The Student Design Resource UK

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You've most likely all heard of Spencer Nugent and Sketch-a-day, most people also know IDSketching too. Its one thing to look at beautiful Industrial design sketches each day to try to emulate, but its easy to find yourself struggling with recreating anything of an even remotely similar level. After all if you could you'd most likely be the one posting the sketches rather than looking at them! Alas here we've found what we think is the biggest collection of video tutorials on sketching by the guys at IDSketching all here on Vimeo!

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Graphic Design

Karen Kavett makes youtube videos about all things graphicsy, and arts and craftsy.

There are some really interesting videos she's made about the history of both colour and type; looking into the history of pantone as well as some funny pantone names, and also insightful and interesting explorations of fonts, ampersands and interrobangs.

Karen has also done a really useful 'How To' set of videos for things like getting an internship, and designing CV's, business cards and logos.

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Coursera

Free online courses are becoming more and more of a reality, and one place that consolidates tonnes of amazing courses run by incredible people at incredible Universities, is Coursera.

Coursera offers lots of great, free online courses in 25 odd categories. You are set assignments and reports in your field of interest, and when submitted are critiqued by your fellow 'Courseras', meaning you get the most out of your time spent there. 

A bit about them:

(From their website)

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

  Happy learning SDR'ers 

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Need some heat-shielding gel? Or maybe some conductive Velcro? Then Inventables is the place to go. The American based company has a wide range of crazy products that might just have what you need for your project.

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The History Of Typography

This cool stop motion animation explores the history of typography, from the very beginning with Guttenberg and his movable type, through to the development of Helvetica in the late 1950's and early 60's. Great little bit of background on one of the things we all use, every day.

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Its not something that we commonly realize  but all too often getting a decent 3D print can be a little tricky. So here we present you with a useful little page by the guys over at studiorola that acts as a checklist for those of you using Rhino software to prep your files ready to be sent to print!

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Another incredibly detailed and useful design essay from IDEO. This time concerned with the human factors within design, this pdf looks at how the tools, resources and skills we as designers and companies can affect and help others around the world. From the small design tweaks to full scale projects it beckons to those who design quite literally to make the world a better place.

Sound like you? You'll love this. If not then you should really really read this as to benefit from the depth of thought that can go behind your projects, rather than the typical superficial style makeover that many of your fellows will no doubt put forwards at your next crit! 

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You know those moments when your teacher, lecturer or boss says something that reminds you just how much of a treasure trove of useful tips and tricks learnt through years of experience they actually are? Well imagine a website filled with insights and lessons learnt from some of the best creative entrepreneurs around. This is that site.

It gets even better still however. For merely the cost of postage (£1.99 to mainland UK last I checked) these guys will send you the book pictured above filled with those same essays and articles on things from how to decide which ideas to develop further to the benefits and disadvantages of keeping your company small. 

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Kuler is a free resource run by adobe to help create a color pallet. Either stick in a starting color and see what you can achieve, or get inspired by existing themes.

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Sunglass provides a great way of collaborating with others to develop your 3D CAD files.  It lets you work manage and view your files, as a team, on any device, and rather ingeniously allows you to create universal embeddable 3D viewers to showcase your work.

This is what Sunglass has to say:

3D has gone beyond portable. Sunglass brings design to the cloud, allowing you to virtually gather around your 3D assets with your design team, anywhere in the world, from your desktop, web, or mobile client.

Sunglass gives you granular control so that you can securely and easily share sensitive designs on a need-to-know basis with coworkers, clients, and contractors. You can chat with your team in real time, and annotate directly on the models in a shared virtual space.

Instant collaboration is as easy as sharing a link; people will receive specific access rights to the right version of your design, directly in their browser without having to download any software. Sunglass truly enables global collaboration, what will you create today?

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Yet another brilliant publication from IDEO. This time looking into How human centered design is best applied and just how important it is to consider others from the very first step of the design process. All this wrapped up in a beautifully laid out booklet that really is worth a look at.

Note: It's quite a big file, but bear with it, it's worth the wait.

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Well, a nice little tool for you guys today from the guys at IDEO. After a read about on their site, I've found they describe best what this does;

'IDEO’s human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways—sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up—as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs'.

In practical terms, when you're half way through a project and your motivation hints at fading and all of a sudden direction just disappears completely. Whip out these cards and let them guide you to seeing your project in a new light, the project management equivalent of getting up from your desk, getting a coffee and then coming back with new eyes.

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Got a 3D printer at home or uni? Don't use it as often as you think you should considering its substantial cost? Its something that becoming quite a popular question. Enter shapeways, think Etsy for 3D printing. Full of ideas and demonstrations of the capabilities of 3D printing. You'll spend less time making failed prints if you've seen how someone else sucessfully made a similar part. And hey, if you're good enough you could start selling your parts there too and start chipping away at that £3000 dent in your wallet left by purchasing the printer in the first place.

The majority of makers on shapeways are pretty good guys and if you're stuck and wondering how on earth they managed something. Send them a message and from our experience they will be more than happy to help a fellow in the maker community or budding design student!

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Sketching isn't something we've posted much about yet. However it is one of the single most important skills for any designer. These tutorials are pretty useful for getting your head around some awkward shapes for the first time in perspective as well as really good for learning some of the basic (and not so basic) sketching skills and methods that you can then use to take your work to the next level.

Just today I've been using their video on section lines to revamp a few old sketches. 

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We've already shown you frogs take on the tech trends of this year to come in an earlier post, but heres an interesting throwback from their archives where the best minds in design strategy take a look at the year that was to come, and has now passed. Want to see how good they really are? Take a read through this and decide for yourselves how close to the mark you think they were.

Admittedly, this isn't as pretty and graphical as their tech trends for 2013 but its got just as much gold dust insight inside and is another great piece to find a starting point for a project.

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In this series of research articles frog explores how in recent years, fuelled by the recession the business climate has began to change from the old style model of seeing populations merely as potential sales and designs task as solely to sell as much junk as possible to as many people as possible, with the aim of requiring replacement early enough to keep up sales, but late enough not to damage the chances of repeat purchases.

Fast forward to modern times, where the notion of consumerism is slowing and people are seeking a more experience based and unique connection between themselves and the brands they support as a means of expression. For the first time, the task of design is changing towards imbuing a product not only with the standard array of functionality and form, but also with meaning, a cause for users to get behind and feel a part of. 

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3D printing is definitely a buzz at the moment with more and more people becoming interested in its potential, but few of us actually know much about them or how they really work.

Now, you may not have this particular printer, but this manual covers a lot of the basics of 3D printing in general and it only stands to reason that once you know how to work one printer, you're going to be in a better position to learn how to use others too when you come across them. So take a browse and see some of the important aspects such as working with your 3D models and preparing the platform/print head for use.