There’s a time for everything: Inspiration, learning, attempting, doing nothing, et cetera. Right now… well, we’re finding that we’re spending our time more intentionally than ever. On one hand, with kids at home and pressure to make our jobs work in this new reality, we may never have felt so busy. On the other, we may be struggling to fill weekends without the same opportunities for distractions that we have had before.
But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that designers are not focused on the easy or short-term. We’re not the type of people who patch things. We’re some of the most proactive, inspiring, focused, and kind peoples working today. We don’t sit and pontificate when faced with a challenge—we put Sharpie to paper (or fire up our work tools) and iterate until shit gets done.
Today, more than ever, the world needs us to remain inspired and tactile to blaze forward a path to the future. And to guarantee that happens, we need to make sure the light of inspiration never goes out.
That’s why we at InVision have put together a megalist of things that won’t just help you pass the time, but might even inspire new ways of seeing the world and reveal a path forward. Some of these resources are tried-and-true, others are relatively new. We started at 50, an arbitrary number, but will update it as new resources are released. True to the design thinking mentality, this is just our first iteration. Feel like we’ve made a huge oversight? Please feel free to send us suggestions by tweeting us @InVisionApp.
It’s a very small step, but we hope this inspiring list of resources will unleash a ripple effect of hope and clarity—and most importantly, new ideas—in an uncertain future.
Books
- Don’t Make Me Think
- Rocket Surgery Made Easy
- The Design of Everyday Things
- A Pattern Language
- Designing Your Life
- User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play
- Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
- Change by Design
- Loonshots
- This Might Get Me Fired
- Good to Great
- Make Time
- Find Your Why
- Design Leadership Handbook
Podcasts
- 99% Invisible
- The Crazy One Podcast
- High Resolution Design
- Twenty Thousand Hertz
- The Design of Business | The Business of Design
- Clever
- The Deeply Graphic Design Cast
- The Honest Designers Show
- Design Matters
- UI Breakfast
- The Design Better Podcast
- User Defenders
- The Method and Design Notes Podcast
- Presentable
- The Futur Podcast
- The Reflex Blue Show: A Graphic Design Podcast
- Grits & Grids
Short films
Feature films
- “Tim’s Vermeer”
- “The Creative Brain”
- “The Pixar Story”
- “Jeremy Scott: The People’s Designer”
- “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”
- “Print the Legend”
- “Have You Seen the Listers”
- “Helvetica”
- “Objectified”
- “Urbanized”
- “Rams”
- “General Magic”
- “Design Disruptors”
TV series
Digital volunteer opportunities
Focusing on work right now? Here check out our newest book:
