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....

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...