✏ Issue #476: 3 Essential Design Trends, How to Design Smooth Gradients, Google Icons, Proxima Vara, and more…

Every month we publish this roundup of the biggest trends we’ve seen ship on the web in the previous four weeks. In March 2021’s edition, Spring takes over with fun new takes on classic concepts; circle animations are back, there’s plenty of pink and purple color palettes, and designers turn to faux split-screens.

Google Fonts has received a significant update to allow it to offer icons as well as fonts. The initial icons are Material Design Icons in five styles: outlined, filled, rounded, sharp, and two-tone. The icons are free and open-source, allowing you to utilize them in personal and commercial projects and edit any shapes you need.

Digital product design is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in the design field, with software and apps inserting themselves into every aspect of our day. In this in-depth post, Kyle Turman takes a deep dive into the central pillars of designing digital products, from user-centered problem solving to collaboration and communication.

The eternally popular Proxima Nova typeface has had a major revision with the release of Proxima Vara, a variable font version. Proxima Vara uses three values, width, slant, and weight, to enable 5,000,000 variations, allowing you to fine-tune your typography without adding unnecessary overheads to your bandwidth budget.

One of the biggest design trends of 2021 is gradients, they’re everywhere, and they’ll be with us for years. Every designer should know how to design a beautiful gradient, and there’s a simple trick to perfect them. Erik Kennedy reveals the secret and presents a neat tool to help you make the most of your new-found knowledge.

Zepel is a product development tool that is designed to unite engineering and product teams to deliver customer-focused solutions. It easily converts feature specs into visually trackable work using Kanban boards and detailed reporting. There’s a free-forever plan for small teams of up to five members.

With increasing numbers of creative professionals turning to freelance work, you may be considering joining them. For those about to embark on self-employment, Cameron Chapman breaks down six myths about freelancing, good and bad, from not having a boss to freelancing being more stressful than a job.

Life’s a bit of a rollercoaster for many of us at the moment. For some people, it’s all down and no up; according to positivenotes.com, 28,146,129 people are having a bad day — nice of them to be so precise. This offbeat site wants to make it easy for you to show someone some love via mail or social, and maybe get it down to 28,146,128.