The Best Articles in Visual Design
The most useful articles and videos in Visual 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 Visual Design Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Visual Design by Refind users.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
why Japan's internet is weirdly designed
Use code ANSWER to get 10% off your Hostinger plan today (on top of ongoing offers like their Black Friday/Cyber Monday $1.99 for Premium Shared web hosting ...
Design Principles For The Web
Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better f...
Thinking on ways to solve TOOLTIPS
In today's GUI Challenge, @Adam Argyle builds a tooltip with a custom element (no web component!), :has(), transforms, and logical properties. Besides a smal...
Stop fighting with CSS positioning
🎓 Master the unknown fundamentals of CSS with my course CSS Demystified: https://cssdemystified.com/?utm_campaign=containing-blocks&utm_source=youtube&utm_m...
What is ...?
New to Visual Design? These articles make an excellent introduction.
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.
What is a picture?
If we want to understand what a picture is, then we must look at the difference between perception and imagination.
What is information architecture? Structuring content for maximum value
Information architecture ensures content and data is structured, organized, and categorized in an effective and usable way, thereby maximizing the value of your websites and applications.
«Information architecture is a discipline focused on structuring, organizing, and categorizing content and data in an effective and usable way, largely for websites and applications.»
A beginner's guide to scrollytelling
Discover how to tell a compelling and dynamic story using the full power of web design.
How to ...?
How to pick the least wrong colors
An algorithm for creating color palettes for data visualization
How to use huge type on the web
I’ve been advocating more daring and bolder use of typography on the web ever since I started the Better Web Type project. Picking a sans-serif font for titles and a serif one for the content is…
How to pick more beautiful colors
Choosing good colors for your charts is hard. This article tries to make it easier.
«There’s no need to rely on hues from all around the color wheel like ⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤⬤ for your visualizations. It will look more professional – and therefore more trustworthy – when it only uses a few hues and their neighbors.»
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Visual Design on Refind.
What it means to design a platform
Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from a post I wrote on an employees-only blog at Stripe. After four months of parental leave, I came back to work and noticed something different. Many of the…
Good Design Is Intentional
Guidance for designing ethically humane digital products and services through patterns focused on user well-being.
3 mindsets to level up your design portfolio game
Product designer Ramses Cabello walks us through his experience on creating and publishing a design portfolio.
Navigating the AI revolution: how designers can stay competitive
Artificial intelligence is changing the way we design and the skills required to succeed in the design industry.
«Customer service will also benefit from AI. Current chatbots may not meet customer expectations, but they might replace more human managers in the future.»
Prompt-Driven Design
Prompt-driven design is when an AI command bar functions as either the primary tool of navigation or output.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Visual Design—all under 10 minutes.
Performance Cards: Designing with Empathy and Meaning
Challenge the way you think and serve access constrained users with these cards.
How Spotify’s Wrapped campaign for 2022 came together
It’s one of the most widely shared marketing campaigns globally. Here, we speak to the design team behind the visual identity to understand what it takes to grab the world’s attention.
Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
With Stable Diffusion, you may never believe what you see online again
AI image synthesis goes open source, with big implications.
«Image synthesis arguably brings implications as big as the invention of the camera—or perhaps the creation of visual art itself. Even our sense of history might be at stake, depending on how things shake out. Either way, Stable Diffusion is leading a new wave of deep learning creative tools that are poised to revolutionize the creation of visual media»
From Web Page to Web Player: How Spotify Designed a New Homepage Experience
Senior Product Designer Alexandria Goree walks us through the design process of making over Spotify’s homepage.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Visual Design.
How to create a more effective homepage
A step-by-step guide on improving your homepage content & copy to increase conversion
Midjourney vs. human illustrators: has AI already won?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
An experiment: we repeatedly give a typical work task to both a human artist and a text-to-image AI art generator. Who wins?
2023 visual design trends guide
The rise of motion design, parallax, immersion, contrasting UI styles, imitations and more
«me. As always the 2023 edition is prepared in a similar manner — with thoughtful consideration that took a few weeks of thorough»
Design Principles: why a design works
Cognitive ease happens when there is no cognitive strain. When a design works, people experience cognitive ease.
10 cognitive biases that shape our world
It was the “Aha” moment. You know, that feeling when you really understand something or get an idea of how to solve a problem? Have you…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Visual Design, including:

zeldman
Author. Designer. Web Standards Godfather. Employer Brand at @Automattic. Publisher, @AListApart, @ABookApart. Ava’s dad. Pete’s brother. He/him.

swissmiss
Here to defend the bright corners of the world with @creativemorning, @tattly, @teuxdeux, @friendsworkhere. My story in 5 mins: http://youtu.be/rUtABHdlAzg
Brad Frost
Design system consultant, web designer, speaker, writer, & musician. Author of Atomic Design. Mastadon: https://mastodon.social/@brad_frost
Tobias van Schneider
A hopelessly inquisitive man. Occasional multi-planetary designer @NASA From me to you → http://vanschneider.com/vip ✣ http://mymind.com ✣ http://Semplice.com ✣ http://Carbonmade.com

Julieanne Kost
Julieanne is the Photoshop & Lightroom Evangelist at Adobe, creator of http://jkost.com/blog, and author of Photoshop Essential Training for LinkedIn Learning.
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Visual Design, including:
UX Collective
Curated stories on user experience, usability, and product design. By @fabriciot and @caioab.
Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈
An online magazine for designers and web developers. Questions? We've got your back: @SmashingSupport, @SmashingConf. Curated by Iris, Vitaly and the team.
Nielsen Norman Group
User advocates offering evidence-based user experience (UX) research, training, consulting. Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Tog, and colleagues.
CSS-Tricks
The official account for http://CSS-Tricks.com, a web design community powered by @DigitalOcean.
It's Nice That
Championing Creativity Since 2007
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web for every user, tailored to the user’s interests. 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.
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- 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.
Which sources does Refind monitor in Visual Design?
We monitor hundreds of sources in Visual Design, including UX Collective, Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈, Nielsen Norman Group, CSS-Tricks, It's Nice That, and many more.
Who are the thought leaders in Visual Design?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Visual Design, including zeldman, swissmiss, Brad Frost, Tobias van Schneider, Julieanne Kost.
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).
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