60 essential resources for becoming a better Designer

Knowing where to look for the help to level up your design skills can be daunting when you’re just starting out. Here are some popular websites, videos, thought leaders, and tools to give you a jumpstart.

News

• Co.Design —Insightful articles on the business of design
• Sidebar.io — Five great design links everyday
• Designer News — A community for designers
• Web Designer Depot — Cool web design articles and tutorials
• Smashing Mag — Well written articles and tutorials on design
• r/design — A popular subreddit just for designers

Inspiration

• Abduzeedo — A curated site of the latest and greatest in design
• Dribbble — Show and tell for designers
• Niice.co — An image search engine for art and design
• Pinterest — A giant collection of design boards
• Behance — A community for design portfolios
• Muzli— A curated blog of great design works

Educational

• Hack Design —Lessons in design taught by industry experts
• Creative Bloq — User created tutorials on Adobe Creative Suite
• EnvatoTuts (f.k.a. Tuts+) — Design tutorials written by experts
• UXDesign.cc — A trove of ux design articles and tutorials
• Prototyping: From UX to Front-End — Curated posts on UX
• Design + Sketch app — Curated tutorials on designing with Sketch
• UX Planet — A great place to discover UX best practices and trends
• Codrops — The best web design tutorials on the web
• Designcode.io — A guide on creating apps in Xcode for designers
• 99u — Helpful career advice just for creatives

Films

• Helvetica — An eye-opening film on typography
• Objectified — An inspiring film on everyday products featuring a few living legends of design
• Why Man Creates — An oscar winning short by the great Saul Bass
• The Deep Dive: IDEO — An ABC interview on IDEO’s design process
• Exit Through The Gift Shop —A mocumentary by Banksy himself
• Art & Copy — A film on the future of ads that will give you goosebumps
• Logorama — A fun animated drama featuring famous logos
• Eames: The Architect and The Painter — A documentary on one of the great partnerships in design history
• Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century — A film on the origins of the Bauhaus school and modern design
• Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight — A film by one of America’s best designers
• Minimum Badass User — A short talk by Kathy Sierra about the importance of putting your users first.

Tools

• Hex Colors — Convert colors between hexcode and rgb
• Google Fonts—The defacto site for web fonts
• Flat color + Flat Color UI Picker — Beautiful colors to use in your designs
• Napkin — Design an app on your phone
• Invision — Prototype your web or app designs with a few clicks
• Marvel App — A simple design collaboration app
• Sketch — The go-to app for design
• Paper — The best mobile app for sketching and drawing
• Semplice — A beautiful Wordpress template for designers
• Userforge — Create a simple user persona in just a few clicks
• Peek by UserTesting — Quick usability tests by real people
• Wireframe.cc — A minimalist and easy to use wireframing tool

Freebies

• Creative Booster — Great fonts, templates, and mockup files
• Unsplash — Beautiful photos to use in your designs
• DaFont — A smorgashboard of fonts
• Sketch App Sources — Templates for designing in sketch
• UI Faces — Avatars of real people you can use in your designs

People to Follow

• Facebook Design —Insightful posts from Facebook’s design team
• MockPlus — Great design blog on prototyping
• Sagmeister & Walsh—A legendary graphic design studio
• IDEO — A legendary product design studio
• Chris Coyier — Tweets from the creator of CSS Tricks
• Luke Wroblewski — Founder of Polar and UX Design thought leader
• Tina Roth Eisenberg — Founder of Tattly
• Tobias Van Schnieder — Founder of Semplice and former Spotify designer
• Marc Andrew — Founder of Sketch Camp