This is not the average kind of post about where designers get their inspiration from, well the title suggests otherwise but i’d like to point out some things that make my life easier as a designer. There are dozens of things I can get inspiration from, sometimes just driving to work gives me this great idea and makes me wish i’d had a voicerecorder at hand because most likely by the time i get at work i already forgot about it. That actually makes me think, i should really start looking to buy a PDA of some sort … the Palm T|X or Tungsten E2 really appeal me. Anyhow I was about to give you some insight into some of the things I frequently use when designing websites and other projects.
Magazines
I’ve got a bunch of magazines i’m subscribed to or that i pick up from the International Magazine Store in Hasselt, the city I work. My favourite must be Computer Arts which may be a little bit too focussed on graphics and DTP for the average Webdesigner but still is of immense value. Great articles, stuffed CD’s with Demo’s, free commercial software, Stock imagery, fonts and a lot lot more. They also got a spin-off magazine called Computer Arts: Project which focusses on one special subject each month. This month’s subject is Street Art.
Honorable mentions for magazines go out for Digit, Webdesigner and some smaller dutch magazines like Inside.
Books
Most books on my bookshelf are technical books related to programming in PHP, MySQL Databases, CSS and XHTML. There are a few invaluable books among them no webdesigner or webdeveloper shouldn’t have. To name a few: Designing with webstandards, The Zen of CSS Design, Taschen’s 1000 favourite websites, DOM Scripting, PHP Phrasebook, Zend PHP Certification Study Guide and alot more.
The fact that my daytime job is at Boek & Soft, a store specialized in software and books about programming, internet, … (anything to do with computers actually) makes judging, reading and reviewing books alot easier for me.
Cheat Sheets
This is my little secret. Well it isn’t a real secret but as far as i know there aren’t many people who make real use of this. Let me give you one piece of advice, take the time to print the cheatsheets from Ilovejackdaniels.com on a piece of high quality paper, take them to your local copyshop and have them plasticized. It’s a big timesaver and makes developing so much easier than working with digital documentation or with a 300 page reference manual by your side.
Other people
Last but not least, networking. It’s amazing how much my knowledge of webdesign increased since I started my own website and blog about a year ago. The amount of people you get to know, the articles you read, the comments you place. Every tiny bit of interaction with other professionals has a big impact on how you work and think as a designer or developer. I’m not going to put all the webdesign and development RSS feed i’m subscribed to here, there are enough OPML lists outthere that you can consult. But take my work for it … every minute you put into your blog or just into communicating with like minded people and professionals is worth it. Get outthere and socialize!
That’s about it, there are more things that i could add like CSSgalleries, Forums, etc but like I said, there are enough websites where you can get that kind of information. Now i’m curious what you people have to add to this list. Show me!
Networking ! My favourite !
Works just as good on-line as off-line.
First: I really enjoyed the little article, especially the cheat sheets will come in handy
. Thanks!
One important thing that I’ve learned over the past few years (I’m still, young, so I still have a lot to learn
), is probably this: when some design isn’t working after fiddling with it for half a day, it is worth while taking your mind back three or four steps, or even just deleting it and starting all over. This is something that is really hard in the beginning, because every design you make or code, has probably numerous hours put into. But once you’ve mastered the “throwing away and starting all over”-thing, it will save you a lot of time and frustration!