Some resources to get started with design
Last October in a meeting in Bangalore, an engineer of our team asked me about useful resources to learn more about design. It is always great to see interest in design from everyone, but especially from the developers that put together the pieces to build the interfaces for our users.
She half-joking mentioned that I may just recommend UX Design for mobile, the book I co-authored and was recently published. While I’d definitely recommend the book, I decided to compile some of the material that I have been more often pointing to (or sharing excerpts from) in conversations about design with engineers or other newcomers to the design field.
Classic books
There is a vast catalog of design books. The ones below are some classic reads that I’d recommend for beginners in the field:
- Don’t make me think by Steve Krug is a short and easy introduction to usability for beginners.
- About face by Alan Cooper is a comprehensive guide for Interaction Design that introduces the concept of design driven by user needs (as opposed to being dictated by technology). It introduces the notion of user research, design principles, and gets deep into interaction details.
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk compiles interesting findings about how our brains work when perceiving the world or making decisions, and how to keep these considerations in mind when designing for humans.
- Microinteractions by Dan Saffer states the importance of the small interactions that compose a larger system and how to design them right.
- Sprint by Jake Knapp provides a good overview of a pragmatic and condensed design process. As part of Google Ventures they were applying a design cycle in a single week to research, explore, prototype and evaluate ideas for different start-ups.
Even if you don’t get a copy of the above books, there is some interesting material related to them from their websites.
Free resources
In addition to the above books, I also found useful many of the free resources that Internet has to offer. Here is a small selection:
- Mike Monteiro provides an introduction on the role of the designer in an excerpt of the first chapter of his book. His talk about the importance of presenting your work is also very useful for designers and non designers. He has also participated in the Dear design student series which have some interesting posts for people entering the design field.
- The Sketch book by Konigi has good material about exploring ideas in general, and sketching them in particular.
- The course Design: Creation of Artefacts in Society is available for free in coursers. Most of the material can also be read in a free ebook by the professor Karl T. Ulrich.
- Google Material Design and Apple Human Interface Guidelines describe the principles they recommend for their platforms, but they also capture and illustrate some general design good practices.
- UX Myths collects frequent misconceptions about user experience, with links to research. For collections of specific principles you can check also Dieter Ram’s principles of good design, laws of simplicity, or the laws of UX.
- Practical typography is focused on, well, typography and provides both general and more detailed recommendations on typography.
- The HEART framework helps to think on analytics for a product form a user experience perspective.
- The Vignelli cannon captures the perspectives of the well-known graphic designer Massimo Vignelli.
I hope these resources are useful.
