The Best Articles in Design
The most useful articles in Design from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
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 2023.
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 1198, including Marcos, Jennifer Ouellette, Tamsen Webster, Message Strategist (she/her), Gabriele
How to ...?
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…
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.
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Design on Refind.
The science behind inspiration and how to design more of it into your life
Practical ways to nurture creative practices in the everyday.
The changing role of design
It’s time to put creativity back into design again
Designer layoff stories
Retaliation, targeted eliminations, legal disputes, and other horror stories from the tech industry
The Gulf Between Design and Engineering / Design Systems International
A new set of principles for better workflows when making digital products
Are Designers Happy? Our New “State of the Designer” Report Aims to Find Out
Explore Figma’s report on job satisfaction among designers in the era of remote work, revealing increased happiness and new challenges.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Design—all under 10 minutes.
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.
Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly
Creators say they struggle to gain a foothold in a font market dominated by Monotype
Dan Mall’s 10 Principles for a Worthy Design Career
Dan Mall distills decades of experience navigating the design world into ten pieces of advice for tackling complex tasks, preventing burnout, and fostering continuous learning.
How you can "think different"
Three ideas, five examples from psychology
«Default question: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” Better starter question: “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?”»
Taste
On subjectivity, gatekeeping, and the risk of leaving design industry terms like taste undefined.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Design.
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.»
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.
Don't design for your users
Guiding principles for designing and building products with intention
Principles of spatial design
Discover the fundamentals of spatial design. Learn how to design with depth, scale, windows, and immersion, and apply best practices for...
Humans VS AI: Who’s Better at Designing? Part 1
Some may think that the essence of a designer’s work is to create beautiful pictures. However, our philosophy states that a designer…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Design, including:
swissmiss
Here to defend the bright corners of the world with @creativemorning, @tattly, @teuxdeux, @friendsworkhere. My story in 5 mins: http://youtu.be/rUtABHdlAzg
Cory LaViska
Just a guy with a laptop and a dream. Building @shoelace_style at @FontAwesome. Previously @Microsoft and @FloridaTech alumnus.
Meng To
Founder at @designcodeio. I teach designers code and developers design.
zeldman
Author. Designer. Web Standards Godfather. Employer Brand @Automattic. Publisher @AListApart @ABookApart. Ava’s dad. Pete’s brother RIP. He/him.
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. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
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
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