Once upon a time, graphic design blogs were all about eye candy. But while there’s nothing wrong with that, recent years have seen more and more blogs that delve a little deeper.
WRITTEN BY: TOM MAY
15 FEBRUARY 2021
Nowadays, if you want to see the latest design work, find out who created it, what the challenges were and how they overcame them, there’s a blog for that. Consequently, if you just want a quick blast of eye candy to inspire you visually, you’re well catered for as well. Indeed, there are so many graphic design blogs out there right now; it’s difficult to know which ones to pay the most attention to.
This is where we step in to help. We’ve teamed up with our friends at Shillington, the original graphic design bootcamp, to bring you our recommendations for blogs to follow.
1. Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo is a collective of individual writers sharing articles about architecture, design, photography and UX. Founded by Brazilian designer Fabio Sasso in 2006, it’s particularly strong on 3D work, which doesn’t get much attention from most design blogs.
2. Design Week
Founded in 1986, Design Week was the UK’s leading design magazine until 2011, when it became online-only. It continues to bring you high quality, well-written news and inspiration across graphics, branding, interiors, digital, product, furniture and more.
3. Creative Boom
Creative Boom (of course) celebrates, inspires and supports the creative community and has an excellent section on graphic design to give you loads of inspiration. The magazine also features insightful interviews with some of the world’s leading designers – Paula Scher being a recent example.
4. Mirador
Mirador is the image-based blog curated by Say What Studio, a graphic design duo based in Paris, France. It draws together many inspirational works out there and pulls them together in a beautifully designed, Tumblr-style feed of visual inspiration.
5. Telepathy
Telepathy has spent nearly 20 years helping startups and brands craft meaningful experiences for their customers. It shares the lessons it’s learned on its UX-focused blog, with intriguing articles such as ‘How to handle inspiration overload’ and ‘Using the Internet of Things to extend your brand essence’.
6. Creative Review
Founded in 1980, Creative Review is the world’s leading monthly magazine for advertising, design and visual culture. And the same high-quality journalism that informs it carries through to its website, which features a range of news, reviews and features from the creative world.
7. The Dieline
For anyone working in packaging design, The Dieline has it all wrapped up. It’s basically the Bible of the sector: a place where the community can review, critique and stay informed of the latest industry trends, and check out design projects being created in the field.
8.Made by Folk
Founded in 2007 by a group of young designers and vagabonds eager to collect and share the best design work they came across, FormFiftyFive soon became an international showcase of creative work. They have since been renamed Made by Folk and added more interactive elements to exchange and store ideas more easily, extending it from design blog to collaborative platform.
9. Eye Magazine
Eye Magazine, the international review of graphic design, is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture. Its associated blog features a range of critical, informed writing about design and visual culture.
10. I Love Typography
This blog covers everything from typography and type history to making fonts, and everything in between, including printmaking to book history, and occasionally calligraphy. The work of John Boardley, author of “Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing”, it’s all carefully crafted, authoritative stuff.