Great newsletters and mailing lists for designers and/or developers

Spend less time swiping endless feeds — read less, read better

Hey! It sure seems like the golden age of newsletters and mailing lists. Since I really love how newsletters—frankly a pretty old notion—are giving me time back from swiping, let me take a bit of my rescued time to round up some of them for you.

IDEO‘s “The Octopus”

IDEO is one of the world’s design powerhouses and their newsletter usually proves that. You will often see their articles reposted elsewhere (sometimes faster) but you can bet your behind there will always be some new golden nugget here.

MIT Tech Review

As a world-renowned university and place of research, MIT has a ton of output and interesting opinions, news and think pieces coming daily. I highly recommend this, and I’m sure that you will find at least one of their many sendouts (AI, emerging tech, blockchain…) as interesting.

Offscreen Dispatch

Super sleek and kind of eclectic, always expect the unexpected with Offscreen. Pretty wide range from products and services to more design thinkingish stuff.

Cognitive UXD

A bit chewier stuff, and perfect for anyone who wants more deep-diving into psychological aspects of UX. Often longer pieces, without becoming too academic.

Sidebar

Perfect morning read! I get this at 9 or 10 in the morning (Stockholm time) and the links are almost always really, really good. Pretty broad range of design, as well.

UX Collective

Superb UX curation on Medium. Make sure to subscribe to them as they round up lots of good stuff under their umbrella.

O’Reilly Design

O’Reilly puts out quite a few books a year, especially on more industrial-scale application of design, UX and related fields. Follow their sendouts instead of looking in the bookstore. Also usually contains a few nice tidbits like free PDFs, previews, videos and more.

Product Design Weekly by Atomic

As the name implies, heavy focus on product design, UI, some UX.

Magenta

Unbelievably good-looking newsletter! Makes my eyes water every time it drops into my email. Created by Huge, I would expect no less.

Fresh Fonts

Very good resource to stay up to date with what’s going on in typography. Contains links to paid and free fonts. Highly recommended!

Typewolf Newsletter

Probably one of the finest destinations on the web for typography. Monthly newsletter that does not overstay its visit, and a good way to make sure your on the ball with the latest trends.

Swizec Teller – Geek with a hat

Amazing guy with both humour and serious development chops. Always inspiring and elucidating stuff! Don’t miss his “Learn While You Poop” Youtube series ;)

Frontend Weekly

Excellent source of modern frontend learning and reading. Seems to be a bit themed from week to week, so some weeks may not always be to your biggest interests. BUT! When they have something good, it’s always super good.

Hope you enjoy at least one of these newsletters!

Mikael Vesavuori is a Technical Designer at Humblebee, a digital product and service studio based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Humblebee has worked with clients such as Volvo (Cars, Trucks, Construction Equipment), Hultafors Group, SKF, Mölnlycke Health Care, and Stena. Our design sprint-based approach and cutting-edge technical platform lets us build what’s needed.