6 Tips and 50+ Resources for Young Product Designers
Things that have helped me continue my journey as a product designer
Since I published the first part of this series of Tips & Resources for Product Designers, I’ve continued to learn a bunch, push myself, and grow as a designer and human. So I figured I would come back, write a new article, and share some new tips and resources. Some of the things here might be repeats, if I found that I still reference and learn from them as I progress through my career, but most are new since the first article.
Hopefully you can find something that interests you in here. Let me know if you do, or don’t, or if I’m missing something that has helped you as a product designer. There’s also some bonus thoughts at the bottom. Enjoy!✌️
1. Stay Inspired
It’s important to continue learning, to continue to feed from something. This can be subject matter related or not, but make sure you are finding inspiration for your day.
Resources:
High Resolution — a limited video series on product design and design thinking.
Design Details — a show about the people who design our favorite products.
Sidebar — the five best design links, every day.
Designer News — where the design community meets.
Product Hunt — where you discover your next favorite thing.
My Morning Routine — an independent online magazine that publishes a brand new, inspiring morning routine every Wednesday.
Intercom Design Blog — design writings from the company Intercom.
Design Better — discover the world’s best design practices.
Abstract: The Art of Design— Step inside the minds of the most innovative designers in a variety of disciplines and learn how design impacts every aspect of life.
Hustle Podcast — a show about the ideas, methods, people, teams and cultures, and everything else necessary to design meaningful digital products in today’s competitive landscape.
Working File — a podcast about design practice and its relationship with the world.
How I Built This — a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
Freelance.tv — Freelance designer @DannPetty drove 10,000 miles across the United States to interview freelancers about their daily lives. These are their stories.
2. Step Outside
One of the most important considerations you can make when designing products is people outside of your bubble. It’s called inclusivity, it includes diversity, you can’t be inclusive without being diverse. This is crucial to understand, to study, and implement.
Designing for inclusivity does not mean designing for your target demographic, but the microcosms that are scattered throughout users and potential users. Probably the most important lesson you can challenge yourself with when designing is involving people different than yourself. Learn about others, about different disabilities, about different passions and goals, step out of your comfort zone, and most importantly, care about this new knowledge.
Another Lens — a research tool for conscientious creatives.
Techies Project — a photo project focused on sharing stories of tech employees in Silicon Valley.
Contrast — a macOS app for quick access to WCAG color contrast ratios.
ARIA — Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) defines ways to make Web content and Web applications (especially those developed with Ajax and JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.
Interface Lovers — an online magazine for creative professionals.
3. Continue Learning
Stop copying Stripe. Although they do have fantastic design we all like to draw inspiration from, there are many great design teams out there revealing their processes and systems they use to design. I’m not saying steal from them instead, however I’m encouraging you to see what the well-structured teams out there are doing and what you can learn from their mistakes and successes.
Facebook Design — collection of articles, videos, and resources made by designers at Facebook.
Atlassian Design — end-to-end design language to create straightforward and beautiful experiences.
Polaris — Shopify’s design system to help work together to build a great experience for all of Shopify’s merchants.
Airbnb Design — a cross-disciplinary group of experience and production designers, researchers, technologists, writers and content strategists, graphic designers, filmmakers, producers, interior architects, project managers, photographers and more.
Material Design Guidelines — a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.
Apple Design Guidelines — Apple’s guidelines for designing apps and more.
Uber Design — the craft behind Uber’s design.
Ueno Design — a page where the Ueno team posts things we like from around the internet.
4. Be Resourceful
The first step to unsuccessful failure, meaning failure where you don’t even try, is saying you can’t do something. Don’t do that. There are many great resources out there to help you get a mockup started, or a portfolio site up, or a prototype created, or direct user research.
Facebook Design Tools & Resources — a library of design tools and resources from Facebook’s design team.
Feather Icons — simply beautiful open source icons.
Squarespace — makes beautiful products to help people with creative ideas succeed.
Semplice — the first fully responsive case study portfolio system based on WordPress.
Format — build your online portfolio.
Bootstrap — an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS.
Unsplash — beautiful, free photos.
Lottie — an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images.
Zeplin — the ultimate collaboration tool between designers and developers.
Abstract — a platform for modern design teams to work together.
8pt Grid — an intro to the 8-point grid system.
UI8 — curated design resources to energize your creative workflow.
FullStory — tells you everything you want to know about your customer’s online experience.
Smallchat — chat with customers using Slack threads.
InVision — the world’s leading prototyping, collaboration & workflow platform.
Framer — the best way to create interactive designs from start to finish.
Principle — makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces.
Build It With Me — a tool that helps connecting you with like-minded designers & developers with the same goal: create cool & useful apps.
5. Be Yourself
The most important thing you can do for your own mental health is to be yourself. Don’t be ashamed of who you are, what you do, or how you do it. Don’t let people tell you that you need to do things a certain way to be a certain something. Your differences are what make you unique, desirable, and valuable. One of the best ways to make new friends and connections in the design world is to put yourself out there. I’ve never received a freelance contract or job offer by simply applying and trying to describe who I am. All of my jobs have come from connections I’ve made through conferences, Twitter, Dribbble, and coworkers.
There are many ways you can put yourself out there to speak your mind, make connections, and grow your community. Whatever you do, just do it as genuinely as you possibly can. Don’t be afraid to reach out to others or ashamed to ask questions.
Startup Weekend — create communities & build companies in a weekend.
Dann Petty Vlog — great example of a designer putting themselves out there through vlogging.
MDS Vlog — great example of a designer putting themselves out there through vlogging.
Drew Wilson Vlog — great example of a designer putting themselves out there through vlogging.
Joel Beukelman Vlog — great example of a designer putting themselves out there through vlogging.
Buffer — a simpler and easier way to schedule posts, track the performance of your content, and manage all your accounts in one place.
Zarf Audio Log — a weekly podcast where Safia shares her journey, experiences, feelings, and strategies as she builds the product and business behind Zarf, an online platform for written and paid subscription content.
Daily UI — become a better designer in 100 days.
Playbook — one place for the design community to share knowledge.
6. Stop Designing
Okay, not altogether, but take breaks from designing, or looking at what other people designing, or listening to other people talk about design. What I mean is it’s just as valuable to research topics other than design. These things outside of design actually have weight in your design practice and help influence your thought process in new and exciting ways.
You could start a radio show, a photo blog, discover new artists, read about topics that interest you outside of design, and so much more.
TED Talks — a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.
NPR Tiny Desk Concerts — intimate video performances, recorded live at the desk of All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen.
Good Good Good — an uprising of hopefuls marching against the hate, fear, and injustice in the world by celebrating and becoming accomplices in good work.
Anchor — make cool audio, right from your phone.
Exposure — a beautiful website for your photo stories.
Some Bonus Thoughts
Okay, I wanted to get some things off my chest about a lot of what’s talked about on “Design Twitter”. First of all, if you don’t know what “Design Twitter” is, it’s a place where designers come together and discuss things related to design. Some times these things can be negative, and some times positive, but always opinionated. So here’s some of my opinions on some design related topics.
Should designers code?
I believe if you want to code, then code, and don’t want to code, then don’t. Don’t feel pressured to learn code if it’s not something you want to pursue. There are benefits for product designers to understand coding practices and limits, but that’s up to you if you choose to learn it. There are also plenty of areas of design you can study and master instead.
Sketch, Figma, Photoshop, XD?
I’m a big believer in using what your most comfortable with to get the job done. My dad always taught me to use the right tool for the job, but any of these are just fine for product design. Use what you feel you can do the best job with. It doesn’t hurt to dabble in each so you know which you would like to use, and so you know what each application is capable of.
Are unsolicited redesigns cool?
Sure, no problem. Redesigning your favorite products is really great practice. But leave it as that, practice. Those product teams do an insane amount of research, testing, and iteration to justify reasoning behind their current design. That doesn’t mean your ideas aren’t good, it just means that if you want to redesign a product, do as much research as you can. Try to understand why design decisions were made and attempt something different, as practice, to refine your craft.
Should you do free work?
Again, this is totally up to you. If you want to donate your skills and abilities, you can do that. However, you should know that those skills and abilities are valuable, and you should be paid what you’re worth as you progress in your career. But if you decide to work for free to build up your portfolio or to work pro bono for a good cause, then good for you.
Conclusion
Do you!
If you would like to talk to me about anything I’ve listed here or my personal experiences with these lessons, tweet me @dmtors . Don’t be shy.
