Web designers make New Year’s resolutions with the best intentions, but let’s face it—they’re destined to fail hilariously. From messy file names to endless font choices, we embrace the chaos and keep designing anyway!
As regular readers will know, each month we roundup the best new designs of the previous 4 weeks. And now, at the end of the year, we’ve selected our 40 favourites from the monthly collections. All the sites chosen stand out in some way, whether that’s through the approach to a design problem, embracing a […]
Santa Claus is a master UX designer, seamlessly combining advanced technology, rigorous testing, and a touch of magic to deliver billions of gifts in one night. From analyzing questionable TikTok trends to perfecting chimney entry systems, his operation is a festive blend of humor, innovation, and holiday cheer.
Email accessibility is one of those few email design trends that are old but relevant even today! Email marketing experts hope to see senders paying close attention to building accessible emails.
Not quite surprising, as the European Accessibility Act (EAA), effective June 28, 2025, mandates all digital products, including emails, be accessible to everyone, especially individuals with disabilities.
Apart from being legally compliant, accessible emails help businesses avoid discrimination lawsuits, broaden their audience, and boost engagement and satisfaction.
Yes, of course; email accessibility is not necessarily increasing significant value to your organization’s profitability. But it does provide a way for you to humanize your brand.
The implication is that it is cheaper in the long run to retain this audience than to acquire them in the future, according to Chad White, the head of Research, Oracle Digital Experience Agency.
Yet, there’s a glaring gap: Only 8% of brands actively follow accessibility best practices, despite 77% saying it’s a priority.
The good news is that creating accessible emails isn’t a question of requiring advanced code or the design overhaul. By having clean, user-friendly email designs, you shall be creating emails that are accessible across devices friendly and to those with assistive technologies.
In this blog, we will walk you through the best practices you have to follow to create more accessible emails in 2025 and beyond.
Email accessibility is the practice of designing and structuring email content so that it is easily accessed, read, and interacted with by everyone, including people with disabilities or those using assistive technologies.
The veteran email marketing agency Email Uplers asserts email accessibility to be one of the 13 design trends shaping the email marketing sphere in 2025.
That’s why Matt Helbig from Really Good Emails said this—which we love so much we are sharing it here- “Treat the inbox as a sacred, personal, and safe place. You should be responsible for what you send to your audience in this place.”
If the thought of not being able to email someone doesn’t get you to embrace email accessibility, we don’t know what does.
If you’re planning to design an accessible email campaign by the year 2025, here are some tips you’ll need to follow.
Not just accessibility, but even from the usability point of view, it is never advisable to overload the email copy with as much information as possible. They render your sent emails inaccessible to recipients with cognitive issues, reading difficulties, visual impairments, and similar issues.
Instead:
Appropriate color contrast is non-negotiable for email accessibility. Anything outside of that makes your emails hard to read for those with vision impairment or colour blindness.
How to get it right?
Image Source: Email On Acid
Make alt text a design norm for making images accessible in emails. Users with visual impairments can not see the images and will need alternative text that communicates with them about them.
Image Source: Mailjet
Rather, you should use alt text for all recipients, not just those visually impaired. Whether they have slow internet, have images turned off, or have security settings. For instance, if the image is blocked due to slow internet access, the recipient will never be aware of its content.
Alt text helps them access the content and provides context to the visuals.
Best Practices for Using Alt Text for Email Accessibility:
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications.
These attributes are the descriptive information that only the assistive technologies such as the screen readers can understand. Since they are hidden, your email design stays the same even if you implement them in the actual email code.
You can make good use of ARIA to make your emails more accessible to a broader audience in different ways.
Use attribute role=”presentation” for tables used in email layouts. This way, you cue the screen readers to treat these tables as structural elements rather than data tables. This makes a huge difference in how screen readers interpret the table and improves the reading experience, especially for visually challenged users.
Next, you can apply aria-hidden=”true” to conceal decorative elements like spacers, shadows, or any content that does not add value. This keeps screen readers from focusing on unnecessary items.
We also recommend you to apply roles like role=”header”, role=”footer”, or role=”article” to define different blocks in your email. This ensures accessibility when some email clients do not fully support HTML5 tags like
However, be mindful that ARIA isn’t universally supported across all email clients. Some may interpret these attributes differently. Hence, you should test your emails to ensure the attributes work as intended.
Semantic HTML provides meaning to your accessible email codes by accurately describing the element you are coding. This gives meaningful structure to your email content, helping assistive technologies navigate and consume content easily.
How to apply semantic HTML effectively:
Use
Use
tags for blocks of text, such as descriptions. These tags ensure that the content is read correctly and maintains proper spacing. For shorter pieces of inline text, consider using .
If inserting customer quotes, do it with the help of a
tag and indicate that the content is a quote. Use it with the tag to give attribution for the source.
- Links for CTAs
- Proper Document Structure
You would also want to include essential tags like , , and in your email’s code. Close all open tags to prevent errors that could disrupt screen readers.
Wrapping Up
Email accessibility will become one of the top priorities for brands in 2025 as they strive to ensure every customer can access information, interact with their brand, and build lasting relationships. It means breaking down barriers and creating inclusive experiences.
Designing accessible emails isn’t as complicated as people would think. A few straightforward adjustments—like the tips featured in this guide—can make a significant impact.
Yet, without prior experience, the process might feel overwhelming.
In such cases, partnering with a professional email design agency can be a smarter business move. They bring the expertise to craft accessible emails that resonate with all audiences.
When you look at the positive impact it makes on the subscriber’s experience and your brand’s reputation, you know that it’s worth it.
Featured Image by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
The post Email Accessibility: How To Embrace This Design Trend For 2025 And Beyond appeared first on noupe.
Xmas.Piclooks.com is a quirky website that generates hilariously bad Christmas movie posters and plots along with equally absurd fake reviews. Perfect for spreading holiday laughs, it’s a festive parody of all the over-the-top holiday movie clichés we love to mock.
Santa Tracker 2024 brings holiday magic to life with cutting-edge features like augmented reality, personalized messages from Santa, and real-time weather updates, making it more interactive and engaging than ever. This beloved tradition continues to unite families worldwide, blending technology and festive cheer to keep the Christmas spirit alive.
2024 has been one of the greatest years for CSS: cross-document view transitions, scroll-driven animations, anchor positioning, animate to height: auto, and many others. It seems out of touch to ask, but what else do we want from CSS? Well, many things!
We put our heads together and came up with a few ideas… including several of yours.
I’m of the mind that we already have a BUNCH of wonderful CSS goodies these days. We have so many wonderful — and new! — things that I’m still wrapping my head around many of them.
But! There’s always room for one more good thing, right? Or maybe room for four new things. If I could ask for any new CSS features, these are the ones I’d go for.
if() statementIt’s coming! Or it’s already here if you consider that the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) resolved to add an if() conditional to the CSS Values Module Level 5 specification. That’s a big step forward, even if it takes a year or two (or more?!) to get a formal definition and make its way into browsers.
My understanding about if() is that it’s a key component for achieving Container Style Queries, which is what I ultimately want from this. Being able to apply styles conditionally based on the styles of another element is the white whale of CSS, so to speak. We can already style an element based on what other elements it :has() so this would expand that magic to include conditional styles as well.
This is more of a “nice-to-have” feature because I feel its squarely in CSS Preprocessor Territory and believe it’s nice to have some tooling for light abstractions, such as writing functions or mixins in CSS. But I certainly wouldn’t say “no” to having mixins baked right into CSS if someone was offering it to me. That might be the straw that breaks the CSS preprocessor back and allows me to write plain CSS 100% of the time because right now I tend to reach for Sass when I need a mixin or function.
I wrote up a bunch of notes about the mixins proposal and its initial draft in the specifications to give you an idea of why I’d want this feature.
// inline commentsYes, please! It’s a minor developer convenience that brings CSS up to par with writing comments in other languages. I’m pretty sure that writing JavaScript comments in my CSS should be in my list of dumbest CSS mistakes (even if I didn’t put it in there).
font-size: fitI just hate doing math, alright?! Sometimes I just want a word or short heading sized to the container it’s in. We can use things like clamp() for fluid typesetting, but again, that’s math I can’t be bothered with. You might think there’s a possible solution with Container Queries and using container query units for the font-size but that doesn’t work any better than viewport units.
I’m just a simple, small-town CSS developer, and I’m quite satisfied with all the new features coming to browsers over the past few years, what more could I ask for?
I don’t need anymore convincing on CSS anchor positioning, I’m sold! After spending much of the month of November learning how it works, I went into December knowing I won’t really get to use it for a while.
As we close out 2024, only Chromium-based browsers have support, and fallbacks and progressive enhancements are not easy, unfortunately. There is a polyfill available (which is awesome), however, that does mean adding another chunk of JavaScript, contrasting what anchor positioning solves.
I’m patient though, I waited a long time for :has to come to browsers, which has been “newly available” in Baseline for a year now (can you believe it?).
#top-layer without popover?I like anchor positioning, I like popovers, and they go really well together!
The neat thing with popovers is how they appear in the #top-layer, so you get to avoid stacking issues related to z-index. This is probably all most would need with it, but having some other way to move an element there would be interesting. Also, now that I know that the #top-layer exists, I want to do more with it — I want to know what’s up there. What’s really going on?
Well, I probably should have started at the spec. As it turns out, the CSS Position Layout Module Level 4 draft talks about the #top-layer, what it’s useful for, and ways to approach styling elements contained within it. Interestingly, the #top-layer is controlled by the user agent and seems to be a byproduct of the Fullscreen API.
Dialogs and popovers are the way to go for now but, optimistically speaking, these features existing might mean it’s possible to promote elements to the #top-layer in future ways. This very well may be a coyote/roadrunner-type situation, as I’m not quite sure what I’d do with it once I get it.
Personally speaking, Cascade Layers have changed how I write CSS. One thing I think would be ace is if we could include a layer attribute on a tag. Imagine being able to include a CSS reset in your project like:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.com/some/reset.css" layer="reset">Or, depending on the page visited, dynamically add parts of CSS, blended into your cascade layers:
<!--
Global styles with layers defined, such as:
@layer reset, typography, components, utilities;
-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/main.css">
<!-- Add only to pages using card components -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/components/card.css" layer="components">This feature was proposed over on the CSSWG’s repo, and like most things in life: it’s complicated.
Browsers are especially finicky with attributes they don’t know, plus definite concerns around handling fallbacks. The topic was also brought over to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) for discussion as well, so there’s still hope!
I must admit this, I wasn’t around when the web was wild and people had hit counters. In fact, I think I am pretty young compared to your average web connoisseur. While I do know how to make a layout using float (the first web course I picked up was pretty outdated), I didn’t have to suffer long before using things like Flexbox or CSS Grid and never grinded my teeth against IE and browser support.
So, the following wishes may seem like petty requests compared to the really necessary features the web needed in the past — or even some in the present. Regardless, here are my three petty requests I would wish to see in 2025:
This is one of those things that you swear it should already be possible with just CSS. The situation is the following: I find myself wanting to know the index of an element between its siblings or the total number of children. I can’t use the counter() function since sometimes I need an integer instead of a string. The current approach is either hardcoding an index on the HTML:
<ul>
<li style="--index: 0">Milk</li>
<li style="--index: 1">Eggs</li>
<li style="--index: 2">Cheese</li>
</ul>Or alternatively, write each index in CSS:
li:nth-child(1) { --index: 0; }
li:nth-child(2) { --index: 1; }
li:nth-child(3) { --index: 2; }Either way, I always leave with the feeling that it should be easier to reference this number; the browser already has this info, it’s just a matter of exposing it to authors. It would make prettier and cleaner code for staggering animations, or simply changing the styles based on the total count.
Luckily, there is a already proposal in Working Draft for sibling-count() and sibling-index() functions. While the syntax may change, I do hope to hear more about them in 2025.
ul > li {
background-color: hsl(sibling-count() 50% 50%);
}
ul > li {
transition-delay: calc(sibling-index() * 500ms);
}flex-wrapI’m stealing this one from Adam Argyle, but I do wish for a better way to balance flex-wrap layouts. When elements wrap one by one as their container shrinks, they either are left alone with empty space (which I don’t dislike) or grow to fill it (which hurts my soul):
I wish for a more native way of balancing wrapping elements:
It’s definitely annoying.
I am a big fan of the CSSWG and everything they do, so I spent a lot of time reading their working drafts, GitHub issues, or notes about their meetings. However, as much as I love jumping from link to link in their GitHub, it can be hard to find all the related issues to a specific discussion.
I think this raises the barrier of entry to giving your opinion on some topics. If you want to participate in an issue, you should have the big picture of all the discussion (what has been said, why some things don’t work, others to consider, etc) but it’s usually scattered across several issues or meetings. While issues can be lengthy, that isn’t the problem (I love reading them), but rather not knowing part of a discussion existed somewhere in the first place.
So, while it isn’t directly a CSS wish, I wish there was an easier way to get the full picture of the discussion before jumping in.
We asked! You answered! Here are a few choice selections from the crowd:
background-images, like background-rotate: 180deg
random(), with params for range, spread, and type
.visually-hidden class.position: sticky with a :stuck pseudoCSS-Tricks trajectory hasn’t been the most smooth these last years, so our biggest wish for 2025 is to keep writing and sparking discussions about the web. Happy 2025!
A CSS Wishlist for 2025 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
Airlines use advanced UX strategies and dark patterns, such as urgency cues, visual hierarchy, and hidden free options, to nudge travelers toward paying for seat selection, turning it into a $12.4 billion revenue stream.
When facing financial challenges, especially debt, securing your family’s future and ensuring that financial obligations are met can feel like an overwhelming task. One of the smartest financial decisions that can offer peace of mind is opting for a term insurance policy. Unlike other life insurance policy, term insurance is often seen as the best option for people in debt, offering significant benefits at an affordable cost. In this blog, we will explore why term insurance policies are the best choice for those burdened with debt and how they can provide crucial financial protection for loved ones.
Before diving into why term insurance is particularly beneficial for people in debt, let’s first understand what it is. A term insurance policy is a type of life insurance that provides coverage for a specific period or “term,” typically ranging from 10 to 30 years. If the insured person passes away during the term, their beneficiaries receive the sum assured (death benefit). Term insurance is the most straightforward type of life insurance, with affordable premiums, and it provides high coverage at low cost, making it an ideal choice for many.
There are several types of life insurance policies available, including endowment plans, unit-linked insurance plans (ULIPs), and whole life insurance. However, when it comes to debt management and financial security, term insurance stands out because of its affordability, simplicity, and straightforward benefits.
When you are in debt, your primary concern is often the financial well-being of your loved ones. A term insurance policy ensures that your family doesn’t bear the financial burden of your outstanding debts in the event of your untimely death. Whether it’s a mortgage, personal loans, or any other liabilities, term insurance provides a safety net by paying off these debts, preventing your family from inheriting them.
The life insurance plans with term coverage are designed to replace lost income, cover existing debts, and give your loved ones a stable financial future, without the worry of creditors coming after them.
One of the primary reasons people in debt should consider term insurance is its affordability. Since term insurance only provides death benefits and doesn’t include investment components like other types of life insurance (such as whole life or ULIPs), the premiums are generally much lower. This makes it a highly cost-effective way to secure your family’s future while balancing existing debt.
If you’re struggling with paying high premiums for other types of life insurance plans, switching to a term insurance policy can free up resources to pay down your debt while still ensuring that your family has adequate protection.
When it comes to managing debt, simplicity is key. Term insurance policies are easy to understand compared to other life insurance options that often have complicated clauses and investment elements. With term insurance, you pay a fixed premium over the policy term, and if you pass away during this time, your beneficiaries receive the sum assured. There are no surprises, no hidden fees, and no complex terms to navigate. For someone already struggling with debt, the simplicity of a term insurance policy is a big relief.
People in debt often have different financial obligations, which can vary widely. Whether it’s a home loan, car loan, or personal loan, term insurance can be tailored to cover the exact amount of your debt. You can choose a life insurance plan with a sum assured that matches your debt obligations, ensuring that your loved ones will have enough financial support to clear the loans after your death.
Some term insurance policies also allow policyholders to increase coverage during the policy term, providing additional protection in case your debts grow over time. This level of customization makes term insurance a flexible option for debt management.
In a world full of uncertainties, term insurance provides guaranteed financial security for your family. Unlike other types of life insurance, where the returns or benefits may fluctuate based on market conditions or other factors, term insurance offers a fixed sum assured in case of death. This ensures that your family will receive the promised amount, regardless of economic changes or investment performance. For someone in debt, having a guaranteed payout can make all the difference in protecting their family’s financial future.
In addition to the basic benefits of a term insurance policy, policyholders can also enjoy tax deductions. Under Section 80C of the Income Tax Act, the premiums paid for life insurance plans are eligible for tax deductions up to ?1.5 lakh annually. This tax-saving benefit can be especially helpful for individuals trying to balance their debt and manage their finances. Additionally, the death benefit received by the beneficiary is tax-free under Section 10(10D), providing further financial relief.
When it comes to people in debt, term insurance plans are the most suitable option due to their affordability, simplicity, and tailored coverage. Other types of life insurance, such as whole life or endowment policies, often come with higher premiums and involve long-term commitments, which may not be ideal for someone facing financial stress. Additionally, these policies typically combine life coverage with an investment component, which may not align with the immediate need for debt protection.
Term insurance, on the other hand, focuses purely on providing a death benefit, which is ideal for people looking for a cost-effective way to secure their financial future while paying off existing liabilities.
For people in debt, a term insurance policy offers the right balance of affordability, coverage, and peace of mind. It ensures that your family doesn’t bear the burden of your outstanding debts and offers financial stability during difficult times. By choosing the right life insurance plans and calculating the appropriate sum assured, you can safeguard your loved ones’ future without overburdening your finances today. Always consider your specific debt obligations, financial goals, and risk appetite before making a decision, and use a life insurance calculator to determine the most suitable coverage for your needs.
By opting for a term insurance policy, you take a proactive step in securing your family’s financial security while keeping your debt situation in check.
Featured image by Jakub ?erdzicki on Unsplash
The post Why Term Insurance Policies Are the Best Choice for People in Debt appeared first on noupe.
Many design leaders find themselves in an impossible situation. On one side, senior management have read articles trumpeting the incredible ROI of user experience design. McKinsey tells us that design-led companies achieve 56% higher returns to shareholders. Forrester reports that every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return.
Yet the reality I encounter when talking to design leaders is very different. Most are desperately under-resourced, with tiny teams expected to support hundreds of projects across their organizations. The result? We’re spread so thin that we can barely scratch the surface of what needs doing.
The problem isn’t just about resources. It’s about expectations and how we define our role. Too often, we position ourselves (or are positioned by others) as implementors — the people who do the user research, create the prototypes, and run the usability tests. But with the scale of digital touching every corner of our organizations, that’s simply not sustainable.
Time For A New Approach
We need to stop trying to do everything ourselves and instead focus on empowering others across the organization to improve the user experience. In other words, we need to become true leaders rather than just practitioners.
This isn’t about giving up control or lowering standards. It’s about maximizing our impact by working through others. Think about it: would you rather be directly involved in 10% of projects or have some influence over 90% of them?
What Does This Look Like In Practice?
First, we need to shift our mindset from doing to enabling. This means:
Let’s break down each of these areas.
Instead of trying to be involved in every project, focus on providing specific, high-value services that can make the biggest impact. This might include:
The key is to be strategic about where you spend your time, focusing on activities that will have the greatest ripple effect across the organization.
One of the most effective ways to scale your impact is through coaching. This could include:
The goal isn’t to turn everyone into UX experts but to help them understand enough to make better decisions in their daily work.
It’s also important to recognize that others might not initially deliver work at the same level of quality that you would. This is okay. The primary goal is to get people engaged and excited about UX. If we criticize them every time they fall short of perfection, we risk undermining their enthusiasm. Instead, we need to foster a supportive environment where improvement happens over time.
Develop tools and resources that help others apply UX principles independently. For example:
These resources should be practical and accessible, making it easy for teams to do the right thing.
Create a framework that guides UX decisions across the organization:
The key is to make these standards helpful rather than bureaucratic — they should enable better work, not create unnecessary obstacles.
Bringing It All Together
All of these elements should come together in what I call a UX Playbook — a single source of truth that contains everything teams need to deliver better user experiences. This isn’t just another document to gather dust; it’s a living resource that demonstrates your value as a leader and helps others get started on their UX journey.
The shift from practitioner to leader isn’t easy. It requires letting go of some control and trusting others to carry forward UX principles. But it’s the only way to create lasting change at scale.
If you’re struggling with this transition, I am running a workshop on design leadership in February. I would love to discuss your situation there.
