The ultimate guide to graphic design resources ✏️
A deep dive into what design resources are, why they matter and how you should organise them.
🎨 Why should I care about design resources?
Interior designers make choices on furnishings, decoration and layout based on their concept. Graphic designers undertake a similar process of ‘picking and choosing’ that leads to much of the work we do involving taking pre-existing assets such as a fonts, images, patterns, mockups, icons and creating brands and other pieces of communication from them. If we were to make all these individual assets from scratch it would bloat a project and mean less time focusing on the aspects of the brand that mattered
When designing a brand for a museum, wayfinding and iconography might be high on the priority list and time would be allocated to craft a bespoke option. If I was designing a new clothing brand I would not prioritise the need for bespoke icons perhaps instead focusing on photography art direction or campaign material.
When we work with pre-made assets and tools it allows us to focus our attention and our creativity on more demanding areas of the project that may be more important to answering a brief or communicating a desired message. Also it allows us to quickly visualise a concept, testing out ideas and styles to see if they work.
Much like developers, using pre-made assets and tools helps us to visualise and test visual concepts quickly and effectively.
Stop worrying about ‘copying’ or ‘stealing’ ideas or designs, as long as you have a strong rationale for that idea you should not feel guilty for using patterns off Shutterstock to create a proof of concept. In fact I would suggest it would be an irresponsible use of time to spend a day creating an illustrated logo only for it to not to be used, although sometimes spending time crafting an idea can help breakaway from ‘easy win’ styles, consult a design director by showing references before attempting just to be safe though.
Okay I don’t think I have covered anything groundbreaking here that most designers don’t already know or do, hopefully you appreciate the importance of using resources within your design process, now let’s look at curating and organising your resources.
What resources should I keep and how should I organise them? 📁
Our resources live in three different places: 🌐 Online, 💾 Offline and 📚 Physical. Let’s cover physical resources first as they are arguably turned to the least on a daily basis and ultimately rely on an organisational system around your physical environment which is outside the scope of this article.
📚 Physical
Firstly we will find Swatches, this may include paper stock, Pantone colours, foils, packaging, potentially anything that would be physically created. Ideally this library of swatches should be kept together in one location. Secondly we would find Inspiration, examples include logo books such as Logo Modernism by Jens Müller, design annuals such as Graphis and magazines such as Slanted. The key here is that the content is professionally curated which can often be a more effective reference than an algorithm driven design site such as Dribbble or Behance. Finally we have Educational, be that practical books such as Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann or creative thinking literature from design authors. What makes physical content special is firstly the curation and secondly by not being online, it’s more likely to be less aligned to design trends.
💾 Offline
Offline resources should be global assets that are not project specific and should be stored with the intention of future and repeated use. They should be organised within a ‘House’ or ‘Studio’ folder you can use an _underscore or !exclamation mark to keep folders at the top of a column. The key here is strict personal curation and organisation, for this reason you may be inclined to manage these files locally and not on a shared agency server. Here is an example folder structure that I would use, your work may require a different structure, for example an illustrator may have many brushes and textures so could choose to categorise further within those folder. For more information on my recommendations for structuring your project files click here.
🌐 Online
Online resources refers to HTML bookmarks. These bookmarks are by far our biggest repository for tools and references and require the most organisation and consideration to manage. It’s very important to be selective about the resources we keep, too many links makes finding the relevant resource so hard that it often becomes forgotten about altogether.
When it comes to storing bookmarks you actually have multiple options available to you.
1. Browser Bookmarks
Advantages: Capture is built in and easy, management is handled by folders, no additional application needed
Disadvantages: No previews to help explore, awkward to collaborate
2. Note taking application
If you are a keen user of productivity applications such as Notion or Evernote (both of which have web clipper extensions for Chrome) you may want to manage your web links within these apps.
Advantages: Management can be organised extensively, view links as page samples, link directly to other pages or notes within your application
Disadvantages: Can be complicated and time consuming to maintain, capture can be cumbersome, must open and use the app to access the bookmarks which can take time.
3. Bookmark application
I have been personally experimenting with a bookmark application as a tool to organise my online resources, it offers a few helpful features over default bookmarks but also has an ongoing membership cost.
Advantages: Options for management, capture is fairly quick with extension, preview and searching is by far the best experience. Few useful tools such as checking for broken links.
Disadvantages: Must use a separate application, does not sync with Chrome, costs money.
No matter the option you choose its paramount the capture method is low friction, management is intuitive and links are both easy to explore and accessible.
Typography
I recommend creating tiers for foundries based on your personal preference, it’s impossible to categories by style as most foundries will make a range of styles of typeface. I do however recommend a separate folder for font distributors such as MyFonts or Adobe Fonts. I also like to include typography specific guides and references here as I will most likely also be using those tools when in a workflow of exploring type.
Stock
This is your call as many of the larger stock websites such as Shutterstock will provide both images and illustration. I tend to categorise those that provide both as whatever their primary offering is (probably images). You could also place Mockups under stock if you would like to simplify.
Design Blogs
Less is more in the world of Design Blogs, pick your favourites and try to cover a mix of disciplines (UI, Branding, Packaging, Typography, Retail).
Icons
Again, less is more here, save icon libraries and artists rather than individual icons or small sets (those should be saved within project folders offline).
Mockups
Do not save individual mockups here, the purpose of this category is for mockup providers. Think of mockups like fonts, you wouldn’t bookmark every font, you would bookmark the foundry. Furthermore using the same high quality mockup providers will lead to a nicer, more consistent, presentation of your design.
Using the same high quality mockup providers will lead to a nicer, more consistent, presentation of your design.
Production
Production for me means printing, but if you work in video or film this will look very different. It is always handy to have production agencies bookmarked so you can make educated recommendations to your wider team if a piece of work is to be produced.
Studios
Depending on the specialism of design you work in you will want to categorise your studio list to your needs. There will always be multi-disciplinary agencies so I recommend putting most agencies into a catch-all category such as ‘Design’ or ‘Graphic Design’ and only filtering out agencies that specifically focus in on one niche. Ultimately you want this list to provide inspiration when creating mood boards or collating references, therefore I recommend you only bookmark agencies that set a benchmark in terms of quality or creativity.
Where can I find resources?
I am not going to share my own personal resources as they are specific to me and your needs will probably be different. However here are some great places to start online.
🔗 Sans Francisco
🔗 Product Disrupt
👋 Thanks for reading
Hopefully my organisational have structures have offered you a template to begin organising your resources in a way in which means you can access them quickly and work towards a more efficient workflow. These are by no means the best solutions for everyone and many of you will find that you require other branches of resources organised, what is important is that you recognise the importance of doing so and how it can make you a more effective designer.
