Issue 30: The foundation of designer and art director

Special edition: The foundation of designer and art director.

Hello, dear readers! 👋

This is the third special issue edition where I focus on the specific profession related to dev or design. In this part, we will talk about the fundamental knowledge and tools that will be useful to a designer today. I tried to select exactly the base that all designers might need, regardless of the field. This is a kind of the motherboard on which you can install special knowledge in specific areas of design.

Other special issues:

• Product designer: How to master the profession

• Web designer and how to be the one, the good one

What's inside this release:

• The best books

• A large selection of articles

• Courses and lectures

• Tools and files to work with

Let's briefly list the disciplines, the possession of which lies at the foundation of the work of a good designer and art director:

• Work Ethic

• Negotiations with colleagues, managers and clients

• Project management, the ability to organize yourself and others

• Principles of perception and fundamentals of psychology

• Basics of Marketing

• Text and infostyle

• Typography, composition, coloristics

• Intellectual and contract law (fundamentals)

In this issue, I've tried to collect the best materials on these areas of knowledge.

📚 Books

• "Design is a job" by Mike Monteiro

• "Burn your portfolio" by Michael Janda

• "Design Form and Chaos" by Paul Rand

• "A designer's art" by Paul Rand

• "By Design: Why There are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons" by Ralph Caplan

• "Design for the real world" by Victor Papanek

• "Design of Everyday Things" by Don Normann

• "Hermann Zapf and His Design Philosophy" by Hermann Zapf

• "How Design Makes The World" by Scott Berkun

Project management and negotiations:

• "Remote: Office Not Required" by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

• "The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design" by IDEO

• "Start with no" by Jim Camp

• "The Mom test" by Rob Fitzpatrick

• "Talking to Crazy" by Mark Goulston

• "Simply said" by Jay Sullivan

• "Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management" by Mark Forster

• "Hermann Zapf and His Design Philosophy" by Donald Ross

• "Don't Read This Book: Time Management for Creative People" by Donald Ross

• "Finish: Give yourself the gift of done" by Jon Acuff

• "Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" by Ed Cutmull

• "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle

Typography:

• "The Complete Manual of Typography: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type" by Jim Felici

• "Typography: A Manual of Design" by Emil Ruder

• "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst

• "Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works" by Erik Spiekermann

• "The form of the book" by Jan Tschichold

• "The New Typography" by Jan Tschichold

• "An Essay on Typography" by Eric Gill

• "In Progress" by Jessica Hische

• "Don't Read This Book: Time Management for Creative People" by Donald Ross

• "Finish: Give yourself the gift of done" by Jon Acuff

• "Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" by Ed Cutmull

• "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle

Composition & Color:

• "Grid System in Graphic Design" by Joseph Muller-Brockmann

• "Design and form" by Johannes Itten

• "The art of color" by Johannes Itten

Psychology of perception and communication:

• "100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People" by Susan Weinschenk

• "Design for cogbitive bias" by David Dylan Thomas

• "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought" by Barbara Tversky

• "Art and Visual Perception" by Rudolf Arnheim

• "Books by Edward Tufte"

• "Say It With Charts" by Gene Zelazny

• "Good Charts" by Scott Berinato

• "Online Influence: Boost your results with proven behavioral science" by Bas Wouters

• "The Invisible Touch" by Harry Beckwith

Personal effectiveness:

• "The Imposter Cure: Escape the mind-trap of imposter syndrome" by Jessamy Hibberd

• "The End of Procrastination: How to Stop Postponing and Live a Fulfilled Life" by Petr Ludwig

🗞 Articles

What makes me a designer?

Tobias van Schneider made a short but valuable instruction for beginners, in which he tried to give an explanation of what it feels like to be a designer:

• Strong urge to design absolutely everything around. It's as simple as that

• Unexplainable desire to touch my surroundings and give them a little bit of self

• Design is about control

My goal in life is to design everything I want to change around me. To design anything I believe should be redesigned, reimagined or improved

What makes me a designer?

This question crossed my mind enough times recently that I went into the DESK archives to find my own answer. To my surprise, there wasn’t one. I’ve never written about it, not until today.

The DESK MagazineTobias van Schneider

84 cognitive biases you should exploit to design better products

A large review article on cognitive distortions in the context of digital product design. The article is very large, it is worth eating it in parts. But it's worth it, because there are a lot of specific interface examples.

About cognitive distortions, but not in the context of design, but in general, there is a good "Cognitive bias cheat sheet" by Buster Benson.

84 cognitive biases that will help you design better-converting products

Learn how to use cognitive biases to increase your product’s conversion rates, engagement level, and retention. A must-read article for every entrepreneur and product manager dealing with UX, UI and B2C products.

BloggerGil Bouhnick

Cognitive bias cheat sheet

Because thinking is hard.

Better HumansBuster Benson

39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes

Kennedy Elliott's materials on visualization methods and their perception by humans. She has prepared a summary of psychological research that helps to better understand what data visualization is, how different types of graphs and objects in them distort perception, on which axis it is easier for people to compare proportions, which types of graphs and diagrams are most effective, and much more.

39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes

These are my speaker notes from a talk I gave at OpenVis in April 2016. Originally this talk was supposed to be called “Everything we know…

Mediumkennedy elliott

Cognitive distortions of designers

Koos Looijesteijn applied the most well-known and studied cognitive distortions to the profession of a designer. He described how these distortions affect the development of projects and how they can be compensated.

Types of distortions and ways to eliminate them:

• The "Ikea effect" is a bias in which people tend to overestimate what they have created with their own hands. Solution: share your work and ask the opinion of other designers to form a more objective idea

• "The Dunning-Kruger Effect" — the tendency to overestimate the level of your knowledge and skills. Solution: try to devote more time to research and test your hypotheses even at the design development stage. This will help to correct errors in time, if there are any

• "The syndrome of rejection of someone else's development" is an attempt to invent something new, instead of using the old but proven. Solution: try to start by looking for simple, but working ideas, and also study the work of competitors

• "False blindness" — inattention in which a person does not pay attention to any object or stimulus. For example, you may not notice some gross error in the text or in the design. Solution: invite users to test your design, perhaps they will find errors that you did not see, because all people pay attention to different things

• "Survivor's mistake" is an attempt to learn lessons only from positive examples, ignoring unsuccessful ones. Solution: study failed examples of projects more often and ask yourself why they failed to succeed?

• "Confirmation bias" is a prejudice in which we see only what is familiar to us and discard alternative theories and refutations of our point of view. Solution: For example, don't test alone. So you will not be able to interpret the results in your favor

Design better by avoiding your cognitive biases

Can you outsmart your brain? Seven biases that mess up your designs and what you can do against them.

Koos LooijesteijnKoos Looijesteijn