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....

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...

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...

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....

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,...

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...

Every week users submit incredible stories to our sister-site Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and then post it for us to relish. If you want to keep up with the latest news for web designers, the best way is to check out the Webdesigner News site. However, if you missed a day, here’s a useful compilation of the top curated stories from the past week. Enjoy! 3 Essential Design Trends, February...

How you present yourself as a designer, the core skills you nurture, the type of work you take on all contribute to a creative career you enjoy. With various roles to choose from — and an exponentially greater number of job titles — how do you know what kind of design path suits your personality? We’ve put together this fun quiz to help you identify your key personality traits, the skills you should work on in 2021, and the type of designer you...

The CMO at Twitter, Leslie Berland, has announced a substantial rebrand intended to reflect the experience of using the site. The move was announced on the platform first and later confirmed on its blog. Twitter hopes the visual identity will “fully reflect the complexity, fluidity, and power of the conversations today.” The instantly recognizable bird logomark stays, as does the inoffensive tech-blue. But everything else has been...