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5 Useful Steps for Getting Started Reading Design Blogs

Some of the most popular blogs around are dedicated to design, development, and multimedia. From tutorial bloggers to inspirational design galleries, the internet is packed with great information for wannabe designers and web developers. But there’s a problem: most of it goes unread.

Sure, some blogs have wide audiences, but an unfortunate number of blogs are without an audience altogether. There are thousands of great blogs out there, and some potentially brilliant designers are missing out on them. These five tips will help you dive headfirst into design blogs, absorb all the great information, and do the one thing so few blog readers every do: put it into action.

Don’t forget RSS/email subscriptions.

Checking every blog for updates manually eats up time like nothing else, and is generally a pretty inefficient way to stay up to date with the news. It’s much more effective to just use an RSS reader, or for those who only follow one or two blogs, an email subscription.

Using an RSS reader is simple, but there’s a little bit of strategy involved to ensure you’re getting the most from it. Sort your feeds by topics – technology feeds all go together, development feeds go together, and design feeds go together – then, instead of just checking blogs as soon as they update, let the updates build up and only ever check them when there’s five or more posts to browse through. Checking all the time is a good way to get nothing done; batch checking your blog updates is a good way to learn efficiently.

Get involved. Comment, email, and tweet about good posts.

The blogosphere exists as the result of interaction and involvement. Without involved content, there’s essentially nothing to blogging. When you see a great post that really strikes your interest, leave a comment and let the blogger know that you enjoyed it. Best situation, you’ll end up with a personal reply from a writer you like; worst situation, your comment goes untouched. There’s nothing to lose when you comment on blogs, so get out there and do it!

Of course, there’s a secondary reason for blog commenting. If you’ve got your own blog, it’s worth a lot more to you when it’s widely read. Sometimes a simple blog comment with a link to your own blog is all it takes to generate a dedicated list of readers.

Start your own, and join the conversation.

The great thing about design, particularly web design, is that you can learn the basics of it on you’re own. Of course, you’ll never become a full-time qualified designer with just an online education, but for the basics of design, and even some incredibly complex stuff, online information can take you pretty far.

There’s a point where that knowledge becomes a valuable resource. While you may not think so, after absorbing years worth of online design content, you might learn enough to start your own blog. If you can offer valuable advice and information to new designers, get your thoughts out there! They could be worth something later on.

Don’t just read anything and everything, be selective.

If the Pareto Principle is true anywhere, it’s online. When it comes to blogs, design blogs especially, 20% of the blogs seem to have 80% of the value. Part of it’s the split in qualified and unqualified designers – the best tend to congregate together, which leads to certain blogs offering much more value than others.

When you’re just getting started, it’s best to read as many blogs as you can. However, over time you’ll grow more familiar with the blogs in your reader and will begin to see gaps in quality and value. That’s when you start optimizing. Remove all the blogs that don’t offer any real value, and hone in on the ones that do. Learning is about optimizing, and when you’re learning design, you should learn from the best.

Don’t let blogs take over your life.

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that every blog post you read, every case study you skim through, and every ‘inspirational’ post you view is teaching you something and getting you somewhere. They’re not. Blogs are a great excuse for inaction, particularly amongst designers and online professionals.

Thankfully, there’s a simple cure. Instead of reading blogs 24/7, block them out once in a while. Give yourself ‘no reader’ days where you don’t look at a single feed, and dedicated hours of your day to work, not reading. Blogs are hugely valuable when they’re used as an actual resource, and a major distraction when they’re used in place of one. Hours in front of your reader won’t make you a great designer, but reading combined with action will.