Design Blogs
24 Ways - This virtual advent calendar adds 24 new posts on the latest developments in web design every December. But if you can’t wait that long then you can still browse the archive going back 10 years.
99Designs Blog – Yes, we all hate crowdsourcing, but the 99Designs blog can be a regularly engaging read.
99u - A familiar resource for many designers, 99u is delivered by the creative industry behemoth that is Behance, and offers up a variety of valuable tips on productivity, creativity and carving out a successful career. From exercises to lessen the impact of sitting at a desk, to tips on maximizing your time, 99u covers a wealth of issues that affect the reality of life as a designer.
the189.com - Proudly celebrating quiet design, the189.com highlights well-made, unassuming everyday objects that just get on with the job at hand.
A List Apart - Don’t be put off by the somewhat intimidating layout, A List Apart means business. It’s the quality and depth of the articles that really sets this site apart, with 1,500 word features on anything that affects web design professionals. And if you’re short on time (or attention span), head to the blog section for quicker updates and the stories that are getting people talking.
Abduzeedo - A popular blog that covers a range of topics for designers and creatives, primarily as interviews and tutorials.
AisleOne - A resource from the heart of NYC focused on design, typography, minimalism and modernism.
app.itize.us - This is your go-to hub when it comes to app design. A meaty feed of app examples, complete with design analysis and links to find out more.
Art of the Menu - Another branch of the graphic design masterminds at Underconsideration, Art of the Menu sounds a little niche until you discover the wealth of engaging content it offers. Celebrating the humble menu, examples explore the importance of good layout, typography, and the fun you can have with menu illustrations and design for every possible cuisine.
Awwwards - Celebrating creativity and innovation on the internet, Awwwards is updated every day with fresh examples of brand new websites, making it a fantastic place to keep up with the latest trends in digital design. You can also submit your own projects for critique (for a fee) and even browse for jobs.
bench.li - A visual catalog of ideas, it’s an categorized library of inspiration that you can leaf through whenever the mood takes you.
Betterment - Pitched as a blog “for people who care about design”, Betterment is very much tuned into a user-centred approach. Design isn’t just about making things look good, it’s about crafting useful products, creating pleasant and meaningful user experiences and helping businesses to succeed—this is the philosophy that is tuned into everything on this site, from the minds behind acclaimed digital agency Digital Telepathy.
Book Design Blog - A whole library of book design, offering examples of work from classic novels to self-published ezines. High-spec production values to minimalist typographical designs are sure to bring you inspiration when it comes to books and magazines.
Booooooom - Launched back in 2008 by Vancouver-based artist Jeff Hamada, Booooooom is now Canada’s biggest art blog. A trusted voice in the contemporary arts scene it offers daily fixes of inspiring artistic endeavors.
Brand New - A place to get you talking about corporate logos and brand identities, Brand New offers up opinions on redesigns for largely well-known products and big companies. A lively comment section accompanies each post, while the insights from site editor Armin Vit are a fantastic way to really tune your brain into design thinking.
Branding, Packaging and Opinion - A far from ironic title, Branding, Packaging and Opinion does exactly what it says on the tin. Founder and Editor Richard Baird is a specialist based in the UK and the site is his selection of the best works in this field.
Company Folders’ Blog – A bunch of designer resources and articles like: “14 ways to be the worst person on your graphic design team.”
Creative Bloq – Your daily dose of design tips and inspiration
Creative Boom - Providing a daily dose of art, graphic design and photography inspiration—Creative Boom is aimed squarely at those in the creative industries and also offers practical tips and useful resources.
Creative Review - The blog form of the world’s leading Creative magazine is at the forefront of the latest news, reviews and big discussions in the world of design, creative advertising and visual culture.
Creative Roots – A brilliant approach to art and design inspiration from around the world, filtered by countries.
CSS Tricks - Want to sharpen up your digital skills so you can transfer your graphic design chops to the web? Well, becoming savvy with CSS should be high on your list of priorities. You won’t be surprised to hear that this site if full to the brim with tips on the essential style sheet language, but it also offers wider ranging advice and updates on the latest developments in other areas of web design.
Demilked - An art, photography and design mash-up, Demilked filters out the best of what’s hot around the world.
Design Cloud - Clean, clear, purely visual Tumblr sharing work and ideas under categories including typography, illustration, visual art and graphic design.
Design Everywhere - A daily visual dose of graphic design works from across the world, Design Everywhere is the creative blog of Singapore graphic designer Preston Tham.
Design Juices – Features a bunch of great articles in general, but what stands out here are the frequent interviews with designers.
Design is Kinky - A long-established blog that serves up a seemingly endless and carefully curated selection of graphic design in all its form. Having launched in 1998, it’s got plenty of years of talent spotting behind it.
Design Of The World - An expertly-curated blog from the design team at Josephmark, exploring thoughtful designs around the world. There’s always something to inspire you here.
Design is Fine. History is Mine. - A fun Tumblr feed with a focus on nostalgia and old-school design, penned by a teacher of design history from Germany.
Design Clever - One of our favourite Tumblr blogs, Design Clever was built by designers Jonathan Ring and Bethany Baker to celebrate talented creatives. You can submit your own work or just seek out inspiration from others.
Design is Kinky - Established in 1998, Design is Kinky serves up a seemingly endless and carefully curated selection of big, bold graphic design in all its glory.
Designer Daily – Blogs updated every day, like this one, are perfect for catching all the special design deals.
Designrfix – I find myself here regularly when I come across the ‘design deals’ and freebies, but they have great articles too.
Designspiration - You can browse this selection of high-level design inspiration by keywords or even colour, so if you want to be inspired by blue or a particular phrase, this site can deliver.
Dexigner – An online portal for designers, architects, illustrators, engineers, artists, and creatives of all kinds.
The Dieline - A rare treat in that it’s a visual inspiration site dedicated to the oft-neglected discipline of packaging design. What began as the personal blog of designer Andrew Gibbs has grown into one of the most popular resources for the package design community, encompassing an awards competition, directory, job listings, conferences and more.
The Dsgn Blog - Founded and curated by Croatian designer Ena Baćanović, The Dsgn Blog has a focus on the work of young designers and students from all over the world.
Eye On Design - The blog of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Eye on Design showcases the best new multidisciplinary work from emerging and established designers across the world.
FormFiftyFive - Curated by a team of more than 30 designers from the UK, the site has now been going strong for over a decade, delivering a mixture of links, image galleries and work examples, alongside more in-depth features and interviews.
The Fox Is Black - Combining the best of art and design, expect to see everything from experimental photography to upcycled furniture, cutesy illustrations to daring music cover art. A great place to discover new talent and get a sense of the wide range of projects to which you can apply your own design talents.
Friends of Type - Created by four designers and lovers of lettering, you’ll find fresh and original typographic design and lettering posts updated daily. Sketchbook in style and handcrafted in nature, it’s a font of knowledge and inspiration.
A Good Book - Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? This unique project, originally launched through Twitter in 2011, is a visual diary of books, celebrating the aesthetic qualities of each and every one submitted.
GoodDesignMakesMeHappy - The title says it all. Capturing the joy she gets from good design, Hannah Dollery wants to share exactly what inspires her. It’s a vast collection too, with well over 1,000 posts all handily categorized.
Grafik - Super simple to browse, Grafik is home to the “world’s most inspiring graphic design”. Packed with posts and projects from across the globe, it’s brimming with ideas no matter what you’re looking for.
Grain Edit - A charming nostalgia trip, Grain Edit is focused on classic American design from the 1950s to the 1970s, and contemporary artists influenced by this period.
Graphic Design Blender - Focused on the skills and practical guidance you need to build a successful career as a designer, offering a wealth of tips for freelancers and plenty of resources to help boost your career prospects.
Graphic Design Blog – Another all-encompassing, yet high-quality blog on everything graphic design related.
Graphic Design Junction – Full of design inspiration, free resources such as vector images/fonts, along with some great tutorials.
Graphic Mania – Design tutorials, vector packs and photography ideas all in one blog.
The Great Discontent - Successfully transferring many of the design standards of print publications to its digital platform, The Great Discontent (which now has an accompanying print magazine) is full of wide images, cleverly used typography and exciting page layouts. Published by Brooklyn-based creative studio Wayward Wild, creativity is the focus here, featuring in-depth interviews with creative minds from the worlds of music, poetry, film and art.
Gurafiku - Japan has long been a hotbed of design innovation, and this Tumblr shows off the country’s rich heritage in graphics and visuals. Serves up lashings of posters, magazine covers and eye-popping typography.
HND Graphics – Curated by the Richmond Upon Thames College, this blog provides a lot of information to young designers and students.
Hongkiat – Design tips, tutorials and inspiration.
Hooked - Hooked is a London-based street art blog that’s brimming with passion, sharing images of street art from all over the world as well as ideas for stencils, illustrations, screen printing. A great stop when looking for ideas in unexpected places.
Hover States - Put together by the animators and digital filmmakers at Animade, Hover State showcases the most interesting web and digital design news in a film format to capture how digital design moves and behaves.
How Design Blog – Covers all the latest design news, trends and visual inspiration to keep you up-to-date.
httpster - A showcase of the hottest in web design, httpster is a perfect place to boost your creativity to see how graphic design skills turn sites from good to great.
I Love Ligatures - Celebrating the seemingly simple but often unheralded art of typographic ligatures, this vast Tumblr stream features endless well-chosen examples. The is one for type enthusiasts, or those just looking to add a little creative flourish to their designs.
Identity Designed - A beautifully presented showcase of branding projects from designers and studios the world over. It’s the level of detail that really sets this site apart, as each case study really digs deep into the creative process, showing you the different steps taken on the way to a successful project.
The Inspiration Grid - The name sums this one up pretty well, it’s a grid-like blog that dishes up new examples of creative talent every day. You can also dip in and out to explore different disciplines, with a comprehensive list of design categories, covering logo design, branding, illustration, typography, print design and much more.
It’s Nice That - Championing creative inspiration, It’s Nice That is a portal for every design sector with a graphic design hub covering everything from typefaces to currency redesigns.
Line25 - A weekly roundup of the most outstanding web designs and helpful blogs filled with advice and tips, you’ll never struggle with a web project again with the help of Line25.
Mirador - Benoit Berger and Nathalie Kapagiannidi from Parisian graphic design studio Say What, generously share their own image hunting work in the form of the beautifully presented Mirador blog.
MissMoss - A lifestyle blog by South Africa-based graphic designer Diana Moss, Miss Moss is a beautifully curated collection of visually stunning products. A veritable treasure trove of homewares, fashion, photography and—naturally—some exceptional graphic design.
Mr Cup’s Graphic Exchange - French graphic designer Fabien Barral, known under the pseudonym Mr Cup, shares his experiences working on high-profile international projects on his blog, Graphic Exchange. The blog will form the basis of a new crowd-funded design magazine called the Walter magazine.
The Next Web’s Creative News – TNW’s creative section of the blog is a superb resource for all things related to creative people. If you’re interested, they do have other sections worth looking at such as ’tech’, ‘money’ and ‘apps’ in the menu.
Nowness - Lose yourself in this vast catalogue of design and art-led videos, using beautifully shot films to really delve deeply into the inspiration behind contemporary culture. Covering a cross-section of design disciplines, with some stunning case studies of visual and product design.
On the Grid - See the world through the eyes of a creative, with this collaborative blog charting travel highlights for a designer across the world’s brightest cities. Content comes from local creatives and travelers offering their favorite things to see. Very neat format created by Hyperakt.
Plenty of Colour - Created by Vancouver-based designer Chloe Douglas, this blog is a celebration of her love of color in all of its glorious forms and a visual journal of what inspires her. Perfect for a colorful pick me up.
Print.pm - Despite the rise of digital, you’ll still find plenty of love for print in the design world. And nowhere celebrates it better than Print.pm, a visual supply of great print design examples, from magazine spreads to billboard posters. If you’re looking for ideas for your own layouts then this is a great place to start.
Quipsologies - A plentiful supply of links showcasing the latest and greatest design projects, events and news that the internet has to offer. Run by the mighty graphic design enterprise Under Consideration, Quipsologies is beautifully presented too and outlines the carefully chosen typography used throughout the site.
Readdd - Titled Read Design Daily, this feed offers snappy headline links for in-depth graphic design content from all over the blogosphere.
Roberto Blake’s Blog – One of only a few designers to embrace video that I’ve come across, I recommend subscribing to his channel.
Sex, Drugs and Helvetica - This Melbourne and Brisbane based blog—that also runs annual conferences for designers—is packed with practical advice on the business side of things such as taxes, freelancing and copyright protection.
Shillington Design Blog – Just a great mix of well-written, informative articles and lovely visuals.
SideBar - A short and sweet feed of 5 of the best design links of the day. Curated by a large team of editors it offers something different every day and a nice overview of what’s happening in the industry.
SiteInspire - Choosy in its selections, SiteInspire is a collection of the best web design out there, specialising in clean and simple sites. Sometimes, less is definitely more. You can even submit your own design for inclusion.
Smashing Magazine - Another established but indispensable resource, Smashing Magazine is a high quality collection of up-to-date articles on the latest trends in design, graphics, UX, coding, web and mobile. In-depth tutorials are complemented by some inspiring work examples.
Swissmiss - It started as way of keeping track of her favourite finds on the web. It’s turned into an exceedingly popular design blog by Swiss-born, NYC-based designer Tina Eisenberg—the creative mind behind awesome products such as Tattly and beautiful to-do app TeuxDeux. As you’d expect, her feed of designer-friendly links, images and videos is equally high quality, but with plenty of fun thrown in too.
This Is Collate - Websites, photography, art and design … it’s all here in one place for you to seek inspiration for your projects. A minimalist design with beautiful wide images makes it a pleasure to explore.
This Is Colossal - Art, design and visual culture come together in this inspirational blog, with weekly posts covering everything from photography and painting to street art. A timely reminder that in the digital age, people are still making incredible work with their bare hands.
touris.ms - A smartly presented and easy to use blog of photography from across the globe and throughout history. Snapshots of countries and cultures that are sure to lead you somewhere unexpected.
The Trend List - An interesting perspective blog that questions any designer’s originality by exploring the influence of contemporary culture on design and highlighting big trends and influences on the industry.
Trendland - A highly-respected cutting-edge e-zine specializing in design trend forecasting, Trendland describes itself as ‘a magazine, art gallery and television all in one’.
Typetoken - A new online magazine devoted to typography, icons and visual language, it features contributions from designers around the globe to inspire and stimulate the senses.
Typewolf - You know the font you want but you can’t find it? Head to Typewolf, an independent typography resource to make it easy to find the perfect lettering for any project.
Typorn - We’re all guilty of ogling sexy typefaces, and on typorn you don’t have to hide your passion for font. A glorious collection of typographic works past and present, you can learn about the process behind iconic designs or discover something new.
Visuelle - Providing a healthy daily dose of creativity, Visuelle is a regularly updated feed of links to the best new design work plucked from studios and designers around the world and across a range of disciplines.
Web Designer Depot - Sharing the latest and greatest findings, tips and techniques for web designers, you’ll learn plenty to help you tackle web projects here, or pick up some expert insights to help you translate your graphic skills to the digital landscape.
Web Field Manual - Created by web designers, it’s an ever expanding, curated list of resources that reveals the insider tips for designing experiences and interfaces on the web.
Where They Create - An absolute dream for the nosy and curious, photographer Paul Barbera opens a secret door into the private studios of the artists and creatives she meets on her assignments. Discover the hidden spaces in which creatives produce their work.
You The Designer – Topic spanning design blog with a bunch of great content to suit almost every designer’s needs.
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