The landscape of tools we use and what sources of inspiration we find are always changing, but here’s a non-exhaustive list of what our design team is using and looking at right now.
Tools
- Figma - For interface design, prototyping, outputting and adjusting SVGs, creating presentations
- FigJam - For workshop facilitation, brain storming, digital whiteboarding, planning, creating project timelines
- MyMind - Used as a visual digital brain to save inspiration and ideas
- User Interviews - For sourcing candidates and conducting user interviews, good for finding candidates in a specific niche
- Notion - Personal documents, note taking, calendar feature, to do tracking
- Things - To do list management
- Hyper - An alternative to the default terminal
- Cursor - Code editor with AI superpowers
- Adobe suite - Photoshop for photo editing/cropping and visual design, Media Encoder for converting files, Illustrator for custom SVG work
- Tuple - For pairing with remote coworkers
- Feather Icons or Hero Icons - A free set of icons to use in UI design
- The Noun Project - More elaborate or unique icons
- Github Desktop - For git visualization and management
- ChatGPT - For content and idea generation
- SVGOMG - Optimizing SVGs
- Loom - For screen recording and demo-ing with narration
- Canva - For use as a “CMS” for creative stuff that the marketing team needs (ads, social posts, etc)
- CodePen - For tinkering on code ideas and playing with CSS
- Google Workspace - For documentation, thoughts, planning, creating presentations, tracking data, taking notes
Sources of inspiration and references
- Mobbin - For UI inspiration
- Dribbble - For UI inspiration
- 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design - Important UX concepts to keep in mind
- A11y Project - Referincing accessibility standards
- CSS Tricks - CSS details, tutorials, and best practices
- thoughtbot’s Customer Discovery Playbook - For design thinking exercises to run with clients, questions to ask, and best practices on approaching early product work
- Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres - For early product work best practices
- Newsletter by Nguyen Le - UI & UX design
- Newsletter by Dan Mall - Ideas, news, the latest trends
- Checklist.design - UI inspiration
- Footer.design - UI and branding inspiration
- Guide to flexbox and Guide to CSS Grid - For remembering all of the niche syntax and properties when using flexbox and css grid
Happy designing!
