Design Dots: A curated mini list of design-related links each day.

I created Design Dots in the hopes of formalizing what I do on a daily basis – sharing links to design-related things with my colleagues. It’s usually done on slack or via instant messenger, so I decided that I should turn it into a daily task and publish it. Now, most designers now will find a clever way of hosting it on some new javascript framework or finding a neat static site generator to host this on. But, not having a ton of back-end framework knowledge, and just enough JS knowledge to get me from point a to b, I decided that Webflow would be the answer for me. I’ve been developing and dabbling in Webflow for a couple of years now and it has been one of the most refreshing and designer-friendly tools I’ve used in recent memory. Now, Webflow has some limitations and can’t solve every framework problem. But, since this is a simple enough website to publish, it seemed the perfect fit. I’m using the CMS to control categories, colors, and icons, and using another collection to hold the posts for the day. At the moment of writing this (Nov 2018), I’m limiting myself to 4-5 dots per day. I may bump that up in the future though. The inspiration for the site came from a mix of sites I frequent every day – and quite possibly most of the viewers here as well. Most notably are designernews.co and sidebar.io (thanks @sachagreif ). There are some aspects of both that I’m borrowing from. From designer news, the flexibility of categorized posts. And, from sidebar, the constraint of 5 posts and the top-down curation of those links. Many thanks to both of those sites, as well as countless others for a constant stream of inspiration. Personally, I’ve been designing websites and branding for 15+ years. I’ve always had my thumb on the pulse of what’s next and am constantly inspired and thrilled by the new products coming out each day. I’m hoping to give back to this community in some form and hope you follow along in this little journey. If this is also a passion of yours, feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to consider having other contributors to the site to really hone in on high-quality design dots each day. Cheers, Tony