Design

Everything design-related I find useful and will reference in the future. It also lets me keep my sanity by not scouring the whole web for an article I saw once.

Articles

Icons & Keylines Demystified

Icon Design

A great introduction to the different approaches you can take to your guide setup to create consistent icons. I tend to go for the Material design approach but it's whatever works for you.
Essential reading when starting on your iconography journey. Again getting that initial setup makes all the difference in making your icons consistent and beautiful to look at.
My go-to article when thinking about layouts and initial setup. A huge helper in defining spacing and starting to understand the fundamentals.

Blogs

The Brand Identity

Graphic Inspiration

An independent graphic design resource with a global reach, showcasing the best projects, companies and products relevant to the industry.

Icon Sets

If you use UnoCSS (I use it for quite a few of my projects) it has a fantastic feature which let's you add icons via class names. Each icon is pulled from icones.js.org, a huge collection of open source icons. Alternatively, if you prefer to use icons as components check out unplugin-icons on GitHub.

Interview collections

Lovers Magazine

Essential Designer Questions

Previously Interface Lovers, Lovers Magazine amplifies the voice of the designer. Asking the essential questions every designer wants to know in order to push and inspire themselves and creatives in the community.

Staff Design

The Individual Contributor Path

I'm a massive fan of anything Brian Lovin does and this is no exception. Brian interviews a great collection of designers and gets some great insights into career growth and the Individual Contributor Path.

Open Source Fonts

Fontshare

Free Quality Fonts

Launched by the Indian Type Foundry, the creator of several popular source fonts (including Poppins, Rajdhani and Hind), Fontshare aims to help brands and individuals who don't have the budget, but want access to beautiful typography. They've done a stellar job and it's well worth checking out for your next project.

Open Foundry

Open Source Fonts

The Open Foundry brings together a curated selection of some of the best open source fonts out there. If you're looking for some more stylised fonts, I recommend taking a look here.

Uncut.wtf

Libre Typeface Catalogue

A gem of a find found in this thread. It's more of a curator of links rather than an open source foundry itself, but what it does do is display the fonts in such a way that you get a great feel for them.

Collletttivo.it

Designed and Distributed

A smaller library of fonts than the others but hugely diverse in styles. Personally I see some fonts here that would make for a great large heading font or intro paragraph to your portfolio.

Subscribe worthy newsletters

A long time favourite of mine and Sidebar never scuppers on sending quality content. I'll admit sometimes 5 links can be a little overwhelming to check daily in that case I recommend just going on the site every now and then, you won't be disappointed.

Spotify Design

Product Design

These guys write some great articles about product design. They also have some playlists you can listen to whilst designing (which is always a bonus).

Dense Discovery

Inspirational/Critical Thinking

I look forward to @KaiBrach's newsletter each week and it never fails to inspire or have some sort of impression on my day. Well worth a subscribe.

Tools

Savee

Collect Inspiration

Like Pinterest but much MUCH better. The content you can source and stumble upon here is much better quality than pretty much anything out there. It's better for graphic design but all inspiration is good inspiration, right?

Figma

Collaboration/Design

In my opinion THE best design tool out there right now. Collaborate with other designer friends, work up prototypes for design sprints and share your work easily with developers. It's pretty much a life saver!

Erase.bg

AI Background Removal

Need to remove the background from an image but don't have the time to open Photoshop and do it by hand? Erase.bg makes it super easy and it’s free with a generous 5000x5000 resolution limit.