience & User Insights

How IDEO designers persuade companies to accept change

Customer Engagement Book

Intercom on Onboarding Book

Using customer stories to grow our business

User stories with examples and templates

User centered design canvas

Elements of user experience

02. Design Fundamentals

Things I used to harp on about all the time to designers I mentored

Featured: Legendary Dieter Rams shares his 10 Principles for good design. Timeless advice - even if we specialise in digital design look outside our own sphere for inspiration.

Articles

10 Principles for "Good Design" (Featured above)

Laws of UX

Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design

Design, Illustrated in 3 Charts

The dribbblisation of design

Critical Thinking

Metrics Versus Experience

Design's North Star

Great digital products don’t happen by accident

Video

The Gap by Ira Glass

Resource

The Guide to Design

03. Business & Marketing

Knowing this stuff will make your work much more effective, and help you earn more $$$. Great if you want to build a business one day, or simply to become a more valuable designer as you become more senior

Featured: Intercom on starting up, is the playbook for startups. Great to learn the ins and outs of marketing for startups and beyond. Learn about key metrics in an interesting and applicable way, which you can apply into your design work and decision making. Recommended reading for designers.

Articles

How to build a business

Ten rules for negotiating a job offer

How to Grow Your Business: 15 Steps We Actually Took Growing to $3.5M/Year

IndieHackers interviews

The Top 5 Behavioural Economics Principles for Designers

Your 3 step guide to building a marketing plan that works

Seth Godin - Blog

Identify your ideal audience

https://joshspector.com/identify-your-ideal-audience/

Video

Steve Jobs on Marketing

Resources

Convertkit open startup metrics

Startup Pitch Decks

Growth Design

Neuromarketing - This is powerful please use for good

Books

Intercom on Starting Up (Featured Above)

Intercom - The Growth Handbook

The Million Dollar One Person Business - Elaine Pofeldt

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh

Girl Boss - Sophia Amoruso

The Hard Things About Hard Things - Ben Horrowitz

Principles - Ray Dalio

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

Zero to One - Peter Thiel

Behind the Cloud : Idea to Billion Dollar Company - Marc Benoiff

04. Typography

Handy collection of tools, type foundries and articles to up your type game

Featured: Klim Type Foundry - one of my favourite type foundries. Their in use section - showcases the potential and application for many of their typefaces. A great source of inspiration and their blog is full of great reads on type.

Type Foundries

Type Foundry Directory - Great directory of Type Foundries

Klim Type Foundry (Featured above)

Resources & Articles

Buttericks Practical Typography

Typeface – Mechanics 001

Typeface – Mechanics 002

Signifier Design Information

Typelist

Inspiration/Miscellaneous

Tools

http://localfonts.xyz/

Books

The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst

New Perspectives in Typography -

Designing news - Francesco Franchi

The Intelligent Lifestyle Magazine - Francesco Franchi

Thinking with Type - Ellen Lupton

Free fonts

Atipo Foundry

Open Foundry

Google Fonts

05. Visual Design

Concepts and sites I visit to improve the craft side of my work

Featured: Dose of Design tumblr covers a variety of visual design cues for inspiration. Sourcing inspiration from the usual digital product design sites - becomes stale. Venture out into other mediums to be inspired and bring that essence back into UI/UX design when the right project presents itself.

Articles

Building a Visual Language

Get noticed in a crowded marketplace

Optical Adjustment – Logic vs Designers

Language of Modular Design

Type & Graphic Design

Dose of Design Tumblr (Featured above)

My Design Obsession Tumblr

Colors

Material design the color system

Web Gradients

Patterns

https://patterncollect.com/

The usual hubs

My Dribbble likes

Behance

Siteinspire

New Inspiration hubs

https://visuelle.co.uk/

https://visualjournal.it/

Miscellaneous

Grids

Machine learning content editor

Lights and Shadow

Design Valley - Collection of tools

DailyUI

Awesome Figma Tips

06. Prototyping & Animation

Look it's 2022 you need to know how to prototype. Bring your work to life to test, validate and see if your designs hold up beyond static screens. Great for testing out ideas, gaining user feedback and getting stakeholder buy in.

Featured: Protopie - a powerful and flexible prototyping tool.

Articles

Animation that matters adding value to your interface

The UX in Motion Manifesto

Tools

Framer

Figma

Protopie (Featured above)

Principle

UXPin

Webflow

07. Mockups & Assets

Handy collection of various assets and mediums for when you need to create comps and videos

Featured: LS Graphics is my go to for mockup devices and animations. Great for quick stakeholder presentations or for video animations.

Mockups

LS Graphics - Device mockups and video mockups

Mr. Mockup - Various mockups

Things - Generator

https://supply.family/

Stock photos & videos

Unsplash - Royalty free images

Coverr - Free stock video footage

Pexels - Royalty free images and videos

Stocksy - High quality stock photos

Artgrid - High quality royalty free videos

Icons and Illustrations

Blush – Illustrations for everyone

The Noun Project

Undraw

Backgrounds

Haikei

Animated Abstract Shapes

Maps

Map styles with google

08. Design Patterns & Design Systems

A collection of aggregator sites for design patterns & design systems, featuring articles and source files

Featured: DesignSystems.com is a great resource centre for learning about building design systems.

Resource Libraries

Material Design 3.0

Design Systems for Figma

DesignSystems.com

Mobbin - Mobile Design Patterns

WebFrame - Web App Design Patterns

UX Archive

Growth Design

Awwwards Collections

Open Graph image gallery

Uber Base Gallery - Figma file

https://component.gallery/

Ebook

Design Systems Handbook

Articles/Videos

SuperFriendly Design Systems

10 great design systems and how to learn and steal from them

Tools

https://standards.site/

09. Videos

A collection of inspirational videos over the years

Featured: Designers Watch is a hub of interesting documentaries for designers and artists. Be entertained while learning a thing or two :)

Libraries

High Resolution - Design Leader interviews

Designers Watch (Featured Above)

Abstract: The Art of Design - Check out other episodes

Videos

Katie Dill - Airbnb's Director of Experience

Hartmut Esslinger

Spotify VP Design - Rochelle King

Everything is a Remix

The Last Lecture: Achieving your childhood dream

Stanford commencement speech - Steve Jobs

Head of Design Instagran - Ian Spalter

How to build your Creative Confidence

Work As Play

Seth Godin – Keynote

When we build - Wilson Miner

Reinvention - Hillman Curtis

Video Editing

https://www.descript.com/

10. Design for Good

Design for positive change and purpose, interesting ideas and companies in the space

Featured: Be another lab using VR to build empathy and harness a different viewpoint and understanding.

Get Stark - Accessibility Resource Library

Design and Accessibility Resource

https://www.a11yproject.com/

11. Blogs & Portals

Other great sites, aggregators and reads

Featured: The Great Discontent a classic web publication with beautiful typography and art direction, with interviews featuring various creatives and designers. The great Paula Scher here :)

Design company blogs & resource libraries

Inside Design Invision

Evernote Design

Apple Design

Portals & Reading

UX Collective

The Year of the Looking Glass

Interviews

Award Sites

12. Design Books

Books are a great way to level up your thinking and process

Featured: This ebook The Way to Design by Steve Vassallo is recommended reading for me. It's not one of those big design books that everyone talks about but that's what makes it a gem. Tons of great insight and wisdom distilled by Steve.

Paperback

LeanUX - Eric Ries

Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

Don't me think - Steve Krug

Hooked - Nir Eyal

Elements of Typographic Style – Robert Bringhurst

Google Ventures Sprint - Jake Knapp

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh

The Vignelli Canon - Massimo Vignelli

Creativity Inc - Ed Catmull

How to... - Michael Beirut

Ebooks

The Way to Design - Steve Vassallo

UX Pin - Free Ebooks

Invision - Ebooks

13. Jobs, Salary & Wealth creation

Resources to help you get paid more, and build financial security. Get that f*** you money - so you have the power to say 'no' to things that don't light a fire within you

Featured: This tweet storm inspired write up by Naval pretty much sums up my sentiments about Wealth Creation. How to Get Rich

Articles & Resources

How to get hired at Google

Ten rules for negotiating a job offer

Naval Ravikant - How to Get Rich

Nathan Barry - Ladders of wealth

Salaries for top tech designers - Use this to see what the top band of designs are capable of getting paid and the value that design can bring to the table for negotiating

Books

Millionaire Fastlane - MJ Demarco Ignore the scammy name it's an incredible book

Retire Young, Retire Rich - Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

Pricing Design - Dan Mall

14. Web3, Blockchain & Crypto

Learn more about the future

Featured: Great video on the future being decentralized. With founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson

Web3/NFTs Thread

NFT views

How to make it in crypto as a normal person (Recommend this one for financial advice)

What are smart contracts?

How does blockchain work?

The future will be decentralized

Lets Do Defi - Dencentralized Finance for dummies

Crypto basics & market

Ethereum - The worlds computer

Web3 - Solving trust issues with math

Web3 Counter Arguments

15. Designers, Agencies & Studios

Some designers & agencies who I've followed over the years. Some are friends, acquittances and people who I think are doing interesting things in the space in one form or another. Opinions and work may vary to mine - but that’s what makes the list interesting.

Featured: Naoto Fukasawa. Even though I specialise in digital design - I tend to find inspiration in mediums outside of our own space. How great designers approach form, simplicity, function and aesthetic.

Agencies & Studios

https://madebystudio.family/