To stay on top of trends seems to be impossible in the rapidly changing design world, and one effective way is to visit popular design communities or forums to see what’s trendy and hot there. Online community is also a great place to ask for possible solutions, search for scripts and look for design feedback as well. Following are 13 top design and development communities/forums to go when you are facing difficulties and need guidance from fellow designers and developers.

1. Dribbble

With a goal to help designers build their team and brand than mainstream social networking platforms, Dribbble is a vibrant community and social network for anyone who cares design. Its homepage is essentially a repository of the most popular shots, and all artists have to earn their right to posts images on the website. There is a tremendous number of web designers, logo designers, graphic designers, typographers as well as illustrators showing and exchanging their creative works.

2. Designer Hangout

Designer Hangout is a dedicated, invite-only network of 10,000+ UX designers and researchers who discuss trends, give advice, share stories, uncover insights, surface opportunities, and connect in-person. As a UX practitioner, Designer Hangout is your "secret weapon" to progressing your career and accomplishing your life goals. Acclaimed to be the World's most reliable brain trust for UX designers in a fast-paced age, it comes highly recommended by Jared Spool, Laura Klein, Lou Rosenfeld, Cynthia Savard Saucier, and other industry influencers.



3. The Interaction Design Foundation Community

Content is the king in the UX design field. and you may find numerous industry experts having a lot to say about the quality of Interaction Design Foundation and its online community. Thus far, it has set up 468 local groups across 85 countries all over the world, and a great place to take part in the local activities, expand the career network as well as meet your next employee/employer, client or friend.



4. Mockplus Community

As a rising star in the prototyping tool industry, Mockplus recently announces its release of Discussion Community for all customers and anyone interested in the industry to post and share their design resources and concerns. There is a ranking system for those who contribute a topic or help resolve a problem, making it a great place to establish prestige and keep relationships.

5. UX Mastery Community

An industry leading community aiming to help UX professionals get started and better on their design way. It’s open to anyone that loves UX and helps seek & share UX advice. If you are looking for a mentor, get career advice, network with peers and want your portfolio reviewed, then don’t look no further.

6. UX Design Community

There are 600 UXers on Slack to discuss user experience. The purpose of this community is to share resources/knowledge, exchange design problems and help each other to grow. It’s great to meet more fellow UX designers especially when you’re facing a knotty problem and working in an isolated environment. A form needs to be filled in in order to get invited from this community.

7.User Experience Stack Exchange

This is a question and answer related website for user experience designers, UX researchers, information architects and human computer interaction designers, allowing anybody to ask or answer a question there. It’s built and run as part of Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. All questions here are tagged with different subject areas, such as usability, website-design, gui-design, interaction-design, user-behavior, user-expectation and so on.

8. Web Designer Forum

As a forum of United Kingdom, Web Designer Forum currently has more than 3,000 members. It’s quite active for its size and a great place for those who want to network with web designers from the UK region. It also has “Marketplace”, “Gallery” and “Jobs” boards for needed ones.

9. Graphic Design Forum (GDF)

GDF can be one of the oldest and biggest graphic design forums, with more than 20K members thus far. The community is large and active, consisting of various general categories like web design resource, web development, website marketing & business, software/hardware and more.

10. Sitepoint Forum

Sitepoint is a huge community with over 250K members around. This is a perfect place network, find programming tips or business advice. For instance, you can find answers about PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, marketing, database, UX design and hosting, etc. Its thriving marketplace enables you to sell and buy websites and designs.

11. Designer News

Launched on 2012 as a place to discuss and share interesting things in the industry, Designer News is a global community of people working in design and technology or those who are interested in the topics. It started as an invitation-only community and let the community decide the most “designer-friendly content” by voting on stories.

12. Hacker News

Hacker News is basically a social news website that is focusing on entrepreneurship and computer science. This community is somewhat similar to the early days of Reddit, but differs in that there is no option for down-vote submissions. All of the content that can be submitted is always defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”.

13. How Design

It’s one of the most popular design communities around and almost everyone in the industry has read or heard about it from time to time. How Design is generally broken down into different categories, such as News, Design Business, Interactive, Design Career, Online Learning, How Events and Competitors, etc. This is a great place to have decent conversations with people, be old or new in the field.

14. Designers Talk Forum

This is a large and active forum, with a clean design. There are a wealth of sections dedicated to coding, web design and much more. Also, it has other areas focusing on graphic design and web design disciplines, with 25,000 members in the community.

Wrap Up

The above communities provide an excellent opportunity to communicate and get inspired by others, which finally contributes to fostering creativity. You can find plenty online and are welcome to share your favorite one here with us!