📝 Issue #472: 3 Essential Design Trends, Seven Rules of Creativity, Penpot App, Goodbye to Pixel Units, and more…

We’re a month into 2021, and the design ideas are coming thick and fast. In this month’s roundup of the latest design trends we’ve seen in the last four weeks, there are fresh new approaches to navigation, an elegant notion for incorporating a personal touch in your branding, and our ongoing love for fluid shapes.

Luxa CSS is a hot new CSS framework that is designed to build and ship products rapidly. It’s lightweight and simple to implement, with a clear naming protocol and an even simpler modifier system. It’s super-easy to learn, and because it’s free and open-source, you can even fork it on GitHub and modify the underlying code if you wish.

The overwhelming majority of web designers accept the need for both responsive and accessible web sites. Despite this, we still tie our designs to the obsolete px unit. Nick Gard runs through a list of times when you might be tempted to use pixels, explains why you shouldn’t, and provides some helpful alternatives.

Gleek is an easy-to-use diagramming app for developers. It allows you to rapidly create flowcharts, relationship diagrams, and sequence diagrams, all using just your keyboard. It’s an awesome way to communicate ideas without drawing. Version control, exports, and live collaboration are included. There’s a free trial available.

Brendan Dawes is an artist who uses generative code to power his projects; he first rose to fame as a leading Flash developer and much of his work stems from those early Actionscript experiments. Collected here are his seven rules of creativity, from embracing doing nothing to not believing your own PR.

If you’re running dozens of third-party scripts on your site, scripts like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Intercom, then you’ll know how slow they make your site. Zaraz is an innovative service that loads memory-intensive third-party scripts, so your users’ browsers don’t have to. You can join the waiting list for the free plan now.

Every brand wants to connect with customers in a meaningful way, building trust and converting first-time users into committed evangelists. Beth McEntee talks to Typeform’s Christine Werner about how the survey tool approaches not just its own CX but how it enables customers to start their own meaningful conversations.

Penpot is a design and prototyping platform for teams. At heart, it’s a design app, but it brings team collaboration into the mix. It’s web-based, freeing you from the confines of a single OS; it’s open-source so that it can be adapted to the needs of advanced teams; it uses SVG for easy web integration. And it’s currently free.