The Best Articles, Videos, and Newsletters in Design
The most useful articles, videos, and newsletters in Design from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Design Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Design by Refind users in 2026 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
An AI artist explains his workflow
How it works — and why it takes a surprisingly long time to make something good.Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔 so you don't miss any videos: http://...
Japanese web design: weird, but it works. Here's why
Japanese website design looks weird. But, they work just as well as other websites around the world. Why is that? I mean, they're information dense, cluttere...
What is ...?
New to Design? These articles make an excellent introduction.
What is a picture?
If we want to understand what a picture is, then we must look at the difference between perception and imagination.
A gentle introduction to Domain Driven Design
Starting into DDD is hard, even though it’s heavily praised by their practitioners. This article introduces the topic, gently.
A beginner’s guide to Design Tokens
Learn the basics of what design tokens are, how they’re used, their benefits, and some tools and resources to get you started.
The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)
Shared by 1385, including Marcos, Jennifer Ouellette, Tamsen Webster, Message Strategist (she/her), Gabriele
How to ...?
How to create a perfect home-office desk
Gretchen Hansen, founder and CEO of the online interior design company Decorist offers advice for getting your best work done at home.
How to get started with hand-lettering
Earlier this year, I pushed out a tweet about my desire to be a beginner again, learn something new and took a particular interest in hand…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Design on Refind.
Lydia Chodosh probes design rules through archiving and cataloguing
A teacher at Parsons School of Design and designer at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Lydia wants to “treat knowledge like a network”.
A 50-year goldmine of design: AIGA New York unveils its poster archive to the public
Travel back through decades of New York’s cultural moods via these “tactile and human” mementoes of design history.
Top Web Design Trends 2026: UK Business Guide
Discover key web design trends for UK business in 2026, from UX improvements to mobile-first design and emerging web technologies.
Persuasive Design
Many product teams still lean on usability improvements and isolated behavioral tweaks to address weak activation, drop-offs, and low retention – only to see results plateau or slip into shallow…
Here's What 15 Years of Lunches with Steve Jobs Taught One Apple Insider
Jobs possessed an “insatiable” curiosity and willingness to keep learning, according to Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Design—all under 10 minutes.
Why is quality so rare?
The modern world has made huge advances in knowledge, technology, and skill. We can build faster than ever. We know more than ever. Yet quality still feels so rare. So many things feel unfinished,…
An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership
“The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the …
Systems, Stables and Stars
Why mature organizations still rely on rockstars for critical work, and how systems raise the floor while stars raise the ceiling.
«Raising the floor and raising the ceiling are completely different problems that need completely different solutions.»
Design Leadership in the Age of AI: Seize the Narrative Before It’s Too Late
Design is changing. Fast. AI is transforming the way we work — automating production, collapsing handoffs, and enabling non-designers to ship work that once required a full design team. Like it or…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Design.
New Front-End Features For Designers In 2025 — Smashing Magazine
Searching for the most flexible front-end workflows and toolkits, it’s easy to forget how powerful some of the fundamentals on the web have become these days. This post is a journey through new front…
Designing for the Eye – Optical Corrections in Architecture and Typography
The Nuberodesign Blog
Why I’m Giving Up My Design Title—And What That Says About The Future of Design
Suff Syed, former Head of Product Design, announces his shift to a technical role, arguing that design has been commoditized in the AI era while technical depth is now where innovation happens. He…
Cognitive load is what matters
There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Design, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Design?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Design, including Oliver Reichenstein, swissmiss, Cory LaViska, Meng To, zeldman.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
How can I report a problem?
When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
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Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
Get the big picture on your favorite topics.