Design Blog exists to explain how design decisions actually get made.
That means naming the studio, the tool or the choice behind a piece of work, and saying plainly when something doesn't hold up.
About Design Blog
What this is
Design Blog is an independent publication for people who make design decisions for a living: web and product designers, brand and UX practitioners, creative directors, and the students who'll be doing their jobs in a few years. It covers interaction design, typography, colour theory, and the grid systems and design systems that hold a piece of work together, along with the studios and tools shaping how UK designers actually work.
Most of what gets written about design online is either a listicle padded out to hit a word count, or a sponsored post dressed up as an opinion. Neither tells you anything you didn't already know. We write about specific work by specific people, and we say plainly when something doesn't hold up, because a review that praises everything is worth reading once and trusting never.
How it's put together
The site is organised around a few distinct jobs, and each one does something different for the reader:
- Criticism and commentary, where we take a rebrand, a redesign, or an interface decision apart and say what it gets right, what it doesn't, and why.
- Inspiration showcases, built from real work with proper attribution.
- Practical tools, for the arithmetic parts of the job: converting between px, rem, and em, checking contrast, or structuring CSS variables.
- A directory of UK design studios, for finding who's doing the work.
A tool that tells you a colour pair passes is only useful if it also tells you when the same tool might be wrong. We'd rather say that plainly than let you find out the hard way.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Any contrast checker or unit converter can be wrong at the edges, misjudging an edge case or working from an assumption that doesn't hold for your particular interface. The tools on CSS Variable Architect and True-Contrast Smart Palette are built to speed up the parts of design work that are genuinely mechanical.
Who it's for
If you've been designing for a year or more, you already know what a design system is and what auto-layout does. We're not going to explain those to you. What we will do is look at how a specific studio uses them, where the convention breaks down, and what the alternative looks like in practice. The Criticism & Commentary section and the UK Design Studios Directory are both built on that assumption: you're capable of following an argument, and you'd rather be shown the reasoning than handed a conclusion.
Getting in touch
For editorial queries, corrections, or anything else, you can reach us at designblog@contactforsales.com.
Criticism that names names
When we review a rebrand or a design system, we say which studio built it and what it does well.
Tools built to be doubted
The calculators and converters here save you arithmetic. They don't replace the judgement that decides what the numbers mean.
Coverage over consensus
We'd rather cover the same terrain in more depth than most design blogs than repeat the same five opinions everyone already has.
More design thinking, and the tools to test it
This page tells you who's writing. The Design Feed shows you what that looks like in practice, and the tools let you check an idea against your own screen.