15 People To Follow In Design & Technology

The people on this list cover a variety of topics as a whole — design, dev, growth, and usability

Check out these authors to get an insight into best practices, processes, and inspiration from the tech world!

Nick Babich

• UX specialist
• Editor, UX Planet

Nick Babich writes extensively about design and practices in interfaces and user experience. His articles are extremely well-articulated, crisp, and concise. They are great reads for not only those like UX design but are also very accessible to someone who’s not very fluent in these concepts. You’ll generally find him writing in UX Planet but he has also been featured in publications such as Net Magazine, Smashing Magazine, UX Booth, Speckyboy, and Tech in Asia. Recommended reads — Storyboarding in UX design, F-shaped pattern in Reading content, and Best Practices for Onboarding.

Anton Nikolov

• UX Designer & Researcher
• User Experience Designer @ Trustpilot

Anton Nikolov writes almost weekly about design principles. These articles touch upon some essential parts of the domain such as good copy and aesthetics in UX design, principles behind products that people love, and the dangers of feature creep. Read more of his writings here or find him on Twitter

freeCodeCamp

• Inspirational tech stories
• One of Medium’s largest tech publications

While not a person, freeCodeCamp is an open-source community that helps people learn how to code through self-paced coding challenges that earn people certificates. The course involves building projects for non-profits. The Medium publication of the site shares some wonderful resources for people to learn coding and many inspiring stories in tech. Definitely check out How Blind People Code. Honorable mention to Quincy Larson, the man behind freeCodeCamp.

Samuel Hulick

• UX designer
• UserOnboard

Samuel Hulick writes about user onboarding probably better than anyone else. He does it so well in fact he’s taken a bunch of products & apps and done teardowns of their onboarding on the UserOnboard site. These are highly educative and entertaining. Also check out his writing on Medium, like how to do Bulletproof onboarding or how to judge if your software wears too much makeup. He even offers training related to onboarding; see that here.

Sarah Tavel

• Venture capitalist, General Partner @ Benchmark Capital
• Previously @ Pinterest, Greylock Partners

One of the first 35 employees at Pinterest, Sarah Tavel worked as their first Product Manager for search and discovery. She shares some great insights about growth, scaling, and understanding the business in general. Recommended reads include her articles on Five lessons from scaling Pinterest (two parts, both must-reads) and the hierarchy of engagement.

Jonathan Z. White

• Freelance front end designer and developer

Jonathan White writes about front-end development as well as design. His fluency in both areas reflects in his writing that balances the aesthetics with the technical side well. His pieces on Designing in Color, learning Design fundamentals, and the guide to learning Front end development are recommended reads.

Jen Simmons

• Designer advocate @ Mozilla
• Host, The Web Ahead

A web designer and front-end developer with a wealth of experience having worked on projects for CERN, Google, and W3C, the highlight of her writing is the depth of knowledge in front-end technologies, especially CSS. She also hosts the podcast The Web Ahead.

Tobias van Schneider

• Designer, previously Art Director @ Spotify
• Founder, Semplice

His writings on design are entertaining and full of information. A must-read for aspiring designers, especially his series on How To Get A Job @ places such as MailChimp, Spotify, Electronic Arts, and Airbnb. Read more of his article on Medium or follow him on Twitter.

Benjamin Earl Evans

• Diversity and Experience Designer
• Author & Entrepreneur

Benjamin Evans’s writing highlights design challenges and solutions along the lines of sexism, racism, and bias in technology. A highlight of his writing is his piece on Project Belong where he talks about trying to solve the issue of racial bias that creeps under the design of Airbnb. He also contributes to a number of tech publications such as The Next Web and Creative Bloq. Read more of his work here.

Justas Markus

• Co-founder, JustnTom
• Blogger

Justas Markus publishes a number of helpful posts on finding the right tools and tricks. These range from WordPress plugins to analytics tools and Java resources. Follow his writing here or keep up on Twitter.

Jake Rocheleau

• Writer & designer

His articles cover both design and developer topics. Jake writes in a variety of publications such as Hongkiat, Speckyboy, and Treehouse, and his pieces include guides on Color Theory, Rule of Thirds, and MongoDB among others. Find more of his writing here or catch him on Twitter.

John Saito

• UX Writer @ Dropbox
• Previously @ Google, YouTube

John Saito writes about User Experience and Project Management. Some highlights include the benefits of great Microcopy and how data drives UX writing at Dropbox. Read more of his articles here.

Alan Cooper

• Software developer, programmer
• ‘Father of Visual Basic’

Alan Cooper is a leading brain on interaction design and using personas as a practical design tool for high-tech products. He now runs his interaction design consultancy, Cooper, and continues to write great material on Medium such as ‘Should Designers Code?’.

Juliana Rotich

• Co-founder, BRCK & Ushahidi
• Technologist, Strategic advisor, Entrepreneur, and Keynote speaker

Juliana Ritoch wears many hats in the tech world and apart from co-founding BRCK, which aims to solve Africa’s internet connectivity issues, she also co-founded Ushahidi, an open-source information platform that helps collect and share data for election monitoring, crisis response, and human rights. Her blog gives an insightful read into Africa’s changing trends and highlights issues from a continent where the technological explosion is still not as scaled as that around the world. Her writings such as that about the changing landscape of citizen engagement in Africa due to technology and how an increasing number of smartphones have helped share data related to cancer screening are some of the highlights.

Braden Kowitz

• User Experience Designer
• Co-Founder, Habitat Labs; previously Design Partner @ GV

Having worked at a venture capital firm that advised to and invested in some of the most pioneering startups on the technology landscape, Braden Kowitz’s writings give a peek into the processes and techniques used to help build great products at these amazing enterprises. He’s also a co-author of the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Other recommended reads include how good storytelling helps build great products, shortening the design cycle with clickable mocks, and his journey through Google talking about the values of openness and creativity that make the technology giant click. Read more of his articles here.