✏ Issue #507: 80s Retro Style, 3 Essential Design Trends, Is WordPress Enterprise Ready? How to Deal With Failure, and more…

The 1980s are remembered for the birth of MTV and the slick futurism of sci-fi movies. The styles we associate with the decade are increasingly popular with web designers. In this inspiring post, Dusica Popovic explores the trend, covering bold fonts, loud neon gradients, and some of the earliest cyberpunk aesthetics.

Shopify has identified five different types of founders and created a “zodiac sign” for each. In this positive article, Dayna Winter looks first at overcoming failure and then offers some specific advice for each of the five types of founder, ranging from learning from your mistakes to having a “plan B” just in case.

Every month we publish this roundup of the most important design trends we’ve seen shaking up web design in the previous four weeks. In this month’s edition, we look at trends that build on trends, with sites picking up more than one of the current crop of design ideas: hero typography, big branding, and round buttons.

WordPress is the most used content management system globally, but the vast bulk of those sites are small promotional sites and blogs with low traffic volumes. Is WordPress a good solution for large sites, with millions of views? Nick Schäferhoff looks at nine pros and cons to consider when using WordPress at scale.

There are a lot of people out there who would like to hire you; the difficulty is communicating your value to them. The Soufflé Club is a new service that helps you define your personal identity beyond job titles, highlighting what’s unique about you. Take one of the quizzes to preview your profile, and join the waitlist now.

Very little has as much impact on whether your text gets read as the font size you set it at. Choosing the right font size is a core skill for any designer or developer. In this helpful typography 101 post, Oliver Schöndorfer explains everything you need to know for perfect type, from types of text to relative units.

Design thinking is a technique used to identify problems in sites, products, or services and find ways of solving them. This excellent primer explains the process, from empathizing with users and defining the problem that needs to be solved, through ideas and prototyping, to testing the solutions with real-world users.

October’s upon us again, and it’s a few short weeks until kids head out to demand candy with the threat of TPing your house. So in preparation for the spookiest day of the year, Renee Fleck has gathered together 12 spooky fonts from 50s B-movie classics to sinister scripts to pack some horror into your designs.