📝 Issue #433: Essential Design Trends, Building a Brand, Tara AI, A Designer’s Job Is Not to Design, and more…

When Envoy rolled out its new brand a couple of months ago, it wasn’t obvious just how essential a frictionless front-of-house would become for offices worldwide. In this fascinating and detailed account, Amy Devereux explains the design decisions the team took as they sought a fresh brand approach.

Despite all the technical advancements on the web, from AR to AMP, the number one marketing channel for most people is still email. In this excellent guide to boosting your open rate, Campaign Monitor offers some invaluable insights, from the right time to send, to how to construct a subject line.

Tara AI is a free product development platform designed to help your team hit its development sprint targets on time. Use Tara AI to plan sprints, from initial outline, through issue tracking. All the while the platform monitors workloads to make sure your team is efficiently deployed, but never overstretched.

Every month we publish a roundup of the latest design trends that we’ve seen dominating the web design scene in the previous four weeks. In May’s edition we take a look at extreme asymmetry with ‘unbalanced’ designs, the way designers depict Coronavirus data, and the shock return of the slider!

Long gone is the time when a designer could get by knowing just design; a deep understanding of web technologies is now a basic requirement of the role. Benek Lisefski looks at the case for adding Project Management to our skillset, and argues that designer-PMs are the new must-have team member.

Regardless of the industry you’re designing for, most websites feature photography somewhere in their UI. This beginner’s guide to incorporating photography in your designs, by Anastasia Marinicheva, presents the essential dos and donts from ensuring image consistency, to text contrast.

InVision have just launched a great free book on business thinking for designers, and in this brief extract, Ryan Rumsey argues that the role of a designer is not to design things, but rather to offer a company a competitive advantage. If you enjoy it, you can download the whole book now.

We’re all aware of the precarious economic situation. Even if you’re lucky enough to be in a region with little threat from Covid-19, your company is still at risk from a downturn in the wider business world. Conrad Egusa offers some sage advice on how to steer your marketing efforts through this unusual time.

SQL Police Department is a fun way to learn SQL. It’s a simple game of crime solving by entering the correct SQL query to recover data from an “illegal server.” You can try out a few cases right now, or buy a license to get full access. The free cases teach SELECT, DISTINCT, LIMIT, and conditionals.