Yes, we get it. There are tons of resource aggregation articles out there.
As a design school, we get asked about these resources by students all the time. As we “scavenger hunt” the Internet for great round-up articles, we were surprised that we couldn’t find a lot of articles that are as complete as we had hoped they would be.
That’s why we decided to jump on the bandwagon and wrote one, a better one, ourselves.
This article features over 100 design resources (such as articles, blogs, podcasts, shows, books, mockup templates, and color tools) that you can use to take your work to the next level.
Table of Contents
- Online Communities
- YouTube Channels
- Websites and Blogs
- Podcasts
- Interview Questions
- Books
- TV Shows/Films
- Events/Conferences
- Design Inspirations
- Color Tools
- Accessibility
- Website Builders
- Web Hosting
- Fonts
- Mockup Templates
- Icons
- Stock Photos
- Stock Vectors and Illustrations
- Image Optimization
- File Storage and Organization
- Build Real-Life Projects
- Junior Design Jobs
Online Communities
When it comes to networking, helping each other out, staying current with the latest design trends, and staying updated on the latest events, there is no better way than joining active online design communities where you can meet fellow designers.
Here are the top few that we’ve handpicked for you.
Discord Channels
Path Unbound on Discord
Yes, we are a little biased on this one, but since we launched it, it has been growing fast and we would love for you to join! There is an extensive breakdown of channels based on resource categories as well as ways for you to stay updated on the latest design events.
Design Buddies
Art of Mind Design
Design Boat
Graphic Design
IterateUX Community
Nitro Design
The Spot — Art & Design
UX/UI
WE Design
GSIUXD (they were a Slack channel before switching to Discord recently)
Slack Channels
MidWest Design Chat
The Designership
Creative Huddle
fresh2design
UX Mastery
Fearless Community
Contra Community (this one is geared towards creative freelancers)
Facebook Groups
Designers Guild
This Facebook is very high quality and extremely active. You will see multiple posts a day and usually a good number of responses under each post.
YouTube Channels
Path Unbound Youtube
The Path Unbound YouTube channel has a library of in-depth UI/UX career discussion videos between founder Stella Guan and various industry professionals who have demonstrated significant achievements in their design careers. It is a great place to gain free, actionable, and no-nonsense design career advice!
Flux is a channel that covers fresh, relevant topics of interest for designers, such as the best design software, guides on how to get started in design, and comparisons of different design tools.
DesignCode is an educational channel that teaches viewers designers how to code, how to use popular design tools, and how to build websites and apps.
The Futur is an educational channel where designers can learn about relevant skills, such as problem-solving, entrepreneurship, experience design, content marketing, and more.
This educational channel has full tutorials and courses on topics such as UI/UX design, graphic design, Figma, web design, and custom fonts.
Design Pilot has tutorials and courses for beginners on UI/UX design, Figma, logo design, UI animation, Adobe XD, motion graphics, and more.
This channel features a certified Adobe Design master and instructor who provides educational content on relevant graphic design and illustration tools, trends, and easy-to-follow tutorials.
Satori Graphics provides graphic design tutorials and speed art videos, with topics of interest for beginners and experienced designers alike.
This channel uploads content about product design, UX design, and UI design, such as tutorials on how to get started in UX/UI design, design inspirations, and design thinking.
High Resolution is a video series on individuals working in the creative industry and the channel focuses on shedding light on how companies think and approach design.
Websites and Blogs
Path Unbound Blog
The Path Unbound blog has a wide range of design topics from bootcamp selection, UI/UX design job interviews to design career advice — every article provides in-depth analysis of the issue with actionable key takeaway summaries at the end.
This design publication creates informational, relevant, and thought-provoking articles about UX, visual, and product design.
If you’re looking to learn about anything that falls under the topic of UX, this is a great resource to refer to with topics ranging from UX for beginners to tutorials on how to conduct user research.
This blog focuses on discussing prototyping, UX design, and front-end development. It also features a toolbox that designers can use to discover the latest design tools.
This blog features the latest stories on design trends, inspirations, UX/UI design, creative processes, and tips for beginners.
Webflow Blog publishes stories on Webflow, web design trends, web design courses, and front-end development.
Design + Sketch features stories and tutorials regarding design, Sketch, and prototyping.
This blog is run by the Facebook design team which feature articles on design careers, portfolios, and hot topics in the design industry.
Inside Design has relevant, relatable articles written by designers with topics ranging from prototyping to creative processes.
UX Booth publishes articles on analytics, research, visual design, interaction design, content strategy, universal design, and more.
This blog covers a wide range of topics within design, such as the design process, design tools and tutorials, brand design, and UX design.
This is an excellent site to learn about design principles with beautiful visual examples and simple, easy-to-understand explanations.
Podcasts
Design Uncensored by Path Unbound
Design Uncensored is a weekly podcast featuring co-hosts Stella Guan, award-winning designer, founder and CEO of Path Unbound, and Kerry McPhearson, passionate emerging product designer. The show discusses UI/UX design industry issues in an open, honest, intimate fireside chat format.
Creative Office Hour by Path Unbound
Creative Office Hour is an interview series that focuses on conversations with individuals in the creative industry, such as what kind of lessons they learned from their experiences. The podcast interviews not only established creatives but also those who are still in the process of “making it”.
UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy
UI Breakfast features guests working in design, marketing, and business where they have conversations about UI/UX design, SaaS products and more.
The Futur is a podcast that features thought-provoking conversations between industry experts in the world of design and technology.
Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Design Matters is a podcast that’s been running over 15 years that features guests working in the creative industry.
This podcast, which is run by InVisionApp, regularly has guests who are top designers working at well-known companies where they are able to share their insights on the industry.
Wireframe by Adobe focuses on how graphic/UX designers, illustrators, artists and creatives can influence the world around them through their work by discussing popular topics within the design industry.
If you want a podcast full of relatable hosts who aren’t afraid to tell the truth about the design industry, this is a great resource to listen to.
A podcast featuring Latinx Designers from all backgrounds, focusing on their stories and struggles.
A podcast featuring People of Color UI designers and their contributions to the UI design industry.
A podcast about young creatives of color and some of today’s most influential BIPOC graphic designers.
Art Pays Me
A podcast about advocating for creative and financial empowerment.
10 Minutes of UX
A podcast about learning something interesting about UX in 10 minutes every week.
Revision Path
This podcast is an award-winning weekly series featuring Black designers, artists, developers, and digital creatives from all over the world.
Interview Questions
Startup Jobs
This website is a job board at first glance, but the interview questions tool it provides is absolutely amazing! Just type in the job title you are going for and you will see the most commonly-asked questions and suggested answers.
Books
For books on UX design:
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- UX Design: A Field Guide To Process And Methodology For Timeless User Experience
- Solving Product Design Exercises: Questions & Answers
- Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set …Test!
For books on product design:
- Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)
- Product Design Process: The manual for Digital Product Design and Product Management
- Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (Cracking the Interview & Career)
For books on color theory:
- The Secret Lives of Color
- Interaction of Color
- Color by Betty Edwards: A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing Colors
- Color Theory: An essential guide to color-from basic principles to practical applications (Artist’s Library)
- Design Elements, Color Fundamentals: A Graphic Style Manual for Understanding How Color Affects Design
For books on graphic design:
- How Design Makes Us Think: And Feel and Do Things
- Graphic Design Rules: 365 Essential Dos and Don’ts
- Graphic Design: The New Basics: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded
- Grid systems in graphic design: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers, and three dimensional designers
- How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While)
- The Graphic Design Idea Book: Inspiration from 50 Masters
- 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design
- Introduction to Graphic Design: A Guide to Thinking, Process & Style
- Graphic Design School: The Principles and Practice of Graphic Design
For books on branding:
- Creating a Brand Identity: A Guide for Designers: (Graphic Design Books, Logo Design, Marketing)
- Branding: Brand Identity, Brand Strategy, and Brand Development
- Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
- Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success
- The Branding Handbook: The Ultimate Branding Guide
- From Individual to Empire: A Guide to Building an Authentic and Powerful Brand
- First Things First!: New Branding and Design for New Businesses
- Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding
For books on logo design:
- The Logo Design Idea Book: (Logo Beginners Guide, Logo Design Basics, Visual Branding Book)
- Logo Design Theory: How Branding Design Really Works
- The Elements of Logo Design: Design Thinking, Branding, Making Marks
- Logotype: (Corporate Identity Book, Branding Reference for Designers and Design Students)
- Logo: The Reference Guide to Symbols and Logotypes (Corporate Identity Book, Branding Reference for Designers and Design Students)
For books on typography:
- Typography Essentials Revised and Updated: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type
- The Typography Idea Book: Inspiration from 50 Masters (Type, Fonts, Graphic Design)
- Advanced Typography: From Knowledge to Mastery
- Lessons in Typography: Must-know typographic principles presented through lessons, exercises, and examples (Creative Core)
- Better Web Typography for a Better Web
- Designing with Type, 5th Edition: The Essential Guide to Typography
- Type Rules: The Designer’s Guide to Professional Typography
- Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
- Complete Manual of Typography, The: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type
For books on portfolio:
- Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff they don’t teach you in design school, but should (Voices That Matter)
- Creating a Successful Graphic Design Portfolio
- Building Design Portfolios (Innovative Concepts for Presenting Your Work)
For books on storytelling:
- Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business
- The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
- Everyday Business Storytelling: Create, Simplify, and Adapt A Visual Narrative for Any Audience
- Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language
TV Shows/Films
This video series follows designers specializing in different fields, such as digital product design and typeface design, and reveals their creative processes.
This documentary film features a neuroscientist who is trying to uncover what goes on in the minds of creative individuals, such as artists and architects.
This short documentary shows viewers what goes on behind the scenes in Pixar Animation Studios where they produced “Toy Story”.
This documentary follows the life of a 100 years old abstract painter, Carmen Herrera, who found fame for her work during her 90s.
Events/Conferences
This website provides a comprehensive list where you can sort design and/or front-end development conferences by country, date, and category.
This website curates a list of updated and comprehensive list of design events. It also has a paid community feature.
Design Inspirations
This website provides projects, images, people, and mood boards that you can refer to for inspiration. It offers search categories, such as creative fields, tools, color, location, and schools, to help narrow down what you’re looking for.
Dribbble is a creative platform where designers and creatives can post and find design work, such as animation, branding, illustration, print, product design and typography.
Siteinspire showcases the best web and interactive design projects and sorts them by styles, types, subjects and platforms.
Design Hunt is a platform focused on delivering users the best creative inspirations, products, and news.
This website showcases web design between the years 1991 and 2006, where you can look at the timelines of companies and old web design software.
One Page Love is a website that offers one-page websites, templates, and resources on topics such as portfolios, resumes, and photography.
Pttrns showcases mobile design resources, interface patterns, and inspiration between the years 2012 and 2018.
Mobbin is a collection of the latest iOS UI design patterns.
This site is a great resource to get UI design inspiration as well as download templates for your next UI projects.
UX Archive is a library of mobile user flows from top mobile apps where you can sort by flows, such as logging in and signing up.
Really Good UX showcases great examples of UX where you can sort by categories such as redesign, modals, tooltips, user onboarding, upsell prompts and mobile apps.
Really Good Emails is a collection of the best and most innovative emails in terms of their design and code.
UI Jar is a collection of handpicked, high-quality design projects that you can sort by website, graphic design, and UX/UI design.
Land-book is a gallery of the best hand-picked design projects where you can sort by landings, portfolios, blogs, stores, and templates.
The following are website competition platforms where users can vote for and explore the best design and development projects:
Color Tools
For color accessibility:
For color palette generators and inspiration:
- Muzli Colors
- Coolors
- Picular
- Colorinspo
- Colourcode
- Happy Hues
- LOL Colors
- Pigment
- Colorhunt
- Colormind
- ColorDrop
- Palettable
- Color and Fonts
- Colorkit
- Colorffy
- Culrs
- The Day’s Color (beautiful color palettes inspired by popular culture)
- Color Wise (colors from the most voted-for products on Product Hunt)
- Color Leap (color palettes inspired by history!)
- Color Lisa (color palettes inspired by the greatest designers)
- 0to255 (easily lighten or darken colors)
- Design Seeds (color palettes by season)
- Polarite (AI-assisted color scheme generator)
- Khroma (AI-powered color scheme generator that learns your taste)
- My Mind (AI-powered, privacy first, no-ad, no-social, no organization inspiration-gathering tool)
For gradients:
- CSS Gradients
- uiGradients
- Blend
- Eggradients
- Fresh Mesh (beautiful mesh gradient palettes)
- Grabrient
- Gradient Hunt
- Gradpad (gradient playground)
- Web Gradients
For all-in-one color tools:
For color knowledge reading:
Browser Extensions:
Site Palette (extract color palettes from websites)
Accessibility
Web AIM is the first tool that pops up in Google search if you search for “contrast checker”. It is a super functional website that lets users quickly check if text color passes accessibility standard. It is not the prettiest website but surely functional!
If you are already an Adobe user, you may want to take advantage of Adobe’s own accessibility tool while using Adobe Color. It even has a color blindness simulator in addition to the standard contrast checker so that you can make sure your color choices make sense for colorblind users as well.
Whole Site Accessibility Checker from Experte.com
The team at Experte.com has taken accessibility checkers to the next level by offering a quick way for designers to identify if a website has accessibility issues and where those issues occur. This comes in handy during the QA process and is a great help for any designers or design teams conducting redesigns for existing websites.
Website Builders
Webflow is a website building and hosting platform that allows users to customize elements of their website with no coding required. There is a free pricing plan but it’s limited in ownership.
This article is a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a WordPress website. WordPress is a website building platform that requires some coding knowledge in order to customize the website, such as CSS and HTML.
Web Hosting
If you choose to build websites with WordPress because you need its flexibility and power, you will need a reliable website host. We recommend the following affordable and reliable web hosting companies that we’ve personally used and tested.
Hostinger offers fast, reliable hosting for individuals and businesses of all sizes. It has servers located around the world and support is very efficient via chat and email. They are among the most affordable hosting service with an excellent user experience, even for tech newbies.
We have an exclusive discount code for them (receive up to 91% off): PATHUNBOUND
Siteground is another great hosting provider also with fast and reliable service. It has excellent support that answers your questions via phone, chat or email. It is more expensive than Hostinger.
Flywheel is optimized specifically for WordPress. It provides excellent hosting services for agencies, businesses and individuals.
Fonts
For databases with free fonts:
For databases with free and paid fonts:
- Typewolf
- Font Squirrel
- DaFont (quality can vary)
Mockup Templates
Mockup World offers the best, free Mockups where you can sort by categories like packaging, iPhone, posters, and fashion.
Graphic Burger offers both free and paid mockups for a variety of projects, such as apparel, phones, videos, and books.
This platform offers free and paid mockups for graphic designers.
Free Design Resources has free, high-quality design resources, such as fonts, mockups, graphics, templates, add-ons, and UI kits.
Icons
For databases of free icons:
For databases of free and paid icons:
Stock Photos
Unsplash is a collection of free, high-resolution photos that anyone can use.
Pixabay is a platform that offers free, high-quality stock images, videos, and music.
Pexel offers free stock photos and videos for your creative projects.
StockSnap has high-resolution photos that you can use for commercial or personal projects.
Stock Vectors and Illustrations
DrawKit offers free and paid hand-drawn vector illustrations and icon resources.
Free illustration library with great filters for file types.
Font Awesome has free and paid pricing plans for their resources on vector icons, logos, styles, kits, and page views.
Humaaans has free vectors and illustrations where you can customize the elements of the human illustrations to your liking.
unDraw is a platform where you can find free SVG and PNG downloads and customize the accent color with a color wheel.
Black Illustrations offers free and paid illustration packs of Black people for your digital projects.
Free Vector is a collection of free vector art that you can sort by categories, such as logos, office, and shopping.
Vecteezy offers free, high-quality vector art, stock photos, and stock videos.
Freepik is a collection of free vectors, stock photos, and PSD.
This site provides a collection of funky scribble illustrations (for $4) for projects that would benefit from abstract shapes in a hand-drawn style.
This is a massive, free and high-quality 3D shape library that will benefit designers looking to use 3D illustration in their design or use 3D device mockups for thumbnails in their portfolio.
Image Optimization
Users can optimize JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF, and WEBP files by compressing them.
This free tool compresses images without sacrificing quality to allow your website to load faster.
This free online tool lets you compress images in the format of jpg and png up to 50MB! You can also specify the level of compression, which is always a plus. We do recommend comparing and contrasting the final image quality as the higher the compression, the lower the quality of images.
Kraken is a free image optimizing tool where you can select optimization mode and resize your images.
Optimizilla is a free, online image optimizer where you can compress JPEG and PNG images.
Optimole offers monthly and yearly pricing plans for its image optimization services.
TinyPNG is a free tool where you can compress WebP, PNG and JPEG files. You can compress up to 20 images that are 5MB each at once, which is pretty generous.
File Storage and Organization
Dropbox and Google Drive are great but there are many downsides to them as well. For example, it is hard to comment and collaborate on your files on both platforms, not to mention the fact that storage is quite limited without paid plans.
We are thrilled to have discovered Playbook, a cloud storage platform that is designed for creatives by creatives, with an offer of 4TB storage for free for students at Path Unbound.
Build Real-Life Projects
Catchafire matches skilled volunteers with nonprofits where volunteers are able to create meaningful, real-life projects.
Develop for Good is one of the largest intercollegiate technology and design for social good organizations. You volunteer your design skills to nonprofits thats are looking for technology solutions. It’s recommended that you team up with developers for the projects.
Taproots Foundation is yet another great way to volunteer and work on real client projects using your design skills. Don’t stop at hypothetical projects. Work on real projects and gain tangible experience.
Junior Design Jobs
Most job boards have an abundance of design jobs that are for mid-to-senior level folks. This one is curated just for early-career job hunters in the design field. It is a much-needed resource for entry-level candidates.
