📝 Issue #438: 20 Unmissable Websites, 8 Expressive Free Font Combos, Black-Centered Design, Pose Animator, and more…

Unless you’re a person of color you’re unlikely to have noticed that fitness trackers work poorly with darker skin, or that facial recognition prefers caucasian features. In this eye-opening article Woodrow Winchester III explains that much like accessibility, black-centered design must be the future of UX.

Grid.js is a free, open-source HTML table plugin that works with most JavaScript frameworks including React, Angular, and Vue. Your table will be sortable, and searchable. You can even implement pagination for times when you have a large dataset to display, and little room to spare.

Each month we publish a roundup of the 20 most unmissable sites we’ve seen launched or significantly updated in the previous four weeks. In June’s instalment you’ll see political campaigns, some clever portfolios, the dominance of dark color schemes, and lots of brave typography.

Pose Animator is an amazing project by Shan Huang. Using the concept of skeleton-based animation, Pose Animator takes a 2D vector illustration and manipulates its curves in real time, based on face and pose recognition. You can download the code from GitHub and animate your own illustration for free.

Content modeling is an approach to structuring a website that mimics its content, producing consistent, usable experiences. But when it comes to government sites, when the gulf of understanding is wider, you need to employ something more. Angus Gordon looks at the options in this persuasive post.

If you think that quality typography requires expensive, premium priced fonts, then think again. Davide Baratta presents a collection of eight font combinations, all using free fonts, that are both expressive, and highly usable across a variety of different projects. Try them out for yourself today.

Way back in 1997, the Nielsen Norman Group ran a landmark series of tests proving that what users really value is a fast site. 23 years later they’ve taken another look, and as Kathryn Whitenton reports, despite the fact that the internet has become much faster, websites really haven’t.

With global recession looming, now’s the perfect time to think about diversifying your income stream. Whereas once we saw careers as a straight line from start to finish, many creative professionals now wear different hats during the working day. Anne Ditmeyer explains how to get started.

There’s a brand new way to size elements in CSS: aspect-ratio. It’s finally a way to avoid that nasty padding hack by sizing height based on width. Chris Coyier takes a look at the pros and cons of the latest way to size elements in the browser, with a really good primer for anyone who codes front-ends.