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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We tend not to think about it, but the Internet has a physical dimension. It’s a complex network of wires, cables, servers, and technical odds and ends — if you really want to, you can track it down; doing so is particularly easy on small islands because there tends to be a single cable tethering the region to the wider world. Those physical cables run all the way to your building, and although an ISP manages them, they are normally rented from...

A domain name is an essential element of every project, product, and company. It’s central to a brand and has a disproportionately large impact on user experience. Not only that, but it also impacts SEO and ultimately revenue. Domain names are also one of the most commonly retailed elements in web technology, with most designers hoarding a small empire’s worth of domain names “just in case” the right side-project comes along. Because...

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...

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....