✏ Issue #474: Steal Like a Designer, What’s New in Ecommerce, A Whole New Trello, Love & Creativity, and more…

We all strive for originality. Being the first to do something is central to human ambition. But design is built from accumulated influences. Daria Vorontsova discusses how to plunder design history in a way that boosts your creativity, from feedback to identifying winning designs, in this must-read post for product designers.

Each month we publish this guide to the latest developments in ecommerce. In February’s edition, we take a look at experiential shopping that’s developed during the pandemic, a 90s nostalgia trend that’s fresh and youthful and in no way minimal, and the au naturale approach to models with not an airbrush in sight.

Trello is one of the front-runners in team productivity. Its approach to task management redefined the category, and now it plans to re-redefine it with a slew of new features to analyze your performance. Michael Pryor talks us through what’s new.

Saul Bass is considered to be a giant of 20th-century design thanks to his logos for classic brands like AT&T and Warner Bros to his ground-breaking posters for films like Vertigo and titles for films like West Side Story. Frederick O’Brien delves into the masters’ portfolio and asks what Bass’ work can teach us about web design.

Audiblogs is an incredible app for translating articles on the web into podcasts you can listen to later. Desperate to keep up with the latest views on UX, but don’t have time to pause work and read? Just install the Chrome extension, save any article you like, and then the app reads the content back to you as a podcast.

One of the most interesting new CSS functions is clamp(), a simple way to specify a minimum and maximum value for a property. Among various handy uses for it is the ability to create fluid typography easily. Andy Bell shows us how in this helpful tutorial.

Ray.so is a neat little app for attractively presenting code snippets. Copy and paste — or type — your code into the window, customize the colors, background, dark mode, and padding, then download the image. It’s a great option for any time you need to display code in a visually compelling format.

It was Valentine’s day this week, and Ward Andrews got all soppy exploring the relationship between love and creativity. From the hope that is central to every creative endeavor to the need for cooperation in love and creativity, and even the similar way love and creativity require courage, it’s just what we needed this week!