Design Resources

Interested in inviting me to speak at your event, company, or conference? I specialize in teaching design to non-designers. Email molly.ampersand@gmail.com.

My workshop at the Bend Design Conference about civic design & visual communication:

My keynote talk at Affect about public service design:

My webinar with design tips for activists

For tactical tips, skip to slide 24.

Civic Design

• Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent: These free guides from the Center for Civic Design were created for election officials, but contain useful tips on user research, plain language, and design for any project.

• United States Web Design Standards: a fantastic style guide with design principles and UI patterns, and it's all accessible out of the box.

• Visualizing Information for Advocacy: a book about how to influence issues using the right combination of information, design, technologies and networks.

Typography

• Typography in 10 Minutes, by Matthew Butterick

• Practical Typography: Pretty much all you need to know about typography, including composition, formatting, layout, and font recommendations.

• Google Web fonts: free fonts for web and download.

Graphics & Photos

• The Noun Project: every icon you could possibly need! Some public domain, some Creative Commons, some cost $1.

• FontAwesome: A font made of icons, for use on the web and elsewhere.

• ColorStock: diverse stock photos!

• CreateHerStock: stock photos of women of color!

• Nappy: Beautiful, free, high-res photos of black and brown people.

• Did you know you could search Flickr and Google Images for public domain and Creative Commons licensed images? Now you know!

Color

• Sim Daltonism: Color blindness simulator tool for Mac.

• Adobe Color: Free online tool from Adobe to help you create a pleasing color palette.

Learn design through games!

• Can’t Unsee: practice noticing details in web interfaces

• The Bézier Game: master the pen tool for vector graphics

• The Shape Type Game: learn about how to make great letter shapes

• The Kerning Game: hone your attention to the space between letters

• The Color Game: train your eye to notice colors

• Hex Invaders: test your hex color knowledge