Think Versa

Learning Semantically

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Learning Semantically

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The best, free in-depth content for skills & disciplines.

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Think Versa

Maker

What's good people! To all my creatives, entrepreneurs and makers, have you ever tried learning something new but get mad anxiety. You try to understand a certain problem but can't wrap your head around it? Well my goal with Versa is to help you break down knowledge into particles for you to digest. If you ever heard about First Principles, then its like that method. For example, if you're trying to learn Photography, of course jump in and start shooting. But then you'll start running into problems, such as "Why is photo so flat?" or "Why is my photo so blurry on the edges?" Hmm, I need to learn about Aperture and Shutter speed. You want to view knowledge as a tree. So you have trunks, branches and twigs. Trunks are disciplines, such as Design or Business. You have Branches, which can range from Product Design to Photography. Inside each branch, you have twigs, which will have all your skills for a branch. So if you went this route: Design > Web Design > Typography, you'll get all the best resources for Type. Within Typography, you'll see other related branches. If you're a specialist, then you'll want to dig deep into a certain branch and learn as much as possible. You'll want to be the best UI Designer or Photographer. If you're a generalist, then you'll want to know enough of many branches to manage a team. If you're a versatilist, then you'll want to master many branches to be the best entrepreneur or leader. Not everyone can be a versatilist. You'll need to be able to juggle many roles and be a B+ player or better in all those roles. If you run a design business, you will need to master Design, Marketing, Business. You'll might need to learn some Development and Psychology as well. Currently, I'm entering things manually, but one day, I'll add auto posting and voting. Later, I will introduce Tracks. This will be lists of what to learn in each branch as a beginner, intermediate and advanced. For now, I'll be posting as much free information that has great information. I'll try to stay away from posts that's there for pure SEO purposes. Of course I'll post free and paid tools. So for Product Design, you'll see Sketch and Figma in there. I'll also post the best Sketch and Figma resources as their own twigs. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or hit me up on Twitter @madebyporter.

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8yr ago

Miami Tech Twitter Directory

I love the concept, but I'm questioning the execution here. I'm not sure if you got this idea from the Elon Musk quote but it's quite relevant: "One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." According to his advice, we should understand the fundamentals before going into specific details. In your product, it seems like the opposite, where you're showing very specific topics for broader categories. Shouldn't we learn the fundamentals of design before jumping into the specific subset of typography? Additionally, the numbering on those links seems arbitrary. I expected a logical ordering of resources but instead got a bunch of random links that have numbers, without much explanation on what the numbers mean. Is that the order to look at the resources in? Is that the best to worst ordering? What is it? -- Tl;DR: I like the concept a lot, and hope you can execute it well enough to deliver a good experience.

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8yr ago

Think Versa

Maker

@dbrereton You're right. When I first built it, I started questioning is this the right way to go. Then I tried to rebuild it but I felt it would take longer to do. So I went this route and then I think with tracks, I can reorganize things in a way where you'll learn what's Design first, then head into Typography. Currently, the ordering is by the most recent, but Im going to change it to the order of what to learn first. So here's what I think would be the fundamentals for Design: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Visu... You can't go any further into product or web until you know these first. Any thoughts, Dmitri?

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8yr ago

Miami Tech Twitter Directory

@madebyporter That's a pretty solid design resource. And yeah, changing things around like that would solve the problems I mentioned above. Thanks for being so quick and responsive to feedback!

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8yr ago

I feel like a new curated directory of resources is posted every week to PH. Maybe someone should make a curated directory of curated directories of resources. But then if too many of those start being made we'd need a curated directory of curated directories of curated resources.

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8yr ago