Design Inspirations for Non-Designers

Ten years ago, I had set a goal for myself to do a different job every four years. I’m an engineer by training, so I started my career as a software developer. Four years later, I started my first venture-backed company. The next four years, I spent a lot of my time building great engineering teams. Before you guess what’s next for me, I’m not trying to do product next. But to my designer friends here, appreciate any feedback for our and mobile . design web app It started about a year ago when I left my previous company to start my second . This time, I’m leading the product and business side of the company as CEO. To deliver the story, I prepared a slide deck for our vision and made initial product sketches. I always had a penchant for great product and design. But I knew my sketches weren’t close to how I would want them to look in the final product. So, I started meeting designers to take it to the next level. startup After few coffee meetings, I learned a lot from those conversations. I also realized it was hard to communicate my vision when collaborating for few hours a week. I had two options, hire a dedicated design resource or learn to do the early design myself. I chose the later. With the help of my design friends in my network, I was able to get started with basic design process and tools. The sketch tool came up in several conversations with a strong recommendation. I played with it and found it a lot less intimidating of a tool than Photoshop or Illustrator. Sketch has fewer features but it’s pretty much all you need to create high fidelity product designs. From a product perspective, good product design is no longer a core differentiator but it’s a requirement. Building great product is an iterative process. The process includes research, user study and implementing best practices. Often, they’re inspired by other great product designs. Rest of this post outlines my design process that I follow to build the early version of the products. This is a guide for non-designers to build their early prototypes with good user experience. Style Guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Color_star-en.svg Once you’re ready with your product sketches, you will need to define a color palette and choose a font family. Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in someone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preferences or cultural background. Knowing color associations helps. This is a on how to choose colors for your startup with examples. great resource is a science in itself and it can be overwhelming if you don’t have a design background. A simpler approach is to follow 60–30–10 rule. Which suggests that you choose three different colors and use them in the ratio of 60%, 30% and 10%. This rule provides a simple way to create a professional color scheme for your brand. Color theory Next is fonts. Choosing a font is important for your brand but don’t sweat it too much. It’s an easy product change if you decide to change your font. Picking a font depends on your product but an easy to read font like Roboto, Helvetica Neue, Open Sans is a good start. Next is typography — the style and appearance of texts. You need to define font-size, font-weight, color for each type of text in your product. For example, a Medium post has a title, quoted and highlighted text, each with different style guides. Tools for Design Inspirations After you have finalized the style guides, you’re ready to start creating high fidelity screens. I recommend Sketch design tool. If you know a designer, get a quick primer from them. This is the best way to learn the best practices and avoid common mistakes. Otherwise, you can get started yourself. There are plenty of online guides and blog posts. Check out this , if you’re not sure where to start. Protip: profile For any app screen design, I start with the product spec. I then do the market research on similar and inspiring product designs. For this, I use a to find how other apps solve similar design challenges. Collect relevant design inspirations from your research. Finally, put your thoughts into a polished user interface and ship it to developers. combination of tools Don’t waste time creating design specs using Sketch plugins, it still takes time. Use tools like . The tool makes it easy to collaborate and ship design specs. Protip: Zeplin Newsletters for Everyday Inspirations There is no shortage of new content. Thousands of new design blog posts are written every day. We’re all familiar with Newsletters. Newsletters are mini publications, curated by experts and enthusiasts on a focused topic. I like Newsletters, and it’s how I keep up with topics that matter to me. So, I dug the web and built a list of great design blogs for every day learnings and inspirations. Take your time to review, and subscribe to those that you like. If you want to keep them organized, don’t miss out on the last part of this article. You can check out my on Nucleus for an example. profile I hope you find this list useful and it helps you get daily design inspirations. Here is the list in no special order. : Web Designer News — A curated collection of the best news for designers each day. Web Designer News Packed with quick bits of news, inspirational resources as well as cool new products and services for designers. Web Design Newsletter: : Tales of researching, designing, and building from Mailchimp. The UX Newsletter : A weekly user experience newsletter on user experience design, game design, and tech industry critique. UX Weekly Get 5 best design links, every day. Sidebar: : A short bundle of the most popular & inspiring stuff in the passing week. Muzli : Digital product design news, articles, showcases and resources. Design Weekly : Thoughts on users, experience, and design — InVision Blog Invision : Get our products/news earlier than others. Designmodo A weekly list of UX, strategy and design articles to help you create smarter and more successful products. Design Startup Digest: That’s all! Did I miss any good design newsletter? Let me know. ❤ Please hit recommend if you found this post useful. ✨ Follow me on to be notified when I release my next story — “Design Tools for Non-Designers” and more. Twitter