In the world of graphic design, you really have to keep track of the current trends. Technology changes and evolves every day, especially web-based technology. The best way to keep track of what is going on is to steadily build up your bookmark library to include as many design-centric blogs and websites as you can.

Here are a few of the many, many websites the design team at Mudbug Media go to every day. Pretty much every designer contributed to these links, which are great resources for anyone involved with graphic design.

Usability Resources

jQuery Tools — This site features a collection of the most important user-interface components for today’s modern websites. The Demos section is extremely useful for designers to visually experience behaviors and functionality that help make a user-interface successful.

Pattern Tap — Pattern Tap was born out of love for the best user interface designs on the web.

UserPlus — UserPlus shares usability knowledge with web designers, web developers, usability specialists and all others interested in creating user-friendly websites. I particularly like their article on Information Architecture because it stresses the importance of defining a website’s structure before starting the visual and technical side of the design.

Color Resources

Kuler — Kuler is nice for both color inspiration and for building a color theme for a project. Color conversions are viewable simultaneously upon entering color values for HSB, RGB, CMYK and Hex colors. If you have values for one color model but need to translate it for another, Kuler makes things pretty easy. And you can save created themes, which is nice for future reference.

0to255 — This website is a color variations web app. It is a simple tool that helps web designers find lighter and darker colors based on any color.

Colour Lovers — Colour Lovers is a creative community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes and patterns. This is a great site for color inspiration. I like to go to this site especially when I have one color in mind for a design, but need ideas for coordinating colors. They provide some great color combinations that I would never think of.

CSS Resources

Campaign Monitor — Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients — Designing a custom HTML email newsletter that renders consistently across the major email clients can be a very time consuming and tedious process. Campaign Monitor put together a time-saving guide of popular email clients across desktop, web and mobile email. When designers have issues trouble shooting e-newsletters, this is the first website I send them to.

CSS Tricks — CSS-Tricks is a web design community for CSS inspiration and other web-related technical resources.

Design Blogs / Technical Resources

Smashing Magazine — Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information to web designers and developers. I read this website daily to learn new design techniques and see best practices, read about the latest trends in web development and get inspiration. I also follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their e-newsletter for all things web!

A List Apart — This website explores the design, development and meaning of web content with a special focus on web standards and best practices. The A List Apart Team consists of some of the best and brightest individuals in the web world including founder Jeffery Zeldman, creative director of Happy Cog and Eric Meyer, a semantician and technical editor.

Design Float — Design Float is a social media site dedicated to the design industry. Like Smashing Magazine, Design Float is a great resource for designers to gain insight and inspiration. It also takes advantage of the social media platform and allows designers to easily share these resources with one another.

Noupe — Another great resource I have bookmarked.

Design Galleries, Tutorials and Inspiration

Communication Arts — Communication Arts is a nice site to see work that people are creating across various design media, whether seasoned professionals or emerging young professionals. CA has a lot of inspiring things to see as well as interviews of professionals in the industry.

Design*Sponge — This website is dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer Grace Bonney. Design*Sponge is dedicated to covering student design; national, and international design shows. The website features do-it-yourself tutorials and interviews from a myriad of artists.

Jason Santa Maria — Jason Santa Maria is an extremely influential graphic designer that I just love. He has worked on projects that would be any graphic designer’s dream including Typekit, Objectified, WordPress, AIGA, A List Apart and Dictionary.com, just to name a few. He has a beautiful website and informative blog. I would encourage any designer not familiar with him to get familiar.

This list is by no means complete, but every link helps inspire and instruct us everyday.  What are your favorite design links?  Leave a comment below.  We’d love to hear from you.

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