For our list of the most important design communities on the internet, we’ve chosen only those places that have a high activity level (daily), are moderated, provide great content or discussion and have a thriving, balanced culture of give and take.
As with any community, each of these has their own rules: watch and learn without jumping straight in. People will love you more if you do.
OK, let’s go:
Comfortably inside the top 50 websites by total traffic in the world, Reddit has a number of great design forums to cater for all tastes. The top 6 subreddits you almost definitely want to join are graphic design, web design, user experience, UI design, design thought and finally user experience design. Between them, they’ve got all the goodies you need to get fully immersed in the design community.
Quora is a global behemoth, and within it’s hallowed community lie answers to a great many of the world’s design mysteries. Quora uses topics, and the ones to check out include user interface design, user experience, user experience design, UI/UX designers and graphic design.
Another behemoth, Stack Exchange started as just a single forum for developers and quickly grew to incorporate a great many communities. ux.stackexchange.com is where all the action happens for UX design and like other sites in this list, it uses upvoting as a way to ensure great questions and great answers drive the community.
You might also find that graphicdesign.stackexchange.com is to your taste.
Showcase your own work, get feedback and discover the latest work from top designers - without realising the site you are on isn’t actually Dribbble.
A community of designers sharing screenshots of their designs and looking for inspiration on a site they don’t realise isn’t Behance. Other advantages: Job lost and found forums. Other disadvantages: Typos in domains are hard to explain.
One of the most popular design communities on the internet, HOW Design has so much to offer; design news, inspiration, forums, online courses, workshops, podcasts, jobs and much more.
Check out who is winning what in the world of design.
Founded and created by Jacob Rogelberg, this Slack channel is the largest in the design community consisting (at the time of writing) of almost 10,000 designers, UXers and product owners. When you join, make sure to say hello in the Fluid UI chat room.
Online communities are great, but they are a pale haired stepchild of real world meetups.
Are you ready for the single best piece of advise on this page?
Go to meetup.com, find your region, find an active meetup group and go meet face to face. If there are none - create one. The meetup algorithm will do a great job of helping to populate your new meetup with people who who have a shared passion for creativity.
The bastard offspring of the famed Hackernews, designernews.co has a superb, content packed upvote forum along with job offers and deals on products. Well worth checking out.
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