NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use links for URLs, use buttons for events and actions; use semantic HTML instead of divs everywhere; use variable fonts… the list went on and on. But, I finally settled on a single, practical thing that people can do to make their website better:

Increase your reach.

Increase the reach of your website by making it more usable for a wider audience of people. Yes, I’m talking about accessibility. But I bet you already guessed that. After all, I tend to speak about accessibility quite a bit, and tweet about accessibility even more than that, and sometimes even make handy examples on CodePen to provide practical examples.

However, when I’m talking about reach, I am not just talking about people who are blind and rely on assistive technology—such as screen readers—to do their banking or pay their utility bills. I’m not just talking about people who are deaf who need captions on videos. I’m not just talking about people who are colorblind, who need color contrast so they can see what is on the page. Sure, this is where our minds automatically go when we think about accessibility, but I want us to think beyond that.

The choice of typeface is one of the most critical factors in any design; it gives the text its voice. It can be desperately frustrating to find the right voice for your project, only to discover it’s outside your client’s budget.

Who doesn’t love a free font? There’s no question that something for nothing is an attractive proposition. When it comes to fonts, the problem is that high-quality fonts require months, sometimes years of work; high-quality fonts are expensive to produce; as a result, many free fonts have to cut corners.

However, decreasing costs for font design software and an open-source culture is making the industry more accessible, leading to hundreds of free fonts as good, if not better, than their premium rivals.

The challenge for designers is where to look. The solution is Typewolf’s Definitive Guide to Free Fonts. This tremendous, 107 page PDF covers everything you need to know to find the best, high-quality free fonts on the web.

Typewolf is one of the most trusted names in digital typography, with an excellent track record of educational guides; you can be sure the suggestions in this guide are second to none.

The guide is split into four sections:

• Section one covers the closest free alternative to every font on Typewolf. The free alternatives list focuses on the popular, and in many cases, the most expensive fonts used by professional designers. That means you’ll have access to over 1,000 recommendations, all listed alphabetically for easy look-ups. Simply find the premium font you want, and you’ll find the closest free font available listed alongside it. In many cases, there are multiple suggestions to give you some agency.
• Google Fonts is an excellent source of free fonts, but its own recommendations are weak. So the second section of the guide is dedicated to the ten best serif and sans-serif combinations on Google Fonts. The best serif and sans-serif combinations include visual examples, and explanations of why these typefaces complement each other, so you don’t find yourself designing in the dark. This section is excellent for anyone who’s unsure where to start with free fonts and needs to identify an effective pairing quickly.
• As good as Google Fonts is, it’s not the only source of free fonts, and if you only look there, you’ll miss out on some real gems. That’s why section three of this guide introduces the 40 best free fonts that aren’t on Google Fonts. Each font listed is carefully presented to preview it at display and body sizes.
• Lastly, to finish off this excellent ebook are the ten best free “hipster” fonts. You know the ones: they’re perfect for coffee shops, small-batch brewers, tattoo parlors, and anywhere Rockabilly is still in style.

All told, there are enough recommendations in this guide to last you an entire career. So no matter what you’re looking for, whether it’s a free version of a particular typographic voice or some fresh inspiration, you’ll find it in this essential ebook.

What’s more, you’ll receive lifetime updates for free. With new content added weekly, this ebook will be a source of knowledge and inspiration you return to again and again. Lifetime access means you can re-download the guide every time you have a project that needs free fonts. You’ll also get access to an exclusive section of Typewolf that showcases only free fonts, so you can see how free fonts can be used well.

Every good designer understands the value of high-quality typography, but not every project has the budget to allow you to use premium fonts from top type foundries. This guide helps you leap that hurdle by offering carefully selected, free alternatives. If you’re new to the world of typography, this helpful guide will give you some practical insight on how to locate free fonts for use in your design work.

This guide will save you hours trying to find the suitable typeface for your project, as well as introduce you to some excellent designs that you might not have considered.

You can download Typewolf’s Definitive Guide to Free Fonts today for the bargain price of $39. You could even gift it to the typophile in your life.

Source

The post Typewolf’s Definitive Guide to Free Fonts first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Designing effective ads that attract attention can be tough in a crowded market where your target audience gets bombarded by millions of marketing messages every day.

To stand out, you need to show your unique value proposition and your brand in an eye-catching way.

Use proven strategies like design principles to direct the viewer’s eyes and ensure easy scannability. Your ads only get a glimpse from your audience before they decide whether they’re going to take a closer look. 

Simplicity is key but that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with colors, font styles, or composition. The end result should be an ad design that quickly reels in your customers and makes them want to take action.

Here are seven design principles to help you create more effective ads:

Structure Your Ad with Visual Hierarchy in Mind

When you first lay all elements of your ad out like the logo, copy, image, and a clear call to action, think about structure and composition. Make sure the most important elements of your ad design stand out first before the eyes of your target audience move on to the next element.

Keep the natural reading order in mind from top to bottom and left to right. The rule of thirds, which is commonly used in photography, is also a useful tool here. Divide your design into a grid of nine rectangles and place the elements you want to attract the most attention to in the central box or as close to the top left intersection as possible.

Depending on how you’re going to publish your ad, consider different arrangements as you adjust your display ads for different formats or blow up your ad for a billboard campaign. To create a successful visual hierarchy, remember to direct your audience’s eyes through your design and towards your call to action.

If you’re using photos of a person in your ads, a pro tip is to use the gaze of the model as viewers automatically follow it to where you want them to look.

Use Lines to Create Focus

Depending on the types of lines you’re using in your ad design, you can convey order, movement, or tension. Use straight lines to make your design look professional and neat, wavy lines to evoke motion, or zig-zag lines to create excitement.

Leading lines help direct the eyes towards the focal point in your design. These lines can be shapes or other graphic elements in your ad that lead your audience to look at the product you’re promoting.

Evoke Emotions with Color

Through the story you’re going to tell or the key message you want to get across, your ad provokes an emotional response. Color in your design is a big part of that, as it’s tied to and can be used to convey feelings.

Look into the psychology of colors to find out which fit best with the emotions you want your audience to feel when they look at your advertisement. Experiment with a mix of color aesthetics and backgrounds to see how they work together.

Color schemes are also crucial for branding your ads. Make sure you use the brand colors associated with your business to create easily recognizable creatives. This way your ads look professional and build trust.

Ensure Easy Readability with the Right Typeface

An eye-catching ad also comes down to the copy that attracts interest but before the brain even starts reading the eyes notice the font size and style. Choosing a typeface that attracts attention to your copy is an important part of your ad design. To make your design more effective and avoid overwhelming viewers, never use more than two fonts.

Your number one criteria for choosing a font style should be readability. Ads need to be easily scannable to enable your customers to take in your message within seconds. If you’re using established brand fonts, create interest by playing with colors, size, and positioning when working on your design.

Make Your Ad Stand Out By Using Contrast

Contrast is a powerful design tool to make your ad stand out. Use it wisely to create space and differences between your graphic elements. This can range from using contrasting colors to playing with the weights and sizes of your chosen fonts.

Using contrast, you can create different meanings within your ad, define foreground and background, or help show the focus of your design. For example, one shape or image might be larger than the other and use more dominant colors to carry meaning or show the order of importance.

Apply Simplicity to Your Ad Design

You only have a few seconds to capture attention with your ad, so it’s best to keep it simple rather than hit your audience with an overcrowded design. For example, your ad can be as simple as an image with text and a logo. 

There’s also no need for an elaborate product photoshoot when you can use eye-catching and royalty-free images. Just choose a photo that fits with your brand and helps convey the key message you want to get across with your advertisement. Apply your creative design skills and branding to make it your own. 

A simple ad design shows your unique value proposition and call to action clearly without any other distracting elements. Don’t try to get everything about your brand into one ad but narrow it down to a single purpose for your ad campaign that helps you to stay focused.

Create Balance By Controlling Space

Depending on the goal of your ad campaign, you have the options of crafting a balanced design to evoke harmony or an unbalanced design to create tension. To explore balance, experiment with various elements of your design like positioning, color compatibility, shapes, or white space.

Balance helps you find where your design might be too cluttered. If there’s too much going on, see how you can apply more white space to give other elements more room to breathe. Creating empty spaces might seem counterintuitive at first but if there are too many elements huddled together, it can cause confusion.

---

Although ad design should be simple, there’s plenty of room to experiment with different elements and use design principles to guide you. Visual hierarchy and lines help to create focus. Figure out which colors are best to use to evoke the right emotions for your ad campaign by referring back to color psychology.

Apply contrast to make elements of your ad and the entire creative stand out. Introduce white space to your design to keep it simple and make your ad easily scannable. Using these design principles helps you create more effective ads that guide your customers through your ad and towards your call to action.

The post 7 Design Principles to Leverage in Your Advertising appeared first on noupe.

Designing effective ads that attract attention can be tough in a crowded market where your target audience gets bombarded by millions of marketing messages every day.

To stand out, you need to show your unique value proposition and your brand in an eye-catching way.

Use proven strategies like design principles to direct the viewer’s eyes and ensure easy scannability. Your ads only get a glimpse from your audience before they decide whether they’re going to take a closer look. 

Simplicity is key but that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with colors, font styles, or composition. The end result should be an ad design that quickly reels in your customers and makes them want to take action.

Here are seven design principles to help you create more effective ads:

Structure Your Ad with Visual Hierarchy in Mind

When you first lay all elements of your ad out like the logo, copy, image, and a clear call to action, think about structure and composition. Make sure the most important elements of your ad design stand out first before the eyes of your target audience move on to the next element.

Keep the natural reading order in mind from top to bottom and left to right. The rule of thirds, which is commonly used in photography, is also a useful tool here. Divide your design into a grid of nine rectangles and place the elements you want to attract the most attention to in the central box or as close to the top left intersection as possible.

Depending on how you’re going to publish your ad, consider different arrangements as you adjust your display ads for different formats or blow up your ad for a billboard campaign. To create a successful visual hierarchy, remember to direct your audience’s eyes through your design and towards your call to action.

If you’re using photos of a person in your ads, a pro tip is to use the gaze of the model as viewers automatically follow it to where you want them to look.

Use Lines to Create Focus

Depending on the types of lines you’re using in your ad design, you can convey order, movement, or tension. Use straight lines to make your design look professional and neat, wavy lines to evoke motion, or zig-zag lines to create excitement.

Leading lines help direct the eyes towards the focal point in your design. These lines can be shapes or other graphic elements in your ad that lead your audience to look at the product you’re promoting.

Evoke Emotions with Color

Through the story you’re going to tell or the key message you want to get across, your ad provokes an emotional response. Color in your design is a big part of that, as it’s tied to and can be used to convey feelings.

Look into the psychology of colors to find out which fit best with the emotions you want your audience to feel when they look at your advertisement. Experiment with a mix of color aesthetics and backgrounds to see how they work together.

Color schemes are also crucial for branding your ads. Make sure you use the brand colors associated with your business to create easily recognizable creatives. This way your ads look professional and build trust.

Ensure Easy Readability with the Right Typeface

An eye-catching ad also comes down to the copy that attracts interest but before the brain even starts reading the eyes notice the font size and style. Choosing a typeface that attracts attention to your copy is an important part of your ad design. To make your design more effective and avoid overwhelming viewers, never use more than two fonts.

Your number one criteria for choosing a font style should be readability. Ads need to be easily scannable to enable your customers to take in your message within seconds. If you’re using established brand fonts, create interest by playing with colors, size, and positioning when working on your design.

Make Your Ad Stand Out By Using Contrast

Contrast is a powerful design tool to make your ad stand out. Use it wisely to create space and differences between your graphic elements. This can range from using contrasting colors to playing with the weights and sizes of your chosen fonts.

Using contrast, you can create different meanings within your ad, define foreground and background, or help show the focus of your design. For example, one shape or image might be larger than the other and use more dominant colors to carry meaning or show the order of importance.

Apply Simplicity to Your Ad Design

You only have a few seconds to capture attention with your ad, so it’s best to keep it simple rather than hit your audience with an overcrowded design. For example, your ad can be as simple as an image with text and a logo. 

There’s also no need for an elaborate product photoshoot when you can use eye-catching and royalty-free images. Just choose a photo that fits with your brand and helps convey the key message you want to get across with your advertisement. Apply your creative design skills and branding to make it your own. 

A simple ad design shows your unique value proposition and call to action clearly without any other distracting elements. Don’t try to get everything about your brand into one ad but narrow it down to a single purpose for your ad campaign that helps you to stay focused.

Create Balance By Controlling Space

Depending on the goal of your ad campaign, you have the options of crafting a balanced design to evoke harmony or an unbalanced design to create tension. To explore balance, experiment with various elements of your design like positioning, color compatibility, shapes, or white space.

Balance helps you find where your design might be too cluttered. If there’s too much going on, see how you can apply more white space to give other elements more room to breathe. Creating empty spaces might seem counterintuitive at first but if there are too many elements huddled together, it can cause confusion.

---

Although ad design should be simple, there’s plenty of room to experiment with different elements and use design principles to guide you. Visual hierarchy and lines help to create focus. Figure out which colors are best to use to evoke the right emotions for your ad campaign by referring back to color psychology.

Apply contrast to make elements of your ad and the entire creative stand out. Introduce white space to your design to keep it simple and make your ad easily scannable. Using these design principles helps you create more effective ads that guide your customers through your ad and towards your call to action.

The post 7 Design Principles to Leverage in Your Advertising appeared first on noupe.

1. Does shadow DOM improve style performance? — Nolan Lawson covers how, because of the inherent encapsulation of the shadow DOM, the styling gets applied a bit faster than it would if those styling rules were relevant to the entire page. But as ever, it depends, and it turns out that classes and IDs are actually faster outside of it (?!), so if you just style with those, that’s the way to go.
2. HTML-first, JavaScript last: the secret to web speed! — Miško Hevery is talking about Qwik and one of the things that makes it fast. I don’t know much about Qwik, but it looks like a JavaScript framework that is pretty SSR-friendly as it keeps state directly in the HTML/DOM (e.g. div ::app-state="./AppState" app-state:1234="{count: 321}">), which you would think is slow, but apparently isn’t.
3. Small Bundles, Fast Pages: What To Do With Too Much JavaScript — Some thoughts from Ben Schwarz on what to do with those problematic big bundles. Make ’em smaller is the main game, then constantly keep an eye on them.
4. Getting Your head Straight: A New CSS Performance Diagnostics Snippet — We covered Harry’s super clever snippet a while back, but Vitaly had beaten us to it and it’s worth re-sharing because it’s awfully cool.
5. New HTTP standards for caching on the modern web — Tim Perry gets into two brand new (proposed) caching headers: Cache-Status and Targetted Cache-Control. “These are designed to update HTTP standards to match the reality of the CDN-powered web that exists today, creating specifications that formalize existing practices from popular CDNs.” Feels like good stuff where web standards can come in and fix up a gnarly situation.
6. Optimizing resource loading with Priority Hints — Leena Sohoni, Addy Osmani, and Patrick Meenan talk about the Priority Hints…. uh… I’d call it an API except it’s really just an importance attribute in HTML, or a JavaScript param in other APIs. Here’s the draft spec. It’s one of those things, like responsive images with srcset/sizes or will-change, where you, the-author, know more than the browser does and allows you to give the browser information it needs to perform better.
7. Have Core Web Vitals made the web faster? — CWVs were announced in May 2020 and then we were told by May 2021 they would become a factor in SEO. Barry Pollard checks in to see if that big carrot (or stick?) has enticed us all to make sites faster en masse. The answer is complicated because the way CWVs are measured has changed in that time. Some measurements say yes, things are better. But if you use steady alternate measurements from before/after, things look worse. I all depends on what slice of the web you’re looking at.
8. Improving performance with Islands Architecture and PostCSS — Astro has a cool feature for components—like —where that element isn’t loaded at all unless that media query matches. I might argue that’s only a good idea if it’s a heavy component or has JavaScript it requires. I say that because it seems like using it for something like static HTML would actually offset any potential savings, as extra JavaScript has to run to test the media conditions and then conditionally fetch assets. But anyway, Oliver Turner demonstrates how to share the media queries between your JavaScript and CSS (via PostCSS).
9. Image Optimizer — This is an Electron-powered (but macOS only) drag-and-drop image optimizer. Like ImageOptim, I suppose. Both are free.

When I was working at my first “real” job in the field in the mid-2000s, it was hammered in the web dev field to build tiny websites (no more than 100KB per page), only use JavaScript for special effects, and make sure everything—from images to Flash content—has a fallback so that JavaScript features progressively enhance. If there was no JavaScript, the site still works 100%, only not as fancy.

The reason for this advice was simple: in the early days of the web, everyone was limited to a dial-up Internet connection which was really slow. Shoot, it took a few minutes just to connect to the Internet, let alone access a website. Hit the “Connect” button and go make some coffee or grab a smoke because it is literally going to take a few minutes. So, in that sense, it’s perfectly reasonable that the key principles of building a good website in the mid-2000s involved making the site small with solid fallbacks for content.

I miss those days a lot. In my opinion, those constraints made the web better. But, as time wears on and the service provider technology continues to improve in the U.S. with broadband (and eventually fiber), the constraints are no longer viewed as an issue anymore.

Today, the rules of web development are completely different. It’s more about the developer experience and less about the user experience: build processes, deciding which framework and tech stack is used, and figuring out where the site lands in Google search results. Sadly, gatekeeping (i.e. you’re not a real “x” if you don’t “y”) and framework battles have replaced the “how to make this cool thing without JavaScript” conversations. I really don’t pay attention to this stuff because, at the end of the day, it all renders down to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the browser; use whatever works for you.

What does bother me, though, is the fact that huge sites that require JavaScript just to use have become the accepted norm. Current stats show websites are weighing in at an average of—big gulp—2MB per page?! And, if you do not have JavaScript enabled, be prepared for the blizzard (that’s what I call sites that only display a white screen).

JavaScript has become a third pillar of the web. I know JavaScript is super useful, so why am I picking on it? I’m picking on the fact that a lot of sites can’t even load if the JavaScript is not there. Since when did loading HTML and CSS rely on JavaScript?

I recently moved to a rural area on the outskirts of a major city, and I’m reminded of those early web dev days because, once again, I have a horrible Internet connection on my mobile device. The broadband connection is okay, but when I’m outside or the power goes out, I’m left with the same old slow experience of the dial-up days. When I’m browsing the web on my mobile device, I live for Reader Mode and I have to turn off things like JavaScript (and most images, compliments of JavaScript lazy loading) because it is too much to download and run. But, just by switching off JavaScript, a lot of sites won’t even load. The white screen of death is not the result of my phone dying; it’s my access to the Internet. And this white screen appears on site after site, hence the blizzard.

For the most part, I can get by using my WiFi in the house to do necessary Internet things, like working, shopping, and paying bills. But, late this summer, my electricity went out. So, I went to the electric company’s website on my mobile device to see when service might be back on because the entire house runs on electricity and I need to know if we need to make arrangements for things, like food and water. But, the electric company’s mobile website is large (3MB transferred and 8.6MB in resources — ouch) and won’t load (even with JavaScript enabled).

Angry, I went to Twitter and posted my outrage.

It should be required for utility (electricity) services to offer a JS-free experience.

Power outage in the sticks means no WiFi and barely, if any, cell signal.

Please consider always offering a simple html-only experience for people if you make the sites for such services.

— Heather (@_hmig) August 29, 2021

I got some pretty awesome responses showing me that some sites actually do handle constraints really well, like traintimes.org.uk and the text-only version of NPR. YES! Why don’t they provide a text-only version of the outage page so when people actually need that page of the site, they can use it even when the conditions are the worst?

My power-outage scenario is a one-off type of situation, but there are people across the U.S. and the entire world who live with unreliable Internet because there is no other option available to them. NPR published an article covering the struggles of trying to teach students during the pandemic in areas where communities have unreliable Internet and it’s hard to believe that this is the current state of Internet availability in any part of the U.S. But, the fact remains that it is.

It’s clear a lot of people would benefit from the constraints of the early days of web development. The beauty of websites built before broadband networks were available (like the infamous Space Jam site from 1996) is that they can load on any kind of device from anywhere under almost any circumstances because they were built with these constraints in mind. Hopefully, all developers start employing an adaptive loading strategy that provide solutions for users on slow networks or low-end devices.

2021 has been both memorable and instantly forgettable. Pop stars were freed from modern-day servitude, some people tried to overthrow democracy, and we all vacationed at home.

Despite the weirdness of the times, the web kept growing, kept changing, and kept on pushing boundaries. We saw a wealth of new sites launch or relaunch with significant updates.

Here are the 50 best sites launched on the web this year. Enjoy!

Crusta C

In April, seafood company Crusta C cleverly used the simple logomark ‘C’ to apply a cutout video effect.

Slow

Slow is a collective of creatives aiming to implement slow movement principles. Its site reflects those aims, creating a sense of calm and deliberation.

hnst

2021 saw tons of brutalist-inspired design. hnst’s take on the style works thanks to the bright red in place of the standard black.

Marram

This site for boutique hotel Marram uses a soft color palette to create an impression of soft golden light and calm.

Levitate

In July, we loved this site for running-blade brand Levitate. The site is clean and light, with a sense of inherent motion in the photography.

Niarra Travel

There’s some beautiful photography on this site for eco-conscious, bespoke travel agency Niarra Travel.

Plunt.co

The core of this site for Plúnt is a combination chooser which feels pleasingly reminiscent of an animal flipbook.

Moth Drinks

Moth makes classic cocktails in a can. The striking black and white graphics and masking effects for its holding page stunned us back in March.

Seed

Selling supplements is hard; people are understandably skeptical. So this site for Seed packs in research and scientific information and avoids the hard-sell.

Wavemaker

Another excellent portfolio site in 2021, this time for creative media agency Wavemaker. The site is uber-confident while still being playful.

Wild Souls

Wild Souls makes nut butters, tahini, and other Greek delicacies. Its site is colorful and warm, and the site typography is soft and appealing.

JUST Egg

JUST Egg produces egg-like food from plant material. The huge photography and bold typography do a great job of making a new concept appealing.

Aalto University

One of the most popular designs of 2021 was Aalto University’s site with its in-depth campus tour. The simple navigation inspired several imitators.

Wisr

Scroll interactions were big in 2021, and Wisr features a Heath Robinson-style machine that ‘runs’ as the user scrolls down the page.

Cevitxef

This site for Cevitxef ceviche restaurant in Bilbao does a great job of making us hungry. Drama is created by oversized text, heavily-styled photography, and lots of movement.

On

The best digital agencies keep their own sites simple, like this site for On digital technology studio that uses black on light blue and adds infinite scrolling.

Acayaba + Rosenberg

We found Acayaba + Rosenberg’s use of architectural photography and subtle scrolling a pleasing browsing experience.

Madre

This site for home linen company Madre uses extraordinary fine-art style still-life photography to enrich a very simple site.

Hyperframe

“Show, don’t tell” is a well-worn mantra. Hyperframe’s site implements it by demonstrating the product’s major selling point on scroll.

Gemini

This exceptional WebGL experiment was built to show what’s possible in the technology. Have a play with the car; it’s a ground-breaking demo.

Felt

In 2021, collaborative mapping tool Felt launched in private beta. Its excellent site does a great job of creating interest while doubling as a recruitment notice.

imNativ

Not every project is exciting, but this excellent site for imNativ uses macro photography to great effect to promote upholstery fabric.

Websmith Studio

Excellently named Websmith Studio uses color to highlight, and the noise effect applied to the background adds subtle interest.

Singita

High-quality photography and a terracotta-based color scheme create an inviting ambiance for Singita, an African eco-tourism and conservation brand.

Fluff

A fullscreen background behind a mobile view for desktop? It sounds like a horrible idea, but this site for cosmetics brand Fluff pulls it off.

Chiwawa

This great site for Chiwawa cantina features wrestling masks, skeletons, and tone-on-tone color to create a lively and distinctly Mexican site.

Nothing

This site for Nothing’s ear(1) earbuds is packed with confidence. Appropriately, it looks even better on mobile.

Chérie Healey

Lots of experts have tried to tell us how to live our lives in the last couple of years, but Chérie Healey’s site manages to stay on the right side of positive without slipping into clichés.

Wayfinder

Wayfinder, a game about our connection to nature using generative code, AI, machine learning, and data mining, could not have been more 2021 if it tried.

Green Angel Syndicate

Not too many investment groups are thought of as ethical, but Green Angel Syndicate specializes in funding companies fighting climate change.

Tether

As the days got darker in the Northern hemisphere, we were wowed by this site for Tether, a cycle safety system using video and illustration to explain its clever approach to bike safety.

Patricia Urquiola

Back in January, we loved the new site for Patricia Urquiola design studio, thanks to its bright, bold colors that we thought inspired confidence.

Headup

Headup’s businesslike approach is created thanks to a pleasing color palette and geometric graphics.

Redwood Empire

For Earth Day on April 22nd, Redwood Empire Whiskey created a microsite promoting a competition styled to match their bottle labels.

GT Super

The one-pager for GT Super has a certain drama in keeping with the font itself and allows you to play around with the size, weight, and style.

Planet of Lana

Due for release in 2022, Planet of Lana is a game from Wishfully Studios, and its teaser page launched back in June has kept us intrigued ever since.

The Longest Road Out

This charming site for The Longest Road Out is a travel map and journal based on the creators’ road trip around Britain, Ireland, and the outlying islands.

Made Thought

Made Thought has a bold aesthetic and approach that explains its outstanding client list.

Miti Navi

Miti Navi makes extraordinary sailing boats. We were attracted to how its site presented a luxury product in an original way.

La Nouvelle

Another powerful digital design agency site was La Nouvelle’s, which used a combination of contrasting and complementary color combinations to catch the eye.

Caleño

Caleño makes non-alcoholic distilled spirits. They relaunched their website in March with bright, joyful colors that reflect the character of the brand.

Capsul’in — Aluminium

This demo site for a coffee pod manufacturer isn’t a site as such, but it demonstrates that even in 2022, there’s room for parallax scrolling.

How Many Plants

Everyone needs a few more houseplants, and How Many Plants is a great guide to how to own and look after them. The illustration style is friendly but efficient.

How & How

One of the most approachable design agency sites of 2021 was How & How’s. It keeps things light and clean, and effective.

The Hiring Chain

Part of a campaign encouraging businesses to employ talented people with Down Syndrome, The Hiring Chain website dispels myths with clearly presented facts.

Virgile Guinard

Back in February, we couldn’t get enough of photographer Virgile Guinard’s portfolio site. Blocks of color pulled from each image hide the image allowing you to focus on one image at a time.

Studio Nanna Lagerman

Studio Nanna Lagermann’s site excels at creating a sense of space and calm. The color palette is soft and neutral. The type is large but clean and sophisticated.

GOOD Meat

Veganism is a growing trend, and one of the sites promoting it with gorgeous colors is this site for lab ‘grown’ meat.

Mama Joyce Peppa Sauce

This one-page site for Mama Joyce Peppa Sauce is big and bold. Click almost anywhere, and two bottles of sauce go into your cart.

Ebb Dunedin

The site bucks the trend for luxury hotel design and instead is styled to complement its interiors. We could have done with time at this boutique hotel in 2021, maybe next year…

Source

The post 50 Best Websites of 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Every day 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 a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

63 Open Source Web Development Tools

Worst UI Design Features that Should Be Avoided

Free Logos by Larkef

How to Create a Skeleton Screen Loading Effect

Plasmic – The Headless Page Builder

Exciting New Tools for Designers, Holidays 2021

Logo Design Trends 2022: The Future of Logos

The Ideal Line Length & Line Height in Web Design

An Introduction to UI Sounds

This New Font Breaks the Big, Unspoken Rule in Typefaces

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The post Popular Design News of the Week: December 13, 2021 – December 19, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Just the first sentence alone here from Stepanie Yee and Tony Chu is solid:

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

And what follows is one of those two-column “scrollytelling” websites that does an incredible job at demystifying a concept. How the classification gets built out into a decision tree makes a lot of sense. And then how you throw new data at it and it’s less reliable because of this concept of overfitting, which it sounds like they’ll be tackling next. I’m sure it will get into correcting the model, which is important for accuracy but it also means there is a mechanism for fixing mistakes. I always think of Weapons of Math Destruction where it made clear many times over that algorithms with no corrective model can be incredibly dangerous¹.

For whatever reason, machine learning (ML) evokes a cool! good job computers! let’s use this! response, and artificial intelligence (AI) evokes a meh. hand-wavy nonsense. it’s all just programmed algorithms in the end response instead.

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

What’s one thing we can do to make our site better? Maybe nothing at all!

Our websites keep getting bigger and bigger! When we have a team with so many exciting ideas and such interesting technology, it can be easy to get swept up and not as easy to prioritize all those ideas.  

However, there are only so many hours in a day, only so many resources, and only so much our visitors want in an interface without their focus being lost. How do we balance it all?

There are many prioritization tools out there. Recently, my favorite has been to ask yourself (and/or your team) when deciding to add something new to your site: What happens if I don’t do this right now? 

When we add new things to our site, sometimes we jump right into the weeds and discuss:

• KPIs/OKRs: What kind of return will this feature have?
• Performance: Will this new code help or hurt our performance metrics?
• Accessibility: Will all of our customers be able to utilize this new feature?
• Maintenance: Do we have the resources to maintain this new component?
• User Experience: How will this affect our visitors?

Conversations around these factors can be necessary, but overwhelming sometimes. Before we even dig too deep into any of these areas, first asking what happens if we don’t do it, can help us really determine the priority and necessity of the task. 

Let’s say we brainstorm three ways to improve our modals:

There are many ways to plan your website roadmap and improve our current experiences. This is just one question to ask upfront to help drive discussions around priorities and focus.

This is by no means an invitation to say “no” to every ask that comes in. If we didn’t iterate and try new things, our websites would grow stale, slow, and outdated. But it’s another way to open communication with your team (or your inner monologue) and explore the impact of new code on your beautiful, fast, accessible site.