Reading List - Issue No. 1

Here’s a curated list of design-related resources that have impacted me for the last couple months.

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1.) Developing Your Eye for Design - Jonathan Z. White

I discovered this article 2 months ago and it’s saved on my bookmarks tab ever since. I’ve went back to it several times whenever I need inspiration or a foundation of where to start. It’s a guide on how to start looking at the world through the lens of a designer. This includes questions to ask yourself. Being able to ask and answer questions about the world around you can help sharpen your design eye.

2.) Hack Design

Free 50 lessons from designers in the field. Very informative and in-depth. Covers topics from user experience to graphic design principles. One of the best all-in-one resources I’ve seen for designers.

3.) Minimally Minimal

A blog/portfolio by product and visual designer, Andrew Kim. As a product design student at Art Center, he redesigned Microsoft’s brand as one of his projects, gaining him extensive media coverage. He currently works at Microsoft working on the HoloLens. Out of all the design portfolios I’ve seen, his remains my favorite. In-depth and a clear thought process, yet visually pleasing in all forms, I highly recommended checking out his previous work for ideas on how to communicate your own projects. Great example of “Show, don’t tell.”

4.) Julie Zhuo’s Blog

Julie Zhuo is a product design VP at Facebook. She is also a prolific writer on Medium and I’ve learned something from most, if not all, of her articles. Her posts are honest, sincere, concise, and vulnerable. They shed a light on the tech industry and I love hearing about her journey in the field.

5.) Coursera

I’ve taken 3 design courses and all of them were great. I particularly recommend Scott Klemmer, professor at UCSD, for the human-centered design and design principles course.

Apple Confidential: Core Values and Marketing

One of the most fascinating talks I’ve seen on what marketing and branding is. Marketing starts with first understanding your brand, which involves understanding the basics: who you are and what you believe in. Once you are very clear about your brand’s fundamental values, marketing is about communicating that brand effectively using images and words. 

When working on a design project, I tend to take a long time trying to understand the brand. If I don’t have a clear idea of their core values, it becomes challenging to channel their beliefs and ideas successfully through a design. Although the research process can be slow, it is worth it. One of the main ways to differentiate one company from another is by their personality. This is crucial since it ends up affecting everything else after that, from the type of customers you get to the type of ideas you generate. 

Although this talk was given in 1997, it is still relevant today. Technology and markets are constantly changing. The only thing that stays the same is a company’s core values. This is probably the most important lesson I learned from this video.

Interesting side note: Jobs spent ~75% of the time talking about advertising, which parallels Apple’s marketing strategy (spend more time on the idea behind your ads and less time showing off your tech specs).