Should You Become a Web Designer in 2021?

20 years ago, Wikipedia was started with the ambitious aim of creating a free encyclopedia for the whole world. Looking back 20 years, the world was a very different place: the Dot Com Bust had just passed; the average US house price was just $136k; Jack Bauer was only 24 hours into saving the world; President Obama was several years away from the US Senate; Destiny’s Child were topping the charts; the appalling events of 9/11, and everything...

Here we are into a brand new year, and although we’re far from out of the woods yet, there is a feeling of renewed hope on many fronts. In this first collection of the year, we have a mix of retrospectives, brand new ventures, and business as usual. There is an eclectic mix of styles on offer, from glossy and slick to minimalist and brutalist, but all confident and looking to a better world in the year ahead. Clar Brand strategists Clar have a simple...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. UI Design...

It’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce store and start selling. There are a dizzying array of ecommerce solutions available in 2021, and most are feature-rich and competitively priced. Ecommerce sites are notoriously difficult to migrate from platform to platform, so more often than not, you’ll be committed to your chosen solution for years. The key when choosing an ecommerce solution to maximize your return on investment, is...

If you already have a good idea of what you want a new website to look like, the next step would be to decide on the tools you’ll need to put into play to turn that vision into a reality. Tools enable you to present its content in ways that will engage and captivate its audience and gain their trust. Tools that will make your website perform flawlessly in all respects. That is why choosing the right WordPress theme to get the job done is so important....

The Beazley Design of the Year for 2020 has just been awarded to US architecture firm Rael San Fratello & Colectivo Chopeke for their Teeter-Totter Wall project, a series of luminous pink seesaws built into the US-Mexico border wall in July 2019. The 74 shortlisted entrants for the prize range from a poster for vegan burgers to a parody of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Most were self-consciously political. As design has grown in stature,...

The new year is often packed with resolutions. Make the most of those goals and resolve to design better, faster, and more efficiently with some of these new tools and resources. Here’s what new for designers this month. Radix UI Radix UI is an open-source UI component library for building high-quality, accessible design systems and web apps. It includes examples and guidelines for all kinds of user interface elements that provide guidance...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Front-End...

When creating a website, it’s vital to remember that not only does it need to work and look great on the device you are creating it on, but on all the other devices, it might be used on too. Mobile and tablet optimization is important not only for the user journey but from an SEO point of view too, and badly created mobile sites just don’t cut it anymore. With more and more devices entering the market, you need to check any website you create is compatible...

Ecommerce design may seem fairly straight-forward; you build an online store that showcases a company’s products or services and gives customers a quick and pain-free way to purchase them. While that formula will always hold true, ecommerce is undergoing some big changes, and web designers need to be prepared to keep up with them. This monthly ecommerce trends roundup will explore these new and evolving design, sales, and marketing trends....

Burger King, the globally recognized food chain with 19,000 restaurants worldwide, has unveiled a redesigned set of brand assets. Since the late 1960s, the company has used a logotype sandwiched between two buns. In 1999 the design was updated to add a blue swoosh and some plastic highlights to the bun; Jones Knowles Ritchie’s new design reverts to the classic 1969 approach, with some modern refinements. Left: The 1999 design, Right: JKR’s...

The start of the year is always a good time to reassess priorities and consider new approaches, but 2021 is more of a reset than we expected this time last year. 2020 is unlikely to go down in anyone’s autobiography as the best year of their life, but it has done something positive: it’s prepared the ground for rapid change in the next 12 months. More than any other year in our lifetimes, 2021 is set to be revolutionary, with emerging trends that...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. The Future...

If you were paying close attention to your IT department around the 8th of December, you might have heard some quiet sobbing and the occasional wail of, “Why? Why?! WHY?!” Now, it was the year 2020, so this might have seemed normal to you, but it’s actually something of a problem that could affect your business: CentOS is pretty much dead. For the non-total-nerds among us, here’s the skinny: CentOS is a Linux-based operating system,...

There are dozens of factors that influence the UX of your site, app, or game. Most of them are beyond your control; user connection speed, end-system resources, even browser technology is all out of your hands. So when you do have the opportunity to influence your project’s infrastructure, you should seize it. The world’s fastest muscle car can’t perform at its best when traffic is gridlocked bumper to bumper; likewise, the most finely...

Don’t drop the ball on these website design trends for the new year. All of the trends featured here this month are visual in nature – not as many user interface elements as previous months, but all just as stunning and usable. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. 1. 3D Scenes on White (Light) Three-dimensional scenes are not just a trend this month but are likely to be one of the biggest website design trends that you see all year....

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. 10 Free...

Over the years, experts have repeatedly discussed the possible impact of mixed realities on web design. Concepts like AR and VR are expected to have the potential to change the way that we interact with websites on a fundamental level. Now that we’re in the year 2021, however, discussions about AR aren’t just observational anymore. The age of mixed-reality interfaces is here, in everything from Pokémon Go, to Snapchat filters. The question...

Google Fonts is one of the most useful tools designers have, with hundreds of amazing fonts provided for free. But if you just grab one of the top ten suggestions, you’re missing out on a vast wealth of typographic gems. Just about every font on Google Fonts is worth trying out, but the very best designs — designs that engage, inspire, and delight — combine two or more fonts. It’s the same principle as sweet and sour; two competing tastes...

2020 has been one of the most memorable years in our history. Few of us have been alive long enough to experience a more turbulent time. But throughout the year, we saw design respond to challenging events with positivity, color, and a desire to elevate those people and projects working to make the world better. As we head into 2021, there’s no denying that 2020 has changed our outlook on life and marked a major turning point in web design trends....

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Minimal...

Naturally, there are bad clients out there, but 90% of the time, it’s not really the client who is at fault. Poor communication, a lack of setting expectations, and a failure to qualify clients beforehand is usually the problem. If you’re dealing with a problematic client, there’s usually not a lot you can do to ‘fix’ things — you should focus on finishing the project as well as you can. However, what you can do is ensure this situation...