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 in 2023 so far.
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 ...
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://...
I Make $1.3M/Year With One Skill
🚀 Head to https://www.starterstory.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=brett<ft=true for your $1 seven-day trial of Starter Story! 📩 Business Ideas News...
AI and Image Generation (Everything is a Remix Part 4)
#ai #aiart #imagegen The Age of AI has arrived and its first flashpoint is art. AI is revolutionizing how we create, view, and experience art, while sparking...
5 super useful CSS properties that don't get enough attention
🎓 Start writing CSS with more confidence with one of my courses: https://kevinpowell.co/courses🔗 Links✅ Full list of filter effects: https://developer.mozi...
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.
The psychology behind highly effective landing pages
Learn what mistakes to avoid when creating landing pages and how to design highly effective ones using psychology.
8 micro tips for remarkably better typography
Typography is so much more than picking a font and deciding what sizes to use for headings and body text. It could be regarded as its own branch of science. And it’s not just science either, it’s…
How Spotify’s Design System Goes Beyond Platforms
Design Manager Juli Sombat sheds light on how a need for more cohesion led Spotify’s design systems team to approach components in a new way.
Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly
Creators say they struggle to gain a foothold in a font market dominated by Monotype
The new Google Fonts: find what you’re looking for
A redesigned Google Fonts website helps you find the right fonts and icons for your project
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Visual Design—all under 10 minutes.
Gestalt Principles of Design
The Gestalt Principles of Design are a set of concepts and guidelines drawn from gestalt psychology, which theorizes that the mind tends to process
How new Twitter X logo fails
Is the Twitter X logo only a Unicode character, or taken from a font? Find out and learn what to consider, when choosing a font for a logo.
The Rhythm of Your Screen
It’s 2023 and I’m still frequently asked by clients about scrolling. I understand why. Every design comes with assumptions about how much content
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
Last night, over wine and seafood, the inevitable happened...
Nike Digital Design System
Our journey to the Nike design system began more than a decade ago, when we were first tapped to reimagine Nike.com.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Visual Design.
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...
Behind The Curtains Of Wikipedia Redesign — Smashing Magazine
The Wikipedia team shipped a redesign of the ubiquitous and one of the [most visited websites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites) on the web. Alex Hollendar and Jon Robson…
Modern CSS in Real Life
Hey! Chris Coyier here. This is a blog-itized version of a presentation I created. It started life as a Keynote file which I presented in person at RenderATL in June of 2023. I put a lot of work into…
How I Used Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth to Create A Painted Portrait of My Dog
In this post, we walk through my entire workflow/process for bringing Stable Diffusion to life as a high-quality framed art print. We’ll touch on making art with Dreambooth, Stable Diffusion,…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Visual 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
zeldman
Author. Designer. Web Standards Godfather. Employer Brand @Automattic. Publisher @AListApart @ABookApart. Ava’s dad. Pete’s brother RIP. He/him.
Brad Frost
Design system consultant, web designer, speaker, writer, musician, & artist. Author of Atomic Design. Mastadon: http://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.
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 Visual Design?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Visual Design, including swissmiss, zeldman, 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).
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?
250k+ 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.