This is where we step in to help. We at Shillington reached out to all our Design Teachers, students and graduates to find out their favourite design blogs to bring you our top 50 recommendations to follow.
1. Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo is a collective of individual writers sharing articles about architecture, design, photography and UX. Founded by Brazilian designer Fabio Sasso in 2006, it’s particularly strong on 3D work, which doesn’t get much attention from most design blogs.
2. Design Week
Founded in 1986, Design Week was the UK’s leading design magazine until 2011, when it became online-only. It continues to bring you high quality, well-written news and inspiration across graphics, branding, interiors, digital, product, furniture and more.
3. Creative Boom
Creative Boom celebrates, inspires and supports the creative community and has an excellent section on graphic design to give you loads of inspiration. The magazine also features insightful interviews with some of the world’s leading designers—Paula Scher being a recent example.
4. Mirador
Mirador is the image-based blog curated by Say What Studio, a graphic design duo based in Paris, France. It draws together many inspirational works out there and pulls them together in a beautifully designed, Tumblr-style feed of visual inspiration.
5. Telepathy
Telepathy has spent nearly 20 years helping startups and brands craft meaningful experiences for their customers. It shares the lessons it’s learned on its UX-focused blog, with intriguing articles such as ‘How to handle inspiration overload’ and ‘Using the Internet of Things to extend your brand essence’.
6. Creative Review
Founded in 1980, Creative Review is the world’s leading monthly magazine for advertising, design and visual culture. And the same high-quality journalism that informs it carries through to its website, which features a range of news, reviews and features from the creative world.
7. The Dieline
For anyone working in packaging design, The Dieline has it all wrapped up. It’s basically the Bible of the sector: a place where the community can review, critique and stay informed of the latest industry trends, and check out design projects being created in the field.
8. Made by Folk
Founded in 2007 by a group of young designers and vagabonds eager to collect and share the best design work they came across, FormFiftyFive soon became an international showcase of creative work. They have since been renamed Made by Folk and added more interactive elements to exchange and store ideas more easily, extending it from design blog to collaborative platform.
9. Eye Magazine
Eye Magazine, the international review of graphic design, is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture. Its associated blog features a range of critical, informed writing about design and visual culture.
10. I Love Typography
I Love Typography covers everything from typography and type history to making fonts, and everything in between, including printmaking to book history and occasionally calligraphy. The work of John Boardley, author of “Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing”, it’s all carefully crafted, authoritative stuff.
11. Identity Designed
This clean and elegant blog, Identity Designed, by David Airey is a showcase of the best brand identities worldwide. It’s just one of the many successful design blogs that he runs. Also see number 37 on our list.
12. Shillington Design Blog
Shillington is a college network offering an innovative approach to design education based on short, intensive courses and practical, industry-focused learning. And it has its own blog too, Shillington Design Blog features a range of inspiring design work and insightful articles. You should know that, though—you’re already here!
13. Under Consideration: Brand New
Under Consideration is a graphic design firm generating its own projects, initiatives and content, while taking on a limited amount of client work. Its Brand New blog is well-known for chronicling and providing opinions on, corporate and brand identity work. It’s edited and written by Armin Vit.
14. Browser London
Browser London is a digital agency that not only does impressive work for clients but has also successfully developed and taken to market its own digital tools and web apps. This blog is full of ideas and insights taken from these experiences, with topics including ‘The rise of dark mode in UI design’ and ‘What dependency hell looks like, and how to avoid it’.
15. Print.pm
The brainchild of Parisian art director Martin Joubert, Print.pm provides a daily burst of inspiration for lovers of editorial print design, mainly based around the latest arty-looking books and magazines.
16. UX Collective
Medium-based blog UX Collective pulls together various insightful articles from designers working at the coalface of user experience. There’s some excellent advice on offer here, about everything from empathy mapping to icon design principles.
17. The Dsgn Blog
The Dsgn Blog is all about visual inspiration. Founded, designed and curated by Ena Baćanović, a designer based in Zagreb, Croatia, it features the work of designers and design studios from all over the world, putting the main focus on young designers and students.
18. Google Design
This design-focused blog is full of interesting articles and news updates from the world of design. Yes, there’s a lot about Google’s products and services, and you’ll also find fascinating posts such as ‘Lessons From the Scariest Design Disaster in American History’ and ‘How to make ambient computing work—for people’.
19. BP&O
BP&O stands for Branding, Packaging and Opinion, and it delivers on all of these things, with a combination of inspiring imagery and in-depth analysis. It’s the brainchild of Richard Baird, a British freelance designer and writer who specialises in brand identities and packaging.
20. Design Clever
Design Clever is a collaboration started by Jonathan Ring and Bethany Baker, two aspiring graphic designers with a passion for everything design-related. This blog was created to showcase talented designers worldwide and they encourage creatives everywhere to submit their work to it.
21. This Too Shall Grow
This Too Shall Grow is a French UX studio focusing on protecting users’ mental health and privacy, pushing for transparency and avoiding dark patterns. Its blog looks at tech in general, UX in particular, and their impact on psychology, mental health and society.
22. Fonts In Use
Fonts In Use is a public archive of typography indexed by typeface, format, and industry. An independent project led by Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles and Nick Sherman, it documents and examines graphic design intending to improve typographic literacy and appreciation.
23. Masterpicks
Are you looking for inspiration from real-world projects? Masterpicks has you covered. This image-led blog presents you with a new, hand-picked design project every day, across UX and UI design, illustration, animation, 3D art, graphic design, branding, industrial design and photography.
24. Frank Chimero
Veteran designer Frank Chimero shares his thoughts regularly on his much-visited blog, and they’re very much worth reading. Jumping between the internet, design, writing, music, film, self-development and work culture, his posts are beautifully written and always relevant.
25. Creative Bloq
Creative Bloq features advice, interviews and reviews on graphic design, branding, web design, animation, VFX and digital art. It also posts daily news from the creative industry, ranging from fun to serious.
26. Spotify Design
Who knew Spotify had a design blog? Well, it does, and it’s a corker. Although it’s narrowly focused on the company’s operations, posts such as ‘How Spotify organises work in Figma to improve collaboration’ contains many helpful pointers for designers and design agencies in general.
27. Wix Creative
Wix is a cloud-based platform for creating your website, and its blog offers inspiration, tips and resources for creatives everywhere. It includes professional step-by-step guides to walk you through everything from colour theory to make a mood board.
28. Dribbble
Enabling creatives to share their work long before Instagram was dreamt of, Dribbble is a design industry institution. Its related blog is packed with practical advice to boost your career, such as forming good habits and getting out of a bad design feedback loop.
29. Design Made In Japan
Japanese culture has a vast global influence right now, and Design Made In Japan is the perfect place to stay updated with its design output. There’s a wealth of editorial, product and packaging design on show, and even a design jobs board for those wanting to work in Japan.
30. Mindsparkle
Mindsparkle magazine promotes the “most beautiful and inspiring projects” in the fields of graphic design, web design and video. With a clean and satisfying design of its own, it’ll become a daily inspiration and you can rely on the founders to only share the very best.
31. Album Colours of the Year 2020
Here’s an offbeat source of visual inspiration that might be just the left-field perspective you’ve been looking for. It’s a collection of 150 album covers to celebrate the colours used in record cover art in 2020. A compelling source of eye candy and palette inspiration, whichever year you view it in.
32. It’s Nice That
Beautifully designed, industry-led and one of the best resources for keeping abreast of art, illustration and graphic design everywhere, It’s Nice That continues to be one of our favourite online publications.
33. Designer News
Describing itself as “where the design community meets”, Designer News pulls in the latest exciting posts from around the web, from Behance and Medium to individual designers’ websites. The community then upvotes and downvotes them and adds their comments.
34. Codrops
Codrops is a web design and development blog that publishes articles and tutorials about the latest web trends, techniques and new possibilities. If you like what you see, sign up for the excellent newsletter to keep updated regularly.
35. Httpster
Just want to browse delicious web design? Httpster is precisely what you need. It’s an inspiration resource showcasing “totally rocking websites” made by designers everywhere. As with all trends, you don’t need to copy them, but it’s helpful to know what they are.
36. Siteinspire
Siteinspire is another showcase of the latest and greatest web designs. Updated frequently, it’s a great place to keep in touch with the most recent interactive design trends and get ideas and inspiration for your creations.
37. Logo Design Love
Another beautifully designed blog by David Airey, Logo Design Love focuses on logo designs from around the world. It’s a nicely curated showcase for the latest logos and featuring reviews and commentary around related work, such as logo design books.
38. The Inspiration Grid
The Inspiration Grid is an online magazine celebrating creative talent worldwide, providing a daily fix of art, illustration, typography, photography and, of course, graphic design. It has a clean, appealing design and everything is easy to find—one of our favourites.
39. Visuelle
David Bennett curates inspiring projects from graphic designers worldwide. There’s no commentary (the images link through to the original site), but it’s compelling visual eye-candy throughout. Add this to your bookmarks for reliable content daily.
40. Onextrapixel
Are you getting into web design? This excellent blog strives to share the best web resources for those of you passionate about pixels. It looks at trends, the best fonts, recommended templates for WordPress and much more.
41. AIGA: Eye on Design
The AIGA, otherwise known as The Professional Association for Design, has a beautiful blog called Eye on Design which is bursting with design inspiration. With contributors from around the world, you’ll never be bored with its varied content.
42. Visual Journal
Curated by Alessandro Scarpellini, a designer and art director from Italy, Visual Journal brings together the best branding and graphic design projects worldwide. There’s very little in the way text here, but lots and lots of beautiful images to drool over.
43. Webflow Blog
Webflow is a product used to create websites visually without coding. Whether or not you’re using Webflow yourself, its blog is packed with excellent articles on broader subjects around web design and UX and is well worth a visit.
44. Ambalaj
Founded by Swedish designer Kristina de Verdier in 2008, Ambalaj is predominantly a packaging design blog, but it also tends to share the latest design innovations.
45. Design by Womxn
Founded by UK-based graphic designer Mary Hemingway, Design by Womxn aims to showcase, champion and support female creatives currently working in the design industry and to inspire women who want to pursue a career in design. One to add to your feed.
46. 8Faces
The official blog of 8 Faces magazine, it features inspirational typography, beautiful lettering, reviews, interviews with leading designers and much more. Curated by Jamie Clarke and Elliot Jay Stocks.
47. Swissmiss
Swissmiss is the work of Tina Roth Eisenberg, a Swiss designer in New York who also founded and today runs Tattly, CreativeMornings and TeuxDeux. It’s packed with visual inspiration, some of which can be quite offbeat, but never dull.
48. Design Taxi
With its own section dedicated to graphic design, Design Taxi is a good shout to keep abreast of industry news, trends and updates. Its posts don’t go into a lot of depth but cover a wide breadth of topics. So it’s great for getting an overview of what’s going on in general.
49. SideBar
Want to keep track of everything going on in web design right now, but don’t have time to subscribe to a thousand different blogs? SideBar saves you the bother by curating the best posts daily and delivering you five relevant links a day, which is much more manageable.
50. This is Paper
This is Paper is a beautiful blog, and print magazine focused on creativity, with a section devoted to print design. There’s also a very popular mixtapes section where you can enjoy listening to some beats while working.
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