Jack McDade – Radical Design

Description

Jack McDade – Radical Design

Who is behind this course? What is this course? Why is this course?

I’m Jack McDade. I designed and created Statamic, designed Laravel.com, Laracon (a few times), Justin Jackson’s highly acclaimed site, and a whole pile of others.

I think the web has become too boring. There are too many fill-in-the-blank websites full of derivative content, lacking in personality. I’ve made a living zigging when everyone else zags. Design helps a site or brand stand out and be remembered, and applies equally to your personal portfolio or sophisticated, high-profile client project.

In this course I’m going to help you take your work from bland to grand. Bleak to chic. Boring to really quite very remarkably good. I’ll turn you into a designer.

It’s time to call bull@#$% on bad advice, show you shortcuts over here, delightful detours over there, and give you permission to get weird. This course is gonna get real. It’s gonna get practical. Silly and serious at the same time, even. I’m gonna teach you everything I know before I forget it all and have to mow grass for a living. Again.

Course Preview

I mean, you gotta know what you’re getting into right? Here’s a sneak peek. A vibe check.

1. Intro to the Intro(Free!)

Every journey starts somewhere. This one begins here, at the beginning of the beginning. I’m glad you’re here.

2. How to Use this Course

This course is a bit non-traditional and non-linear. Let me explain how you can get the most out of it.

3. The Big Secret

In this lesson I reveal the big secret most people don’t know about designers and the designs they design.

4. Start Curating(Free!)

If you’re serious about design, become a curator and start collecting everything anything that inspires you. I’ll show you how to organize it (Hint: don’t).

5. Start Stealing

Creatives steal. It’s the way of a creative’s live. Artists trace, musicians cover, writers do copy-work. This is where learning begins.

6. The Radical Design Process

Everyone has their own process, whether it works or not. I’ll explain mine and why I think it’s the right one for you too.

7. Choose Your Own Adventure

Once you finish this video, you can watch anything in any order. If you want. I still put everything in the order that made the most sense to me though.

1. Gather: Create from Abundance(Free!)

Do you start cooking a meal with an empty fridge and pantry? Wait, you do? Holy cow please explain how you don’t starve to death!

2. Gather: Inspiration

Flee from trends! Let’s dig into some non-traditional places for inspiration to make sure the work you do is unique and fresh.

3. Experiment: One Banana Per Day

Please don’t eat a hundred bananas in one day.

4. Experiment: Don’t Work. Play.

Experiments are like exercising. You need to be prepared for the main event.

5. Unleash: Stop Consuming. Ignore Everything.

Once your inspiration cup is full, it’s time to ignore everything, plug your eyes, and cover your ears because it’s time to bring your design to come to life.

6. Unleash: Establishing Goals

Not to keep you from the fun parts, but you must have the answer to the who, why, and what questions before you design so you can know when you’re done.

7. Unleash: Good Design Begins with Content

If you don’t have content, you have nothing to design with. The best designs come out of the best content. Here’s the bare minimum you need to start.

8. Unleash: Make Garbage

Staring at a blank page sucks. Make some garbage and get rid of that blank canvas.

9. Where to, Gumshoe?

You’ve finished another section! What’s next? Oh no, poisonous lizards!

1. The Truth About Best Practices

In this section we’re going to put all this theory into practice and design a landing page from start to finish. But first, let’s talk about “best practices”…

2. Writing Good Content

Having good content is a critical first step to making any progress on a good design. In this lesson I break down my content refining process.

3. Style Drives Layout (Part I)

Different design styles have their own way of treating content and images, which is why style should drive the layout, not the other way around.

4. Style Drives Layout (Part II)

We have one design concept, let’s do another one and see where we end up.

5. Balance vs Grids

Design Grids are overrated and annoying to work with. Let’s get into a much simpler way of laying out a design. Balance.

6. How to Trick People into Reading

People hate reading. Most people will do anything to avoid it. So how can you possibly get your content into people’s brain sacks? Let’s open my bag of tricks.

7. It’s Font O’Clock

This is one of my favorite steps in the design process – playing with awesome fonts. Let’s explore my favorite places to find good fonts for this design.

8. Calls to Action

It’s time to design the areas of the landing page where we want a user to DO something — like click a button, fill out a form field, or take a shower.

9. Fiddly Bits

Now that we’ve laid out the content, it’s time to decorate and ornament the site with all those little fiddly bits that give a site a real personality.

10. Easter Eggs

We’ve finished a design! Now we can take one more pass through it and look at how and where to hide easter eggs — fun little hidden details — to delight your users.

11. Strategic Squishing for Mobile

Let’s not forget about the mobile layout for our design. We’ll have to bring someone of our fun little elements to the chopping block.

1. Design Software(Free!)

Let’s talk about all the different design apps available today, what they’re best suited to, and what I recommend you use if you don’t already have your favorites.

2. Sketch

Sketch is my design app of choice. I know, Figma is probably more popular (and may even have more features), but I’ll explain why Sketch fits me and my process best.

3. Photoshop

The OG. The mac daddy. The most versatile raster image editing tool this side of the asteroid belt. Let me show you why I think every designer should have it.

4. Illustrator

Illustrator isn’t the only vector editing app, but it’s by far the most powerful. With great power comes great complexity — which I hope to strip away for you.

5. MidJourney

AI certainly has its place in the design process. I’ll show you how I use MidJourney as part of my personal design toolkit.

6. Asset Libraries

I couldn’t have accomplished what I have in my career without the aid of asset libraries. They multiply and expand your capacity far beyond your wildest dreams.

1. Goodbye Icons, Hello Monochrome!(Free!)

In this video I redesign boringrails.com using a few constraints from the board. Let’s start by getting rid of icons and images, and then finish by going full monochrome.

2. Using JSON in your Sketch Designs

Did you know that you can use JSON to populate your designs and generate cards, lists, and other repeatable elements? Well you can. This one is aimed at devs.

3. Vectorizing Paper + Pen Drawings

Let’s draw something, take a picture of it, and then turn it into a vector SVG using Illustrator’s Live Trace feature — all in under 5 minutes.

4. The Hidden Secrets Inside Your Fonts

Did you know that some fonts are packed full of extra glyphs and ligatures that you can leverage to add spice and sizzle to your designs? Let me show ya.

5. Fast, Dramatic Social Media Images

Pressed for time and need to design something quick and dirty? Here are a few quick tricks to just get the job done and move on.

6. How I Make Hand-Drawn Dashed Lines

Curious how I make those hand-drawn lines in almost all of my designs? I’ll show you!

1. Bloopers & Outtakes(Free!)

Sometimes words just abandon me, leaving me stranded. Other times I thought I knew what I was doing but it turns out, nope — Noobville Population: 1.

2. The Radical Radical Design Design

Want to watch a super-condensed version of me designing radicaldesigncourse.com? Sure you do. I got 7 hours of work down to 45 minutes for ya.

3. Critique – Erro Coffee

VIP Design Critique for errocoffee.com.

A little bit more about me & my background. Perspective Matters.

I’ve designed literally hundreds of bad websites & dozens of really good ones. I spent my time in the trenches to get good at this. I’ve had to make the logo bigger 410 times. I’ve been forced to work with both Comic Sans and Zapfino on the same project. I used to make rounded corners with 4 separately sliced out .GIF files. I’ve been a designer for 15+ years in a whole pile of roles and companies, including…

• A cog in a huge marketing agency machine
• The Director of Interactive at a growing web agency working 60-80+ hour weeks where I slept on the office couch many times
• A “Design Technologist” on the Design System Team at (the short-lived) GE Design in San Francisco
• A freelance designer branding startups and MVP UI design
• The designer behind everything in the Laravel ecosystem for a while
• The owner of my own small agency, Wilderborn
• Creator of Statamic, my bootstrapped indy CMS.

So yeah, I’ve probably been there and done that.

 

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