Tips on Writing for Usability

Design Resources

  • Adobe Color: interactive web app to help you choose nice color schemes.
  • Colour Lovers: a community of people who post and vote on color palettes.
  • Colorgorical: research-driven model to help you create color palettes that are both aesthetically pleasing and optimized for communicating data.
  • LOLColors: curated color palette inspiration
  • Fontpair: collection of fonts that go well together.
  • Beautiful Web Type: showcases the most beautiful fonts from Google’s free WebFonts collection
  • Subtle Patterns: a great collection of unobtrusive background patterns for a website.
  • icons8: huge collection of icons.
  • Noun Project: enormous collection of well-designed icons. Many are free (at least with attribution).
  • Flat Icon: sets of icons with visually consistent design
  • Sketch: Mac OS X app to help you draw new designs. Free trial or $50 student license.
  • FindA.Photo: search engine for free stock photos that includes search-by-color
  • Pexels: high quality free stock photos that you can use
  • Frontify: rapidly create a style guide for your app
  • Unsplash: you can find high-resolution royalty-free photos here.

Prototyping

  • inVision: create prototypes for web or mobile. Lots of integrations. My favorite prototyping tool right now. Note: we have a class code for free unlimited use until 6 months after you graduate.
  • Adobe XD: Adobe’s new interface design tool. It just came out of beta and if you have Adobe Creative Cloud I suggest you try it out.
  • Marvel: create desktop and mobile prototypes. Integrates with Sketch. Nice free plan.
  • Facebook Design Resources: a set of images and tools curated by Facebook to be used during UI prototyping.

Mobile Resources

  • Android Design Guide: design guidelines and patterns that are consistent with the android experience.
  • iOS Design Guide: design guidelines and patterns that are consistent with the iOS experience.

Design Inspiration

  • Dribbble: showcase of what designers are working on
  • Awwwards: awards for design, creativity, and innovation on the internet
  • Niice: sort of a more design focused pinterest site that can be used to create moodboards (and explore ones created by other people).
  • muzli designers: browse the work by a number of designers
  • heyuser: a video gallery for mobile onboarding inspiration

Visualization Tools