📝 Issue #455: 3 Essential Design Trends, Overcoming Imposter Syndrome, Avoiding Cognitive Biases, Spline, and more…

All professionals feel inadequate at one time or another, and imposter syndrome — the misplaced belief that we are frauds, that will shortly be found out — is common in the web design industry. Mathew Cropper offers some helpful tips for dealing with self-doubt. A must-read for anyone creative.

Spline is a brand-new 3D design tool for the web. It allows you to create 3D content in a GUI and export production-ready code as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It enables you to approach 3D design as if it were 2D design opening up the third dimension for web designers. You can request early access now.

Every month we release this roundup if the three biggest trends we’ve found emerging on the web in the previous four weeks. In October’s edition we’re looking at designs that take a stance on important issues, abstract elements in designs, and images that stop you in your tracks and make you think.

Design is all about making decisions, but those decisions are frequently skewed by our cognitive biases — the shortcuts in our brain that act like our default settings. Koos Looijesteijn argues that by being aware of our cognitive biases we can break out of our patterns and improve our design process.

Gazepass is a brand new API that enables multi-factor authentication for logging into a website or app, without the need for a password. Once the API is integrated users can log into your site using the biometrics on their device, a webcam or front camera, or even their fingerprint ID. It’s free to get started.

We’ve all heard the advice “Fake it ’til you make it”, but is it a good idea to pretend we’re more capable, more successful, more experienced, than we actually are? Ward Andrews looks at the science behind the pop-wisdom and discovers that in some cases, you can be successful with this strange tip.

Over the course of the last few decades the web has evolved from the wild-west of design, to a set of best practices, user expectations, and legal requirements. Robert Mayer investigates the history of UI unification and speculates where designers can break new ground while maintaining UX standards.

If your site is powered by WordPress then you need to monitor it to ensure it’s safe, secure, and still running. WP Umbrella is a new monitoring plugin that alerts you if your site goes down, analyses performance, and monitors site health from errors to indexability. There’s a free version, perfect for most sites.

In the past few years a singular design trend has emerged to inspire thousands of sites — often SaaS sites — to adopt flat, minimal, illustrations of featureless people. Aleksandr Hovhannisyan explores the Blue People trend, why it’s a no-no for serious brands, and what you should be doing instead.