✏ Issue #498: 3 Essential Design Trends, Get More Clients, Why We Love the Pastel Color Palette, Google Penalty Tools, and more…

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Every freelancer would like more clients. There’s no feeling as bad as realizing that work is about to run out. In this must-read post for anyone striking out alone, Chris Do offers invaluable advice on strategies for increasing your stable of clients, alongside his recommendations for books, podcasts, and videos that will help you win work.

Websites are 99% text, so it’s vital for user experience that your web copy is high-quality. Strings is a great new app that helps you take charge of your copy, from design to code. It uses a dedicated Figma plugin to analyze your design and make sure your copy is on-brand and delivers the results you need for your site to succeed.

Each month we publish this roundup of the top three trends we’ve seen lighting up the web in the previous four weeks. August’s edition is here, as always packed full of inspiration, and inside, you’ll find alternative cropping approaches for images and video, a sticker-inspired UI device, and the current trend for breaking design rules.

Social media is a cornerstone of all good marketing strategies, but with so many different channels and multiple formats for every channel, it’s a headache saving images for all the different sizes you need. Biteable’s Image Resizer is an awesome free tool that resizes images for you, spitting them back out in standard sizes for social media.

Pastel color palettes are the stuff of art cinema, cool French sweet treats, and half the buildings in Miami. In this great introduction to the ever-popular trend, Ben Barnhart walks us through the pastel color palette, the interesting ways it can be used to enhance our designs and provides a host of sample color options.

A Google penalty is every site manager’s worst nightmare. Diagnosing a problem is made exponentially harder by natural drops in ranking as a result of algorithm changes. If you’re having SEO problems, this collection of 8 tools is a great place to explain rapid drops in traffic. It’s a good post to bookmark for the future, just in case.

Some problems are universal; they affect everyone, from the greenest freelancer to the grizzled veteran creative director. In this helpful post, The Web Designer tackles the five most common problems designers face, from asking about a client’s budget to handling unrealistic deadlines, and offers some practical solutions.

The UX industry is awash with fake pseudo-wisdom, so it was inevitable that sooner or later, someone would take a poke at it. With content as coarse as its name, this funny site dispenses wisdom like, “A wise man would use a in-house passive performance testing to go viral in social media channels.” Enjoy!