31 UX Design Inspiration Resources

The world of user experience has never stopped evolving and it’s essential to stay up-to-date on the latest ideas and conversations happening in the industry. However, being overloaded with content it can be hard to find the truly helpful materials.

Since you’ve already found your way here to the Creative Cloud blog, you’re off to a great start! If you’re looking to add more resources to your list though, this post is here to help. I’ve put together a rundown of 30 of my other favorite UX design blogs and resources (in no particular order) to help you better understand UX and stay on top of current trends.

1. Behance

Behance is the world’s largest online creative community where users share their work. Users represent a wide array of creatives including graphic designers, illustrators, typographers, user interfaces designers, web designers and more.

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2. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the world’s most popular and highly regarded magazines in the area of web design and web development. The User Experience category features great articles on usability, information architecture, interaction design and other UX-related topics both for digital (web, mobile, desktop apps) and physical products.

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3. UX Matters

UX Matters provides inspiration and insights for both professionals who are working in all aspects of UX and newbies who are just stepping into the field.

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4. AWWWARDS

Awwwards is the site that awards the best of the best in web design and development. It’s a place where creative professionals from all over the world come to find inspiration, share knowledges and receive constructive critiques.

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5. Designer News

Designer News is a global community where design and technology professionals share interesting links and timely events.

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6. Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group is trusted authority in all things related to UX. Eliminate guesswork and rely on NNG’s fundamental reports, research and articles regarding user experience.

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7. UX Magazine

UX Magazine is an online UX publication discussing the latest trends in UX design and product strategy. Here you can also find information about upcoming UX events (conferences, workshops, informal meetups, and classes).

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8. UI Movement

The main real difference between UI Movement and other design inspiration sites, is that it’s focused exclusively on user interface designs. Each design example in a collection is tagged so that you can easily find whatever design element you’re interested in.

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9. User Onboard

This site is dedicated specifically to user onboarding — the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting a product. Samuel Hulick, the author of this site, presents each case study in fun and engaging way.

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10. UX Myths

UX Myths is a popular source of information to debunk common myths in UX design. The site collects a lot of research data and facts from well-known UX experts in order to reveal the common design misconception. This resource is especially helpful for UX beginners.

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11. Creative Bloq

Creative Bloq contains a lot of useful information and fresh ideas for your future design project. The information shared via this publication varies from design ideas to project management methodology.

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12. Dribbble

Dribbble is a designers’ community, where designers demonstrate their works and get inspiration from each other. Designers use Dribbble to showcase creativity without any goal besides that, but it still serves as a good resource for inspiration.

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13. UX Mastery

UX mastery helps UX professionals get started in the field and get better at what they do. The site contains a lot of helpful articles, tutorials, and resources.

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14. Little Big Details

Little Big Details is a curated collection of design inspiration. This resources aims to demonstrate why little details such as form labels, notification messages, and subtle animation effects are just as important as the more obvious elements of your design.

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15. Design Shack

Design Shack showcases inspiring examples of design, alongside resources and helpful tutorials. Regular articles are highly focussed on teaching readers new techniques for creating their own designs, and daily community news ensures that everyone who follows this resource is up to date with the latest developments.

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16. A List Apart

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. The site features a lot of helpful long-form articles from the field professionals covering topics around design methodology.

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17. Web Designer Depot

Web Designer Depot makes posts daily about design trends, best practices, great web design, and more.

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18. UI Patterns

UI Patterns is a user interface design pattern library. It makes it easy to find patterns that you need for your project. UI Patterns doesn’t only highlight design patterns, it goes a step ahead to discuss the problems typically associated with each pattern and effective methods to solve common problems related to them.The site also contains a bunch of interesting articles on UI design which can help extend the way you approach using patterns in your designs.

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19. From Up North

From Up North is an online magazine which publishes content on the latest trends in creative industry. It explores different categories providing a variety of design perspectives.

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20. UX Booth

The UX Booth is a publication by and for the user experience community. Their articles are strongly focussed on beginner-to-intermediate user experience and interaction designers.

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21. Medium

Medium is online publishing platform, with thousands of new stories updated daily. It’s a great place to read, write and interact with the stories of fellow UX designers.

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22. Site Inspire

Site Inspire is a gallery which showcase the best web design projects. It features over 2500 real-world websites and makes it possible to search for a specific project by type, subject, and style. Thus, when you want to get very specific with your searches related exclusively to web design, Site Inspire is a good plate to go.

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23. Mobile Patterns

Mobile Patterns focuses solely on the UI of mobile apps. This website is good for getting inspiration on iOS and Android app design. From the sidebar, you can narrow down screenshots by several different UI elements (e.g. Calendar, Camera, Maps, etc).

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24. Pttrns

Pttrns provides holistic collection of design patterns, resources and inspiration. Unlike previously mentioned Mobile Patterns, Pttrns contains not only Mobile patterns, but also patterns for smartwatch apps.

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25. Luke W

UX expert Luke Wroblewski publishes articles and reviews about product design, and provides helpful materials for mobile and web design strategy.

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26. User Testing

Informative content which is often based on user research makes this blog a great source to understand all aspects for creating a great user experience.

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27. Designmodo

Designmodo is a great resource of informative material for designers and web developers. They also have a dedicated category for UX Design.

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28. 52 Weeks of UX

52 Weeks of UX is a discourse on the process of designing for real people. The site contains dozens of interesting topics related to the user experience and human behaviors.

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29. Boxes And Arrows

Here you can find a lot of helpful articles about design principles, processes and methods. There are also a number of case studies on UI design, interviews and product reviews that makes it a truly valuable resources for UX designers.

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30. User Experience Stack Exchange

UX Stack Exchange is a question-and-answer website for UX design. If you have a specific question and would like to hear a frank opinions from UX experts you can ask it there.

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31. Interaction Design Foundation

The biggest and most authoritative library of open-source UX Design resources.

Conclusion

Designing a great UX is challenging, even for the most seasoned designer. Countless factors need to be taken into account. Hopefully the resources mentioned in this article will help you come out of an ideation dilemma and inspire you to design user experiences that are simple, intuitive and delightful.

Do you have any resources you’d add to the list? Let us know in the comments!