Popular Design News of the Week: May 3 2021 – May 9, 2021

YouTube is the Web’s biggest video channel. Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute. The volume of data it stores and streams is beyond comprehension. Owned by Google, YouTube has been central to our lives online in such a big way, that it’s almost unbelievable that it’s been with us for less than two decades. If you’ve ever wondered just how big it is, which videos broke its records, or how many users it has,...

WordPress powers nearly 40% of all websites, thanks to its commitment to making publication possible for everyone, for free. Combined with premium plugins and themes, it’s possibly the ultimate tool for building attractive, unique, and feature-rich websites without any coding or design experience. However, you do pay the price for this experience, with WordPress and its third-party products not always being built for performance...

Sometimes you just don’t give a damn anymore. Possibly the only thing worse than designer’s block is designer’s apathy: that sinking feeling you get when you realize that you just don’t care about this particular piece of work anymore is disheartening. The dread of going back to it is paralyzing. There are many reasons you can stop caring about your work. Maybe you’ve just done the same thing too many times in a row. Maybe your client...

Spring and fresh designs are in the air. This month, it’s obvious that designers are feeling creative with new and interesting concepts that range from a new style for cards, homepage experimentation with multiple entry points or calls to action, and risky typography options. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. 1. “Flat” Cards Card-style design elements that allow users to click through to other content aren’t new,...

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...

We’re rounding up the week with a fun quiz for anyone who loves fonts. You’ve seen these typefaces used in hundreds of designs — from presidential campaigns, to corporate branding — but do you know who crafted those curves? We’ll start off with an easy one: Do you know who designed Futura? ...

This week, in a move like something from a particularly eventful episode of The Office, popular project management app company Basecamp banned political and societal discussion in the company's internal communications. In a post that has been revised for “clarification,” the company’s co-founder Jason Fried listed six rules for employees: No societal or political discussions at work; No more ‘paternalistic’ benefits;...

Landing pages are central to successful marketing campaigns; they allow you to target particular customers with particular solutions to particular problems. It’s easy to confuse what a landing page is because users “land” on many pages. When we talk about landing pages, we mean a page that is entirely dedicated to a particular type of customer. In fact, if we could create a unique landing page for each individual user, that would be...

This month’s collection contains a combination of big and bold, and clean and minimal. Although basic minimalism is still trendy, with lots of white space and greyscale type, we are seeing it softened with color. This is implemented differently, ranging from hints of off-whites in images to gentle pastels as section backgrounds. Playing around with type and using typefaces with a few characteristic quirks is another way minimalism is...

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...

CSS is an awesome tool for styling websites. It’s small, fast, and easy to learn. But like all code, there’s a right way, and a wrong way to write it. Badly written CSS renders slowly, impacting on the perceived speed of your site, and even damaging your SEO. Writing fast CSS is about knowing your CSS selectors, knowing your shorthand, and understanding how properties are best applied. What better way to spend the final Friday in April, than...

At the dawn of the web-era, there was much focus on how environmentally friendly websites were: we’d chop down fewer trees, ship fewer products, and travel less for business. And because the web was small, any negative impact it had was relatively small. But the Internet’s no longer small, and neither is the impact it has on the environment. The average website uses 211,000g of CO2 per year, watching a video online outputs an estimated 0.2g...

Ten years ago, people began talking about the “Independent Web.” Although we don’t commonly use the term anymore, that doesn’t mean that it’s not still as vital a topic of discussion today as it was a decade ago. Today, I want to look at where the term came from, what it refers to today, and why it’s something that all of us in business, marketing, and web design should be thinking about. What Is The Independent Web? The Independent...

Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day. Here’s what new for designers this month: April’s Top Picks Charts.css Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style...

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...

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...

Over the last fortnight one site builder has gone toe-to-toe with another, as Wix launched a marketing campaign aimed at attracting WordPress users, and instead attracted universal ire. First, Wix sent out expensive headphones as gifts to key WordPress “influencers” in an attempt to lure them to the platform. Second, they produced a series of adverts that instead of promoting their own product, tried to imply that WordPress is so bad...

We’re no longer arguing about whether climate change exists because climate change is now extensively documented. Instead, we’re arguing over whether climate change is a natural cycle or human-accelerated. At this point, the reasonable best-case (yes, best-case) scenario is that global temperatures will rise by 2˚C — if we don’t meet our global emissions targets, then it will be higher. A 2˚C rise in temperature means a rise...

Have you ever wondered why we’re so amazed by motion? A moving image is more likely to grab your attention than a static one. Motion is exciting and attention-grabbing – plus, it allows us to access more information in a short space of time.  For a while now, companies have been experimenting with all kinds of motion and animation in their design choices. We’ve seen the rise of animated website backgrounds or live-playing videos instead...

Google has been talking about the Core Web Vitals tool and the Page Experience Update for about a year now. With the update scheduled to roll out in May 2021, now is the time to make sure your websites are prepared for it. It’s taking a lot of the best practices Google has recommended over the years and making them an official part of the search algorithm, so not taking this seriously could negatively impact your sites’ rankings. Today, we’re...

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...

Inclusive design is all about designing sites with everyone in mind instead of designing for your own preferences. It’s an essential component in a professional-grade site and the cornerstone of a successful project. Accessibility (A11y for short) is the technical branch of inclusive design. Accessibility is a science: it knows what markup is required to make the text available to the visually impaired; it knows the minimum button size...