A curated resource list to kickstart your design education

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Overview

“To be a good designer you must be a good engineer in every sense: curious, inquisitive.” — Charles Eames, 1949

Becoming a great designer is about much more than taking a single course or attending a single bootcamp.

You have to be self-sufficient. You have to be hungry to learn.

Throughout design school I collected every resource I found to be useful. Since then I have continued to amass a collection of links, books, articles, and more that will help you speed boost your career.

Basics

You have to start from the beginning. You have to understand the basics. Learn to love type, learn to navigate the pen tool, figure out colors, learn some design history, and learn some basic principles.

Starting UX

Okay, hopefully now you know the essentials. We'll learn more as we go, but let's jump into the UX world. The absolute most important thing for you to learn and master is process. While you continue to hone your product thinking, process is the value you bring. Tools change & trends die. Master process.

Advanced Resources

Once you've gotten your footing with the basics, learned some of the vocab, and figured out a bit more what interests you; try to absorb as much as you can from high quality sources.

Inspiration

It's always a good idea to have your ear to the ground; watch the trends, predict them, respond to them, and know what's happening in the design world.

Newsletters

Courses

Article feed

Design for Humanity
5 minute read
Your Body Text Is Too Small
13 minute read
Designing accessible products
8 minute read
The Golden Age of UX is Over
6 minute read
Psychology and product design
5 minute read
UX Writing vs Copywriting
5 minute read
A Muggle’s Guide to Product Design
4 minute read
A UX Career is a Business Career
9 minute read
Don’t take design critique as an insult
4 minute read
How to Design V1 Products and Live to Talk About It
6 minute read
10 cognitive biases to avoid in User Research (and how to avoid them)
12 minute read
Things I (honestly) don’t want to see in your portfolio
What Your Engineering Team Wants in a UX Designer
3 minute read
The Vandalisation of ‘UX’
11 minute read
What it takes to be a Product Designer
4 minute read
Guidelines for thoughtful product design
5 minute read
Content: the design system element you forgot
6 minute read
Accessibility drives aesthetics
8 minute read
The atomic unit of a research insight
Continuous user research in 11.6 seconds
4 minute read
A Guide to Understanding What Makes a Typeface Accessible
10 minute read
8-Point Grid: Vertical Rhythm
5 minute read
Don’t Confuse Product Validation With Product Research
4 minute read
How Quantitative UX Research Differs from Data Analytics
6 minute read
Settings are not a design failure
3 minute read
Great interfaces are made of good typography
6 minute read
Spacing, grids, and layouts
9 minute read
Designing Better Design Documentation
15 minute read
The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation
87 minute read
A Designer’s Guide to Working in Tech
29 minute read
The 8-Point Grid
6 minute read
The Power of Visioning
8 minute read