A list of color resources I put together.
‘With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft’ - Henri Matisse
Color is one of the most important aspects of design, and also one of the hardest to master. It has the ability to have a significant impact on people’s emotional state and can be a huge influence on the way people see your designs. Great designers understand the rules and theory of color and use them to create emotional designs that people can relate to. While color theory is a broad topic, you don’t have to be a master painter to use it effectively in your designs. Instead of just randomly choosing a color palette for your next project why not take a little time to learn about the fundamentals of color and help your designs stand out.
Here are 5 great resources to get you started:
Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine has a nice introduction into the basics of color theory. In their three part series they talk about everything from color families to hue, chroma, saturation and tones and how to create effective color palettes for your own designs.
WebDesign Tuts
As part of their ‘Web Design Theory’ series, Tuts Plus has an article that can get you started in the right direction. Whilst not as in-depth as the Smashing Magazine article they have some interesting case studies and show you some nice resources for finding interesting color palettes.
The Gnomon Workshop
The Gnomon Workshop ‘Color Theory: The Mechanics of Color’ is a two hour DVD, that covers thoughts on how we define the concept of color and how to use the ‘Mechanics of Color’ to your advantage. It’s a great resource if you want to take your knowledge of color theory a bit further.
Six Revisions
Six revisions has a shorter article on color theory. They cover the main terminology used when talking about color and guide you through some theory with case studies of live websites. The article also has a great collection of resources to that relate to color and even tools for evaluating your designs colors.
Johannes Itten - ‘The Elements of Color’
If your looking for more than just a quick read the ‘The Elements of Color’ by Johannes Itten is the place to go. Ittens’ books on color theory and application are standards throughout the world. ‘The Elements of Color’ is a condensation of Itten’s major work ‘The Art of Color’, but it is much easier to find a copy of ‘The Elements of Color’ for a reasonable price.
Also if you read the whole post you might like to follow me on twitter
—May, 2012
I see a lot of posts about reading suggestions for books for beginner programmers, but I haven’t seen many lists of recommended books for design. UX and design are massively important skills for developers to have and whilst reading about design won’t make you instantly better, it can teach you how to think about your work and different techniques you can use to improve your designs.
Here are some design books / resources I recommend to developers.
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Designing for emotion This book is a really good introduction to how design can influence how people feel about your product. I wrote a more detailed review here.
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Design is a job If your considering doing some freelance work at some point this book is a must read. It’s another book from A Book Apart but I really like their shorter format and low prices.
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Don’t Make Me Think One of the most popular books about web design and interaction.
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UX Magazine It’s not a book but it has some really good articles about UX design. If you don’t have time to read a whole book then this is the place to start.
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The Gnomon Workshop: The Mechanics of Color This dvd is a great introduction to color theory, one of the most important elements of design.
Also if you read the whole post you might like to follow me on twitter
—May, 2012
There are a huge amount of resources online for learning objective-c and programming for iOS but not all of them are created equal. Working with dull tutorials that are badly designed makes learning less enjoyable so I decided to create a list of well presented, quality tutorials for iOS development. Not all of these resources are free but they are well worth the price.
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Design then Code A great introduction to iOS development and design. I wrote a review if you would like some more details.
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Team Treehouse Another great way to get started with iOS development. Their videos are probably the best quality iOS tutorials on the web. The library isn’t very large at the moment but they add more all the time.
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Stanford iPhone Application Development This resource is a bit more advanced and moves through a lot of content fairly quickly but the quality of the lectures is amazing.
Send me a tweet or an email if you know of any others I should add to the list.
Oh.. If you read this far you might like to follow me on twitter
—May, 2012
We want our work to stand out from the rest. We want people to have such a great experience that they feel the need to talk about it to everyone. We weant what we make to be remarkable.
Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter focuses on the idea that design can make people feel something for whatever it is your designing. Walter is the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, one of the best designed sites on the web, and he really delivers in this great read.
The book is set out in a ‘show and tell’ style that is perfect for the topic. Walter uses live case studies of sites like wufoo, tapBots and others to illustrate how design isn’t just about color and layouts but that it is an opportunity to create an experience for your users and give your product a personality. Each chapter has multiple examples that Walter breaks down and gives you strategies and ideas that you can use to instantly improve your designs.
Have you ever noticed that hearing your favorite son on the radio seems so much more enjoyable that when you play in yourself? Surprise amplifies our emotional response. When we anticipate a moment, the emotional response is diluted across time.
The book is full of insights like this and gives examples of how you can use surprise in your designs to increase the emotional connection between your users and your product.
At about 100 pages the book is a nice quick read, it gets straight to the point and provides amazing value. If your a designer or developer this book is a must read and will help you think differently about how you approach design.
Designing For Emotion is published by A Book Apart and is available in paperback, or ebook (epub, mobi and pdf).
If you enjoyed the review you might like to follow me on twitter
—May, 2012
From Garry Tan’s blog:
We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous.
I love how much this applies to people learning pretty much anything. When I started out in development I found it really hard (still do) but I’m able to work through things on my own now without wasting days on trivial problems. All because of the compounding returns of knowledge. When you start learning you build this base of knowledge that everything else in the field builds upon. All the things you’ve learnt in the past help you with learning new things in the future. A perfect example is learning a language (spoken or programming) each successive language you learn is easier than the last.
As a beginner I think it’s important to keep this in mind when struggling through hard times, the effort you put in now to make sure you understand the fundamentals properly will be well worth it in the future.
Oh.. If you read this far you might like to follow me on twitter
—Apr, 2012
Since my design skills are not the greatest and my blog needed a redesign I thought it would a nice small project for me to work on and learn from. I’ve tried to keep it fairly minimalist and as a way to keep practicing some design I’m going to start developing header images for each of my posts. Starting soon…
I’ve also added an RSS feed, so if you like anything that you read let me know and sign up to the rss!
—Apr, 2012
I’ve started using dropbox a lot more heavily recently and was beginning to get close to the free limit (2GB at time of writing). I had heard of people using adwords and their referral link to increase their limit, but I wasn’t sure how effective it could be. Then I received an adwords coupon for $100 and had to give it a go. It works! and pretty effectively as well. I managed to max out my free account (up to 18GB) for about $70. Dropbox allow you to go over the 18GB referral limit (mine got to about 24 GB) but they brought my account back down after a couple of days, so I ended up spending $100 total. The pro account for dropbox is $99/year for 50GB so the whole process didn’t save me much money but I had a free coupon and in a year or two it will probably have been worth it :).
Heres a walkthrough / breakdown of how I did it, if you use my most cost effective keywords and find a couple of more on your own I’m sure you could do it for less.
I ran my campaign for 6 days, I had 355,665 impressions and 763 clicks. The average cost per click was $0.13.
Here are the keywords I used.
And my overall campaign stats.
As you can see most of my traffic came from the google display network instead of the search ads, although the search ads had a much higher click through rate.
My most effective keyword ‘cloud storage free’ received 61 clicks but it was also the most expensive, costing an average of $0.56 per click. There were a few adds that did well and had average cpc’s of less than $0.10 so it is definitely possible to do this for cheaper.
Overall whilst not hugely cheaper than paying for the 50GB plan it’s a lot more fun playing with adwords, and if you won’t use 50GB but use more than 2GB it’s the cheapest option to go for. I would definitely recommend throwing down $20 - $30 (you can set budgets for your campaign) or using a coupon if you have one and seeing how much space you can get.
Total win for dropbox, imagine having a product that your customers would actually pay to advertise for you…
—Apr, 2012
Learning to program is an iterative, systematic process of eliminating magic.
I found this quote somewhere and it sums up my experience of learning to program perfectly. At the start I had no idea how different parts of programs worked together, rails routes and how controllers worked were a complete mystery. But as I spent more time learning I realised that almost all of these strange concepts were underpinned by some fundamentals of computer science and programming in general. Once you pull away some of the abstractions it’s much easier to understand whats going on.
The hard part is that as a total beginner you don’t really know how much is being done for you by your langauge of choice, how much ‘magic’ is it using?
The only way I’ve found of dealing with that problem is to try and really understand the fundamentals, the best way I’ve found to do that is through research. If you don’t understand exactly what your program is doing look up the parts you don’t understand.
The Stanford Introduction to Computer Science courses are also an amazing resource and really teach you the fundamentals of programming instead of just a language.
—Apr, 2012
I always worry that I’m not learning fast enough. I don’t know why, maybe I think I’m going to miss out on something. That’s totally unrealistic but I think about it a lot and I’m sure other beginners do as well. The tech industy is filled with learn ‘x’ in 24 hours type books whose titles may or may not be constructive and who claim to do something that is pretty much impossible. Anything that’s hard, like learning to program takes 10,000 hours to become really good at. I know this but I still worry about not being good enough, fast enough.
Richard Feynman is famous for his learning techniques, here he writes about how after a while he got burned out with physics and stopped ‘playing’ with it and didn’t enjoy the field as much. It struck me that this was probably at a point in his career when he knew enough to get by most days without having to really think about something or learn anything new. I realised I don’t want to get to that point in my career, what I love about computer science and the tech industry so far is that there’s a seemingly endless array of things to learn about. So need to stop worrying about learning quickly and use the drive that it gives me to play around with as many things as I can.
Use the worry and fear to help yourself start your next project, hold on to the worry and enjoy yourself because when it’s gone it sounds much worse.
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—Apr, 2012
If your looking for a fun introduction into iOS design and development the Design then Code tutorial by Mike Rundle is a great place to start. There are two sections to the tutorial which is based around the creation of a simple iphone app.
Part 1 shows you how Mike thinks about designing interfaces for iOS and how to implement the designs in photoshop.
Part 2 gives a brief introduction into iOS development and how to recreate your photoshop design into a working iOS application.
Unlike most tech related tutorials these ebook style walkthroughs look great. The content is well set out and easy to follow along. My only complaint is that they are a little short and there’s not enough of them. I would love to see a guide of similar quality that was more in-depth or went through the process of completing a more complex application.
If you’ve done some programming before (even if only a little) and are looking for a place to start with iOS development or design these guides are a great choice.
—Apr, 2012