Subtlety is the soul of most impactful designs. Perhaps for that reason alone, the conversation around design, has mostly been in the background of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, IOT and so many other so-called sexier technologies of the last decade. Not to take anything away from those disciplines. But for some reason, the design conversation has been in this unique position of being the second most important thing in the industry. At least this was the case until ‘mobile applications’ arrived. And since then shadows have started to clear off from the talks about user experience and designers.
With that thought in mind, I ended up doing some research around modern day development in design tools and resources. During which I came around some pretty cool new tools that I was completely unaware of. Fair warning, am not a professional designer, though I collaborate with some at my work and marketing community in general. So without further delay, these are the 7 coolest and modern design resources I believe, any beginner or a pro designer should know!
Quick Design
Quick Design is a platform to find free and top online design courses. The unique aspect of this platform is that they don’t only provide resources for digital application designers, but to a wide range of 3D, CAD software and other industry oriented designers as well.
An additional cool feature of the platform is that you can follow other designers learning tools of your own interest. This can help in bouncing creative application ideas off each other and to use them for your own use cases.
Absurd Illustrations
One of my favorite places to go for cool inspirations! In their own words, absurd.design is a project which comes with a set of free surrealist illustrations for app or landing page messages, presentations, articles and more. The main idea is to give people a chance to think and spark their creative imagination and artistic vision.
Design Principles
As their homepage describes, Design Principles is an open source collection of the most innovative and consistently working design ideas. It sources design case studies and examples of the most powerful web applications that define our new digitally integrated living, work, and travel. Check it out to for inspiration, ideas and proven innovation powering some of your favorite applications.
MarvelApp
MarvelApp intends to provide a hands-on workshop to you or any of the team members you are working with, even outside your design team. So that not only you, but others can also correlate to often times misunderstood designers in the company! So that you or all of your company can get acquainted with basic principles of Design Thinking and create new features, apps, and products.
Their workshop promises to take you from nurturing empathy, idea generation, right the way through to sketching and creating interactive prototypes, in sessions that can fit into an hour!
Not a bad way to plan for a team activity on a Friday!
CheckList Design
Checklist Design is a collection of best UI and UX practices to provide a complete, honest and rewarding experience for your users. Take in the knowledge of not just what to put in your solution, but how and why it should be there. It gives you a no-nonsense functional approach to the most common problems you’ll find when making a professional app ready to hit the market on short notice!
UI Sources
Launched in the mid of 2018, UI Sources is a curated repository of interaction design. Analyze product flows, features, and interactions and get real design inspiration for your own apps. This resource is built and can be extensively used by designers, developers, product folks and entrepreneurs.
Undraw
UnDraw is an MIT licensed and constantly updated collection of beautiful SVG images that you can use completely free and without attribution. Just signup with them and use their thoughtful, elegant and very functional images to go along with your product.
This completes my list of 7 cool new resources for a modern designer from any field. Hopefully, whether you are a beginner or a pro, you found something worth taking from this article!