Craft

How design happens, from knowing the right thing to build to building the thing right and everything in between

Research

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

Strategy

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.

Naming

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

Typography

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.

Design systems

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”

Finding illustrators

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”

Translation, localization, internationalization

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

Accessibility & inclusive design

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

Websites

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]