Popular Design News of the Week: March 1, 2021 – March 7, 2021

The constituent parts of a typeface design have some bizarre names. Any ideas what a beak might be? How about a crotch? Take our fun quiz and find out how well you know typeface anatomy. Featured image via Unsplash....

Advertising knows you better than your friends, better than your family, perhaps even better than your partner. Look up pizza recipes, and advertising will show you promotions for pizza ovens. Download a marathon training plan, and advertising will show you the latest running shoes. Buy a car, and advertising will show you adverts for other cars because no system’s perfect. Advertising does this with a simple trick: it watches you constantly....

Stock images are an essential tool for anyone working with clients who can’t afford to hire a photographer for a bespoke shoot, and with the cost of photography shoots running into thousands of dollars, that’s most clients. Last month we looked at the 10 Best Free Stock Image Sites for 2021, and this month we’re focusing on the premium end of the market. Paying for stock doesn’t guarantee that you’re getting a higher quality product...

Proxima Vara, a variable font version of the enormously popular Proxima Nova type family, has just been released. Designers love Proxima Nova for the simplicity of its letterforms, its wonderful rhythm, and its generous x-height that all combine to produce a highly legible, modern typeface — that also happens to be cheaper to deploy than many similar designs. The variable version allows designers to tweak the weight from 100–900, the...

D&AD Shift is a free design school program for creatives over the age of 18, who do not already have a degree-level qualification. It’s been running since 2016 and is a 12-week program led by successful industry professionals. Until now, D&AD Shift has been running courses in New York and London, but it has announced that thanks to a partnership with Google, it will be rolling out the program to cities worldwide; the expansion also...

March is that time of year where the feeling of newness starts, from the first Spring days to fresh design projects. These trends are no exception, with fun new takes on some classic concepts. Circles are always popular, but the top trend is an animated take on the traditional element; plus, fun pink and purple color palettes and a few faux split screen designs round out trending styles. Here’s what’s trending in design this month. Circle...

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...

Design is on a loop; it goes round and round, repeating the same ideas, and revisiting the same problems. If you want to know what will happen in design tomorrow, take a look at yesterday. This week’s quiz is a jaunt through the history of design. Do you know which typeface was chosen for the American Declaration of Independence? How about the location of the first design museum? Can you attach the design motto to the designer? Take the quiz and...

There are many reasons you might be wanting to improve your design skills this year. Perhaps you have extra time on your hands and want to put it to good use. Or maybe you’re new to web design and finding that there’s a lot you still don’t know how to do. It could also be that you recognize that the web is changing, and your skills could use some refreshing to keep up. Whatever the reason, there are many ways to level up your web design skills in 2021....

If you like to build websites with WordPress, then you’re in for a treat. Now, for the first time, you don’t need to know how to code to use Google’s popular Material Design system on your WordPress website; the web giant has released a WordPress plugin and theme to import its colors, icons, UI elements, and typography straight into your CMS. Google already provided a set of tools for generating Material Design themes, but until now you...

It’s February, and the spring sun is finally starting to peep through the winter clouds. While many of us are still largely restricted to our homes, the web has kept on growing. We see a shift in attitude towards natural health, wellbeing, and sustainability, and these are now being branded less often as outliers and increasingly mainstream. We’re also seeing more and more color all the time, ranging from an emotional signifier in the background...

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...

UX principles guide many of our decisions when we design and build sites and apps. Understanding UX principles doesn’t mean you can dodge your own testing, but they do give you a head start. Often named for the researcher who identified a particular truth, or pattern, these laws are the product of hundreds, and sometimes thousands of hours of lab and field-based research. How well do you know these UX laws? We’ll start you off with an easy...

Since the skeuomorphism of the early 00s, the design trend of choice has been minimalism. In fact, minimalism has been de rigueur for substantially longer than that. You can make a fair case that minimalism was the defining theme of the 20th century. Beginning with the widespread adoption of grotesque typefaces in mass advertising the century before, continuing through the less-is-more philosophies of the middle part of the century, and...

When photographers take images to sell commercially, like every other business, they want to maximize their returns, so they adapt their ideas to meet commercial trends. As a result, stock always looks like stock, and that minor deception introduces a small amount of doubt in users. But the rise of camera phones, and the increasing affordability of DSLRs, has led to a growth in people who aren’t monetizing every shot. What that means is if...

Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat has developed a variable font, that is designed to make the effects of human-driven climate change tangible in a simple graphical form. Whereas most type designers use variable font techniques to embed a range of weights in a single font file, the team — lead by Helsingin Sanomat’s art director Tuomas Jääskeläinen, and typographer Eino Korkala — used the technique to “melt” the typeface....

There are some interesting shake-ups on the horizon for ecommerce: Experiential shopping, Virt-ical worlds, Au naturale models. We’re starting to see signs of them already — many of them spurred on thanks to the events of 2020. Below, we’re going to explore what’s going on with these new ecommerce trends and technologies and take a look at a bunch of sites that are setting really cool examples for each. 1. Experiential Shopping With...

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. Google’s...

What is WordPress? It began as a simple CMS for building a blog, and it has evolved over the years into a complex ecosystem of tools and resources. WordPress can power ecommerce sites, interactive courses, art projects, and of course, it powers one or two blogs. Depending on who you ask, WordPress powers between 35% and 40% of the entire web; that makes it one of the most important technologies of the web era. Best of all, it’s free and open-source,...

This article is brought to you by 4Kdownload.com, a suite of video tools that help you make the most of YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, and many more popular resources. YouTube isn’t just for videos of cats snowboarding; it’s also a treasure trove of design tips, freebies, how-tos, career advice, and all-around creative inspiration. Whether you’re a seasoned design veteran or just taking the first steps along a creative career, there...

When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally. Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts...

One of the few bright spots in 2020 has been the creativity companies and individuals alike have exhibited in dealing with what, at times, seemed to be overwhelming problems. The world of web design was no different. Designers and agencies had to adapt and implement new color schemes or design new shopping experiences, which made some of the previous design trends not fit for the current design problems. We’ll take a look at these newest design...