📝 Issue #439: Exciting New Tools for Designers, Building the Love Into Creative Business, Bootstrap 5 Alpha, How to Estimate the ROI of Design Work, and more…

In this awesome video, the design industry’s business strategist of choice, Emily Cohen, introduces the concept of love as a starting point for business interactions. Cohen covers practical ways to show and receive love in creative businesses, and how to build long-lasting, reciprocal business relationships.

Each month we post a roundup of the top tools for designers, developers, and other creative professionals that have been launched in the previous four weeks. In June’s packed edition you’ll find design apps, AI-powered tools, an incredible script or two, illustrations, icons, and as always some great free fonts.

Bootstrap Version 5 has finally arrived in alpha. And there are a couple of big changes: Bootstrap no longer relies on jQuery, and support for Internet Explorer has been dropped. Mark Otto walks us through what’s new. It’s not even in beta yet, so expect further changes, but you can explore the release now.

Both checkboxes and radio buttons present a challenge for front-end developers. Neither input is easy to style without hacks. Sara Soueidan delves into the topic with a comprehensive guide to the right way to hide, and then style checkboxes and radio buttons, while maintaining accessibility.

This super-fun, diverse set of avatars have been designed in 3D to look like the kind of plastic toy you played with as a kid. The premium set is 70+ characters, but there’s a collection of eight you can download for free. If you’re very quick off the mark you can commission a toy face of yourself from the designer.

Design rarely has any guarantees attached, and so when we hit a recession, design budgets are the first to be cut. Alen Faljic believes that the return on investment of design work can be quantified, and he sets out how to do it in this excellent guide for designers who struggle to communicate their worth.

Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t, at least as far as Hey is concerned. Hey is a new kind of email that offers a host of features including email screening, subject line edits, the deliberately named Imbox, and innovative workflows for personal email. There’s a two week free trial, but it’s invitation only until July.

User experience is an essential component in any website or digital product. Despite this, measuring the success (or failure) of UX often gets overlooked. Kayode Osinusi presents a detailed guide to measuring UX, from the reasons to do so, to the most effective methods, to the insights you can gain.

Twenty years ago Microsoft released Windows 2000. It’s not as vaunted as Windows 98, nor as ill-fated as Windows ME, but it paved the way for future versions of the OS. Benj Edwards takes an affectionate stroll down memory lane to revisit one of Microsoft’s most stable operating systems.