The Balanced Team Blog

At the recent Balanced Team conference in Chicago, a popular theme was “broken comb people.” In response to the idea of the “T-shaped designer” who has deep expertise in one area and familiarity with many areas, Jared Spool proposed that modern teams require people with wider range of functional skills.

At the un-conference portion of the event, I facilitated an activity to collect learning resources the participants personally used and found helpful to broaden their skillset. Here’s the list for your reference and reading enjoyment!

Ways To Learn

• Pairing and working near pairs for getting context
• Find a front-end mentor so you’re not confused by what you read
• Code Academy, for an intro to JavaScript
• W3 Tutorials for getting unstuck with specific problems
• F orrst, a community of developers and designers
• nerdi.net, a web developer toolbox
• Rails Bridge, women coding together, power+energy
• Skillshare, esp. financial modeling for entrepreneurs with Taylor Davidson
• Stack overflow, for getting answers to code/dev questions
• Rails Tutorial, for learning rails
• Treehouse, Web training website with gamification elements (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby)
• Smashing Magazine (and books), general Web and design and UX and fontend dev
• A Book Apart, series for deep dives into current thinking
• Big Nerd Ranch, iOS programming
• UIE UI conference, full day workshops on UX critical skills
• UIE virtual seminars

UI/UX

• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love, Marty Cagan, good description of team roles
• Rosenfeld Media books, esp Web Form Design book by Luke Wroblewski
• Google search “UX Design Patterns“
• The Noun Project for icons and vectors
• Twitter hashtag #ux for finding resources on topics
• Yahoo design pattern library
• The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Robin Williams
• Follow Mike Lane (@mlane) on Twitter. He posts lots of great design, UX and code resources

Typography and Graphic Design

•  Kuler, browse color combinations
• Dribble, show and tell for designers
• 300 Mobile Icons, Bill Reid, great for quick icons (could not find a link, sorry!)
• What the Font, figure out what a font is from a sample, explore fonts by characteristics
• FFFFound, inspiration, has a great mobile app
• Pintrest for design and typography inspiration
• Evernote, keep track of your audio, pictures and notes anywhere
• Behance, online portfolio site, use for design inspiration
• Gimmie Bar, good for bookmarking things you like
• Lost Type, great, free typefaces

Front End Development

• CSS Tricks, how to take advantage of CSS
• Scout, tool for Compass, SASS
• W3C markup validation service
• Burlington Web App meetups and demos (could not find link, sorry!)
• Vandelay Design, curated resources, mostly Web design
• Susy, CSS framework for responsive Web
• Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, explains the philosophy behind modern web thinking
• Twitter Bootstrap, for basic web templating
• Bootswatch, bootstrap themes
• CSS3 for Web Designers, Dan Cederholm
• JavaScript, the Good Parts, short, sweet, JavaScript resources
• CSS Mastery, Andy Budd
• Hack WordPress templates to experiment with PHP, HTML, CSS
• Use Firebug to edit HTML/CSS of any page
• Use Sass, Haml for saner coding