Rather than write an article about the awesome tools that I use to make my design work, I thought Id approach the topic from a different angle.

This is a list of great resources I use – sometimes on a daily basis – to learn about design, to get better about design thinking and problem solving. I use these things to prepare myself for the design process, they help make my imagination a reality.

Podcasts Pretty much every day I’ll listen to a podcast – its a fantastic conversational way to learn. Sure, you’re not actually in the conversation for real, but its such a familliar way to learn, its easy. At the moment Im Loving Shop Talk Show by Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks and Dave Rupert of Paravell Inc. Great weekly speakers and a nice split between actual design talk, and some front end coding that doesn’t go to deep.

Other podcasts on my iPhone are By Design – a much broader take on design in Australia hosted by Fenella Kernebone of the ABC, The Web Ahead by the amazing Jen Simmons, On The Grid a more graphic and advertising related podcast by Matt McInnerney, Andy Mangold and Dan Auer. Love Triple RRR in Melbourne’s Byte Into It podcast about all things computing, IT and user focussed design, and I also have 99% Invisible, Monocle Design and This American Life for good measure.

Dribbble This site cops a lot of flack from designers, developers and clients alike, but the value it brings to the design community is unquestionable. It helps designers strive to be their best, and showcases a great up-to-the-minute survey of the best trending industry practices. Sure, some may use this as a place to steal ideas and copy, but as I’ve written before, a trained designer in a disciplined research and discovery phase can take great value from a glance across super-relevant solutions and clippings of designs that have solved similar problems before them. Its a great resource, that Dribbble.

Designspiration and Haw-Lin Great site with a great contributor base adding great work all the time. Great. Lots of freshness here. Designspiration. M O O D is a little more abstract, a definite side step from traditional web design inspiration, but I find the faces and forms found here are really captivating. Its a really nice exercise just to take time out of the day and ‘read’ through the photos.

Design Blogs via RSS At the moment Im using Reeder App to catch up on the following design blogs. In no major order are Mark Boulton, A List Apart, Happy Studio, Simple Bits, The Island Continent, Cognition by Happy Cog, the Typekit blog, Jeffrey Zedman, StuntBox, Smashing Magazine, UI Parade, Van Schnieder’s blog, isdn, Subtraction.com, TypeEverything, alexlikesdesign, Bokardo, CSS Tricks, Designer News, One Minute Wonders, Behance and The Great Discontent. I follow a whole bunch of tech blogs, but that’s just to keep abreast of news.

Twitter and Kippt Great for links and seeing new products and sites launched online, these two are a great source of inspiration and information. Its an excellent way to see the finished product of other professionals, and the work is often introduced via a blog or tweet which provides important context.

View my feed on Kippt; some of my fave follows on my twitter are Ben Schwartz, Khoi Vinh, Josh Clarke, John Allsopp, Frank Chimero, Scott Belsky and Erik Spiekermann.

Booooooks Lots of ‘em. Currently Im reading Design is a Job by Mike Montiero. Grid Systems by Joseph Muller Brockmann. Its a classic graphic and typographic design book, but it totally underpins so much of the web design work I do today. Conversations with Students by Paul Rand is really inspiring – in a sense its like a written podcast, a discussion as above that you read though. Also by Michael Beirut 79 Short Essays on Design is a great read, centered around his times with Massimo Vignelli. Oh, and The Story of Art is an essential read for anyone who’s responsible for stylistic decisions on a daily basis – it provides so much foundation and grounding.

So they’re the main go-to resources I use each day to challenge my design. I really like the approach Rosetta Stone take when teaching languages – an wholly immersive approach with sights, sounds and smell. While I’ve tried to spend one lunchtime per week ‘levelling up’, I’ve found that concentrated periods (a day or two) of all-out-learning and thinking, while exhausting, have far more resonance and yield a deeper understanding of the learning.

If you’re a designer, what resources and tools do you use? What approach to learning feels best for you?

The post Get better at design – places and things I use to learn appeared first on Ricky Synnot Design.

Drawing on the rich city cityscapes captured in the black and white film Manhattan, this design immerses viewers in a quick flip-book style world, with glimpses of events, friends, and parties in their city.

Pulling this together – the design delivers quick animated sequences that capture the essence of whimsically going out with friends for a night in the city.

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Taken too was a small photo library I had been building documenting some street art projects I had done.  At the time I had just finished university, and was really exploring the street and my surrounding city as a canvas, and how art could exist in this landscape.

I was running a little search on The Way Back Machine the other day, and stumbled upon old incarnations of this website.  Here are some photos of a time I thought was lost forever.

Thanks internets.

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While not a functional eCommerce website, many visual cues have been used to the browsing and recognition process, ultimately resulting in increased online enquiries.

Visit: www.taharasuri.com.au

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“The eye wants to look at an orderly set of marks on the page. They eye wants relative perfection.  The hand is the radical aspect of writing.  The hand wants to write faster and faster, writing changes.  The hand wants to write expressively. Thats the radical hand at work. So the whole history of writing can be looked at as an elegant little conflict between the conservative eye, which wants everything perfect and rational, and the radical hand, which wants to write fast and write expressively.

And it’s this constant battle that makes our environment that we look at when we look at lettering.”

If we think about web design in this context, or design for digital mediums, then there’s really something I think we designers and art directors can learn. If in the above paragraph, we substitute ’lettering’ for ‘the web’, we come to a pretty interesting situation.

While humans have written for thousands of years, we may ‘type’ code for the web, but we certainly aren’t really ‘writing’ our designs be hand.  Watch the beautiful expression and flow that happens as the calligrapher in the video gently and effortlessly puts ink on paper.  The hand, arm moves in a practices, trained motion.  It’s a calm and serene setting where craft takes on form.

As designers we must demand technology that helps us craft the web with such fluidity, with such ease.  While I’ve been using a basic Bamboo Touch pen and tablet for a few months now, I still feel like im pointing and clicking like it’s 1984.

Maybe if I set up some environment with one of these motion detectors, and a top of the line tablet this would make a difference  but Im talking about a fundamental shift in the technology, the touchable interface, and the applications that it guides, a fundamental shift towards more expressive and fluid web and digital design.

What would this look like? How would it feel?  Right off the bat I’d probably hope we didn’t have ‘air’ based controls, like the motion sensor above, because its nice to hold a tool when you’re crafting.  Its the practiced and relatively perfected motions that take good craft into beautifully great craft, and that’s something as an industry we have the power to make easy, to facilitate and to provide worldwide.

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Fascinating stuff – Oefner mixes ferrofluid with watercolor and places the mixture over a magnet.

And the work of Haring:

And the amazing work of Australian indegenous artist Betsy Napangardi Lewis:

Fascinating stuff.

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Note: an ‘event’ is essentially a happening that one can attend. Maybe a gig, a gallery opening, or the circus.  Anything, just something that happens on a date at a particular time.

So with my limited knowledge about displaying content, most notably learned from Sarah Wachter-Boettcher’s talk at the 2012 Web Directions South conference, and regular talks on Jen Simmons’s Web Ahead podcast, and the ShopTalk boys too, I tried to find a good visual solution to presenting an event as its own content type.

We have news stories, articles, photo galleries, video posts and a whole raft of content types out there.  This is great, because the type gives the content its individual voice, and allows users to differentiate between them.

Take videos for instance – with a play symbol on top (active or not), and some optional timecode or a playhead, a user knows exactly what’s going on, and what to expect. The content is taking advantage of the one thing it has over other content – time.  And pretty moving-pictures.

So I question the way we represent events.  The one thing events have over other types is a time and a place relationship.  Its finite, its definite. If an event has been publish – its a big deal… *this* will take place, for real, at a particular venue at a particular time.  Thats powerful stuff.

Just by publishing the content type has the potential to move people.  It can gain commitment from many people to be there at that venue at that time.  You’re basically asking people to take serious action in the real world.

The best way we could display these dates in a dynamic way was with a calendar icon.  In the same way video content employs the universally recognisable play button, we decided to use a calendar icon filled with the event’s month and day value, so show that this piece of content is in fact, without doubt, an event.

Regular calendar icon in event unit

The large day number helps too – as users readily associate this with a reference to a date, as with the calendar app icon on iOS.  We did a larger version too, when a large feature rotator called for it.

A large calendar icon on an event unit

We’ve found higher engagement and far more intuitive understanding in our users having implemented the date icons onto all event units across the site. It helps separate event units from the purely written content, so the two arent fighting as much for attention on the page.

So the simple idea here is: Dress your content in it’s best clothes. If all your content units are wearing their best outfit, your website’s going to look a lot better!

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Update: ‘This’ is a previous theme of this site, not the current theme. It is still available for free download.

You can download and use it as a guide for help when designing for a mobile first, responsive design. If its a portfolio site, a business site or a simple one-pager, hopefully it’s of some help.

Git Repo: https://github.com/rsynnot/responsive-wordpress-theme-nemo 

Again, its a work-in-progress, so I’ll be updating the repository periodically. Keep an eye out for updates.

As I mention in the Readme.md file – the best outcome of this initiative is a discussion about responsive design, so please feel free to ask any questions, and make any recommendations, updates, fixes etc.  Comment below or send me an email.

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