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.
Want the audio commentary version? Watch the recording of my webinar Saving Good Causes from Bad Design.
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!
- 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