📝 Issue #468: 3 Essential Design Trends, Radix UI, Ornament and Design, The Rise and Fall of Invision, and more…

It’s a new year, and in the first of our monthly roundups of the essential design trends we’re currently seeing on the web, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for the rest of 2021. 3D scenes leave dark mode behind and introduce light to the third dimension, big type is finally back, and there’s a new approach to photography.

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Radix UI is an open-source component library that helps you build high-quality sites and apps with a keen focus on accessibility. The project aims to deliver a comprehensive set of UI components that fit common design patterns from accordions to sliders. Each component can be styled with your favorite CSS library.

In 2016, Invision had the world wide web at its feet. Touted as a successor to Adobe, and with a one-time valuation of $1.9 billion, Invision fans have all but thrown in the towel over the last five years. Sean Dexter looks at the story of one of the web’s most hyped tools, asks where it went wrong, and whether there’s any hope of a rally.

Tabbied is a fun pattern generator for fans of modern, geometric shapes that produces designs straight out of the Memphis playbook. Pick one of the presets, and play with its colors and key variables like the number of elements, the underlying grid, and drop shadows, then export the design as a PNG. It’s free to use.

From the time the web first grew up to be a tool for business, we’ve enthusiastically embraced cold, detached minimalism. But in 2021, the first signs of a widespread interest in maximalism and decoration are showing. Theo Inglis looks into the history and purpose of design and ornamentation in this engaging column.

If you’re planning to launch a product in 2021, it will almost certainly pull its data from an API. This searchable collection of public APIs should be your first stop when seeking out data sources. There are APIs providing crypto data, bike hire locations, Fortnite stats, Spotify, Telegram, and tons more useful sources.

January’s a great time to consider your career path and ask yourself if you can do anything to level up throughout the rest of the year. In this great post, Martin Sandström ruminates on what it meant to be a UI design in 2001, 2011, and what that means for people who arrange pixels on screens in 2021.

If 2021 is the year you’re hoping to break into the startup world, then take a look at Pearl, a job source with a difference. Text details of the type of role that excites you, and when something comes along, they’ll hook you up. It’s an excellent way of getting into early-stage startups in roles that often skip traditional hiring routes.

Pop-history tells us that Henry Ford’s customers just wanted faster horses. Whether the quote can truly be attributed to Ford is unclear, but what we do know is that if faster horses were the answer, he asked the wrong question. Adam Fard lists four reasons to distrust user feedback, and how to make it work.