Sometimes it’s hard to balance a full-time job and reading professional literature on a daily basis, at other times — you’re just too tired to even watch Youtube; and if that’s the case, then listening to podcasts can be the perfect solution for you. Podcasts are free, you can listen to them whenever and wherever you happen to be — on a bike, on a boat, in your car, on your bed — podcasts are a perfect source of wisdom full of captivating stories, engaging interviews, meaningful conversations, and bits and pieces of professional advice. In this piece, we’ll cover the TOP 6 Best Trending podcasts, which are either new on the scene or have been updated regularly for years and still maintain their perfect status quo. If you like reading blogs, however, you might like our collection of Web Design and Development blogs.
Design Details
Twitter: @DesignDetailsFM
Creators/Hosts: Marshal Bock and Brian Lovin
Number of Episodes: 309
Duration: 60 min
Rotation: once a week, every Wednesday
Description:
The hosts are truly incredible on this one: Marshal Bock is a Design Lead at Youtube Gaming and Brian Lovin is a Designer at GitHub. You can surely count on the hosts’ expertise.
On the podcast’s page at spec.fm, you’ll find the pinned featured episodes, which were deemed by creators as definitely worth your attention; among those featured are talks with Mills Baker, a Design Manager at Quora and Lori Kaplan, a designer with 30 years of experience at companies like Apple, Netscape, Netflix, among others.
Marshal and Brian don’t only talk about design, but also about many other things surrounding the field like the importance of building diverse teams and open source community. However, for the most part, the hosts speak of web design, and that’s exactly why the podcast made it to the top of our list.
Design Matters
Creators/Hosts: Debbie Millman
Episodes: 296 episodes
Duration: 60-90 minutes
Rotation: once a week, every Monday
Description:
For more than a decade, Debbie Millman has been interviewing designers from all over the US and beyond. In fact, she has been so successful that the show received a couple of distinguished awards, including People’s Choice Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2011; the show was also featured in the blogs of Adobe, UX Collective, Shopify, goop, Creative Live, and many others. In 2012, Millman was congratulated personally by Michelle Obama in the White House for running the best and longest design show in history.
Debbie herself has been named as one of the most influential designers by Graphic Design USA; she’s also an author, educator, and brand strategist.
Over the course of ten years, Debbie has interviewed more than 300 guests, whose interviews can still be easily found on the show’s website. In fact, you can browse the episodes by discipline, year, or guest’s last name.
Millman talks to writers, musicians, bloggers, brand consultants, actors, creative directors, design critics, and of course, web designers. The last episodes featured David Lee Roth, Austin Kleon, Zoe Mendelson, Stephen Gates, Elizabeth Gilbert, and more.
I particularly enjoyed the talk with Seth, an eccentric cartoonist and an author of Palookaville, a book about the cartoonists of his generation, where he explored the reasons why they switched from fantasy to depicting reality and real-world problems, and how they all struggled to find themselves in this disorderly world.
The Deeply Graphic DesignCast
Creators/Hosts: Wes McDowell
Duration: 60 min
Rotation: once or twice a month
Description:
This is the web and graphic design podcast that offers both practical and creative design advice.
The Deep End is the distributed team behind the show with Wes McDowell, the host of the podcast, being a Team Lead.
Every other month Wes talks to different guests or, otherwise, holds a discussion with his team members about what makes graphic and web design great, what tools exist to make a designer’s job easier, how to run a creative business, and how to manage big fish clients, among many other topics surrounding the design industry.
Type Radio
Twitter: @typeradio
Creators/Hosts: Liza Enebeis
Duration: 15 – 60 min
Rotation: once every other month
Description: Typeradio is a micro FM podcast that operates out of the Netherlands, Amsterdam. It’s been on the design scene for quite a while but has remained a sort of indie podcast initiated by Lisa Enebeis, an author, blogger, seasoned designer.
What really makes this podcast stand out is that instead of some of the guests traveling to Lisa, she travels to them herself — that’s exactly why you’ll see episodes recorded in Moscow, LA, Goa, Munich, and many other places.
She talks to speakers, conference organizers, artists, ordinary web designers, workshop lecturers, etc., which makes a podcast qualify for a “one of a kind.”
The Shop Talk Show
Twitter: @ShopTalkShow
Creators/Hosts: Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier.
Number of Episodes: 373
Duration: 60 min
Rotation: once a week, every Monday
Description:
The host of the show, Chris Coyier, is best known for building CSS-Tricks and co-founding CodePen.
Each Monday, along with his co-host, Dave Rupert, a lead developer at Paravel, Chris talks to different guests about web design, development, performance, tooling, and a little bit of everything else.
The site of the show, besides the episodes themselves, features a job board, the AMA and sponsorship sections, and, of course, the archives.
The last episodes have been dedicated to WordPress databases, technical writing, management, the state of CSS, and accessibility.
While most of the subjects are pretty broad, the podcast has garnered a steady following among designers and front end developers, so you’ll definitely learn a few tips here and there, especially from the prominent guests, even if the episode is not directly related to web design.
The Big Web Show
Twitter: @thebigwebshow
Creators/Hosts: Jeffrey Zeldman
Number of Episodes: 187 episodes
Duration: 60 minutes
Rotation: once every other month
Description:
Jeffrey Zeldman, the host of the show, is the Principal Designer and Creative Director at Automatic, as well as a co-founder of An Event Apart, a Publisher of A List Apart and A Book Apart.
The Big Web Show features special guests who come to the show to speak on various subjects ranging from art direction, content strategy, typography, interaction design, user experience, web technology in general.
The last episodes, which were released quite a while ago already, featured such guests as Mina Markham, who worked on the Hillary Clinton UI pattern library “Pantsuit,” and Tantek Çelik, a legendary computer scientist and web standards pioneer.
Jeffrey Zeldman has interviewed a number of renowned people over the years, having started his podcast back in 2010. Some of his older episodes do not have any guests but only Jeffrey talking things that shaped the web and his perception of web design through time.
In case you’re interested in discovering more shows, then you’ll certainly like our collection of web development podcasts, which we’ve covered a little earlier this year.
Author: Marina Vorontsova is a copywriter from Soshace.com, a hiring platform for web developers: hire a developer or apply for a remote job.
