Nikka Estefani
Category: Design Tips
Having a community of fellow UX/UI designers is important if you want to grow your skills and career potential. This is also your chance to give back to the same community by helping others out in their own endeavor.
Thanks to the Internet, finding a community is just one click away. Even the lockdowns won’t stop you from finding a supportive community because you can find your new friends and colleagues right at your own home.
Having a community is also especially important for UX/UI designers because the design trend changes rapidly. If you want to get the latest design trend, you must have key sources to get them – and communities will help you with that!
So, where can you find these communities? Here are the top 10 online design communities to find fellow UX/UI designers worldwide!
1) Dribbble
Dribbble is more than just a social networking platform for designers, but Dribbble’s main goal is to help designers form teams and collaborate with each other.
That being said, Dribbble is a lively community for designers of any field – including UX and UI designers! Here, you can meet new friends or colleagues, share ideas and you can even showcase your work here as well.
2) Behance
Behance is another great community for designers of any field – again, including UX and UI designers! Here, you can see works from the best designers for inspiration. You can also showcase your own work to get feedback and give inspiration to fellow designers!
3) Designership
Designership is an active community for designers of any fields. Not only you can connect with fellow designers, get inspiration from their work or make friends with them, but you can get a lot of perks from Designership including instant feedback, job opportunities, collaboration opportunities and even mentorship!
With more than 11,000 members so far coming from different countries, Designership is certainly worth checking out!
4) UX Stack Exchange
Its design may not look new and modern, but don’t just turn your eyes away from it – you can get tons of valuable advice, lessons, inspiration and ideas from UX Stack Exchange.
If you have any questions, you can ask on their forum and expect some answers coming to help you. On the other hand, if you want to help others learn the ropes of UX, you can share your answers and advice through the forum.
5) Interaction Design Foundation Community
If you specifically specialize in UX design, Interaction Design Foundation Community is for you.
Here, you can learn and hone your UX skills, see job or project opportunities, expand your professional network, and of course, meet your new friend.
6) UX Mastery Community
Whether you’re just starting out in your UX career, a student who wants to learn UX, a professional who wants to share advice, or even just a curious guy who wants to learn (and maybe share some insights) about UX, UX Mastery community offers these perks to you.
Unlike many design communities, UX Mastery Community focuses mainly on education and advice. So, you probably won’t get job opportunities here, but you’ll get tons of career advice.
7) Designer Hangout
Design Hangout is a dedicated design community for UX designers. With more than 10,000 UX designers and researchers on this community, you’re sure to learn something valuable for yourself.
At Designer Hangout, you can discuss trends, share your ideas and stories, give advice, learn career opportunities, see unusual insights about the field, etc.
Designer Hangout is not only a great design community for UX designers, it is also highly recommended by some of the most well-known industry influencers such as Laura Klein, Lou Rosenfeld and Jared Spool.
8) Web Designer Forum
If you are a UX or UI designer from the United Kingdom, you may want to check out Web Designer Forum. This online community has around 3,000 members so far. The numbers may not be that much compared to other communities, but this is a fairly active community, so this is still worth checking out.
Also, if you live in the UK, you can also meet with fellow web designers because most of them are from UK as well.
9) Designer News
Designer News is a discussion platform created for designers around the world. Like with most design communities, you can discuss and learn about different topics related to design. Many members of the community are actual design professionals, but some could be design students or anyone just starting out in the career.
10) Graphic Design Forum
Graphic Design Forum is one of the oldest and, as a result, one of the biggest online community for designers with having more than 20,000 members so far. Best of all, this community is active despite its size, so you can get a lot of interaction, discussion and learnings inside the community.
