✏ Issue #478: Ghost 4.0 Launched, Getting Started With Inclusive Design, Google’s New Ranking Algorithm, Why Does a Design Look Good, and more…

Logos are important — and not just to designers; logos are important to ‘normal’ people too. Why? What is it that makes us buy a shirt with a particular brand mark or take to social media to vent over the slight tweak in hue some company has made? Stuart Watson explains why we care about logos, even if we pretend we don’t.

Ghost 4.0 has just been released. The latest version of the popular blogging platform focuses on monetization, with a dashboard designed to help you transform content into cold hard cash. There’s also a new template store, a built-in newsletter feature, and a dark mode. There’s a free trial, and plans start at $9/month.

Inclusive web design is about creating a site design that works for everyone. It’s not just about accessibility features but about designing with a non-exclusionary mindset. In this quick start guide, we walk you through the key elements to consider when designing a 21st-century website that delivers results for your clients and their users.

Brevy is a feedback tool for websites that lets your whole team collaborate in the review and QA stages. It seamlessly integrates with apps like Slack, Asana, and GitHub, so non-technical users can wade-in, and no one’s feedback gets lost at the bottom of an inbox. Brevy is currently in beta, and you can request early access.

The Nielsen Norman Group is famous for its studies on usable design, but in this quick post, Sarah Gibbons and Kelley Gordon focus instead on three UI elements that make a design look aesthetically pleasing, from typography and spacing, to hierarchy and color, to consistency. It’s a great primer on why we do what we do.

Fonts are functional in the sense that we read them. But they are also visual and evoke emotions. In this excellent guide to categorizing and selecting fonts, Oliver Schöndorfer discusses the various emotions different typefaces provoke and aims to give you a new emotion-based vocabulary with which to identify your typographic decisions.

Serial entrepreneurs and aspiring first-timers are always on the hunt for the next new opportunity before it takes off. To help them, Opportunities is a regular series of reports delivered by email and generated by machine learning that aims to keep you in the loop about potential growing markets in tech. There’s a free plan available.

Google prepped its latest algorithm change in the 2nd quarter of 2020, but as the pandemic took hold, it decided to postpone until businesses had time to respond. Well, time’s up. The algorithm is expected in May this year, so you need to prepare. Rachael Hope looks at how the update will affect WordPress — or any other kind of site.