Design Digest: Trends, Logo Redesign, and Fresh Memes [Part1]

Design is inspiring. However, the industry is changing incredibly fast and it is sometimes difficult to keep up with all the trends. We have prepared a digest of the best recent cases, fresh news, tips, and funny memes on design to make your day a bit brighter. Enjoy ;)

🦄 Product Design

Articles

Writing an Effective Guide for a UX Interview — tips on how to compile a guide for in-depth interviews from the Nielsen/Norman Group.

Design review means asking questions — a guide to conduct a design review and discuss the industry in a more “ecological” way.

Why Does a Design Look Good? — another good article from Nielsen/Norman Group on what makes design aesthetic, namely: consistent typography, clear hierarchy, good color scheme and grid.

Behavioral Design 2021 — an annual review of design trends from behaviorist experts.

What Saul Bass Can Teach Us About Web Design — some reflections on what a modern web designer can learn by analyzing the legacy of graphic design.

Obscure Mobile Design Techniques That Boost UX — the review of design techniques for mobile that improve UX.

Mastering Iconography: The 3 Do’s & Don’ts of Icon Design — a good article on the consistency in icon design with nice examples.

7 photography tips to enhance your UI designs — tips on how to work with photography in website design with some nice examples of popular Dribbble shots.

What does simple design really mean? — We all pretend to strive for "simple" design. But what does it really mean to each of us?

Works

true • overview is the website of an HR-agency where the grid, 3D, and typography are as minimal as possible. Created by Anton & Irene.

Here is how they presented their project on their website.

Case Study: Lumen. Website Design for Museum of Mountain Photography — a case study of the Museum of Mountain Photography website from Tubik.

Liquid Crystal: a clean, simple, and still impressive website.

TheRoom: an attractive website with nice fonts and minimal animation.

Bonjour Paris: there is something interesting in horizontal scroll, right? :)

VJ Type Typefaces: fonts have never been presented so elegantly before.

Helsedirektoratet — a great work with 3D and animation on the website.

MAD — a website-portfolio of the Berlin-based studio in the form of a desktop. You can interact with different elements on the page.

Just a lot of inspiration from UX Planet.

👁️ Graphic design

Articles and case studies

Last month, McDonald’s updated its global packaging design with a focus on illustration. Later, Packaging in Europe discussed with the creators, the Pearlfisher agency, what exactly stood behind these changes. 

Booking.com designers revealed the details of creating illustrations in products for travelers.

The Dieline tells how Pizza Hut expands its consumer experience with the Pacman AR game and pizza packaging.

Creative Review - what exactly has changed in logo design over the decade.

Another season of logo redesign: automakers Renault ta Peugeot, jewelry manufacturer Swarovski and even the venture fund Andreessen Horowitz. 

Is graphic design too trendy? - An article about design trends and what's wrong with them from It's Nice That.

The Climate Crisis Font - a variable font that represents irreversible climate change and, according to the author's description, is based on real data of glaciers in the Arctic seas.

Works

Pasta Sepia — a system of visual brand identification based on the definition of sepia by all possible methods. Concise and complicated.

Mun Champs Elysées. Identity, custom typography, illustrations, and stationery in a minimalistic and elegant style for a restaurant in central Paris from Violaine & Jeremy.

Nexible: bright geometric brand identity for the German digital insurance company MORPHORIA.

Mapfry: brand identity for a geomarketing startup based on thermal maps and interface visualization from Polar, Ltda.

Visual identity of Sendlane from Balkan Brothers.

🚀 Products and tools

Figma

Improved prototyping capabilities.

Designing micro-interactions with Figma interactive components. A brief overview of the beta features of Figma Interactive Components.

Subscription terms have changed for team work, individual accounts will remain free of charge as before.

Adobe

The new mobile application Creative Cloud - now featuring personalized recommendations for project editing from an "artificial intelligence" Adobe Sensei.

Updated work with cloud documents.

Plugins, addons

Fig3D — a plugin that adds a 3D effect to vector objects.

Glass-Morphism in Figma — Figma project with ready-made objects in the style of glass morphism.

Other

FREE AVATAR LIBRARY FOR FIGMA AND SKETCH — if you don’t want to search for photos of avatars on Unsplash, you can find them here :)

Draftshot — an application that predicts (or at least tries predicting) the popularity of shots on Dribbble.

Creatopy — an online platform for creating design and collaborative work.

FlutterFlow — no-code online platform that allows people to create their own mobile applications, providing fast iterations.

Siter.io — visual website designer from Designmodo.

Droste Creator — a tool for creating recursive images.

Freezeframe — an application for saving workspaces in Mac OS.

Tabbied — pattern generator of geometric shapes. You can change colors, quantity, size.

🤔 All at once

What to read

The Awesomic team has created the first design community in Ukraine.

Forbes on the NFT phenomenon and whether you should become an owner.

Adobe research on what skills future leaders need.

From blind optimism to sober responsibility: How design has changed since the first Innovation by Design Awards — FastCompany about innovations in design.

Sustainable Web Design — a new book from A Book Apart.

Full interview from Helvetica/Objectified/Urbanized movies.

Google UX Design Professional Certificate - Google has posted a course for UX designers on Coursera that costs $39 per month after the trial period. Duration - 6 months. There are also courses for Project Managers and Data Analytics.

Lockdown is a good time to make a new home workplace setup. Inspiration can be found here.

What to listen 

Meet the Creatives — podcast, authored by Rob Johnston, a designer and photographer from New York who seeks to bridge the gap between entry-level creative professionals and the best in the industry.

Memes

Hope you enjoyed it 🤗

Stay tuned for more!