Tools & references we actually use.

The most comprehensive gallery of UI/UX design portfolios, resumes, and case studies. Curated by designers, for designers.

A categorized showcase of design portfolios — filter by style (minimalist, dark, bento grid, interactive) to find the aesthetic that fits your vision.

Portfolio inspiration at the push of a button. Discover exceptional designer and developer portfolios on demand.

One of the most meticulously documented personal sites on the internet. Paul's writing on design, technology, and photography is a masterclass in craft.

Software designer with an exceptionally clean, considered portfolio. A benchmark for how to present product work with restraint.

Rasmus Andersson's personal site — the designer behind Inter and former Facebook design lead. Filled with thoughtful writing and open source work.

Product designer and writer whose site blends portfolio work with sharp essays on design leadership, creativity, and career.

A directory of personal sites with a /now page — a low-key treasure trove of designers and developers worth following.

A growing collection of the best web design across the internet — from portfolios to product sites. Beautifully curated with screenshots.

A reference library specifically for 3D and interactive website experiences. Essential if you're pushing the edge of what's possible in a browser.

Branding, Packaging & Opinion — a long-running editorial blog covering graphic identity work at its finest. Deep, considered reviews of brand design.

Italian editorial blog covering branding, editorial, and graphic design with an emphasis on print and visual culture.

A curated archive of modernist and Swiss-influenced logo design. Essential reference for anyone serious about mark-making.

Daily design inspiration newsletter and site by Pablo Stanley. A sharp curatorial eye for what's happening across visual culture.

A quietly excellent internet curation blog. Expect unusual finds across design, technology, and culture.

WeTransfer's editorial platform celebrating creativity. Features original stories, manifestos, and artist profiles that push beyond the design industry bubble.

Josh Clark's blog on product design, UX research, and the evolving practice of design at scale. Thoughtful, opinionated, and worth reading cover to cover.

A London-based creative studio producing campaigns, interactive experiences, and digital products for some of the world's best brands. High craft, high concept.

A personal design blog exploring craft, detail, and visual thinking. Posts like 'Dithering' show the kind of curiosity that makes great designers.

A personal site exploring philosophy, design, and creative thinking. Quiet, thoughtful, and worth bookmarking.

A visual search engine that understands aesthetic similarity. Invaluable for mood boarding — search by feel, not just keywords.

A visual bookmarking and mood boarding tool for designers. Save, organize, and share visual references with a genuinely beautiful interface.

A reference library of UI components across popular design systems. Useful for understanding how different teams solve the same interface problems.

A clean, flexible icon family with 6 styles and over 1000 icons. Available for Figma, React, and as SVGs.

Shows you how color contrast affects people with different types of vision. Essential accessibility check before shipping any color system.

Microsoft's framework for inclusive design thinking. The toolkit and principles here translate well beyond enterprise contexts.

An open-source checklist for building complete design systems. Covers every component category with helpful context for each decision.

An archive of 1000+ design resources, tools, and assets. Well-organized and regularly updated — a solid bookmark for discovery.

Recorded user flows from popular apps and products. Invaluable research for understanding onboarding, checkout, and core UX patterns in production.

Browser-based design and animation tool that makes mockup creation and simple animation accessible without After Effects.

A fully featured Photoshop alternative that runs entirely in the browser. Handles PSD, XD, Sketch, and more — no installation required.

A massive library of device and scene mockups. Fast to use and consistently high quality — the right tool for portfolio presentation.

A library of 100+ abstract shapes for design work, available as SVGs and React components. Excellent for backgrounds and decorative elements.

Converts URLs, images, CSVs, and other formats directly into Figma designs. A workflow accelerator for research and documentation.

Free AI-generated stock images, illustrations, and 3D assets. Higher quality and more distinctive than traditional stock — genuinely useful for design work.

The canonical article on running an interface inventory — the first step in building any design system. Required reading before starting a system audit.

An introduction to design principles and patterns for AI-powered products. Covers mental models, feedback, uncertainty, and trust.

A research-backed catalogue of interaction patterns for data-sharing, consent, and transparency. From the team at Projects by IF.

Mix-and-match illustration library of people in diverse styles. Free to use, Figma-ready, and consistently popular in product design work.

A collection of design principles from well-known companies and teams. Useful for writing your own or stress-testing the ones you have.

One of the most thorough public design systems — covers foundations, components, patterns, and content. An invaluable reference for anyone building or contributing to a design system.

eBay's open design system — clean documentation of their components, motion, and design principles. A well-structured example of design system at scale.

Skyscanner's open-source design system. One of the few that documents both the design and engineering sides with equal rigour.

Generate perfect Tailwind CSS color palettes from a single hex value. Indispensable for anyone doing design engineering with Tailwind.

A library of animated and interactive React components — text effects, backgrounds, and UI elements ready to drop in. Great for adding motion without starting from scratch.

Visualize JSON data as an interactive graph. Useful for understanding API responses, design token structures, and complex data schemas.

The most visual way to learn Git. Interactive exercises that make branching, rebasing, and merging click — essential for design engineers.

The W3C community group specification for design tokens. The canonical reference for understanding how tokens should be structured and exchanged across tools.

A comprehensive directory of static site generators — useful for designers and design engineers choosing the right tool to build their portfolio.

A structured, free Figma course covering everything from basics to auto layout and components. Clean teaching style, no fluff.

A Figma community file with hundreds of categorised design examples — logos, layouts, type systems, and UI patterns. A fast way to explore visual references inside Figma.

An archive of typography in the real world — logos, posters, books, and websites. See how the best designers use type in context.

A collection of free and premium portfolio templates for Framer and Webflow. A solid starting point if you want a polished site without building from scratch.

Courses on building, scaling, and selling design systems inside organisations. Particularly useful for senior designers taking on system ownership.

McKinsey's landmark research showing design-led companies outperform peers by 2:1. Essential reading for any designer making the business case for their work.

Levelling frameworks from 15 top companies — Google, Airbnb, Stripe, and more. The most comprehensive public reference for understanding what senior design actually looks like.

Brian Lovin's guide to writing performance reviews that actually advance your career. Practical, honest, and not often discussed in design circles.

Basecamp's public ladder for design titles — how they think about junior, senior, and principal design roles. Refreshingly clear and worth benchmarking against.

How to frame design work as a narrative that stakeholders understand and act on. One of the most practically useful pieces on design communication.

Kathryn Gonzalez on what separates a design engineer from a designer who codes — judgment, taste, and the ability to own both sides of the interface.

Jim Nielsen's influential argument for why the best interfaces come from people who design and build simultaneously. The foundational piece on design engineering.

Jim Nielsen revisits and deepens his argument two years later — with real examples of what gets lost when design and engineering are separated.

Fons Mans on developing a reliable visual eye — how to move from taste to execution without second-guessing every decision.

A personal collection of notes on what design engineering means in practice — covering tools, mindset, and the blurry line between design and code.

Dan Mall on how to introduce a design system through small pilots instead of big-bang launches — and how to measure whether it's working.

Josh Clark's annual design industry forecast — what's shifting in AI, product thinking, and design practice. Measured and worth reading at the start of every year.

Evelyn Kim's personal essay on navigating career direction as a designer at Uber. Honest about doubt, ambition, and what meaningful work actually feels like.

GitLab's public handbook on design management — how they think about IC to manager transitions, expectations at each level, and design leadership at scale.

BuzzFeed's open-source design role definitions — one of the first companies to publish their full levelling framework. Still a relevant benchmark.

A course on how to make confident UX decisions — covering research synthesis, frameworks, and how to communicate design rationale clearly.

Job board, courses, and community for creative professionals. Particularly good for freelance and boutique agency roles you won't find on LinkedIn.

A freelance network built specifically for creatives — connecting designers, illustrators, and motion artists with quality work and fair pay.

Remote's public design career framework — a detailed map of what's expected at each level, from junior to staff. Transparent and useful for self-assessment.

A practical guide to creating design token documentation that stays in sync with your actual design files — a common pain point on growing design system teams.

Nate Baldwin's deep-dive into how Intuit structured their design token taxonomy — covering naming, tiers, and the decisions that make a token system scalable.

A thoughtful breakdown of how design system foundations (spacing, colour, type) should be structured — written by someone who has built them at scale.