Designer Must Haves
Author of this post: Tara MacKay | About Blog Authors »
I recently found an article that presented the 30 must-have fonts for designers, and it made me wonder what other must-haves that design professionals recommend for beginners…
First off, those 30 must-have fonts I mentioned are found at justcreativedesign.com. Jacob Cass breaks them down by serif and sans serif, and includes some that you likely have handy (Helvetica, Lucida) and some that are well worth the cost, like the lovely Frutiger. Paired with each font is a note on where each is often used, for example Futura is great for large displays, as well as small book text.
Designer J. Hollister has produced a great list of books on Amazon that he recommends to beginning graphic artists. The selections focus on the fundamentals of visual design as well as turning your design work into a business. Personally, I can do without the Classroom in a Book series titles listed here (though some love them), but the other choices, like Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual and Thinking With Type, are essential to a new designer’s library.
Speaking of books, design firm fs media provides an interesting list of the five web design books every designer should own. The usual Don’t Make Me Think and The Zen of CSS Design are at the top, but the rest are interesting choices that you may not have come across yet. Something to note is that this list focuses much more on the structure, workflow, and CSS presentation of websites, rather than web graphics or Flash design. Designers often want to learn imaging first, but the underlying structure is far more important.
Some of the items that “designers must have” are, to me, less than essential and downright amusing, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some purpose. Web design blog mandarinmusing.com says that a Web 2.0 designer must have diagonal a stripe generator, found at stripegenerator.com. http://www.stripegenerator.com/ You’d be hard pressed to call this a fundamental application for newbie designers, but it’s fun and occasionally handy all the same.
A much more ambitious “must-have” comes from flash99good.com. http://www.flash99good.com/?p=193 The author suggests that digital artists can benefit from the creativity and personal touch of the Wacom Cintiq tablet, and justifies the hefty price with its productivity assistance. If you can’t drop a grand on this now (probably because you’re buying real must haves like Photoshop), an inexpensive Graphire or Intuos tablet is a good buy for digital artists.
This is just a small handful of the must-have items suggested by various designers online. In your experience, what are your top five design tools, apps, or books?
March 11th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Thanks for the link up :) Many of the ‘must have’ articles are just eye catching titles by the authors but sometimes you do come accross something you wish you had have known about earlier.