The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You [Book]
By Julie Zhou, formerly VP of Design at Facebook and now cofounder of Inspirit
Related: The Looking Glass

Team Structures and Operating Models
by Andrew (Andy) Warr, Sr. Staff Design Researcher at Uber  •  UX Collective
Read his other stuff, too.

The Business Impact Of Design: Five Best Practices For Measuring It  [Report, 17 pgs.]
By Gina Bhawalkar, Forrester  •  via InVision

Business Thinking for Designers
InVision

The Anatomy of a Large Experience Design Organization — 2.0
By Jesse Kaddy, Associate Director, Product Design at Wayfair

A Tactical Guide to Managing Up
First Round Review

Make a user guide to working with you with this article from First Round Review and this from Julie Zhou

Staff.design – Navigating the Individual Contributor Career Path [Website]
A fantastic project by Brian Lovin

Tips for managing a team of very senior designers [Twitter thread]
By Stan Rapp, Product Design Manager at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Lattice’s Library, including their collection of ebooks and templates — great resources for managers and HR pros

Cross-pollination between design teams can be a real 10xer. Try a design fika (from the Swedish coffee break), using this guide from the Webflow design team.

The Manager’s Handbook [E-Book]
By Alex MacCaw, CEO of Clearbit

Design Leadership Handbook [EPUB]
By Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery  •  Published by DesignBetter.Co by InVision

Performance Management as a New Manager, Part 1, 2, 3, 4 are incredible [Articles]
By Jasmine Christensen

The US military is one of the best researchers and teachers of operational leadership in the world. People significantly underestimate how much of the US military's effectiveness has depended on how they've made operational leadership a science. Wharton Business School (routinely itself ranked #1 business school) called Marine OCS some of the best leadership training on the planet. Because of the nature of the military, they love documentation (manuals), and because it's the US government, nearly all their materials are freely available in the public domain.

• The USMC's JJDIDTIEBUCKLE mnemonic framework for leadership traits [PDF]
• US Army ADP 6-22: Army Leadership and The Profession [PDF]
• MCWP 6-11: Leading Marines [PDF]

To name just a few. Google around—there's so much free coursework on leadership.

One caution here: the military is great at operational leadership, which is designed to achieve efficiency and order, and which benefits from strictly hierarchical, top-down leadership. Design organizations usually have very different leadership needs focused around collaboration and innovation, which benefits from a flat, egalitarian, and informal structure. Knowing both types and when to use what tool is key. Lots of friction in design leadership happens at this liminal space, between operations mindsets that hate ambiguity and creative mindsets that benefit from it. Becoming proficient in both helps you navigate both worlds and designer leaders often under-index on the operational side.

There's an explosion of browser-based 3D tools like Spline and Glossi which are really transforming how designers can use 3D in their work. Check out how web tools like Webflow let you embed a Spline scene and animate it with no code. Really cool.

Devon Ko has been the go-to expert on 3D for designers for a long time; she teaches a course on it (focused on Cinema 4D) appropriately called 3D for Designers. If you have a 3D animation question she—or the Slack community she's made for the course—is who I'd ask.

Blender is another great tool, and it's free and open-source, which makes it easy to get started or ideal if you're just dipping your toe into 3D

Augmented Human: How Technology Is Shaping the New Reality [Book] by Helen Papagiannis

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a great starting point to make sure your design work is accessible. Also check out guides like, What’s New in WCAG 2.1

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design guidelines, including their Inclusive 101 Guidebook [PDF]

Stark is a suite of tools to help you make your design more accessible. Also check out The Stark Community for meetups, help docs, and a Slack where you can ask questions

I really like the Contrast app for Mac too—it lets you quickly test colors from anywhere on your computer

This section wouldn't be complete without starting with Unsplash. Unless you live under a rock you know this is the world's best source of free stock photography. I think Unsplash+, their paid service, punches above a lot of other stock imagery sources, too.

Death to the Stock Photo has great photography organized by shoot by various photographers. Subscribe to their free newsletter and get a monthly free drop in your inbox, and subscribe to their paid subscription to get much more, or pay ala carte per image.

Filmsupply is probably the best stock video—actually, the word film feels more apt given how cinematic and narrative-driven these shots are—site out there. Also check out their sister site for music, Musicbed.

Cosmos, a Pinterest-like product I love (check out my boards here), has created Public.Work, a search engine for over 100,000 public-domain images from sources like the New York Public Library. Unsplash's Archival collection is another great source of this kind of historical imagery, too.

People + AI Research (PAIR) at Google, especially their guidebook is a great resource for designing at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence

Counterprint might be the best design bookstore ever. Based in the UK but shipping worldwide.

One of the best places to find design books is the design section of the Rizzoli Bookstore. If you can, also go to the brick and mortar store IRL in NYC; you can easily spend hours browsing, leaving reluctantly only when security tells you they’re closing and yes, you really do have to leave now. Speaking from personal experience.

Museums are one of the best sources of design books. Check out bookstores at SFMOMA, NYC’s MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt, Poster House, to name a few

Many design books are published by one of a few big publishers, like MIT Press, Phaidon, and Taschen, and you can shop from them directly

Standards Manual has a physical location in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NYC

Some tech companies have their own imprint, like Stripe Press

Learn more about being a Climate Designer at ClimateDesigners.org. And check out their jobs page, too.

Emergency on Planet Earth [Google Doc]
A thorough walkthrough of everything there is to know about the worldwide planetary climate emergency we’re currently facing, including what needs to happen next

Figma runs an annual conference called Config which, given Figma's popularity, has kinda become THE meetup for designers in tech each year. Streaming free online or paid IRL in San Francisco.

AIGA runs a great design conference every year

For a very academic HCI focus, check out ACM's (Association of Computing Machinery) renowned conference called CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). The site is different each year so Google to find this year's registration site.

Dribbble used to run a cool conference called Hang Time but I don't think they're running it anymore unfortunately :(

Intercom on Customer Support
‍By Intercom

Simply the go-to manual for information graphics design:
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures [Book] by Donna Wong

Everything by Edward Tufte, particularly The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [Book]. He also hosts a 1-day workshop course where he teaches case studies from his books. I took this in-person in a giant hotel ballroom but it now appears to be offered online. Happy to tell you more if you’re considering it.

History and Foundation of Information Science, a curated list of books from the MIT Press

The Politics of Design [Book] by Ruben Pater

For a great case study in information graphics discourse, check out The New York Subway Map Debate [Book], a new book by Gary Hustwit, featuring newly discovered photos and transcripts from that famous evening at the Cooper Union in 1978 when designer Massimo Vignelli and cartographer John Tauranac debated the future of the NYC Subway Map. Includes a forward by Paula Scher of Pentagram as well. Definitely worth the read for anyone interested in designing information graphics; if you understand this tradeoff, you'll understand a lot about the subject.

How not to design data graphics: WTF Visualizations

A quick note on this section: process is one of the hardest topics in building products and one reason for that is that it’s so much about judgement and adaptability. It’s about what tools you have and knowing how and when to use them. No one process is right for every situation, person, product, etc. It’s something that tends to strongly correlate with experience and it’s hard to codify best practices that are widely applicable.

Principles of Product Design [EPUB] – a good reminder on best practices for design process
By Aarron Walter • Published by DesignBetter.Co by Invision

How to Present Designs
By Julie Zhuo

DesignOps Handbook [EPUB]
By by Kate Battles, Meredith Black, Dave Malouf, Collin Whitehead, and Gregg Bernstein (editor) • Published by DesignBetter.Co by InVision

Design Systems [EPUB + Guidebook]
By Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, and Roy Stanfield • Published by DesignBetter.Co by InVision

How to start a design system: Design Systems: Pilots & Scorecards by SuperFriendly

Adele, by UXPin, is a giant “repository of publicly available design systems and pattern libraries”

Enterprise Design Sprints [EPUB + Guidebook] by Richard Banfield • Published by DesignBetter.Co by InVision

The Design of Everyday Things [Book]
By Don Norman (of “Norman Door” fame), former VP of Advanced Technology at Apple + professor of computer science, cognitive science, psychology, among other things

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception [Book]
By James J. Gibson

Optical Effects in User Interfaces: An Illustrated Guide (the importance of making things look like they’re sized, aligned, desgined, etc. consistently rather than actually being geometrically consistent)
By Slava Shestopalov  •  Muzli

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play [Book]
By Cliff Kuang + Robert Fabricant

Things We Could Design – For More Than Human-Centered Worlds [Book]
By Ron Wakkary  •  MIT Press

Wakkary argues that “…human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but is itself part of the problem…and that posthumanist design enables a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, with whom we are entangled.” The book’s forward is really great too, in how it defines what design even means.

Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape It and The Politics of Design
By Ruben Pater (who has a fantastic website of work too)

The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future and Design in Conservative Times
By Marjanne Van Helvert

Cory Doctorow is an incredible thinker on tech:

• The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation [Book]
• An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification at DEF CON 31 [Talk]
• The Enshittification of TikTok [Article]

Design Justice—”An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.” 2021 PROSE Award Winner, Engineering & Technology Category [Book]
By Sasha Costanza-Chock  •  MIT Press

Diversity and Inclusion in Tech, Part 1: Foundations, Myths, and Pitfalls and Part 2: Improving the Hiring Process
“Everything you want to know about D&I in technical hiring but are too afraid to ask.”
By Jennifer Kim and Jason Wong
Related: For startups in particular, here’s a great thread by Jennifer on Twitter on key things to know. And Inclusion at Work, too.

The Diversity & Inclusion Compendium for Designers [Google Doc collaboration]
A huge Google Doc filled with D&I resources for designers
Curated by Marissa Louie

Design Books by Womxn & People of Color
Curated by Yuan Wang

The Good Boss: 9 Ways Every Manager Can Support Women at Work
By Kate Eberle Walker

Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume
By Lauren Rivera + András Tilcsik • Harvard Business Review
Related: Interestingly, this seems to apply to men more than women

Research: Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time
By Lai et al. • Harvard

The Art of Work presents:
Homerun’s Guide to Diversity & Inclusion [PDF]

Learn about bias in artificial intelligence with AI Explorables by Google’s People + AI Research (PAIR)

Pocket Biases [App]

Wikipedia’s Cognitive Bias Codex is a beautiful “radial dendrogram” showing 188 cognitive biases, each clickable and linked to their respective Wikipedia article. A go-to reference for learning about cognitive bias. (via Dense Discovery)

I took the course, Emotionally Fluent Leadership by Design Dept. [Course], taught by Liz and Mollie, the go-to experts to learn about understanding and managing emotions at work. Read their two books, No Hard Feelings [Book] (selected a best book of the year by NPR and Fortune) and the sequel, Big Feelings [Book]. And articles of theirs, like this one in HBR about unwritten rules in organizations [Article].

Pro tip from Liz + Mollie’s wisdom: If you work remotely, consider that the person you’re speaking to is in a different physical context, so they may bring a meaningfully different mental context to the conversation, too. Don’t forget that you’re speaking to them in their home, so you’re a sort of guest. That’s an additional layer of complexity to manage. Give yourself—and them—the space to build that skill.

Radical Candor [Book] teaches you how to be clear and kind by leading with, you guessed it, "radical candor” at work
By Kim Scott

A feelings wheel is a great tool to more clearly identify how you feel. Start in the center and work your way outward.

Therapy is incredibly valuable and everyone should do it (especially people managers) but it can be hard to know where to start. Though there are a lot of startups offering alternative formats like texting, it’s not the same as direct 1:1 time in my opinion. Alma [Product] can be a great place to find a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, and more.

The Senior Software Engineer [Book] by David Bryant Copeland is a great guide to the behaviors of great tech leaders and has a lot of applicability outside of engineering, too

Nemil Dalal's Notes to a Young Software Engineer has a bunch of great articles. Also look at Four Startup Engineering Killers as well.

State of Startups 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015
”The industry's largest dataset on what it’s like to run a startup” from First Round

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2018
First Round Review

Everything that Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, has written (don’t let the 90’s website aesthetic fool you)

A great resource to find investors is Ramp’s Investor Database

The Freedom of Ignorance [Article] by Nemil Dalal

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design [Book]
By Michael Beirut

Design Justice—”An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.” 2021 PROSE Award Winner, Engineering & Technology Category [Book]
By Sasha Costanza-Chock • MIT Press

Designerly Ways of Knowing [Book] and this article on Futuress featuring excerpts
By Danah Abdulla, recommended by @round via Yang You

Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing [Book] – "a theory of place for interaction design" that combines theory of architecture with interaction design
By Malcolm McCullough • MIT Press

Start here:

• Most Slack-based design communities (like IxDA, Designer Fund Collective, etc.) have jobs channels which are some of the best insider info on roles, including ones that haven't yet been posted publicly
• Most VCs help their portfolio companies recruit. A bunch have public job boards (check out this one from Designer Fund for design-led companies) and many also have dedicated recruiters to help find talent.
• YC's Work at a Startup is famous as one of the best places to get roles in startups, particularly at very early companies that are often a great place to start if you're brand new to design.

Climate Designers Jobs

Design Gigs for Good

Freelance with Trestle Collaborative

All Hands

(most VCs have one of these and they’re awesome resources, but Designer Fund’s is particularly great because these are all companies that value design)

Femke’s job board

‍

Undraw
Open source illustrations, a single style but easily exportable in your brand color

Blush
”Create, mix, and customize illustrations made by artists around the world.”

Minty
Great platform to find illustrators. A ”commissioning tool for professional art buyers and artists.”

Closer&Closer
LA-based representation agency for illustrators, animators, & letterers. Great for just inspiration too.

Agent Pekka
Representation agency for illustrators and animators. Based in LA, Amsterdam, Helsinki.

H+ Creative
”LA-based creative studio representing the future of visual media, worldwide”

Storybook is a fantastic JS tool to ensure parity between your design system and eng implementation

Easings.net is a useful cheat sheet for various ease functions to smooth animations

Contrast is a great app—Mac menu bar app and Figma plug-in—to check WCAG contrast ratios quickly

Hoodzpah’s Freelance and Business and Stuff is a reasonably priced online course that tells you everything about going freelance. Includes access to a great community, including Amy and Jen Hood themselves.
"The slack channel alone is worth the price of the course." — Chris von Burske

Run Studio Run: How to operate and grow a small creative agency
By Eli Altman of A Hundred Monkeys

Graphic Artists Guild Handbook has been guiding designers for over 48 years on how to set pricing, industry ethics, legal advice, and more.

A Designer’s Guide to Interviewing
By Tanner Christensen

Trends and Timescales
By Jill Carson

High Agency
By Shreyas Doshi

How to Approach Job Hunting Like a Design Challenge
By Chrysan Tung

Five Steps to Nailing Your Portfolio Presentation in Job Interviews
By Peter Herbert Barnaba on the Figma blog

How to Prepare for Your Facebook Product Design Interview (or any company, really)
& How to improve your chances when applying to design jobs
By Lily Konings, Product Designer at Facebook  •  UX Collective

3 ways to tell the story to nail your UX portfolio reviews
By Xiaofang Mei, Senior Design at Microsoft

Resume inspiration and templates from Figma

Hi, it’s your mom and I have some advice for your job search [jk]
By Micah Osler

Also check out the “Recruiting” section above to “spin the map around” and consider how the other side of the table is thinking and perceiving you

Pretty much everything by Andrew Chen, fmr. VP of Rider Growth at Uber and now General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, but in particular a few noted below:

• Why “Uber for X” startups failed: The supply side is king
• How to (Actually) Calculate CAC
• DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but here’s where it fails

The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
By Andy Raskin

Defining Growth Design: The Guide to the Role Most Startups are Missing [Article + Audio Interview]
First Round Review, based on an interview of Angel Steger, Director of Growth Design at Dropbox

Intercom has several great books on growth:

• The Growth Handbook
• The Sales Handbook
• The Lead Qualification Guide
• Intercom on Customer Engagement

Email marketing for ecommerce
By Val Geisler • Published by Stripe Atlas

What Is a Modern Data Stack for Growth? — thanks to Keenan for this recommendation
By Arpit Choudhury, founder of Astorik • Published on the Amplitude Blog

Try a mentorship session through ADPList (or directly with me, if you like). Design Buddies is another great community as well. Both ADPList and Design Buddies run regular workshops, portfolio and reviews, online meetups, and much more, and are accessible even if you’ve never done design before.

Briefbox “offers practical, realistic and industry-respected project briefs, courses, and mentoring to help you improve” as a designer. Even if you don’t get the paid full version of the briefs, what you can see for free already offers great starting points for your own projects.

Online Platforms to Find a Mentor in the Tech Industry
By Polina Karasova

How to Develop an Eye for Design
By Kathleen Warner

If in doubt, try copying nature: The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps.

IDEO’s Design Kit Mindsets

Newfound Network: “Small, invite-only groups for knowledge sharing and peer support.”

Students of UXD

A quick note in this section: don’t underestimate how many designers are entirely or mostly self-taught! Most of the designers I’ve worked with have been. Ultimately, one of the best things you can do to learn is just to start. You don’t need to work in a company to design something. Identify a problem to fix or start with websites like Briefbox above and just get started. Then, use mentorship to get feedback. That loop alone is all you need to learn everything you need to know to work as a professional designer.

UI Jar — “handpicked design inspiration for your real life projects”

Typewolf is great for web design inspiration, not just type

One of the best sources of web design inspiration are paid templates for platforms like Webflow

I really like Cosmos for inspiration these days. You can see my moodboards I've been curating here.

Invisible Details of Interaction Design by Rauno, staff design engineer at Vercel, is fantastic. As is all of his work.

‍

You don’t need to go to a fancy program to learn to be a great designer or design leader. Most of the best designers I’ve worked with have been entirely self-taught. But they can help, in particular in filling in some gaps that are likely to become evident if you move from designing to things like executive roles. Full disclosure: I’m a current or past member of or participant in most of these, so I can be a bit biased. Happy to chat about my experience if you’re curious if one is a good fit.

Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders by Yale School of Management x AIGA (I did this—happy to answer any questions you may have)

On Deck Design Fellowship (I’m currently part of ODD cohort 3)

Design Dept. offers workshops, team learning, and leadership coaching to help teams, ICs, and leaders become more effective

d.MBA is a 6-week business course teaching business fundamentals to designers.

Reforge is a great learning community, especially for product management, marketing, and ops folks

AIGA’s Professional Development resources

Designer Fund has a number of great programs, including their Collective group. If you’d like to strengthen your business x design skills, check out their Design for Business Impact case study blog, and their Business Value of Design program.

Round is a community for senior leaders and executives in tech

Career ladders, like these ones hosted at staff.design, are a great way to self-audit which areas you should focus on growing in. We can also talk about it together.

The Senior Software Engineer [Book] by David Bryant Copeland is a great guide to the behaviors of great tech leaders and has a lot of applicability outside of engineering, too

Podcasts Repo, a list of product, engineering, & entrepreneurship podcasts [META]

Inside Intercom

How I Built This with Guy Raz (NPR)

IDEO Futures

Stanford Innovation Lab with Tina Seelig

99% Invisible

New Layer with Tanner Christensen and Jasmine Friedl  (rec’d by Vivian Tsang—thanks!)

Insert:Human

By Design by Abstract

d.MBA

Intercom on Marketing [EPUB, Kindle, PDF, + Audiobook]
By Intercom

Pressfarm can help accelerate your press/PR efforts

The agency Fictive Kin put together a guidebook on building marketing websites: Your Website Owes You Money [Guidebook]

For tons more than I could ever add here, check out First Search by First Round and the Y Combinator Library. You can search thousands of articles on anything you’d ever want to know about building products and companies.

For resources on human-computer interaction, including 126,000 publications, check out the HCI Bibliography by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). Recommended resource by Carnegie Mellon’s renowned HCI Institute.

I cannot recommend readings.design enough. An incredible compendium of reading on design.

Most people underestimate the importance of using a VPN. After a lot of research I recently chose NordVPN. Use my referral link for 3 months off a 1- or 2-year plan, or 1 month off the monthly plan. I'll get 3 months when you use this, but this doesn't at all affect my recommendation. I use this daily and you should too.

NordVPN lets you also sign up for Incogni at the same time. I strongly recommend this; it's the fastest and easiest way (really, the only feasible way) to remove your data from the numerous data brokers that are selling it every day. And if you're outraged by this, you should also donate to organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Find nearly any brand assets with Brandfetch

Screens & Time
By Sachin Monga, CEO at Cocoon

Control Panel: a tumblr blog with great control panel examples

How to Move to NYC
By Tobias van Schneider

Hometown is a collaborative guidebook to people’s hometowns. “Explore every city like your best friend grew up there.”

Mockups are having a little renaissance. They're so much better than they used to be, but awful ones still abound. Here are my top recommendations to present your work in the best light:

For photography, start with The Brand Identity's mockup store. It's an aggregation of some of the best mockups, including those featured individually below. Fantastic quality and broadly usable (not too opinionated, so the emphasis is on the work and they're flexible) with a medium price point in my opinion. Check out the heavily-discounted bundles.

LS Graphics is my go-to for isolated device renders, both static (PS) animated (AE). A wide array of devices and platforms. Buy ala carte or in an unlimited-access subscription (a great value). They also have a fantastic Figma plugin with a subset of their products available as a (confusingly, different) subscription, which is highly recommended. A bunch of equally high quality free stuff, too.

Mockups Directory has great minimal imagery with a very polished feel. Mostly devices held in minimalist environments but also some print. Free stuff, too.

Mockup Maison has a huge library of photographed mockups across a wide array of cities worldwide. Particularly good for city-specific outdoor signage (especially billboard and subway ad placements), clothing, and print generally, all with artful shadows and a realistic, trendy feel. Some devices available, too. Expensive, individually and especially in a $1.3k/year subscription, but you get what you pay for with this.

Bendito Mockup, based out of Spain, is similar. Lifestyle photography is grouped in photoshoots, each with a consistent feel all their own. Particularly great at capturing a certain kind of cool, trendy, fashion-y, modern millennial/gen-z lifestyle vibe. As with a lot of lifestyle photography, heavy emphasis on print (which is also much more evergreen than devices). Great value—very fairly priced.

Art Directed (ARTD) is also similar to the photo ones above. IRL photography in a style that I think is really versatile.

Mockup Republic is another fantastic one. Photography with a great mood, but a pretty small collection so far.

Akoya Studio has a bunch of nice photography-based mockups. Minimalist and modern.

Beyond Forms is a gorgeous mockup project by the very talented Daniel Lepik. Also a tiny collection so far.

099's Minimal Mockups all have a single aesthetic: single devices, packaging, and merch on a granite-esque cube. You can customize the lighting, angle, device color, etc. before purchasing. Interestingly, the site's name comes from the commitment to having only 99 products (though each have variations) in the catalog; items will be archived to make room for new, better things.

Mr. Mockup can be a solid option. Great scene composition packs for branding, especially food packaging. Straightforward and very affordable.

Mockuuups Studio is a web-based drag-and-drop dead-simple tool. Some of them can work but not nearly at the quality of the other options here—runs a bit stock-image-y.

Maneken is a new app that combines high-quality imagery with a super convenient webapp that will apply your designs automatically

Ply has some nice mockups straddling renders and photography, with a futuristic vibe.

Peculiar Mockups is just what it says on the tin—mockups that are a bit weird

Designing Multi-Device Experiences: An Ecosystem Approach to User Experiences across Devices [book]
By Michal Levin (my former manager)  •  O’Reilly

This thread on designing TV products

Ten Usability Heuristics

Don’t Call it That! (also comes as an ebook and 1st and 2nd print editions, too)
By Eli Altman, Creative Director at A Hundred Monkeys, the go-to agency for naming companies
See also: Go Name Yourself, a deck of 90 cards to help you find a name

NameLab

Search for existing brand trademarks with this great search tool by the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO). Not only can you search by name, you can also upload an image to check for AI-judged similarity. (Thanks to Smith & Diction for this recommendation!)

Find nearly any brand assets with Brandfetch

Intercom on Onboarding and The Onboarding Starter Kit
By Intercom

Empty States: as the name says, a collection of empty state examples/inspiration in the style of Pttrns

The PM 🤝 Design Partnership [Article]
By Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe

Intercom on Product Management [EPUB, Kindle, PDF, + Audiobook]
By Intercom

Building a great product management organization
By Elad Gil  •  Published by Stripe Atlas

The Product Book (rec’ed by Zach—thanks!) [Book]
By Carlos González de Villaumbrosia and Josh Anon  •  Product School

To Launch or Not to Launch?
By Julie Zhou

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making [Book]
By Tony Fadell

At Config 2024, Shishir Mehrotra (CEO @ Coda) and Yuhki Yamashita (CPO @ Figma) gave a fantastic presentation, Rituals to Unblock Planning [Talk], a continuation of their ongoing work to study the ways that product teams do planning. You can also find the full slide deck as a Figma Slides template here. [Deck] Shishir is writing a book of this research, Rituals of Great Teams [Book], that should be fantastic once released.

The art, science, and labor of recruiting by Vinod Khosla, legendary founder of Khosla Ventures

Building the Initial Team for Seed-Stage Startups
By Andrew Chen

”I’ve come to believe that the first batch of people you want on your team are going to be T-shaped, meaning they are broad in a bunch of different areas and deep in a particular one.”

How to Hire Your First 10 Employees
By Caleb Kaiser, AngelList Talent

Startup Recruiting Bootcamp

Asana’s Head of Talent on the Secrets to Finding a Great Startup Recruiter
First Round Review

Just Enough Research [Book]
By Erika Hall of Mule Design

↳ Erika recommends Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector [Book] by Sam Ladner, PhD., for researchers who are moving from academia to corporations

How to evaluate and prioritize research needs: Time management and prioritization for user researchers [Article]
By Andrew (Andy) Warr  •  UX Collective

Improve your startup’s surveys and get even better data
By Elizabeth Ferrall-Nunge, Director of User Research at Twitter • Published by GV

Principles of effective survey design [Article]
By Annie Steele, Head of Research at Stripe • Published by Stripe Atlas

Wikipedia’s Cognitive Bias Codex is a beautiful “radial dendrogram” showing 188 cognitive biases, each clickable and linked to their respective Wikipedia article. A go-to reference for learning about cognitive bias. (via Dense Discovery)

UXR Field Guide [E-book]
By my friend Q Carlson, SVP of Design at Project44

Moderating Best Practices [Article] and Moderating The Back Room [Article]
By Natalie Golub, Staff UXR at Coinbase

We desperately need elected representatives that are actually representative of America—that is, leaders who come from the diversity of backgrounds that make up the country. I'm a big believer that the skills it takes to design products—listening to people and understanding their problems and then working with, not for, those people to design a better way—are the same kinds of skills that would make our political life better. If you're thinking about running, please do it! And contact me to let me know how I can support you.

Run for Office is a database of national political offices at all levels, supported by the organizing software NationBuilder

‍Arena runs training for future candidates and campaign staffers and an annual summit

New Leaders Council (I'm a fellow) runs a 6-month "Institute" fellowship program focused on engaging progressive leaders in their community

Run for Something helps equip you to run for office

Run For Office Day, a project of Civic Nation is a movement to encourage underrepresented populations to run

Bulletproof Row Symbols in Sketch
By Raphaël Guilleminot, Principal Designer at Deliveroo

Designing a Top Nav in One Symbol
By Jon Moore in UX Power Tools on Medium

This is, without a doubt, the coolest Sketch technique you’ll see all day
By Jon Moore in UX Power Tools on Medium

Why Your App Looks Better in Sketch
By Nathan Gitter

Prototyping with Sketch and Principle
By Marc Andrew for Prototypr.io

Embed GIFs in Sketch: GIF.me plugin

Operations startups—companies that make SaaS ops tools—obviously make it their business to write extensive thought leadership on startup operations. Check out the blogs of companies like Ramp, Mercury, Brex, Stripe, etc.—there's a gold mine of advice there—just watch out for their product placement/bias. VCs have put out tons of info as well; I particularly like First Round Review.

The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation [E-book] is a fantastic guide to both issuing equity (if you're a founder or startup ops person) and negotiating equity offers (if you're a job candidate)

Equity for Founders [Book]
By Patrick McKenzie  •  Published by Stripe Atlas

Employment [Book]
By Patrick McKenzie  •  Published by Stripe Atlas

Stripe Atlas publishes free guides on the basics of startup operations

If there’s only one thing you remember about strategy, make it this mantra: strategy is what you say no to. Strategy that doesn’t include hard choices about what fires you won’t put out isn’t real strategy.

Notes from “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy” by Jeff Zych distills key lessons from the book by that name written by UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Richard P. Rumelt. Thanks to Nathan for this recommendation.

Ladder examples at Staff Design’s resources page, and a few linked directly here:

• Product and content designer levels at Intercom [Google Doc]
• Product Design Roles at Buzzfeed [Markdown file on Github repo — see rest of the repo too for more resources]
• Zendesk’s Product Design Career Paths are no longer publicly available but if you can find them, I think they’re some of the nicest ones I’ve found

“Designing” a Career Ladder for Product Design
By Helena Seo, Head of Design at DoorDash

A Design Team’s Guide to Leveling
Designer Fund

Designer Fund’s Resources.

Dense Discovery is an amazing newsletter that’s more like a weekly magazine. That’s no surprise as it comes from Kai Brach, who also made Offscreen (below). Check out the Dense Discovery archive of past issues—it’s a gold mine.

Offscreen [Print magazine that feels like a book]
Both by Kai Brach

Typewolf, and Typewolf’s list of typography resources
By Jeremiah Shoaf

The Looking Glass
Essays by Julie Zhuo, VP of Product Design at Facebook, with an emphasis on answering reader questions

UX Power Tools on Medium

Joe Smith’s “Study” page where he collects interesting things he’s read. Also check out his great weekly Wrap Ups, an awesome way “to close out each week and set teams up well for the following”.

UX Collective on Medium

d.MBA’s Resources page

A List Apart

The Futuress: “Feminism. Design. Politics. Where these three intersect, you will find Futuress.”

Signature Block is a great newsletter if you’re interested in starting a venture fund

The top thing to know about internationalization is that far more than you might think is cultural and so far more than you might need to change depending on the cultural context. A couple quick examples:

• Mirroring the entire interface for right-to-left reading languages (the CTA associated with a search field, for example, is on the left of the field if the page is in Hebrew)
• Green and red, in the context of profit and loss (like on a stock ticker) are inverted in some parts of the world, like China (one of the world's biggest markets), so don't rely on red to communicate something bad

Translation, Localisation, or Transcreation? [Article] by Anne Sophie Delafosse, Localization Coordinator at Deliveroo

Typewolf, Typewolf’s list of typography resources, and the Flawless Typography Checklist
By Jeremiah Shoaf

Identifont, especially their font identification and other tools
One typography tool to rule them all: find, identify, compare, and blend between, and much more

The Value of Multi-Typeface Design
By Bethany Heck on About Face

Also by Bethany Heck: Font Review Journal: Scholarly, long form reviews of typefaces, great for learning about the intricacies and history of type.

Italic—What gives Typography its emphasis is a study of (or meditation on) italicization and italics in type. Worth reading for anyone serious about typography.
By Hendrik Weber

Chris Peterson’s Typography Resources

Professional Web Typography [Online guidebook]
Donny Truong

Wordmark.it: rapidly test a given word in all of your fonts

Learn typography as you play games with Kerntype and Shapetype. Check out Color too, by the same person.

Pretend Foundry’s Font Builder is a fun way to make a hand-drawn font right from your browser

The Crystal Goblet, a short seminal essay on type by the amazing 20th century typography pioneer, Beatrice Warde. A must read for scholars and lovers of typography (which is to say, all designers).

Learn how to design fonts like a pro with Blaze Type's (an awesome type foundry) aptly-named book, How to design fonts? [PDF + Book]

The Elements of Typographic Style [Book scanned to PDF] by Robert Bringhurst is a masterclass in type. One of a kind.

Breaking Down the UX of Switching Accounts in Web Apps by Christian Beck on UX Power Tools

Ways to Design Account Switchers & App Switchers by Jon Moore, also on UX Power Tools

New to crypto/web3? There are basically two big boxes of stuff to learn: 1) how it works and 2) why it works, why it’s important, and what the outcomes it can make possible. For your first steps on these, start here:

1. Probably the best place to start is Coinbase's guide to Crypto Basics.
2. Learn the mechanics with Ledger Academy, in particular their School of Block
3. Crypto can be intimidating but is easy to learn once you get the hang of some core concepts and paradigm shifts relative to the old web2 world. One of the best ways to start to wrap your head around those new paradigms is this page about the pluriverse.

DAOs, A Canon, NFT Canon, and Crypto Canon are incredible collections of resources and reading, compiled (and often written) by a16z

Good Design in Web 3 [Presentation] and Designing for the Humans of Web3 (from ETHDenver ‘22) [Presentation]
By Yang You, an awesome product designer on my team at Syndicate
↳ Also check out Yang’s list of resources on her Shelf page

Gaby Goldberg’s Web 3 Reading List

Notes on Web3 [Article], sent by Robin Sloan to the Murray Street Media Lab in Berkley, CA

As designers, our inclination to deeply understand the problem and the people we’re solving for leads us to be cautious about jumping in to hi-fi design without first creating consensus. But DAOs’ democratic, hive-mind process means learning to design in a new way, one that leads with artifacts.

Building in web3? Bootstrap your testnet wallet with this faucet from Paradigm.

As you use dapps, you’ll approve tokens, exposing potential vulnerabilities. It’s a good idea to routinely check (and revoke, as needed) these approvals with Etherscan’s Ethereum Token Approval Checker.

Guang-Yi, legal counsel at Ethereum Foundation, wrote an incredible Crypto Compendium. It’s an amazing resource for anyone who wants to know anything about crypto laws and regulation. Note: I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Want to learn to develop apps on web3? Try tranqui.eth’s Condensed Guide for Learning Web3 Development in 100 Days

Crypto, Culture, & Society is a “learning DAO exploring the impact of crypto on culture and society.” Check out their Web3 Starter Pack to get started with web3!

Learn to engineer web3 apps by building simple games with CryptoZombies

Another great starting point is this great list of crypto articles, compiled by Jihad Esmail, my former teammate at Syndicate and one of the best crypto thinkers out there imo. I'm mirroring them here for your convenience but head to that link for the latest:

Philosophy

Squad Wealth, Other Internet [Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti]
Positive Sum Worlds, Other Internet [Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti]
Inventories, Not Identities, Other Internet [Kei Kreutler]
Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool, Other Internet [Toby Shorin]
Headless Brands, Other Internet [Brian Lehrer, Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti]
The Twin Propellers of Web3, David Phelps

Community and DAOs

A Prehistory of DAOs, Other Internet [Kei Kreutler]
13 Ways of Looking at a DAO, David Phelps
How to DAO 201: Onboarding as Wayfinding, Rafathebuilder
How to DAO 401: DAO Community Leadership, Rafathebuilder
Better Living Through Networks, David Ehrlichman
Cities of Ghosts Await Their DAO Revival, Dark Star DAO
Conceptual Models for DAO2DAO Relations, PrimeDAO and BlockScience
DAOs as Novelty Search Engines, olly.eth

Product Development

Market-Protocol Fit, Other Internet [Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti]
A product manager’s guide to web3, Jason Shah & Lenny Rachitsky
Legitimacy is the only moat, David Phelps
Embedded Education, Tina He
Crypto Wants to be Seen, Kayvon Tehranian
Go-to-Market in Web3, Maggie Hsu

Economics and Governance

Hyperstructures, Jacob Horne
DAO Delegates: Misused and Misunderstood, Dan Wu, Julia Rosenberg, and Chun Poon
Pods: The DAOnfall of Token Voting, Chun Poon, Julia Rosenberg, and Maria Gomez
Speculation is a Superpower, Jacob Horne
Building an Economy Within a DAO, Shreyas Hariharan

This huge graphic from Electric gives a great overview of most of the most notable projects in crypto

(Lastly I may be producing a course on designing for crypto...stay tuned. If you're interested in getting updates, sign up at any email field on this site.)

This website is built with Webflow and I can't say enough good things about it. It really is powerful enough to deploy even large company websites.

I often use Octopus, a really simple tool to create a sitemap diagram

The agency Fictive Kin put together a guidebook on building marketing websites: Your Website Owes You Money [Guidebook]

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