What we read: inspiration from the Daylight team

It’s exciting to have such a dynamic team here at Daylight – designers, developers, digital strategists and producers coming together with a passion for solving our clients’ problems. And we solve those problems through unique perspectives and skills across our various disciplines honed through a passion for learning.

There are countless sources of news, analysis, and inspiration our team uses to stay at their best in each of their disciplines. So we wanted to take a minute and share some of those sources after a quick survey from a few Daylighters. Below are their responses. Whether you’re a client looking to get a better understanding of technical language, or someone looking to be the next great fit for our team, we hope this gives you a glimpse into what drives the work we do.

Tyler – Designer

“My current preferred source for design news is Sidebar. I get an email daily that covers a lot of different design topics.

“If I’m picking up a book, it’s generally one of the A Book Apart series books. I’m currently reading ‘Practical Design Discovery’ by Dan Brown. My favorite design book of theirs is Mike Monteiro’s ‘Design is a Job.’”

Brandon – Designer

“When I’m unable to attend an event locally, I watch Creative Mornings talks for inspiration as well as check out their ‘Fun stuff to click on’ section of their newsletter.

“I’m a bit of a Ted Talk junkie. I’ve watched hundreds of talks and continue to watch at least a few a week for new ideas and inspiration. It’s an ongoing joke to the extent that my wife once threw a Ted Talk birthday party for me and had a handful of my friends give B Talks. It was a lot of fun and likely the most inspirational birthday I’ve had.”

“On my commute, I listen to a lot of podcasts including The Creative Agency Podcast, On Point, and The Firn Line.”

David Q – Developer

“To get a sense of what’s going on in the Portland tech scene, I follow Rick Turoczy at Silicon Florist – @turoczy and @siliconflorist.”

“I read the Benedict Evans (Andreessen Horowitz VC) weekly newsletter. It provides a good overview of what is going on in the tech news scene particularly around AI and machine learning.”

“For books right now I’m reading ‘Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code” by John Brant, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts…and loving it.”

Alex – Strategist

To round out this list, I’ll add in a few of my recommendations. Marketing Land and their Marketing Day post is the perfect blog round-up – all of the ML posts and posts from their sister site, Search Engine Land, plus curated links of the best posts from around the web that day.

For the latest news on algorithm changes or SERP tests, Search Engine Roundtable is my top source. Barry Schwartz does a great job finding all the little nuggets with Google. And my favorite search marketing blog is hands down The Moz Blog, and I’m especially a regular viewer of their Whiteboard Friday videos.

For books, I highly recommend the “Ultimate Guide to Link Building” by Eric Ward and Garrett French. One of the biggest factors to website success in SEO is backlinks, and this book brings a comprehensive look at tactics, tools and case studies to help.

We hope you find some new reading inspiration from this list and at some point in the future, we’ll share more responses from the rest of your team. Enjoy!