Popular Design News of the Week: June 14 2021 – June 20, 2021

It’s fair to say that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a controversial topic among web developers. AMP is a Google-guided technology that strips down web pages to a limited sub-set of tags to serve pages faster. It was developed as a web-based rival to native news apps from vendors like Apple. The controversy first arose when it was clear how much influence Google had over the conventions, essentially creating a tiered Web overseen by a single...

Inclusive design is often mistaken for accessibility, or even used as an interchangeable term, which is a good indication that most designers don’t know what it means. Accessibility is a process that seeks to mitigate issues in a design that is not sufficiently universal; inclusive design increases the universality of the design. In real-world terms, an accessible building may replace its front steps with a ramp; an inclusive building...

This month’s new tools and resources collection is a mixed bag of elements for designers and developers. From fun little divots to tools that can speed up development, you are sure to find something usable here. Here’s what new for designers this month: June’s Top Picks Codewell Codewell is a service to help you learn, practice, and improve HTML and CSS skills with real templates. The benefit here is pretty obvious. When working with...

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, a significant portion of the Web fell over when on Tuesday, sites powered by Fastly were impacted by a massive outage that affected around 85% of the network. The near-total collapse — which was quickly identified and remedied — took out sites including GitHub, Stack Overflow, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Reddit, Amazon, and CNN. Furthermore, it was all but impossible to express rage on Twitter because the server that handles...

Every designer has their own preferred strategy for collecting resources. Some pluck brushes, fonts, and templates from different “stock photo sites” and public marketplaces. Others collect graphics from swipe files and forums around the web. The never-ending desire for themes, visual content, and graphical components has prompted an influx of “design packages” to appear around the web. These all-in-one bundles, ranging...

If you are feeling like me right now, you have mixed emotions about the world in general. And this is translating into a pretty distinct design trend that’s happening almost across the board: Websites aren’t using many images of people right now. There are just too many questions about what is appropriate (mask, no mask? groups?), so the default answer seems to be using more “artless” options focusing on typography, graphical elements,...

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...

Do you know logos? Is branding your thing? Then try our fiendishly hard logo quiz… We’ve lined up ten logos belonging to household names. We’ve even given you four options to choose from to identify the logo. There’s just one catch: we’re only revealing a small part of the logo. We’re kicking off with a couple of obvious ones to ease you in but be warned, they get tougher… Featured image via Pexels....

HTML is one of the foundational building blocks of the Web. But just as web design best practices and techniques change over time, so does the code we use. As HTML evolves, some of its older markup has been deprecated while other parts have been repurposed. Does that create more problems for us, though? Would we be better off starting over so we can make sure we’re all working from the same language rather than trying to edit out the bits we don’t...

Want to know which of the top blogging platforms you should consider using this year? Blogging is still one of the best ways to draw attention to your brand, generate thought leadership, and build your credibility. Research suggests that US internet users spend 3x more of their browsing time on blogs than on email. Additionally, people view about 20 billion blog pages on average each month.  So, how do you join the blogging revolution? You’ll...

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...

Psychologists tell us that by answering a handful of oblique questions, we can gain greater insight into our real desires. Today, we’re going to put that to the test with a simple fill-in-the-gaps story that will help you determine your ideal career in design. We’ll tell you a short story, and ask you to add a few key details, from which we’ll work out what kind of career probably suits you; what kind of roles you should pursue, what kind of...

Asset management and website performance optimization are two of those unavoidable headaches faced by every website owner. A digital asset management (DAM) platform can provide centralized asset repositories with intuitive dashboards to help you manage assets. On the other hand, an image CDN can help you get rid of that messy responsive syntax and provide dynamic asset optimization with huge performance boosts. The problem is that website...

This month we have several examples of brutalism used to good effect as a foil to showcase products and/or work. By contrast, at the other end of the scale, we have brands who have chosen to go more of an immersive experience route, using full-screen images, sound, animation, and even VR. Both are valid approaches, depending on the content. The former tends to work better as a backdrop for artwork, photography, and artisanal craft goods — acting...

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 at I/O, Google unveiled the latest version of its Material Design design system, Material You. Initially presented as an upgrade for Android 12, Material You is the biggest revision to Material Design since its launch in 2014 and will be rolling out across all Google products in the coming year. Material You is an adaptable system that takes the building blocks of Material Design — the spacing and component approach — and skins...

Parallax is a term that is applied loosely and frequently in the world of web design. As a trend, it has been popular and unpopular in equal measures for some time. However, it’s still one of the most valuable tools for animation in the digital world. Parallax creates an illusion of depth when scrolling, a timeless effect that still has lots of value in the web design world. Sure, parallax has its issues, from problems with usability, to concerns...

User experience design is something that most of us associate with websites. But why isn’t it something we extend beyond the website? Here’s why I ask this: As a consumer, it’s so rare that your only interaction with a brand is through its website. Take an ecommerce site, for example. You buy a product from it, and then what happens? You get a confirmation email; You get another email when the package ships; You might get another email or...

Each 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...

Every month we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these...

Are you thinking of building a website with a site builder but find yourself confused by the dizzying array of options? Well, puzzle no more because we’ve put together this great infographic to cut to the heart of the question: Which is better for you, Squarespace or Wix? Each of these site-building giants is ideal for a particular type of person, but which is best suited to your next project? Do you need total creative freedom? How about a large...