✏ Issue #487: Material You, Iconoir Open Source Icons, The Problem With Design Is Designers, Giving A Damn About A11y, and more…

This week Google unveiled Material You, a new version of its Material Design design system. Details are thin on the ground so far, but Google will expand on the initial release in the coming months. Material You will form the basis of all Google UI design for the foreseeable future, and it’s expected to be highly influential on the Web.

Accessibility is about creating apps and sites that are inclusive by design. It’s a vitally important but surprisingly difficult area to master. UX Collective has teamed up with Sheri Byrne-Haber to produce this excellent free ebook in PDF format. Aiming to deliver a more candid approach than other guides, it’s a must-read.

Fingerspelling is an incredible web app that helps you learn your ABCs in American Sign Language. Start a game, turn on your webcam when prompted, follow the hand shapes, and the machine learning will read your hand position, guiding you to form the correct letters. It’s an awesome experiment and fun to play.

Every designer is opinionated, every designer has a process that gets results for that individual designer, and many are evangelical about their approach. But, in this concise and persuasive post, Christopher Butler suggests that good designers don’t have a good process; rather, they have a thorough knowledge of themselves.

If you love icons, you’ll love Iconoir, a free, open-source collection of icons. There are currently 914 icons available for download, with no strings attached. Each icon is delivered in SVG format, ready for use or editing. The designs are clean, minimal, and modern, with just enough clever little touches to give the set personality.

There’s a war raging in front-end web design between purists who insist on the separation of style and data, and…well, basically front-enders who like Tailwind. At the core of the issue are utility classes, style definitions that should not be confused with inline styles. Sarah Dayan tackles the issue in this lengthy and illuminating post.

User experience extends far beyond your website. UX is about every connection your users have with your brand, from the first time they encounter you on a search engine to the moment your product lands in their mailbox and beyond. Suzanne Scacca breaks down the UX essentials beyond your site in this insightful post.

Throwing its hat into the ring of project management apps is Desqk, an interesting new solution that takes inspiration from social media. Desqk is aimed at freelancers and contractors who don’t fit into the enterprise-grade project management SaaS that dominates the sector. You can register for the invite-only beta now.