The Best Articles in Design
The most useful articles in Design from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Design Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Design by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
An AI artist explains his workflow
How it works — and why it takes a surprisingly long time to make something good.Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔 so you don't miss any videos: http://...
What is ...?
New to Design? These articles make an excellent introduction.
What is a picture?
If we want to understand what a picture is, then we must look at the difference between perception and imagination.
A gentle introduction to Domain Driven Design
Starting into DDD is hard, even though it’s heavily praised by their practitioners. This article introduces the topic, gently.
A beginner’s guide to Design Tokens
Learn the basics of what design tokens are, how they’re used, their benefits, and some tools and resources to get you started.
The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)
Shared by 1222, including Marcos, Jennifer Ouellette, Tamsen Webster, Message Strategist (she/her), Gabriele
How to ...?
How to create a perfect home-office desk
Gretchen Hansen, founder and CEO of the online interior design company Decorist offers advice for getting your best work done at home.
How to get started with hand-lettering
Earlier this year, I pushed out a tweet about my desire to be a beginner again, learn something new and took a particular interest in hand…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Design on Refind.
Inspirational Websites Roundup #57
Discover a fresh collection of websites, each chosen for their outstanding design, to spark your inspiration.
Defining experience quality in large language models
A look at the design strategy behind Adobe Acrobat’s newest generative AI features
Surf the web like it’s 1999 with these old-school cursors
404 isn’t just an error code—this year it’s our annual April Fun Day. We’re throwing it back to our favorite digital design eras.
The GenAI Compass: a UX framework to design generative AI experiences
Implementing human-centric design thinking to GenAI.
Generative UI and Outcome-Oriented Design
GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Design—all under 10 minutes.
How to create the perfect icon
A meticulous system to ensure that your icons are perfectly recognizable, consistent and legible.
Tesler’s Law
Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
Pencils Down, Ideas Up: Navigating Design Critiques with Grace and Grit • Slack Design
Charting the crit terrain Critique—or, to use its more casual truncation, “crit”— is one of the most powerful team-powered tools that can contribute to a designer’s growth. The merits of a forum in…
Five Future Roles for Designers
Last Tuesday was the first class of my systems course. As I did last year, I asked students to envision their jobs twenty-five years from now. What will their work look like in 2049? What will they be…
John Maeda on Creativity, AI, and the Human Pursuit of Uphill Thinking
John Maeda shares takeaways from this year’s Design In Tech Report, and why we should embrace uphill thinking in a world optimized for shortcuts.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Design.
The Gulf Between Design and Engineering / Design Systems International
A new set of principles for better workflows when making digital products
Care beyond code: 7 best design practices for frontend developers—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
Frontend can be about more than just code—we’re also the last bastion helping our teams against pesky design bugs! We share 7 best design practices for frontend engineers.
Table of Contents: The Ultimate Design Guide
Tables of contents provide a page overview and direct access to specific sections. When designing a table of contents, carefully compare different placement and styling options to maximize usability.
The Sounds Of Invisible Worlds
Like the microscope and the telescope did centuries ago, new technologies to capture and analyze sound are leading to startling discoveries about what the eyes cannot see.
«In the Kamayurá language, the word anup (“to hear”) also evokes “to comprehend,” in a manner superior to the word tsak (“to see”), which evokes “to understand” only in a narrow analytic sense.»
The design manager’s toolkit
Take the best of being a designer and create a durable playbook for handling challenges as a manager
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Design, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Design?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Design, including Oliver Reichenstein, swissmiss, Cory LaViska, Meng To, zeldman.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
How can I report a problem?
When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
Who uses Refind?
450k+ smart people start their day with Refind. To learn something new. To get inspired. To move forward. Our apps have a 4.9/5 rating.
Is Refind free?
Yes, it’s free!
How can I sign up?
Head over to our homepage and sign up by email or with your Twitter or Google account.
Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
Get the big picture on your favorite topics.