✏ Issue #497: Attracting Clients To Your Agency, 20 Best New Websites, SVG Gobbler, 25 Years of the Internet Archive, and more…

Prepare for a wide range of communication roles and build expertise in areas such as UX, UI, and HCI. Choose from specializations in content strategy, communication with data, and learning design. - Ad

It’s great to win work by word-of-mouth; personal recommendations get you introduced to potential clients with zero effort other than doing what you do. But if you’re going to grow an agency, word-of-mouth isn’t enough. Paul Boag explains the fundamentals of a proactive approach to winning new work and how to get started.

Tricycle is a set of automation tools aimed at lessening the workload of designers and other creative professionals. The tools span the full product lifecycle from prototype to production code. You can describe a design, and the tool will draw it, or sketch an idea lo-fi and watch the tool create a hi-fi version. You can join the waitlist now.

Every month we publish this roundup of the best new websites we’ve seen on the web in the past four weeks. As we pass the mid-point of 2021, decorative details are creeping back into designs; even conservative sites are using simple flourishes, color choices, interesting font choices, and animation to raise their design to the next level.

SVG Gobbler is an awesome, free, and open-source browser extension for exporting vector-based SVGs from web pages. You can use it to quickly download and optimize SVGs for your own sites; grab logos from top sites; collect icons for inspiration; pull down illustrations; examine SVG code, and reuse it where permitted.

The web is ephemeral, with sites launching, and vanishing, in days. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that’s seeking to record the vanishing web for posterity. Launched in 1996, it’s celebrating its 25th anniversary in the next few months, and it is coordinating virtual celebrations to which you are cordially invited.

Qatalog is a new set of tools for organizing work across teams. It allows you to see what’s important quickly, align goals, centralize projects even as your team is decentralized, and automate workflows. Qatalog integrates with your favorite tools, including Asana, Google Drive, and Slack. There’s a free forever plan for up to ten users.

AI is coming, but whether it’s a tool to eliminate user frustrations and facilitate creativity, or a legion of unstoppable killbots is really down to us. In this podcast, Fergal Reid talks to IBM’s Arin Bhowmick about designing AI-powered tools used by millions of people, his team’s design process, and innovating through design.

Extracting text from images is an incredibly time-consuming process; the fastest solution is often retyping the text, until now… TextSniper is an incredible app for macOS that uses AI to extract text from videos and images. Simply drag the marquee over the area of text to extract, and use Cmd+V to paste it into the app of your choice.