Popular Design News of the Week: June 27, 2022 – July 3, 2022

An unreliable, semi-broken and unresponsive website is an excellent way to lose leads and visitors — regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or well-designed, the visual elements are. Over the past decade, we’ve seen more initiative to deliver faster internet to regions of the world that were previously devoid of it. With online communities expanding and more people becoming receptive to online shopping, ensuring your site’s...

Personalized marketing is when you attune your marketing efforts based on customer data. This data can be anything from the first and last name to purchase intent, concerns, and history. Personalized marketing has revolutionized the way businesses market their product and service to their audience. It brings value to people’s lives, spiking the sales graph for brands and businesses. So it’s a win-win situation for both the company...

There are a lot of dark, retro vibes trending in website design right now. Although there are still some light projects popping up – including a pastel trend below – a lot of what we are seeing has a quite moody feel. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. Pastel Color Palettes Let’s start with the trend with a lighter feel – pastel color palettes. While much of the web is trending toward dark aesthetics, there’s a segment that’s...

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site. The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s...

The hardest part of designing websites for a living is setting your prices. Setting a fair price for your services is something that nearly all of us struggle with. If you’re lucky, you’re part of an agency that has experienced design leads who can assess projects objectively. But if you’re a freelancer — or if you’re one of those design leads — you have to set your own rate. It’s a challenge to find a sweet spot in the market. You...

Starting your own business is a process with a fair share of challenges. Even in the web design world, where you can potentially minimize costs by working from home and collaborating with freelance contractors, many expenses exist.  To run a successful web design business, you need enough money to invest in everything from skilled colleagues to resources (like fonts and themes), software subscriptions, and technology tools. Finding...

UX laws are an invaluable tool, providing guidelines for designers that ensure we don’t have to continually reinvent the wheel when crafting experiences for the web. However, UX laws tend to be devised by scientists and psychologists — people who are more than comfortable with the exceptions and allowances of academic language. By the time they filter down to us in the trenches, the language has invariably been over-simplified, and...

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site. The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s...

This week, Microsoft officially ended support for Internet Explorer. Victorious in the first browser war with then-rival Netscape Navigator, IE was only finally surpassed by Google’s Chrome. Whereas once huge numbers of sites would warn users to switch to IE, by the end Microsoft’s biggest app was a virtual pariah. Over the course of its lifetime, Internet Explorer has revolutionized the web with its freeware model and support for...

Moving from studying design into the big wide world of web design is a daunting process. It’s a competitive and dynamic industry that’s growing all the time. It’s estimated that between 2020 and 2030, web designer jobs in the US will increase by 13%. One of the most challenging aspects of starting a career in web design is getting hired, especially as a freelancer.  The first thing that most clients and agencies look for is usually your...

Automation is the theme of this month’s collection of exciting new tools for designers and developers. There are tools to make your images better, tools to create illustrations, and tools to make your workflow more efficient. Plus, a whole host of tools that are just plain fun. Here’s what is new for designers this month… designstripe designstripe lets you create beautiful illustrations with no design skills. Drag and drop different...

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site. The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s...

Navigating the world of web design can be difficult. There is so much conflicting and outdated advice. How many times have you been advised to obey the 3-Click Rule? It states that users must reach the content they want in three clicks. But, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, no research supports the 3-Click Rule. It’s just a guess, the web’s equivalent of an urban myth. There are dos and don’ts of effective web design in 2022. In this...

As a website designer, your professional life revolves around crucial questions that might help you to deliver better results for your clients. Which widgets are essential to driving conversions? What kind of checkout page elements do you need to include? Should there be a video or slideshow on that product page? One of the biggest queries that we face when building landing pages to encourage sales is whether a CTA (call to action) button needs...

Are you bored with some of your current design projects? This month’s collection of website design trends can help break you out of that rut with some fun and funky alternatives. And all of these options are anything but boring. From visual display to technique, these trends present a different set of challenges. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. 1. Layers on Layers These website designs have so many layers of information...

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site. The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s...

WordPress 6.0 has been released, and another niche jazz musician will be enjoying extra Spotify royalties next month. WordPress 6, named for latin-jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, is the realization of a change of direction the WordPress Foundation adopted several years ago.  All versions of WordPress now power around 42% of the web. That’s approximately 810,000,000 sites. If you looked at each site for a single second, without...

Websites haven’t always been as adaptable as they are today. For modern designers, “responsivity” is one of the most significant defining factors of a good design. After all, we’re now catering to a host of users who frequently jump between mobile and desktop devices with varying screen sizes.  However, the shift to responsive design didn’t happen overnight. For years, we’ve been tweaking the concept of “responsive web...

In this month’s collection of the best new fonts, we’re going to see some fonts that test the limits of weight, height, and gravity. We’re also going to see font families that merge unexpected styles with one another. 1. Bells Morten Bells Morten is a display font inspired by vintage signage. With high-impact lettering that’s easy to read, this font would be great for websites that are short on words and heavy on imagery. 2. Bold Tension...

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site. The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s...

When you hear the word “leadership,” do you think of a particular person? If you’d been asked that question anytime before the 1900s, chances are you’d think of an accomplished politician or a battle-tested general. These were the people leading society for most of recorded history. Today, you might have someone else in mind. Since the industrial era, the US has birthed a pantheon of founders who’ve arguably led our society as much...

Having the right WordPress plugins on hand can do wonders for your business or online presence. WordPress offers a vast collection to choose from. There are so many of them. However, finding those that get the best reviews and can do the most for you can be a challenge. A plugin can give you additional functionality. It could otherwise be difficult or overly expensive to realize with your website by itself. A glance at the 10 top WordPress plugins...