One of the best things about graphic design is that it never stands still for a moment. But that does mean that keeping up with the latest trends, techniques, and technologies can be a bit of a challenge. That’s where design blogs come in. The best ones bring you the latest work, best practices, news and conversations in bite-sized chunks that never feel like a chore to read. These blogs can also be a great source of visual inspiration, helping to spark fresh ideas of your own and stopping you from becoming creatively stale. But it’s impossible to read them all–well, not if you’re going to get any work done.
And so, to make things manageable, we’ve brought together the very best design blogs to bookmark today, as chosen by the Design Teachers, students and graduates from Shillington’s graphic design bootcamp.
Some of these are specific to one industry or discipline, some are broad and wide-ranging, and we’ve also included a few company blogs that have useful insights for designers as a whole.
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. Typewolf
When it comes to choosing type, samples set in “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” aren’t very useful; seeing how real type performs on actual websites is better. That’s why Jeremiah Shoaf set up Typewolf, which shares examples of popular fonts in the wild. Given that so many typography blogs are run by type designers, it’s also refreshing to see one written, instead, by a designer who uses type in their day-to-day work.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
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. Friends of Type
Short on words but packed with visual inspiration, Friends of Type features fresh and original typographic design and lettering, posted almost every day by four primary contributors. The last week of every month, they feature a guest designer. There’s also a shop with some brilliant T-shirts, tote bags and fonts for fans of typography.
18. 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.
19. 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’.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
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. Behance Graphic Design
Behance is long-established as Adobe’s platform to showcase your creative work. But with over 10 million members, it also does a lot of curation to surface the best. As the title suggests, Behance Graphic Design features the very best graphic design work, including posters, logos, branding, music packaging and more.
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. Incredible Types
Incredible Types is a showcase of outstanding typography and design worldwide. Maintained and curated by Nathan Leigh Davis, it currently has 426 pieces of inspirational design in its showcase from 432 creatives and studios from 51 different countries.
28. 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.
29. 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.
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. 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.
32. Aisle One Digest
Aisle One is a visual journal of design produced by Antonio Carusone. After a four-year hiatus, its accompanying newsletter, Aisle One Digest, returned last November. In its new form, each issue offers all the great design inspiration from the blog, plus photography, film, music, and cultural content.
33. Alphabettes
Launched in 2015 on a whim by Amy Papaelias and Indra Kupferschmid, Alphabettes is dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of women in lettering, typography and type design. With 250+ members worldwide, the blog features the latest work, commentary, and research in all these fields.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. 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.
37. Consumer Packaged Goods Directory
The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory is a great place for brand-builders to find inspiration and ideas from what’s new and fresh in the marketplace. This brilliant blog has a network of industry experts to help them find the fastest-growing emerging consumer brands. They share five new brands weekly in their newsletter and add them to their online directory.
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. Femme Type
Founded by Amber Weaver and led by creative-type-focused media company TYPE01 Ltd, Femme Type celebrates the work of female type designers and type-focused creatives. It aims to encourage women to pursue careers in font design, typography/graphic design, motion, and 3D and font engineering technologies.
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. Admire the Web
Admire The Web showcases the very best in website design, with fresh content every day to keep you inspired. There’s no commentary, but each post features the full web page in all its glory, from top to bottom.
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.
48. Work In Progress
Dropbox is one of the most popular file sharing and storage apps in the creative profession, and its blog, Work In Progress, is a great read, too. As well as news about the app, you’ll also find a bunch of great interviews with prominent users. So, for example, you’ll also find articles on work culture (such as ‘Tips for cultivating inspiration and sustaining your creative flow’, and interviews with leading creatives.
49. Design by Women
Design by Women is the only design blog that focuses on women and gender expansive creatives working in the industry today—from creatives at the very start of their careers to some amazing industry leaders. Explore interviews and features with Jessica Walsh, Justyna Green and Jennie Potts, alongside Shillington graduates like Lorelle Skelton, Katie O’Rourke and Anja Zhao.
50. Stark
Accessibility is often forgotten in a rush to get designs to market. To keep on top of the latest thinking and techniques, subscribe to this blog by Stark, which helps companies ensure their products are accessible, compliant, and inclusive. Here you’ll find a bunch of useful articles, such as ‘5 mistakes to avoid when making your designs accessible’ and ‘Do virtual whiteboard apps work for everyone?’
Artwork by #ShilloLDN Design Teacher Lizzie Curtis.
Have all these incredible blogs got you dreaming of a creative career? With Shillington’s innovative graphic design course you can become a graphic designer in as little as three months, online or on campus in New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne.
