It’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce store and start selling. There are a dizzying array of ecommerce solutions available in 2021, and most are feature-rich and competitively priced. Ecommerce sites are notoriously difficult to migrate from platform to platform, so more often than not, you’ll be committed to your chosen solution for years. The key when choosing an ecommerce solution to maximize your return on investment, is...

The Beazley Design of the Year for 2020 has just been awarded to US architecture firm Rael San Fratello & Colectivo Chopeke for their Teeter-Totter Wall project, a series of luminous pink seesaws built into the US-Mexico border wall in July 2019. The 74 shortlisted entrants for the prize range from a poster for vegan burgers to a parody of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Most were self-consciously political. As design has grown in stature,...

Burger King, the globally recognized food chain with 19,000 restaurants worldwide, has unveiled a redesigned set of brand assets. Since the late 1960s, the company has used a logotype sandwiched between two buns. In 1999 the design was updated to add a blue swoosh and some plastic highlights to the bun; Jones Knowles Ritchie’s new design reverts to the classic 1969 approach, with some modern refinements. Left: The 1999 design, Right: JKR’s...

The start of the year is always a good time to reassess priorities and consider new approaches, but 2021 is more of a reset than we expected this time last year. 2020 is unlikely to go down in anyone’s autobiography as the best year of their life, but it has done something positive: it’s prepared the ground for rapid change in the next 12 months. More than any other year in our lifetimes, 2021 is set to be revolutionary, with emerging trends that...

It’s that time again: the self-fulfilling prophecy that is the Pantone Color of the Year has been announced for 2021. For 2021, we’re getting two colors of the year. The colors selected to grace museum gift shops, and end-of-year blog posts are Ultimate Gray (a mid-range gray somewhere around #939597) and Illuminating (a citrus yellow that’s approximately #F5DF4D). A marriage of color conveying a message of strength and hopefulness...

The transitioning of power is fraught with difficulties. Different teams have different values, different experience, different expertise, different priorities, and that leads to different tooling, and different methodologies. It’s tempting to think of web design as an end-to-end process, starting with research and concluding with metrics. The reality is that most designers and developers join projects part-way through an ongoing...

I think of a creative practice as a combination of an approach (a design philosophy) and a series of techniques (craft skills); a good tool facilitates a technique, which in turn supports an approach. It wasn’t until I sat down to write a list of tools I can’t design without, that I realized just how many tools I rely on as an integral part of my creative process. The danger of tools is that they promote certain techniques, and that bias can alter...

Whether Adobe’s focus on collaboration and remote-working was prescient long-term thinking, or if this direction of development is a reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic is unclear; what is clear is that the timing of this release is ideal for the new work environment we find ourselves in. Adobe CC June Update Highlights Adobe’s move from an 18-month release cycle, to multiple releases per year thins out the excitement surrounding these...

It’s April Fools’ Day, and each year on the 1st of April we normally join the rest of the world in posting a humorous, and entirely fictitious story. But this year, we decided to go a different way. These aren’t normal times. Around the world, millions of people are struggling with the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak. Many people have lost family members, and many more are struggling to support themselves and their families....

Each year, at this time, Pantone nominates a color — or colors, in the case of 2016 — to represent humanity’s hopes and aspirations for the coming year. At least, that is what its PR department sends out. In reality, it’s a rather obvious — if highly effective — marketing gimmick to keep the print-design company relevant to design news year-on-year. It’s an arbitrary bit of self-promotion, that does an excellent job of reinforcing...

After months of extensive testing, the new design is a confident, and positive change for one of the web’s biggest names, albeit with some controversy that is bound to cause a ruckus. If you’d like to be among the first to have an opinion, you can opt-in right now, or Twitter will opt-in for you in the coming days, because this change is mandatory. Twitter’s life began as a deliberately stripped down social network, in the same way that Google...

Back in April, jQuery 3.4 was released with all the pomp and ceremony of a British monarch on the 4th of July (happy Independence Day to all our American readers). There have been a flurry of minor releases since then, with the current version being 3.4.1. We’ve had a few weeks to poke around, and check out the new features, and more importantly the now deprecated features. What we found was a modern library that defied a few of our expectations....

I work out of a small office in a co-working environment. Next to my dedicated space is a hot-desking area used primarily for video conferencing. Thanks to a bank of west-facing windows, an overenthusiastic heating policy, and unseasonably hot weather, meetings are often conducted with the doors open, and it’s then that I overhear some of the most engrossing insights into the minds of both clients and designers, that I’ve ever encountered....

Firefox’s mobile browser’s nightly release has become the first browser to implement a left-handed option in its preferences. First proposed at the then bi-annual web conference, way back in 1998, the left-handed web protocol was initially envisaged as a way to enable left-handed browsing online. The protocol was never officially adopted, thanks to ambidextrous hardware. However, the rise of the touch screens has lead to an unexpected...