📝 Issue #437: Designing for Digital Confidence, 3 Essential Design Trends, The Third Age of JavaScript, Little UX Crimes, and more…

Every day, a million new users go online for the first time. Designing for Digital Confidence is a campaign backed by IDEO, Google, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that provides a free set of tools to help creative teams design for the whole world, regardless of language, tech, or ability.

Typography is central to all design, but on the web we can push it a little bit further than our cousins in print. In this excellent tutorial Mario Carrillo will walk you through the steps required to animate text around a mesh using Three.js. The tutorial is simple to follow and the final effect is certain to impress.

Dark UX patterns seek to exploit people’s learned assumptions about the web, to get them to do something they otherwise would not. In this helpful post Aliona Kyrychenko covers some of the most prevalent. It’s not only a must-read for designers, but also a great warning guide for anyone who uses the web.

Every month we gather together a collection of three design trends we see dominating the web in the coming months. We published June’s roundup this week and in it you’ll find strong images contrasted with subtle text, modern serif font choices, and the lingering influence of last year’s Brutalism trend.

Google has released a new set of best practices for getting your sites ranking well on the search engine. Sowmya Subramanian explains what’s involved in ranking for ‘page experience,’ where the concept fits in SEO, and confirms that the algorithm change will now be delayed by six months due to Covid-19.

Every decade or so there’s a change in the makeup of JavaScript, according to this speculative post by Shawn Wang. It’s a tough call considering we have just twenty years of JS history from which to extrapolate. Wang examines the next phase of JS, and questions whether JavaScript will survive beyond the next fifteen years.

If you’re aiming to grow a startup, one of the most challenging steps in the process is developing a pitch deck. Pitch decks are essential tools for raising capital, onboarding staff, and defining your vision. To get you started PitchDeckHunt is an inspiring collection of pitch decks from industry-leaders.

In the latest of its “Unleash Your Inner Dragon” series, design.org explores design magic. Just as there is a science to creativity, there is a special something extra, that Ward Andrews calls ‘magic,’ and in this article he teaches you how to embrace and develop this side of your creativity.

One of the biggest problems for self-isolating designers is product photography. Setting up a desk in a handy corner is one thing, a full photography studio is quite another. Or so you might think, but as this simple guide from Kendall Plant shows, it’s achievable in the most modest of spaces.