I’ve compiled my top 30 choices for the best Reddit communities geared towards design. This list places heavy focus on design in all its forms: print, interfaces, icons, logos, motion graphics, anything you might design on a computer probably has a subreddit.
If you’re a designer and don’t know about Reddit then I highly recommend you give it a try. Each of these communities feature passionate users that simply love design. And you may be surprised how much great content can be found on Reddit if you know where to look.
To get things started let’s cover the obvious choice of /r/design. As you can imagine from the name, this is a very popular design sub with over 120k subscribers. Content spans many topics of absolutely anything design related—both digital and physical.
Depending on the type of design work you do, this may not be the most interesting sub to visit on a daily basis. However it can be invaluable for questions about designers or their work.
I also think this sub has a great way of floating unique and intriguing content to the top. Discussions are fruitful and offer a surprising amount of design knowledge if you take time to read through the comments.
Digital graphic design is bigger now than ever before, and the /r/graphic_design community is proof of this. Posts can include news, inspiration, thoughts or theories relevant to graphic designers.
Note that graphic design generally covers non-interactive products like illustration, icons, print work, branding and identity design.
The community has 80k subscribers and continues to grow larger every month. It’s one of the bigger design subs and really keeps a clean house with only quality content streaming down the front page.
The subreddit of all web design subreddits, /r/web_design has a community of well over 140k subscribers growing larger every year.
Unfortunately because it’s such a big sub the content can be very hit-or-miss. You’ll find lots of beginner posts asking how to setup servers or what to do after buying a domain name. But for all of these beginner threads you’ll still find plenty of genuinely interesting questions and cool webapps.
If you’re a web designer this is a must-subscribe community. It’s very active with many professionals lurking in the shadows. If you have any questions about the web design industry or how to make it as a web designer, this is the community to ask.
Here’s a newer sub that focuses primarily on web design and development news. It’s not really a place to ask questions, but rather it’s like a feed of news stories curated from around the web regarding design news and dev technologies.
Submission guidelines are generally lax but content must pertain to either web design or development news.
And although /r/webdesignnews/ is still very young, it already has a growing community with active submissions on a weekly basis. Definitely a great sub to stay on top of happenings in the web design industry.
Easily the biggest user experience sub on Reddit, I highly recommend following /r/userexperience if you do any work building interfaces.
For a somewhat small community it’s surprisingly active with 7-10 posts each day related to user experience design and interaction design. This is a great sub to ask questions and learn more about UX design without going to a more general community like /r/web_design.
If you have any interest in user experience design this is a must-follow community. Smaller alternatives include /r/usability and /r/uxdesign.
On the flip side of UX design you’ll find UI design. Every digital experience needs some type of interface, and that interface should have pretty components with styles that encourage user behavior.
Reddit’s UI design sub is much smaller than others but it features quality content. You can post anything related to any type of digital UI including websites and mobile apps. Also you’re free to ask questions about UI design and get feedback from the community, either for your own work or regarding someone else’s work.
I like to think of /r/designthought as a subreddit made for design philosophy. Designers come together to share deep thoughts and ideas regarding the design industry and creative process.
Submissions can include links or text posts, but they’re all meant to instigate a discussion. The community has just about 15k subscribers and averages 1-2 posts per week. So even though it’s a big sub, content volume is surprisingly low.
But the quality of content is often well worth the subscription. Posts aim to delve deeper into subjects rather than placate the reader with repetitive industry terms and banality.
We all know about the nightmares caused by horrible clients and poor work environments. Well Reddit’s Tales From Designers brings these nightmares to the fore and offers some great reading material.
The sub is dedicated to self-posts containing stories from designers working freelance or at a company. You’ll read about horror stories that include complaints and even potential lawsuits.
Working as a designer can be very rewarding. But like any job, there’s inevitable problems and things people want to get off their chest. This is the sub to do it.
Need feedback on your portfolio? Not sure about the work you did on a recent project? Well Reddit Design Critiques is here to help.
Every day over a dozen posts stream into the sub with questions, suggestions, and quality advice from designers. Content may include anything from graphic design to marketing or product design. It’s a very critical community with feedback only meant to help others grow.
It is possible to instead ask for critiques in specific subs that pertain to your area of work. But not all subs allow critique questions, so /r/design_critiques was born as a place dedicated to getting help and helping others.
Data visualization is a big topic and it’s getting even bigger with great tools and open reporting. The /r/visualization subreddit has a community of 15k+ readers with a keen interest in data mapping, digital graphics, visual charts and infographics.
You’ll find plenty of examples of data visualization along with articles that discuss the future of visualization in design.
If you already work in this field it’s definitely worth following the sub. Or even if you just want to learn more about big data and visualization techniques, this is the community to follow.
Identity design always includes a crackerjack logo and the folks over at /r/logodesign realize this first-hand.
The sub is for anything logo-related from news to questions and even critiques on personal logo work. Most threads seem to skew towards gathering feedback from the community, which holds ~14k subscribers total.
But it’s also possible to submit a self post with your own question or discussion subject about the process of planning, designing, and releasing logos for live production. This is basically the community for anything & everything logo-related.
The readers of /r/designinspire are Reddit users that love creative inspiration. It’s a great place to browse if you’re looking for inspiration, or if you’re looking to share some inspiration with others.
Self-posts and personal work are OK as long as they’re worth sharing. Design inspire is about the nuances of design: the little curves, the perfect colors, the minor things that help a design come together and feel whole.
Unfortunately the sub is not very active at the moment. But hopefully more Redditors can contribute and breathe life back into a wonderful place for design inspiration.
Typophiles rejoice because there’s a whole entire subreddit with your name on it. /r/typography is the place to go for anything and everything type.
The only stuff you can’t post is content that doesn’t fit digital typography(like calligraphy, which has its own sub). Also if you’re looking for a specific font you should check the next sub in my list below.
But /r/typography is a great place to find type discussion for pairing fonts, trying out new fonts, or asking questions and getting opinions from the pros.
Stuck trying to figure out the name of a certain typeface? Well /r/identifythisfont is here to help!
With a community of 7k subscribers and a very active list of new posts, this can be the best place to get an answer regarding fonts that are just unsolvable on your own.
But even if you don’t have a font question it can still be fun to browse the sub and see what others are looking for. You may even find a cool new font in the process.
Whether you’re looking for critique or just want to show off, /r/idesignedthis is the place to post your own design work. You can publish anything from a website to a rebranding, a print project or anything inbetween.
For a sub with only ~4k subscribers I’m impressed at how much content is posted on a regular basis. I’m even more impressed to see that readers actually drop comments in the comment threads!
Critiques are always welcome and this is a great place to gather anonymous feedback on your work. Reddit is notoriously a community of very critical comments, so a positive review from multiple users actually means a lot on this sub.
I really appreciate the beauty of retro 90s design. It was an odd sort of beauty, and looking back it was cheesy as hell. But there was a very hip rad vibe to it during those times.
The 90s design sub is a place to find, well, 90s design. This can be anything from print work to paintings or even old mall photos. This is the ultimate 90s nostalgia trip with a focus on aesthetics.
New posts are added weekly and it’s a surprisingly active subreddit. The first page contains content from the past 30 days and as of this writing it has over 7,600 subscribers.
Much like the previous subreddit, this is geared specifically towards design styles from the 1980s. I’m also a big fan of retro design work and /r/80sdesign is full of that kinda stuff.
Granted most of the posts pertain to westernized versions of 80s culture. But they’re all so fascinating and the best submissions offer a quality dose of inspiration for designers and artists alike.
You’ll find submissions ranging from Game Boy boxart to some totally 80s toilet designs.
You can learn a lot about the Reddit community by the fact that /r/crappydesign has double the number of subscribers as /r/design. People love to laugh, and what a better source of joy than side-splitting design abominations?
Crappy design is all about the worst designs across the board from fashion, furniture, architecture, print work and photo manipulations. You’ll find some offbeat stuff like colorful cleaner next to juice. But you’ll also find minor sexual innuendo and editing mistakes like double chins on book covers.
After browsing the top content list it should be clear why this sub has such a large following. Everything posted to crappy design can be funny to anyone, but it’s especially funny to designers who recognize the best blunders and understand that someone probably got fired.
For all the leaps made in web design over the past 20 years, I’m still amazed at how many people run unusable and abhorrent websites. And whenever I want to see more examples I check out Bad Web Design.
The sub is very small with only a couple hundred users. In total there are about 80 submissions at the time of this writing, but it’s a fun collection of all the crap out there online.
If you’re a freelancer and hoping to drum up some business you might try contacting some of these business owners to see if they need a new website. I know the world would be a better place if everyone had a decent web design—but I realize that might be asking too much.
Everyone who does creative work already knows that design is a huge umbrella term for many different specialties. The /r/LearnDesign subreddit attempts to make the learning process easier and simpler.
Whether you’re a complete newbie or even an intermediate designer, this is a surprisingly active sub with a wonderful community of knowledgeable Redditors. The term “design” is all-inclusive so you can ask about anything from graphic design to industrial design or motion graphics.
This is a great community to ask very general beginner questions or more specific “how to replicate this” type of questions.
The small sub of /r/LearnWebDesign is a great place for newbie questions about web design. You’ll find helpful links and questions directly related to the epistemology of web design.
You may also be interested in the sister sub /r/learnwebdev which focuses on web development.
Some of you may be asking why you couldn’t just ask questions in the /r/web_design sub. And of course you can! But this is a much smaller and more specific community that can be just as useful without having your questions bogged down in dozens of daily submissions.
The design porn subreddit is part of the overarching SFW porn network that idealizes beautiful photos of anything from botany to architecture or rural landscapes.
So naturally readers of the /r/DesignPorn sub are interested in photos of beautiful design. This can come in the form of practically anything: posters, books, furniture, household facets and warm interiors.
Since there are so many overlapping areas, this sub is less popular than others with more specific niches. But the design porn community has about 100k subscribers who actively publish breathtaking content every day.
If you’re into the idea of safe-for-work porn then give /r/DesignPorn a try.
Graphic designers and web designers love to release freebies online. In fact I often publish freebie collections here on WhatPixel to share with readers and help promote the work of great designers.
Reddit has its own community for sharing digital freebies called /r/eFreebies. These can be anything free and digital like vector icons, PSD files, eBooks, free music, software… absolutely anything digital that can be downloaded for free.
And if you’re a designer this can be a great place to find other websites that release quality freebies online.
Design as an industry is constantly expanding with more tools and services than ever before. Design Tools is a subreddit dedicated to curating the best tools from all over the Internet in one central location.
These tools are vaguely defined in the sidebar, but they can include plugins, software, or webapps like Dribbble analytics.
I’ll admit the community is very small and somewhat inactive, so it may not be the most useful place on Reddit. But if you’re ever looking for new tools or resources it can be a fun sub to check every so often.
Quality designers are in high demand from in-house positions to agencies and freelance gigs. The subreddit /r/designjobs is made specifically for designers and hiring managers to help the community of designers find work.
Low-quality job offers will be removed without question. The sub is heavily curated and surprisingly active with 5-10 posts every day.
Blue links indicate designers offering their services while green links are job openings or current projects in need of a designer. This is a great way for the Reddit community to help each other get work done and keep the bills paid.
Fantasy User Interfaces are custom-designed interfaces made to evoke a sense of futurism or fulfilled fantasy in the viewer. This is one of the more offbeat subs but it contains some incredible stuff.
You’ll find custom GUI designs made for Star Wars and even videos of After Effects interface animations.
Reddit’s /r/FUI is a breeding ground for unique ideas in the scope of GUI design. Many posts reference pop culture but there are many unique ideas as well. Very few interfaces are really applicable to modern software design, but it’s still fun to dream.
The concept of minimalism has been around for centuries in both design and art, and really in all creative fields. The minimalism subreddit loves all things minimal whether they be physical products or digital graphics.
Surprisingly this is one of the larger design subs on all of Reddit, so it has a very active community of minimalist lovers sharing content and offering their thoughts. Top posts can hit over 1000 points and the sub just keeps growing larger every month.
If you’re a fan of minimalism or if you produce any type of minimalist design work this sub could be your home away from home… minimally speaking.
Ever wanted to learn more about working in a creative studio? What about the typical lifestyle of a creative professional?
On /r/thecreativebusiness you can ask and read all sorts of content related to the business of being a creative, whether a designer or writer or digital artist. But this sub is for more than outsiders looking in.
The creative business subreddit is primarily geared towards insiders who want to share experiences, thoughts, strategies, past client stories or work-related issues with other creative people. It can be a place to vent, and a place to learn. The community is very small but it’s tight enough to curate some incredible content.
This is a default sub so there are lots of subscribers, but it hosts some real fun content.
Users can post original photos and request Photoshop comps from other users. Anyone with Photoshop skills can try their hand at reimagining a photo with additive elements. These posts are geared more towards graphic designers with proficiency in photo editing, but anyone that appreciates creativity can browse the whimsical photo renditions.
While there isn’t much technique discussion, you can always ask someone how they performed a specific photo manipulation. This is a great community to chat with Photoshop experts and pick up some basics of real-world photo manipulation skills.
Slow but pragmatic describes the content of Unsolicited Redesigns. Users will post spec designs recreating software interfaces and websites.
If you redesign a new Yahoo homepage or reimagine the Spotify app you can post your creation to the sub for critique. Users are brutally honest about flaws and generally well-receiving to quality designs.
This is also a fun sub to post other work to gather opinions, suggestions, or just to reap karma. The community is always open to new content as long as contributions are high quality and relevant.
With only 30 subs I did have to whittle out a few from the list. But since there are so many great design subs on Reddit, I really didn’t want to leave any behind.
So in closing here are some honorable mentions that didn’t make the cut but still deserve recognition as valuable design-related subreddits:
Jaime is a jr. designer interested in mobile UI/UX research and frontend web development with JavaScript frameworks. He covers general news and useful resources in the web design space.
