Top Ten Design Blogs of 2005

We are a design team as well as proud bloggers. As such, we’ve discovered many great blogs that cover issues affecting the design, advertising, marketing, PR, photography and illustration communities. After analyzing numerous blogs, we’ve selected our Top Ten picks for 2005 that we feel have contributed to the design industry in a tangible way. The criteria for our selections were simple: chosen sites needed to not only catch our eye with superb style and visual language, but more importantly with intelligent content and discourse relating to the diverse audience within the design field. Many blogs lean toward the serious or academic side, while others are sources of surprising news, events and even humour. Our sincere thanks and admiration to all the bloggers in our list – you’ve informed us, moved us, entertained us and most importantly inspired us to become better designers. Keep up the great blogging!

There are dozens more blogs that could make this list, but here (in no particular order) are our picks for the Top Ten Design Blogs of 2005:

1. Coudal Partners Created and edited by Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, this blog is an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce. It’s also one of our daily visits with excellent news, interviews, links and a clean, elegant design. This has been our favourite blog for over a year.

2. Voice: AIGA Journal of Design This is the official design forum for AIGA members to turn first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis and research and advance education and ethical practice. It’s an impressive archive of design articles and discussions written by such esteemed contributors as Steven Heller, Ellen Lupton and Milton Glaser.

3. Design Observer Easily the winner if there were a “most serious” category, this site tackles the tough issues in communication design today. Co-founded by the renowned design critic Rick Poynor (though he recently resigned to find more profitable writing opportunities), this blog really digs in and presents intelligent discourse on the big issues surrounding design, culture and business.

4. Speak Up Founded by Armin Vit of Pentagram in New York, Speak Up is an author-based, reader-supported community devoted to graphic design. Using interviews, discussions, reviews and sometimes even rants, the site serves as an intelligent dialogue amongst professionals in the graphic design community.

5. Veer: The Skinny As the “Ideas” section of Veer.com, this blog is dedicated to enhancing design and creativity by complimenting their many design products such as stock photography, illustration, motion clips and typefaces. The Skinny is a beautiful showcase of visual elements and explorations into communication, logo design, typography and other design brain candy.

6. Newstoday Created by The Quorporation Broadcasting Network’s Superfamous and Jason Kristofer, Newstoday’s motto is “for a better tomorrow” and is perhaps the supreme online design community site. Excellent news content, layout design and a great platform for broadcasting to the design community. The “newstoday” sign-song audio when you log on is horribly annoying though.

7. The Prepared Mind This blog was founded and is edited by designer Christopher Gee, a NYC-based interaction designer and principal of Cube Interactive. The blog was created in order to serve as a conversation starter on issues in and about the graphic design industry and has grown to include articles, interviews and audio podcasts dedicated to discussing issues that don’t get enough attention on many other design blogs, forums and discussion boards.

8. Design Is Kinky One of the first design blogs, Design is Kinky was created way back in 1998 by designer/illustrator Andrew Johnstone of Sydney, Australia as a way of getting involved in the design community that he saw beginning to grow online. Influenced by sites such as Digitalthread, Zeldman.com, Shift and the K10k crew, as a designer Andrew was excited at the potential that the community showed and decided to jump on board and become a part of it.

9. CRIT Launched in the fall of 2005 by the School of Visual Arts MFA Design program, CRIT is open to all graduate students, prospective graduate students and design educators as a forum for the discussion of the issues, events, and concerns of DESIGN — graphic, industrial, product, motion, web — from academics to the real world.

10. Designers Who Blog Created by designer Catherine Morley, founder of Katz-i International Web & Graphic Design in the UK, Designers Who Blog is less about design industry happenings as much as it is a comprehensive list of design blogs written by designers, illustrators, photographers, those in advertising and marketing, etc.

Note: Some have suggested that our own blog.industrialbrand.com be included on this list, which is flattering, but in the interest of remaining objective, we obviously excluded ourselves.