Comics for Designers #441

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...

We all get excited about new projects; we're daydreaming about possibilities from the first contact with a potential client. Most professionals have an established onboarding process, with contracts to sign and business assets to acquire; if you’re a coder, you probably set up a fresh new repository; if you’re a designer, you create a new project folder. All of us start imagining how the case study will look in our portfolio. But few,...

Web design is an ever-evolving field. Those of us that have been in the industry a long time (i.e., six months plus) have seen the launch of more products, the establishment of more ideas, and the promise of more growth than most industries see over a whole career. While the tools we use, the terminology we employ, and the goalposts we shoot for are constantly changing, core skills are transferable and long-lasting and will ensure you not only...

The best thing about writing about website design trends each month is looking at all the great sites that are being developed. Designers are stretching creatively and exploring new techniques and ways of doing things all the time. It’s refreshing and inspiring. This month, some of those trends include a style that nods to brutalism, slide scrolling that’s interesting and fresh, and animated typography. Here’s what’s trending...

Everyday 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...

[-- For those that didn’t spot it: this post was an April Fools joke, no one can track you by the way you type! --] This week Google announced further details of its plan to remove cookies from ad tracking. The strategy, which the ad giant expects to be fully implemented by 2022, has come about due to increasingly stringent privacy laws in a growing number of territories around the globe. Google’s first step was the announcement in January of...

As a web designer, you face plenty of challenges, both good and bad. One of the bad ones is to suddenly find out that you’re either in danger of missing a client’s deadline or will be unable to meet it at all. A missed deadline could be due to something beyond your control and no fault of your own. There are measures you can take to avoid what you do have control over. Such as not having the right design tool or design resources to do a task that has to...

Who is Grammarly for? Can a grammar checking tool like Grammarly replace a human editor and proofreader? Is the Grammarly checker worth it? Are the Grammarly free checks sufficient for me, or should I upgrade to Grammarly Premium? Should I install Grammarly on Chrome? How effective is Grammarly for Word? Is downloading the Grammarly desktop app worth it? You have questions…all of which we’re going to answer. I have been using Grammarly...

Everyday 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...

For many, SEO is more of an art than a science, a mysterious process in which a tiny tweak to a site’s code can propel it to page one of Google or send it plummeting to the depths of page 50. Myths abound, but the answers are readily available if you know where to look. How much do you know about SEO? Let’s find out! ...

ITF (the Indian Type Foundry) has launched a brand new font service to bring beautiful typography to every business for free. The service, named Fontshare, will be familiar to anyone who has used Google Fonts. Browse the fonts list, pick out the styles you want, and add them to your site. It’s a well-designed site; there are several options for browsing, list or grid views, editable sample text, and even a type layout tester. There are two embedding...

Illustration is a big trend in 2021. Every designer should have some ability to illustrate, whether that’s producing icons, creating lettering, mocking up layouts, or crafting full-blown illustrations. Designers’ workflows are as varied as their work, and one designer’s favorite tool is a frustrating mess to the next designer. Most design apps have a free trial, so it’s worth trying out a few before committing. Counting down...

This month’s collection of the best new websites launched or updated in the last four weeks features color, and more color, and then — just for good measure — a bit more color. Yellow is a hue of choice, but you’ll also find burnt orange, rich purples, and greens and blues in equal measure. What is missing is the tech-blue of years past, replaced with something altogether more Mediterranean. Enjoy! Cevitxef This site for Cevitxef ceviche...

Everyday 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...

It’s Friday, and we wanted to have a little fun with a design test that might make you go cross-eyed. Here are ten images, each with a dot in the middle of another shape — a square, a circle, or maybe something trickier. Can you tell with a glance if the dot is in the exact center of the shape? See how many you can get right; pathetically easy or fiendishly difficult? You decide! ...

So, really, you’re in the business of designing websites for your clients’ audiences. But how do you ensure you get it right? You could take what your client tells you at face value, but that’s only going to scrape the surface of who their audience is. What you need to do is figure out how consumers think and why they respond to websites the way they do. A lot of this is already explained to us by psychology principles. Once you memorize them,...

We’ve been big fans of Ghost since it first launched via a Kickstarter campaign way back in 2013. Ghost 4.0 has just been released, and the host of new features is another giant leap forward for the popular blogging platform. The content management space is one of the most crowded for startups; there are traditional CMS, headless CMS, site builders, and the omnipresent WordPress, which, if current trends persist, will power 729% of the web...