📝 Issue #454: 20 Freshest Web Designs, Coding Hands-Free, Adapting Illustration Styles for Clients, The Ultimate Guide to Link Building, and more…

Every month we publish this roundup of the 20 freshest site designs we’ve seen launched on the web, in the previous four weeks. September’s edition features big and bold design features, oversized type, confident colors, and tons of animation. You’ll find portfolio sites, ecommerce, and product design.

Are you tired of hunkering over your keyboard, typing away until your fingers bleed? If so, you’ll love Serenade, an awesome app that lets you write code hands-free by speaking it. It works with a variety of coding apps and popular languages from JavaScript to Python. You can download it for free, now.

Illustrators all have their own style, but how do they vary that style to fit different clients? Should illustrators adopt trends? Should illustrators’ portfolios be broad or focused? Molly Long talks to leading illustrators about sticking to a creative process while remaining commercially viable, in this helpful article.

Ever wondered exactly who is watching you as you browse the web? Blacklight is a great free tool that reveals the user-tracking technology on any website. Just enter a URL and the site lists the number of ad trackers, third party cookies, keystroke capturing, cookie evasion attempts, FB pixels, and more.

SEO is a complex, many-faceted process that needs specialist knowledge and a whole load of time to get right. But there’s one thing you can do right now, that will have more impact on your ranking than anything else, and that’s link building. This ultimate guide to link building is the perfect place to get started.

UX writing is the low-hanging fruit of UX design, it’s a smart way to improve user experience quickly, and easily. Nick DiLallo presents eight principles for crafting good UX writing, from making flows simpler and easier to understand, to working with a core vocabulary, to vanishing when not needed.

Web components had the potential to expand the web, giving us access to a wider range of UI elements without the need for heavy JavaScript. And then we overused JavaScript anyway. Lea Verou laments the failed promise of web components and proposes five guidelines to get us back on track.

Swell is a brand new ecommerce platform taking on the established players. Swell is headless, meaning there’s no front-end provided. It’s designed to start selling immediately, and be flexible enough to customize later. Unlike many rivals, it boasts a fully customizable checkout. There’s a 14 day free trial.

Designing onboarding for a website or product is challenging, especially when there isn’t a body of historical data to learn from. In this helpful guide, Andrew at Lucky Duck talks us through five ways to ruin onboarding, the three key concepts to focus on, and a variety of solutions to solve common issues.