The role of a Product Designer requires the ability to pull together a number of different design skills and considerations all at once. That means it’s important to stay up-to-date with trends and best practices across a range of different design disciplines.
If you’re new to the field, this article at Dribbble provides a great introduction. In it, Elona Jaquez defines Product Design as “the intersection of the various UX design disciplines that go into creating modern digital products. These generally include UI design, interaction design, user research, information architecture, problem definition, and design thinking, prototyping, visual design, motion design, and management of design systems.â€
I’ve put together this useful list of some of the best product design blogs to follow, which will help keep you well-versed in the busy world of digital product design through 2021 and beyond.
Product Design Blogs to Follow
InVision: Inside Design
InVision Design Blog – InVision itself is a UI design and prototyping tool serving over 7 million users. InVision’s blog covers a number of topics related to product design and their ´Process’ category is particularly great for content in this area. There is also a wealth of knowledge available from InVision aside from the traditional blog post content in the form of ebooks or their podcast.
Prototypr
Prototypr Blog – Prototypr is a community publishing platform for designers and developers covering prototyping, UX design, front-end development, and more, which currently boasts over 185 thousand followers on Medium. The blog features and promotes product design content written by prominent figures in the field, and new content is added on an almost daily basis.
Courtside: Dribbble Blog
Courtside: Dribbble Blog – I’m sure most of you reading this are familiar with Dribbble as an online community for sharing your work-in-progress and building out a portfolio of work, but how many of you have explored the Dribbble design blog? It regularly features topics that benefit product designers at any level, written by or inspired by designers from around the Dribbble community.
XD Ideas: Adobe
XD Ideas: Adobe – Adobe XD is another prototyping, wireframing, and UI/UX design tool that helps you animate and collaborate on your designs. Naturally, this is a perfect tool for product designers and the XD Ideas blog is a well-curated collection of processes and principles that serves their audience perfectly.
UX Collective
UX Collective – Their tagline says that they “believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers.†With over 416 thousand followers at the time of writing this, there seems to be a huge demand for content around design thinking. The UX Collective exists to give a voice to unheard design voices all over the world with curated stories on user experience, visual, and product design.
DesignSystems
DesignSystems – is a Figma publication for design systems creators, designers, developers, and managers. Figma itself is another popular UI/UX design tool. This is a common theme across many of these product design blogs, but let’s be honest: it makes sense and the quality of content is impressive across the board.
A List Apart
A List Apart – is a veteran in the blog game and there is certainly more of a focus on web design. Besides publishing books and running events, A List Apart has always been a reliable source of information and opinion for designers, developers, architects, strategists, writers, and project managers.
UX Booth
UX Booth – is a publication by and for the user experience community operating for over 12 years. Their blog covers topics such as analytics, business strategy, content strategy, information architecture, interaction design, philosophy, research, accessibility, and visual design. They are trusted by over 100,000 regular newsletter subscribers.
PlantApp Design Blog
The PlantApp Design Blog – Another curated collection of posts supporting a core business: a version control app made for designers. This blog is fairly new and looks like one to watch for 2021.
UX Tools
UX Tools – covers content across 4 main categories: Interaction Design, Techniques, Research & Testing, and Psychology. Created by Jordan Bowman and Taylor Palmer and their focus is on user-first, practical tips for building better digital experiences. With over 10,000 newsletter subscribers since August 2020, they already have a strong following, and they are easily one of the freshest product design blogs to follow this year.
UserGuiding Blog
UserGuiding Blog – regularly posts content covering all corners of the product design world. Their specialty and core business focuses on user onboarding, so a lot of their content naturally follows this theme. They, too, have their own podcast and ebooks to go alongside the blog.
UX Studio
UX Studio Blog – is a 40+ person UX design and research agency based in Budapest, Hungary that quite literally walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk when it comes to product design and specifically the UX aspects of product design. Their blog content has been a regular feature on their site for years, and it features content on everything from case studies and research data to product design and product management.
Muzli
Muzli – is another curated collection of product design content and inspirations, which interestingly is also available as a Chrome extension to help you to stay inspired. Topics are contributed by various professionals in the industry and they have regular roundups for more concise, bite-sized pieces of information and eye-candy from around the design world.
Case Study Club
Case Study Club – is home to many fantastic case studies written by product designers themselves, which gives you some fantastic insight into the thoughts, goals, and considerations that went into a project from start to finish. I always love taking inspiration in this way and case studies are a goldmine of knowledge with some great visuals and storytelling to match.
Toptal Design Blog
Toptal Design Blog – is a hub for advanced design studies by professional designers in the Toptal network. Toptal allows you to hire some of the best freelance designers in the world in one place, and their blog is where a lot of those designers go to scratch their writing itch. There’s a wide range of content added on a frequent basis covering many different topics but all fairly well centered around topics related to product design.
Google Design
Google Design – what better source to get your product design information than one of the biggest players and influencers in the digital product design world, Google. The blog is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, writers, and developers at Google covering content about internal projects, as well as shining the spotlight on other innovators in the product design world.
Sidebar.io
Sidebar.io – isn’t strictly a ´product design’ focused website, and it’s not even technically a blog, but it makes our list because it is a fantastic way to stay well informed with fresh blog content from around the larger design and development community daily. Sidebar has been running since 2012 and it promises to deliver 5 new curated links each day. The site regularly features links relating to product design which is why it earns a well-deserved mention!
Best Product Design Blogs 2021?
That’s my roundup of 17 essential product design blogs to follow in 2021. It’s certainly an exciting time for anyone to be involved in digital product design with such a huge collection of free knowledge and resources being produced and shared daily. Hopefully, these suggestions will help you on your product design journey.
If you have any further suggestions of blogs I might have missed be sure to leave a comment below and share your best recommendations for other product design blogs with us.
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