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Where I Go To Find Design News and Inspiration

Posted 10 years ago by Murat Mutlu

It's been nearly two years since I started my own design and tech newsletter. In that time I've built up a great list of news and inspiration resources that I check on a daily or weekly basis and thought it would be useful to share (and build upon!).

I'm a pretty big procrastinator, it takes a while for things to marinate in my brain so I'm often checking these sites to help spark ideas and I always seem to find that one thing that helps solve the problem I'm having.

More recently I'm finding myself reading more and more articles that aren't directly related to design but could have impact to how we work, whether that's privacy, health or technology.

So here's my go-to list, let us know in the comments if you have any gems of your own, would love to add to these!

News and articles

Designer News (daily) - Great news, resources and discussion submitted by the design and creative community. Also check out the Twitter feed. Or if you use Chrome check out the Geisha extension which changes your new tab screen into the latest design news.

Sidebar.io  (daily) - Endless amounts of great design articles and resources submitted by selected curators. You can either check the site or sign-up for the daily/weekly email, always relevant and timely. Also check out the Twitter feed.

Product Hunt (daily) - the ever growing list of new or updated apps and services, submitted and voted up by the community. It's a great way to find products for design inspiration.

Hacker News (daily) - The name is quite deceiving, although it only occasionally has design related articles, it's an incredible rescource for finding news and resources about tech and stories that are shaping our lives. Also check out the Hacker News Twitter feed which updates with the most popular stories through the day.

Digg (daily) - believe it or not Digg has some amazing content these days, it's one of the first things I check on my phone everyday. It's a real mix of tech, culture and brainfood. Also check out their Twitter and iPhone app.

Farnham Street Brain Food newsletter (weekly)- this is more art and culture than design but always has some great stuff around philosophy and motivation. Sends out every Sunday.

Benedict Evans Newsletter (weekly) - lots of great mobile and tech news and stats. Sends out every Sunday.

Kippt (weekly) - I usually use Kippt for saving articles from the web but once you start following all your Twitter connections on the service you get a great feed of what everyone is bookmarking. If you're following like-minded people on Twitter you'll find the feed content is wide, varied and always worth exploring. Here's the feed of stuff I've been saving.

YDJ Blog - lots of articles with links to resources

Design and UX inspiration

Dribbble (daily) - nothing new here, I check Dribbble on a daily basis, either for inspiration or to help solve any design problems I'm having.

Did you know that there are tons of useful freebies given away by designers on Dribbble everyday? It just requires a few search keywords to dig them up, usually a combo of 'free', 'freebie' or 'psd'. Here's a few of my favourites - icons, Photoshop actions, PSDs and UI kits.

Pttrns  (weekly) - design inspiration from the best looking iPhone and iPad apps. I use this a lot.

Little Big Details (weekly) - Spend just 30 mins on this site and I guarantee you'll come away with a dozen possible improvements to your designs and UI copy.

UX Archive (fortnightly) - A great site for examining user flows of popular apps.

User Onboard (fortnightly) - UX and onboarding teardowns of popular websites. The amount of effort that goes into each post is amazing.

Got anymore to add?

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Hi! I'm one of the co-founders at Marvel and a Product Designer by trade. You can often find me asking why Arsenal haven't signed anyone this season. Follow me on Twitter.

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