Ten Design Blogs You MUST Read
Posted Wednesday, 14 February 2007 by Gudmund in
Design
Inspiration, information, advice and entertainment; what more do you want? The following blogs offer all these elements in different measures and combinations, but they do have one thing in common: whether design is your bread and butter or for your eyes only, they are must-reads.
In no particular order, we give you this somewhat subjective shortlist:
Veerle's blog is a cheerful and extremely insightful mix of design advice and views, tutorials and interviews. The focus is on CSS and web standards but the content is varied, and Veerle has a way of writing engagingly about anything.
Quite possibly Belgium's tastiest export ever – after
Leffe Dark.
veerle.duoh.comN.Design Studio is the personal site of Nick La, an extravagantly talented, Toronto based designer and illustrator. His site is a well-stocked goodie-bag of software tutorials, freebie graphics and design inspiration.
www.ndesign-studio.comBrandSpankingNew is written by Timothy Groves, a designer based in Munich, Germany. Timothy writes about everything from design, fine arts and the business of design to Javascript, XHTML and the like.
He also maintains a comprehensive and inspiring 'Recent surfing' list.
www.brandspankingnew.netMark is a designer with many years experience in the fields of print, advertising, multimedia and web design. He offers sound and authorative guidance on many of the core elements of good design, including typography, designing with colour, CSS and information design.
He is also a member of the
BritPack collective.
www.markboulton.co.ukMike Davidson is CEO of
Newsvine. Somehow he also finds time to run his highly successful personal site. The content is wide-ranging, but could be said to cover communication design in its broadest sense.
Mike was one of the pioneers behind the development of
sIFR, which brought rich typography functionality to the web, so his site contains documentation and updates on this project too.
www.mikeindustries.comIf web standards, accessibility and usability is your thing, Roger Johansson's site cannot be rated highly enough. Impressive stuff.
www.456bereastreet.comJon Hicks is a UK based print + new media designer, and part of the Camino browser graphics team. He posts an excellent and engaging blend of web and graphics related content on his site.
www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journalWolfgang Bartelme is an Austrian designer specialising in top-notch user interface and application icon design. The content of his journal is focussed on interface design, cutting-edge web design and scripts and Mac OS.
www.bartelme.atAdvertised as 'Simon Collison's Illogical Waffle', this site doesn't entirely live up to its description. It does, however, deliver some rather interesting, as well as entertaining, content. The main focus is on web design, but there are also plenty of articles for anyone interested in design in general – or life in general for that matter.
www.colly.comIt is perhaps rather unfair to bundle this site in with the above sites, which are all more or less one-person operations, albeit very accomplished ones. The credits for Design Observer, on the other hand, read like a Who's Who of some of the most notable design writers from the last decade, with founding contributors including Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Rick Poynor.
A must for everyone who wants a regular input of well written articles on all facets of design and creative culture.
www.designobserver.com