How to select Brand Colors

How to select brand colors?

If you are
- designer
- working on presales
- working on concept design
- working on ideas to share with customer
- working on some proposal

any scenarios, where you need to bring branding part, theming, customization of look and feel.. You can use www.kuler.adobe.com app, its free to use web based solution from ADOBE. There are some other applications, but Kuler is one of the best.

Subject based  Search - This has great search engine, where we can write our subject and it gives exceptional result with great color palette. Your subject can be - company name, emotion, business (hospitality, finance, govt, sports) .. .etc

Good Form Designing - Tips

for me, form designing is one of the most tough part.. there is no easy way to handle this. sharing some of the ways to handle this
- Understand the business purpose of whole app
- Go through scenarios at least 3 times before starting IA/IxD part
- Identify CONSTANT and DYNAMIC content
- Identify different kind of ACTIONS
- Identify MANDATORY fields
- Do proper POC of ERROR MESSAGE (Client Side) and FEEDBACK Message(successful/failure/continue)
- Error/Feedback is very important part, there need to be great consistency
- For Content - Better to use INFORMAL LANGUAGE
example
------ Things are in process, feel free to have "Cup of Coffee"
------ Heay Traffic in Seattle(City), Data will take some time to come :)

- Some of the great tools/features are
------ Accordion
------ Wizard
------ Yes/No  - Toggle (http://artsmaths.blogspot.in/2012/07/radio-button-to-toggle-button.html)
------ Flyouts
------ Description Text
------ Inline Editing
------ AutoSave

I have some good example, ll be sharing here. If you have any links or content, please share.. ll update this with your name. My ideas is to make good repository of UX info, which we can refer during our dev process.

Good online UX magazine/site

Smashing Magazine must read online site for all ux lovers.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Lets start reading some UX Books

Some of the must read books on UX

Must

• The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman

• Don't make me think" by Steve Krug• Sketching User Experience - Bill Buxton
• About Face 3: The essentials of interaction design" by Cooper, Reimann & Cronin

• GUI Bloopers 2.0" by Jeff Johnson

• The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin

• Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsenp

• Designing the Obvious" by Robert Hoekman Jr

Others

• Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few

• Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

• Interaction Design by Rogers, Preece et al.

• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Data by Edward Tufte's

• User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky

- Free Book on net - http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/MagicInk.pdf

some of the great information are here - http://commadot.com/books-for-ux/

How to start with creativity

start doing scribble with pen/pencil/mouse on any canvas, idea here is to draw things around you the way you see them. Once you start doing very regularly, u ll start developing your own style of art and it ll help you to visualize things in minimum lines.

Believe me with time, you will have great repository of art work which you can use it for various purpose. example - for Icons, For poster design, for website design, for storyboarding, for wireframing .etc

TIPS
1. Create an environment for creativity
2. Start the habit of drawing
3. Create a personal visual library [Start drawing objects in your own style example: Watch, Calculator .... .etc]
4. Create a personal metaphor library
5. Take creative and visual thinking breaks
6. Practice Creativity
7. Read more fiction literature/Mythology 
8. Start a visual thinking school
9. Play your fav music and start drawing lines - this is one of  my fav way of doing art work - http://www.artsrajesh.blogspot.com
10. Start appreciating other arts and learn from them


VISUAL THINKING TOOLKITS- vertical lines
- Horizontal Lines
- Circles
- Spirals
- Wavy Lines
- Jagged Lines
- Star(success)
- Diamond(Decision)
- Spiral(Change in Direction)
- circle(harmony)
- Direction(arrow)
- straight
- Triangle (Relationship)