📝 Issue #464: UX Christmas, Stripe Treasury, 3 Essential Design Trends, 100 Design Lessons for 2021, and more…

UX Christmas is an advent calendar of UX articles, one per day up until December 24. Last year’s UX Christmas delivered a wealth of goodies, and this year so far we’ve opened articles on Figma, remote teams, things we wish we knew before starting a UX career, digital typography, and more.

Stripe Treasury is a radical step forward in the development of fintech. Built by Stripe and backed by some of the world’s leading banks, it’s a banking API that can be integrated with your own site to allow users to deposit funds, pay bills, manage their cashflow, and even earn interest. You can request an invite now.

Every month we publish this roundup of the three most exciting trends we’ve found on the web in the previous four weeks. In the final edition for 2020 you’ll find that social events of the past year have been highly influential, macro product photography is taking over, and simple, self-assured animation is en vogue.

Marketing copy is notoriously difficult to write well. Founders have their sights set on the horizon, but the customers they’re trying to engage are in the here and now. Headlime is a superb set of marketing templates underpinned by AI, that helps you to generate incredible content that converts. Plans start from $29/month.

Coding Rooms is an awesome new platform for teaching, and learning code. It’s a dedicated online classroom that allows the tutor or mentor to see each student’s work, and engage with them directly, as part of a guided practical course. It’s free for students to participate and teacher plans start at $42/month.

2020 has been an exceptional year, and not in a positive way. But from hardship comes opportunity, and we have a chance to turn things around in 2021. To help, UX Collective has put together this inspiring list of 100 design lessons for 2021, from the way we act towards each other, to technology trends for the year ahead.

Clerk Chat is an awesome way to combine the personalization of SMS, with the group dynamics of Slack. The free plugin integrates Twilio and Slack, letting your team receive, and send text messages to customers, and even bulk SMS, all with an auditable trail. It’s like your whole team sharing a single cellphone.

Google Fonts serves gazillions of font requests around the world. It’s a great free resource, but somewhere along the line we lost sight of the simple fact that self-hosted fonts are faster. Simon Wicki looks at the argument for self-hosting fonts vs Google Fonts and explains why we got it wrong in this great post.

Glue is an exciting new product aiming to untangle your creative process. Glue’s AI looks at your apps, and your connections, then defines relationships between them, allowing you to sort through all your project documents, and decision points in a single dashboard. You can request early access now.