How To Build A Design Portfolio With Zero Clients

Each month we publish this roundup of the best new fonts for designers to help you find new ways of packing personality into your designs. In October’s edition, you’ll find a number of revivals and a ton of vintage inspiration, all wrapped up with a modern twist. After years of geometric sans-serifs, a few decorative flourishes are more than welcome. Enjoy! The Future The Future and its accompanying monospace The Future Mono is a homage...

Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web is 25 years old this week, and one glance at an eye-tracking study will tell you its key observations are still relevant today. Simply put, users don’t read a web page; they scan it for individual words and sentences. A typical pattern shown in eye-tracking reports is that users will rapidly scan a page, scrolling down to do so. Then either hit the back button and pump your bounce rate, or scroll to...

The design world fluctuates back and forth, swerving between love and hate for different design trends. Sometimes we see a wide range of approaches, and sometimes designers all hop on the same idea. This month, the web is dominated by animation. Designers are cramming in motion in unexpected ways. And it’s fun to explore. Here are 20 of the best new sites on the web this month. Enjoy! Bannach Bannach is a German furniture brand. Its products...

User Experience is a crucial consideration for any web developer or designer; the only way to ensure that you’re delivering a successful website is to ensure that the end-user or customer will feel comfortable using it.  A strong user experience increases your client’s chances of successful audience engagement and conversions. What you might not realize, however, is that the strategies you use to enhance UX as a web developer or designer...

There were mixed reactions on Thursday morning when Adobe announced it had acquired Figma. Excited press releases extolling the benefits of the “collaboration” followed the news. Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, said: “There is a huge opportunity for us to accelerate the growth and innovation of the Figma platform with access to Adobe’s technology…” The reaction from the design community has been a little less enthusiastic....

Apple has released an OS update. Packaged in with it is the latest version of Safari, 16. Expected to be released ahead of next month’s macOS 13, Safari 16 is packed with updates, making it one of the most capable browsers available. For web designers, the significance is the forward momentum in web technologies that enable freer design work and fewer hacks to achieve complex layouts. Little by little, CSS recommendations are being implemented...

The Summer’s over, and we’re back at our desks to discover that the web’s best app builders, font designers, asset creators, and developers have been hard at work to deliver this bumper collection of exciting new tools for designers and developers. Below you’ll find productivity apps, icons, gradients, AI, and some awesome new fonts. Enjoy! CSS Scan Forget right-clicking on a website to see how it’s coded. CSS Scan is a browser...

Modals, a nifty little feature that allows you to display different messages at the top of your website, have been touted as extremely useful. Some even claim that they are helpful enough to completely replace the banner ads we all hate so much. But are modals in web design a UX disaster? If you are unfamiliar with the term, a modal is a dialogue window appearing when a visitor clicks on a hyperlink or hover image. Suppose you want to collect on-site...

Typefaces give expression to text, communicating personality in a way that no other design element can. And so, we put together this collection of the best new fonts we’ve seen on the web each month. This month’s collection of fresh new fonts includes some typefaces that push boundaries in subtle but irresistible ways, a few retro fonts that evoke specific eras, and some exceptionally well-drawn examples of classic themes. Gazzetta...

Three weeks ago, you started a web design agency. Then over the last two weeks, you’ve taken a leap toward making your business viable by defining who you are as a business and putting together your documents. This week, we’ll tie up loose ends so that you’re a fully functional agency able to pick and choose the work you accept. Day 22: Pitch Deck Over the next few years, you’ll be doing a lot of pitching: walking into a room and trying to convince...

As the season starts to change, so do some of the trends that web designers are using in projects. From a return of blur to interesting frame edges for images to neon color, there’s a lot to get excited about. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. 1. Blur is Back Blur as a design element is gaining traction in a big way. This web design trend can look like a lot of different things and be used in a variety of ways. From backgrounds to blur...

I bet you didn’t know that WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder and content management system (CMS). Just kidding…of course, you did! But that’s not all there is to know about WordPress, so take our ridiculously challenging WordPress quiz and see how much of an expert you are… (Scroll to the bottom for the correct answers.) 1. What is WordPress? SEO plugin to check your keyword density AI tool to create illustrations...

The purpose of a website is to reach new customers and keep current ones engaged. Therefore, customer-first should be at the top of your list for design features. After all, without your clients, your business won’t grow or succeed. Customer-first has been a buzzword for a few years now. In a nutshell, it’s easy to imagine what customer-first design means. The needs of consumers come before anything else. However, the concept isn’t...

This month we’re seeing websites that are very conscious of the design trends they’re following. Designers are making conscious choices to adopt styles, and opting out when it doesn’t suit the site. What we end up with is a crop of sophisticated, well-designed websites that use style as a technique to further their aims. Here are the sites that caught our eye this month, enjoy! Seen Seen uses conversations to explore themes surrounding...

Two weeks ago, you started a web design agency. Last week you began to define your agency by choosing clients, setting red lines, and writing your elevator pitch. This week, we will implement some practical solutions before problems occur. Remember one task per day; it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Day 15: Terms of Service In the rush of excitement surrounding a new project, it’s too easy to skip the preliminaries and jump into work. Before...

Learning how to design an MVP webpage or website could be one of the best things you can do as a site creator in today’s digital world. In a fast-paced landscape, where customer preferences and technology are constantly changing, most companies don’t have time to dedicate months or years to each web project. The longer you take to complete your website, the more likely your creation will be outdated by the time you hit “publish.” That’s...

Web design is often stagnant because designers look at the same work and follow the same trends. Unfortunately, algorithms promote work that is liked, and designers produce content to get likes, which leads to a self-feeding cycle. We’ve been talking about the dribbblization of design for years, but Behance is just as guilty of promoting and encouraging homogenous design. It’s not that Dribbble and Behance don’t have value; they...

Live chat is one of the most powerful tools for customer experience in the current marketplace.  In a world where customers are constantly connected to the online world, online chat is a reliable way of getting quick solutions to common problems.  Today’s consumers prefer talking to an agent over chat to calling a contact center, and they often feel that live chat is less frustrating than waiting for the right person to answer the phone. ...

Last week, you started a web design agency. This week we’ll help you take the next steps toward making your agency viable. The first couple of days were spent on legal checks and taxes. After that, you’ve picked a niche to specialize in, an awesome name, worked out how much you’re going to charge, and set up business accounts. Then, finally, you took a day off to prepare for this week. (If you skipped any of those steps, go back and catch up now.)...

There’s nothing like a new font or two to breathe new life into your designs. And so, every month, we put together this collection of the fonts that have caught our eye in the past few weeks. This month we’ve got traditional slab-serifs, some original scripts, a couple of workhorses, and plenty of characterful display faces. Enjoy! Canora There are plenty of calligraphic typefaces available, but Canora is a little different. Alongside...

In today’s fast-paced marketplace, having a website has become more of a necessity than a luxury. A website showcases a business to potential customers and is the backbone of a brand’s presence online. However, like a machine with many moving parts, a website requires regular maintenance for optimum performance and security. Here’s why it’s essential to ensure that your clients regularly maintain their sites to get the most out...

Many designers and developers dream of starting their own web design agency. Most don’t try because it seems too challenging, but getting started is simple. To start a web design agency, you decide you’re the boss of a web design agency. That’s all there is to it. Now, let’s talk about the tricky part: making your web design agency sustainable over the short, medium, and long term. Over the next few weeks, we’ll walk you through the...