10 More Essential Resources for Designers by Mark
October 24, 2008 in interaction design with 4 Comments
Last time, we talked about how ZURBians improve their efficiency and workflow by linking you to a few of our favorite resources across the Web. We're back with another 10 today for our fellow designers that focus on finding inspiration, improving our skills, and keeping us efficient.
Pattern Tap
As a designer, you're more likely to see things differently than the rest of the crowd—we call that design thinking.
Get inspired and fill up on good Web with this collection of design patterns like 404 pages, headers, and more.
Web Design Inspiration
Patrick Haney has been at it for quite some time now: he's been collecting screenshots of some awesome Web design on Flickr for all the world to see. It's a great and easy way to get inspired if you're ever stuck, or just want to take in some new designs. He adds new ones at least a few times a month and there are some real gems in there.
Swiss Miss
Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer gone NYC, a graphic designer living in Brooklyn. Her site, Swiss Miss, is loaded with design thinking, strategy, and plenty of inspiration. Videos, photos, products, websites, and more populate her achives.
Veer Ideas
Most people know Veer for their stock images and fonts, but the good stuf is in The Skinny where they highlight their design findings across the Web. Their laid back, clean style and clear approach to showcasing design makes this a regular read for us.
Minimalist Web Design
Simple, clean, and minimal designs are not just trend words. Having a truly minimal design is more often an exercise in control and restraint, and it's hard work. Rainfall Daffinson has put together a nice set of links, quotes, and examples of minimalism in Web design. We use it as a reminder to keep things as simple as possible to ensure the best interactive experiences.
John Resig's Blog
Javascript lets you add behavior to your websites that XHTML and CSS can't, and if you do it right, you can really push your website into the future with lightweight effects and techniques that have been outlined by John's blog. As the creator and lead devloper of jQuery, he's got some chops on the matter. He even wrote the book on professional Javascript.
Copy Paste Character
Looking up how to insert special characters or symbols into your documents or HTML has been a pain in the butt for us. We found some help with the XHTML Character Reference, but it took a bit of work to copy and paste the symbol we wanted.
Copy Paste Character is a cleaner and smaller way to do the same thing. You just click to copy and then paste. It's very intuitive and easy to use.
I Love Typography
Last time we told you about bringing better typography to the Web. This time, we're telling you to keep learning more about typgoraphy. iLT is a great resource for fonts and offers a unique look at the history of many fonts and typography. A must for any deisgner.
Five Simple Steps...
Mark Boulton is renowned designer and speaker on a variety of Web design topics. He's written several series of articles with a common "Five Simple Steps to..." theme:
He's even putting the series in a book!
Web Developer's Handbook
Don't let the name fool you: the Web Developer's Handbook is a huge resource for just about everything Web desigeners and developers could need. Icons, CSS resources, usability, tools, and more. With so many great links and tools, you could easily spend a full day reading the Handbook.
What'd we miss?
Got others to add? Use the comment form below and drop us some links. We love finding new sources of inspiration, tools to make our life easier, or new insight into interaction design and strategy.
4 Comments
Patrick Haney says:
Thanks for including me with such useful resources. I've actually used all of these except for Swiss Miss (which I definitely need to check out) in the past. Veer Ideas and I Love Typography are 2 of my favorite things to look through when I need a boost of creativity.
Dan says:
Brilliant post, and super helpful. Is this part of a new trend? :)
Mark (ZURB) says:
Patrick: Veer has always been a great place to find new ideas, images, fonts, etc. Even clothing like the Kern jacket pictured on your site. They always seem to have great stuff pouring out of their pages.
Dan: Perhaps. It's always good to share resources and ideas we find with our fellow designers :). Improving our craft is an important part of the job, wouldn't you agree?
matthew Smith says:
Glad I've got my google alerts on! What a great recommendation from Zurb for Pattern Tap. We've worked hard to make that a decent resource for designers and we hope to improve it! We're thrilled that a quality design group like Zurb sees Pattern Tap as helpful to the design workflow.
We'd love to know how you all are using it, if you're ever inclined to share :) - drop a line : yo (at) patterntap (dot) com
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