These graphic design inspirations are sure to ignite the creative fire you need, to stay fully informed and push your passion for creativity to new frontiers. Thankfully, there are endless amounts of resources online for graphic designers at any level. But having a few reliable starting places can help you meet clients’ needs, while encouraging you to explore new design solutions, keep up with design trends, and push your creativity. Whether you need inspiration, want to learn a new skill, or are eager to show off your talent, the internet is overflowing with blogs and guides. Learn new design tricks, watch tutorials, or share your work with any of these blogs at your fingertips. Or, if you’re hitting creative block, you might want to brush up on your design skills but don’t know where to start among the thousands of graphic design blogs, guides, and other resources online.
I have compiled a alphabetical hand-picked list of helpful graphic design blogs that I have stumbled upon till now; and I will keep on adding more websites.
1 Behance
Behance is the leading social media platform owned by Adobe that allows many people with web design careers to showcase their portfolios of visual work such as graphic design, fashion, illustration, photography, and more. It is a democratic place to share knowledge. One of the pros of Behance is that it is extremely easy to use. If you’re an artist who’s not a coder, this is a good site for you.
If you are in the creative field and you haven’t developed a portfolio yet, one of the most popular online platforms these days is Behance. It’s published millions of projects, and more than 10 million members since its launch in 2006, and it remains the go-to place to showcase your work. Each project on Behance shows the number of people that have viewed your project and liked it. That makes it a little risky to list your project out there — what if no one rates it or appreciates it? If you don’t have the time or resources to create your own, using a site like Behance will not only help you show off your skills, it will also help you sort your work by type, which is something that is important when applying for a job. You can sign up to Behance and build profiles consisting of projects. Both registered and unregistered users can “appreciate” any particular project, as well as comment on them. Members of Behance can follow other users’ profiles.
Most inspiration sites are agnostic about the tools used in the creative process. Not so Behance, which gives you a handy way to see what people are doing with a given platform or tool with its Tools Used filter (under “Additional Filters”).
In my opinion, its a designer’s blog with detailed classification and content. Theme covers on web design, interactive design, user interface / user experience, photography, industrial design and many other topics. The variety and innovative content always gives designers a massive design inspiration.
2 Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. It is available on web and mobile, and integrates millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations. Whether you need an Instagram story, logo maker, or birthday invitation – create all these graphic design needs and more on Canva.
The quality of the resources on Canva are great. There’s something for everyone to use! From backgrounds, design templates, a variety of fonts and more! You can easily search the designs for whatever you might need or upload your own design elements to use.
Canva also saves all of your designs, so you can have access to them from anywhere! Sharing your creations over social media is also a breeze with their easy sharing options. From guides to designing book covers to clever 404 page designs, you’ll find a wealth of inspiration. Learn from established graphic designers or connect with up-and-coming artists all in one place!
3 Create
Create is Adobe’s magazine by creatives, for creatives — available online and as a mobile app. Visit them for inspiration and tutorials on photography, illustration, graphic design, web design, motion graphics, audio/video, branding, and more. Each week, Adobe Create Magazine features innovative artists and shines a spotlight on creative work in photography, design, video, illustration, and more. Formerly it was known as Adobe Inspire Magazine.
Also available as an app, Adobe Creative Magazine is a go-to for graphic designers who need inspiration, tutorials, and information regarding the latest trends. Hone your skills by getting involved in popular design challenges or get helpful tips for working in Photoshop.
4 Creative Bloq
Creative Bloq features advice, interviews and reviews taken from four print magazines: Computer Arts (graphic design and branding), net (web design), 3D World (animation/VFX) and ImagineFX (Art).
It also posts daily news from the creative industry, ranging from fun to serious. online blog that provides its readers with daily creative tips and inspiration about web design, graphic design, 3D, and more. It helps its readers stay informed up-to-date by offering the latest trends and developments in the global design industry.
5 Creative Boom
Creative Boom is a UK-based online magazine and podcast, dedicated to artists, designers, illustrators, photographers and anyone working in visual arts and communications. Founded in 2009, it celebrates, inspires and supports the creative community and has an excellent section on graphic design to give you loads of inspiration.
It features a wealth of visual inspiration from makers around the world. In any given week, you might read an article about giant woodcuts, bespoke ping pong paddles, and rare photographs of Prince. With this wide-ranging source of inspiration, the site champions a multi-disciplinary approach to artistic influence.
In addition to writing about and promoting creatives, the site also offers practical advice on how to start or grow your career. It is a trove of resources, including tips on making it as a freelancer, maintaining a work/life balance, and getting over your creative block. No matter where you are in your career, their advice is sure to strike a chord.
6 Creative Overflow
Creative Overflow is a Design Blog for Anything Creative. They have a goal of expanding the community of design eccentric individuals from all over the world by inspiring them through articles, resources, tutorials and inspiration.
You’ll find the latest design resources, tutorials, and inspiration to enhance your artistic flow. If you’re in a creative slump and need motivation to start a new project or you want to contribute a guest blog post, you can find exactly what you need on Creative Overflow.
7 Designhill
Designhill is the world’s largest online graphic design marketplace. From highly interactive design contests to all-inclusive, end-to-end design gigs to artificial intelligent design tools, Designhill has a service to fulfill all your design needs.
Founded in 2014 in India, Designhill has been helping design talents learn, grow and get hired by over millions of businesses around the globe. Millions of designers and artists look for design inspiration and jobs on Designhill. They encourage creative talent around the world to get hired for design projects, showcase their portfolio and become a part of a global design community – No matter the skill or experience.
Here you can connect businesses and individuals with skilled graphic designers. Customers can launch contests for virtually any type of graphic design work they need, from logos and web pages to t-shirts, banner ads, email templates, business cards, infographics and more.
Additionally, Designhill provides an interactive interface that allows the customers to give real time feedback and ratings to design works, to help the designers better understand the customer’s expectations. Customers can browse our top designers and choose their favourites to work on 1 to 1 basis.
8 Design Clever
Design Clever is a collaboration started by Jonathan Ring and Bethany Baker, two aspiring graphic designers with a passion for everything design-related. This blog was created to showcase talented designers all over the world, and they encourage creatives everywhere to submit their work to it.
9 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. Its readers come from commercial design disciplines which range from retail, products and packaging to graphics, interiors, exhibitions and digital.
Design Week Awards held every year are the leading accolade in the design industry, catering for every area of commercial design. It showcases excellence and innovation in design, celebrating work across many specialisms, ranging from branding to digital, interiors to products, and beyond.
10 Dribbble
Dribbble is the leading destination to find & showcase creative work and home to the world’s best design professionals. Enabling creatives to share their work long before Instagram was even dreamt of, Dribbble is a design industry institution. Its related blog is packed with useful advice to boost your career, such as how to form good habits and how to get out of a bad design feedback loop.
The entire site is full of basketball elements. You can see its logo is a basketball image. Users are called Player, works are called Shot, the administrators are called Coach, and the user level is divided into Rookies to All-Stars. All are basketball terms.
Dribbble often compared with Behance, but it outshines in terms of a better design platform as well as a community. Dribbble community has been around since 2009, where designers can share work, or shots, and get feedback. If you really want all the features of the network, you have to pay. It can be worth it if you are using it to sell your work or get work.
Dribbble is a place for designers to publish works, but it needs to be invited to join in. It more likes a semi-open social network, pay attention to feedback and communication. That also encourage members to propose amendments to each other, you can deduce your works from some people’s idea, and then released out. At least, that is Dribbble’s original intention, and it also becomes popular rapidly. But now it has become a place to play cool “in 400×300 pixels “.
11 Digital Arts
Based in the UK, Digital Arts benefits from the backing of the world’s largest IT publisher, IDG. Through IDG‘s global network, Digital Arts has access to the world’s leading writers, reviewers and the best-informed sources in the industry. This guarantees that Digital Arts always provides the best, most up-to-date information, keeping it well ahead of every other website in the market.
It addresses the needs of those within the exploding digital media market by providing relevant and forward thinking content, and by consistently running more exclusive reviews and features than any other website in the market.
12 Inspiration Grid
Launched in February 2011, Inspiration Grid is an online magazine celebrating creative talent from around the world. Your daily fix of design, art, illustration, typography, photography, architecture, fashion and more.
It has a clean, appealing design, and everything is easy to find. Inspiration Grid is the go-to for learning about what creative pioneers are up to. Filter thousands of blogs by specific categories you’re interested in, such as advertising, logo design, and technology.
13 Instagram
Instagram is an American photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. It is a great tool for finding inspiration not only for website designs, but for all things related to design and the web. There are tons of theme pages on Instagram that focus on showcasing other designers’ work.
The app allows users to upload media, which can be edited with filters and organized with tags and location information. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users’ content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a feed.
14 Masterpicks
Looking for inspiration from real-world projects? Masterpicks has you covered. This image-led blog presents you with a new, hand-picked design project every day, across UX and UI design, illustration, animation, 3D art, graphic design, branding, industrial design and photography.
15 Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information on the World Wide Web using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards.
Maybe you’ve heard of this not so little website called Pinterest? Pinterest is a hub for distributed content across the internet. From cooking recipes to design inspiration – Pinterest has it all. If you search for “web design inspiration” on Pinterest, you’ll see all the users who “pinned” their favorite web design content for others to see.
Pinterest not only allows you to find inspiring designs for your own work, but it can also help you find content to inspire, shape, or change your whole design career trajectory. Because anyone can post on Pinterest, you’ll find a wide variety of content from website showcases to valuable blog posts.
I use Pinterest a lot for my inspirations related to Architecture & Interior Design. I have created several pinboards and also shared my portfolio of work.
16 Site Point
Site Point is a hub for web developers to share their passion for building incredible Internet things. The company commissions a wealth of original content, ranging from articles and videos through to books and courses. They work closely with their sister company Learnable, which sells subscription access to SitePoint’s premium materials.
Are you an entrepreneur looking to learn about the latest design trends or wanting to teach yourself a new skill like JavaScript? Site Point has the materials you need to succeed. Get tips on how to build your online graphic design portfolio or learn how to grow your online brand. Site Point also includes a subscription service that gives you access to e-books and the latest content.
17 Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine is a website and eBook publisher with more than 5 million global monthly visitors, that offers editorial content and professional resources for web developers and web designers. Founded in September 2006 in Germany, Smashing Magazine delivers reliable, useful, but most importantly practical articles to web designers and developers. If you’re looking for conferences, workshops, or networking opportunities Smashing Magazine is an excellent resource. Read case studies, get helpful tips, and expand your knowledge with a plethora of how-to guides. Each post tells you how many minutes it will take you to read, ideal for fitting a good read into your busy schedule!
18 UX Collective
UX Collective is a publication founded by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga in 2004. The website has more than 2.5 million monthly visits and covers topics like user experience, usability, and product design. The UX Collective manages, edits, and publishes more than 100 stories every month.They invest 15-20 hours every week on collaborating with authors to edit their stories, writing thier own stories, and curating the most relevant content to share with the readers.
I am highly impressed by the attempts made by the founders of the UX Collective. If every designer in our industry dedicated 1% of their time sharing knowledge online, for free, design would be a much more accessible discipline – and we would all make a more meaningful impact. UX is becoming increasingly popular, and with that comes a lot of clutter, noise and disorientation.
19 UnderPinned
UnderPinned is an online platform of tools and services for freelancers, and its associated blog has an array of articles about all aspects of going freelance. Topics range from tips on chasing payments to how to make your photography stand out.
From Portfolios to Project Management, Invoicing and Contracts, to educational tools and support services, UnderPinned is designed to help freelancers and small businesses handle every aspect of their admin.
If freelancing means working with different people every day while pursuing and pitching for work you love rather than keeping up with a growing pile of admin, then UnderPinned is the tool for you.
20 Wix
Wix is an Israeli software company, providing cloud-based web development services. Today, Wix is the biggest player in the website building landscape and hosts a whopping 160 million websites. It allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools. Users can add social plug-ins, e-commerce, online marketing, contact forms, e-mail marketing, and community forums to their web sites using a variety of Wix-developed and third-party applications. The Wix website builder is built on a freemium business model, earning its revenues through premium upgrades.
Wix offers an excellent drag-and-drop site builder to create small websites. There are 100s of free templates available. Wix provides its own web hosting as well as domain names (free and paid). The App Market makes it easy to add extra functionality such as photo galleries or ecommerce.It includes professional step-by-step guides to walk you through everything from colour theory to make a mood board. The best all-around website builder on the market.
Wix Blog is the also a good place to get inspired by stunning website showcases, fresh web design tips, tutorials and so much more.