Design
GDES-220 fall 2015 · American University Design
Instructor: David Ramos (ramos@american.edu)
Resources about what you make, why, and for whom.
Careers and professional practice
- Shaughnessy, Adrian. How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul.
-
Foote, Cameron S. The Business Side of Creativity.
- AIGA Standard Contract (free to use)
- AIGA Design Jobs
- AIGA Survey of Design Salaries
- A List Apart “Survey for People Who Make Websites”
Interaction and user experience
- Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things.
- Hall, Erika. Just Enough Research.
-
Wroblewski, Luke. Mobile First.
- A Dao of Web Design
- Userium usability checklist
- Mobile screen Sizes
- Why not to use “click here” text
- 52 Weeks of UX
Communicating and testing design
- UX sketching
- Close Photoshop and Grab a Pencil: The Lost Art of Thumbnail Sketches
- Wireframes (mostly, a collection of tools)
- Interactive Sketching Notation
- Wireframes > sketch resources
- EightShapes Unify
- Visual vocabulary for IA and IxD
- PDF templates
Process and starting projects
- Following a Web Design Process (big picture view, aimed at large client projects)
- Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
- Design research and process (created for a media/journalism NGO)
- Design Process in the Responsive Age
- Style tiles
- Photoshop for the web
- InDesign for the web (I’d recommend InDesign for comps over Photoshop)
- HTML/CSS code as part of design process (closer to how I work)
- Designing the Boston Globe’s new responsive site
Web typography
- Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
-
Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type
- The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
- On Web Typography
- Google Webfonts that Don’t Suck
- TypeTester (tool to compare screen type)
- Guide to CSS Font Stacks: Techniques and Resources
- A Way Back: font stacks in great depth
Accessibility
- Dive into Accessibility
- WebAIM (articles, accessibility checkers, simulators)
UI/UX standards
- Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines (the gold standard in UI guidelines)
- Types of views natively provided by iOS
- Microsoft Windows mobile (a more typographic, assertively digital approach)
- Summary of touch target sizes