Additional Resources

You’re reading an excerpt of Land Your Dream Design Job, a book by Dan Shilov. Filled with hard-won, personal insights, it is a comprehensive guide to landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company, and covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, for experienced and aspriring designers. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Coming up with a new design proposal from nothing can be a lot of work. Usually, when you’re joining a company you have frameworks already set up for you, be they design systems, brand assets, or just existing processes that can help you stand up a new concept quickly.

​important​ When you are using outside resources for your design exercise be sure to properly attribute and credit the work.

Many of the assets that I’ve used for design exercises (including this one) came from popular, free-shared libraries. Here are some I recommend for the raw materials for your design exercise.

• Photography

  • Pexels. Bills itself as a free and inclusive photo and video library.

  • Unsplash. One of my favorites, and the go-to resource for high quality photography.

  • Pixabay. Over a million images and videos shared, free for personal or commercial use.

• Illustrations

  • Humaaans. A customizable illustration library by Pablo Stanley. Use is free for personal and commercial use.

  • Blush. Founded by Pablo Stanley, it’s a customizable illustration resource that allows you to remix, change colors, and find illustrations for different occasions.

  • Undraw. Similar to illustration libraries already listed but with less focus on the character and more emphasis on staging.

• Maps

  • Your project may not require maps, but if it does, spending a little time customizing a map could be another way you can differentiate your design.

  • Mapbox. Probably one of the most robust APIs out there. With Mapbox studio you can customize tons of things (you have to create an account). The learning curve may be a little steep at the beginning, so I recommend you take a couple of pre-existing Mapbox maps and customize those first to get a feel for it.

  • Google map styles. You can select a theme or you can come up with a brand-new style, customizing things like buildings, landscapes, points of interest, roads, transit lines, and water.