✏ Issue #485: Design Leaders’ Salaries, 3 Essential Design Trends, Adobe Font Recommendations, Winter CMS, and more…

Spring is a great time to explore new design trends and find fresh inspiration. Every month we bring you this collection of the most striking new trends we’ve seen online in the previous four weeks. In May’s edition, we explore flat card design, a new kind of funnel, and typography that takes a deep breath and gets risky. Enjoy!

Forked from October CMS, which has recently abandoned the open-source model, Winter CMS has launched thanks to key contributors reaffirming their commitment to OSS. Expect Winter CMS to diverge from October CMS in the coming months, with new features planned. Because it’s open-source, it’s free to use.

Design systems are an integral part of an efficient design workflow, but they remain a mystery for many designers. In this excellent primer, Josh Cusick walks us through the hows and whys of developing a design system and making them a part of our everyday design practice, with practical insights from the UX team at Microsoft.

Adobe has revealed a new feature for its Adobe Fonts service: font recommendations. Now, when browsing typefaces on the site, you’ll see a recommendations tab with a list of fonts similar to the one you’re already viewing. The Adobe Sensei-powered feature is a great way to discover new type options for your designs.

Whenever we test an application, we dread the list of bugs and errors. But what’s worse than failing a test is passing it the first time. Jonathan Thompson looks at the myth of the 100% pass, false negatives, a “fail-first” mindset and explains why you shouldn’t trust a test that never fails in this excellent guide to good code testing.

Need a day off but not sure how to ask? Want to approach someone about a position but unsure how to grab their attention? Want to decline an offer without burning any bridges? Whatever your reason for firing off an email, Emaily can help you set the right tone by generating the text for you. You can request early access now.

If you’re thinking of renegotiating your salary soon, check out this short post from Brittany Anas that looks at the average design leader’s salary across a range of different industries. Unsurprisingly race and gender still play a negative role, but the difference between a happy designer and a sad one is just $30k.

This free mockup generator is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to present their work in the context of a device. Select a mockup, upload your image or images to the editor, flip the orientation if you wish, then download the mockup. Downloads can be up to 5000px, and there are dozens of mockups to choose from.