✏ Issue #479: How To Get Web Design Clients Fast, Fontshare, 20 Best New Websites, The Logo Is Not Enough, and more…

If you’re running an agency or even working as a freelancer, you’ll know that growing your business is a tough prospect. In this timely guide to getting more clients and reaching financial stability Stephen Roe introduces his agency’s pricing model, its approach to finding clients, and explains why he’d turn down a $10k design job.

Who doesn’t love a whole bunch of fonts for free? The Indian Type Foundry has been making its commercial fonts available to students and non-profits for years. With Fontshare, it’s extending this philosophy to make beautiful, high-quality fonts available to anyone for personal or commercial use. There are currently 50 fonts to choose from.

In this excellent guide to a creative process, Ruby Boddington talks to award-winning designer Caterina Bianchini as she guides us through the process of answering a creative brief. It’s an engaging, hands-on tutorial on the design process, taking you step-by-step from research to mood boards and on to the final design.

Grid is an incredible cloud-based app that allows you to take simple spreadsheet data and transform it into interactive charts and presentations for the web that bring your data to life. You can use just about any type of data, from marketing reports to financial predictions. Grid is free to use with a watermark, and paid plans start at $29/month.

Every month we publish this roundup of the best new sites we’ve found on the web in the previous four weeks. In March 2021’s edition, you’ll find a ton of color, with yellow being a popular choice this month. There are some excellent portfolios on show, a few food and beverage sites, incredible travel photography, and sites that want to change the world.

UICoach is a great resource for anyone who’s learning user interface design. Using its curated prompts, you generate a design challenge, tackle the brief with your preferred tools, finally post your design, and receive feedback from the growing community. All contributions are anonymous, so it’s a safe place to hone your craft.

In this passionate and well-argued post, Gingersauce argues why a logo is not sufficient to gain a potential customer's recognition, and what you actually need to stand out in a crowded marketplace. It’s a must-read guide for anyone involved in developing a brand and may change the way you think about designing identities in the future.

One font name and two text samples; can you identify the font? Can you identify Open Sans just by looking at it? Comic Sans is easy to spot unless it’s up against Comic Sans Neue. Do you know Helvetica by sight? Foont is a fun game to challenge your designer’s eye on different fonts. The odds are 50-50, but it’s fiendishly difficult.