“Great Designers Steal”ProductNation

February 26, 2013
Published under Design
3 Comments

Picasso is purported to have remarked, “good artists borrow, but great artists steal.” He probably did not mean it in a literal sense. He wanted to inspire us from great works of arts and re-interpret or re-imagine them in a different way. Here are some references that have inspired us to become better designers.

1. Balsamiq: Its simple sketchy interface evokes a sense of nostalgia of our playing with crayons as children. The clients don’t get distracted by little details allowing us to focus on important things such as navigation, content prioritization, quantity of content, and what a screen does. You should definitely use this to visualize and share your vision before writing a single line of code. This is also a great tool to communicate user stories within the agile framework.

2. Pattern Tap: Its a collection of crowd-sourced design inspirations for all page types and devices. The designs are categorized by facets, so search for “login” to be wowed by how a simple screen can be so beautiful.

3. The Noun Project: “The mission of The Noun Project is to collect, organize and add to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language so they can be shared in a fun and meaningful way.” The symbols are free and delightful. You have see them to believe.

4. Smashing Magazine: An online magazine for designers and front end developers, to stay current with the ever evolving tools and techniques. It also has a great compilation of books and ebooks that could be references on your next project.

5. 365psd: 365 psd, needless to say, means one high quality psd file a day. A great resource for free UI kits, page templates, and icons to get you started or help get over the creative block. And do sign up for a freebie everyday.

6. Google Web Fonts: Are you still married to times, arial, and helvetica? Here are hundreds of open source free fonts to help design great looking yet highly readable sites. Don’t forget to look at the “pairings” feature. It recommends best complementary font pairs to add that extra zing to the design.

So go forth and steal, and please keep adding to this list.

About the Author

Nishant is the co-founder and CEO of Design For Use, a UX consulting firm based out of Austin and Gurgaon. He has been in the business of creating stellar user experiences for over 13 years. Previously, he has done academic research and managed user experience teams at Lucent Bell Labs, Scient, Prodigy Communications and SBC Communications. He has a Bachelors in Civil Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Nari-Kannan/632089281 Nari Kannan

Great Post, Nishant! In keeping with your title, there is also a very compelling reason to use existing User Interface idioms in design. It is to make things simpler, familiar and hence, easier to use. Have you noticed how every new competitor to Google search all has the same kind of interface with a simple rectangular box in the center?

http://www.designforuse.com Nishant Jain

Good example, Nari. I remember when Alta Vista used to be a de facto search engine and how its interface eventually became indistinguishable from Google’s. Unfortunately it was a blatant copy and not a case of getting inspired. I believe there is a lot of improvement on appropriateness of search results in last decade but not that much on encouraging better search queries. Google is sort of doing that now. I dream of a visually rich search that concentrates more on refining instead.
http://www.facebook.com/nishantjain1 Nishant Jain

Good example, Nari. I remember when Alta Vista used to be a de facto search engine and how its interface eventually became indistinguishable from Google’s. Unfortunately it was a blatant copy and not a case of getting inspired. I believe there is a lot of improvement on appropriateness of search results in last decade but not that much on encouraging better search queries. Google is sort of doing that now. I dream of a visually rich search that concentrates more on refining instead.