Articles

15 Best New Fonts, November 2022

Nothing breathes life into your designs like the typefaces you choose, so every month, we put together this roundup of the best new fonts we’ve found online.

This month, a distinctly medieval aesthetic permeates some of the designs. You’ll find plenty of rebellion in fonts that break the rules for fun. And as always, we’ve included some excellent practical options. Enjoy!

Arnika

Arnika is a relaxed typeface with much more character than typical sans-serifs. Its strokes flare to the point that it’s almost a serif, and the oversized x-height gives it an almost medieval sensibility. There are four weights crying out to be used in a branding project.

Nosi

Nosi is an irreverent typeface that does an excellent job of evoking the spirit of music fanzines, French cinema, and teenage dramas. It’s a great choice for editorial display work if used sparingly.

Parabole

Parabole Display is what happens when you join the wrong points on your outlines: outer curves become inner curves creating an engaging and very usable display font. Parabole Text is the simplified sans-serif. It’s an exciting pairing for editorial work.

Rizoma

There aren’t enough new serif fonts, perhaps because they are harder to draw than the more popular sans-serif. Rizoma is a welcome exception. Based on Roman inscription letters, it is confident, modern, and highly usable.

Guacheva

If you’re shopping for a festive typeface and want to avoid the usual brush scripts, look at Guacheva. The all-caps serif is elegant and feminine, with a clear sense of calligraphy.

Axios Pro

Axios Pro is a good solid workhorse of a sans-serif. Based on early 20th-century grotesques, it will feel familiar to anyone interested in western architectural type design. It’s available in 10 weights and two variable fonts, with extensive OpenType support.

GT Pressura

GT Pressura brings the warmth of print to the web by simulating the effect of ink spreading over paper. The subtle rounding of the sans typeface adds a unique visual interest to the mono, standard, and extended fonts.

Galdy

Script fonts are almost always based on a brush or a pen, traced into vectors. So it’s refreshing to see Galdy, a refined retro script. With a distinctly americana feel, it’s perfect for branding projects.

Nitido

Nitido is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed as a companion for Nitida. It is an expertly realized font family with seven weights and seven accompanying italics. As a result, it‘s ideally suited to corporate design work.

Kinckq

Kinckq is an intriguing experiment with variable font techniques. Inspired by a 19th-century woodcut font, Kinckq is a didone that bends through its middle, creating a 3D effect that’s made for large sizes.

Broger

Broger is another distorted typeface, this time twisting shapes and tying them together with elegant ligatures. It’s an excellent choice for branding in the health & beauty market.

Charte Mono

Charte Mono is another attempt to solve the unsolvable — the Latin alphabet is not monosized. However, when resolved as well as Charte Mono, monospaced fonts are excellent for user interface design, charts, and signage systems.

Lini

Lini is designed to be as compressed as possible while remaining highly legible. It supports Latin and Devanagari languages and works equally well in both forms. Lini is still in beta but is already award-winning.

Rotulo Variable

Rotulo is a variable font with huge contrast between its thick and thin strokes. Inspired by hand-lettering on signs, it’s a chunky option for branding or display type on websites.

Bouuuuuh

OK, so we’re a month late for Halloween, but Bouuuuuh is still worth a mention. Its cartoonish shapes are perfect for poster design, T-shirts, brand design, and, yes, next year’s Halloween marketing.

Source

The post 15 Best New Fonts, November 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

16 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Two

Actualités, Actualités

Last week, you started a web design agency. This week we’ll help you take the next steps towards making your agency viable.

The first couple of days were spent on legal checks and taxes. After that, you’ve picked a niche to specialize in, an awesome name, worked out how much you’re going to charge, and set up business accounts. Then, finally, you took a day off to prepare for this week. (If you skipped any of those steps, go back and catch up now.)

This week, we’ll start defining who you are as an agency. The process is the same as last week: focusing on one task per day. By the end of the week, who you are as an agency will start to become apparent.

Day Eight: Choose Your Clients

For any new business, the temptation is to grab any work you can get to keep the money flowing in. However, chasing money is counter-productive; you end up clutching at opportunities instead of taking a targeted approach.

Last week you selected your niche. Today, you will choose the clients you intend to work for. And we mean that literally: draw up a list of target clients.

Do you want to work for Nike? Fine, add it to the list. Think Apple would look good in your portfolio? Add it too. Make sure you add a few that are more realistic but don’t aim too low.

By the end of the day, you should have a spreadsheet of companies to target.

Day Nine: Tech Stack

Now you know who your agency is planning to work for, it’s time to identify the technology stack you’re planning to offer them.

It may be that you will be a full-service agency handling everything from branding to custom apps. Alternately, you may perform better handling one aspect of the job well and outsourcing the rest.

However you plan to approach the actual work, you’ll need a full-stack solution for most clients. That means brand design, web design, marketing and content, front-end code, content management, and SEO.

The best advice is to focus on your existing strengths and develop a skill to an expert level. Then, once you’ve done so, you can expand sideways to plug any gaps.

For example, moving into WordPress development is a good option if you already know HTML and CSS. On the other hand, if you’re more design orientated, a site builder approach using SquareSpace or Shopify might be a better fit.

Technologies change, so you shouldn’t expect your core technologies to stay with you throughout your career. But these are the solutions you’ll become an expert at over the next few years.

Day Ten: Define Your Red Lines

All companies have brand values, whether they define them or not. So at this stage, it’s more practical to look at what you’re not prepared to do.

Everyone has red lines that they’re not prepared to cross. Would you work for a pornography company? Would you work for a radical political group? Would you work for a controversial religion? Would you work for a company with a patchy human rights record? Would you work for big pharma?

There’s no right and wrong answer to this; it all comes down to your personal values. However, you will be asked to cross the line at some point. It’s easier to say “no thanks” if you know where the lines are in advance.

If you don’t have red lines, that’s valid too. But be aware that once you’ve crossed a line, that line will stay crossed; you’ll attract more of that type of work, which will define you.

Day Eleven: Write Your Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is a short couple of lines that can be delivered to a prospective client on a (hypothetical) elevator ride between two floors.

When someone asks you what you do, “Um, well, you know, mostly just websites and stuff.” Is not a good answer.

Your language should be natural, non-technical, and self-assured. Something like, “We help startups like yours outperform their competitors on Google.”

Once you’ve settled on a good elevator pitch, practice it over and over. Write it on a post-it and stick it to your monitor, screenshot it and use it as your phone’s wallpaper. Say it over and over in the shower, in the car, and in the elevator. Learn it so that when someone asks, it trips off your tongue effortlessly.

Day Twelve: Pick a Coffee Shop

You don’t need fancy offices to start a web design agency, and in fact, the first agency I worked for tanked primarily because they couldn’t afford their office lease.

People are used to remote work now, and most meetings can be conducted by video call. But you will still find clients who like to meet one-to-one, especially for a kick-off meeting.

It’s always best to visit a client’s premises if you can, but coffee shops are a good alternative, and every new agency should have one.

Consider your coffee shop your meeting room. If you’re lucky enough to be in a town or city where there are a few to choose from, try to pick one that matches your values: quirky and independent, efficient and corporate, etc.

Check when the quiet times are (you don’t want to be shouting over the buzz of rush-hour orders). Make sure you know where the nearest parking or public transport is so that you can direct clients. Ensure the wi-fi is OK, preferably free, and find out the password in advance.

Day Thirteen: Start Your Branding

Two weeks in, you finally get to do something creative: design your logo.

If you’ve been matching days to the days of the week, then it’s Saturday. That should give you more time for this task, but don’t go to town. Your logo is going to change and evolve. It is far too easy to get wrapped up in tiny details like logos and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Remember: no logo, no matter how cool, ever won a pitch.

If you’re a designer, you probably ignored us and started the logo on day one. In fact, you’ve probably had something knocking around in a sketchbook for a while.

If you’re not a designer, type out your name in a geometric sans-serif, tighten the tracking, and call it a day.

Either way, by the end of today, you’ll have something that fits your niche, ties into your elevator pitch, and appeals to your target clients.

Day Fourteen: Rest

Hopefully, you learned the benefits of a rest day last week, and this week was easier as a result.

It’s time to do whatever you do to relax. If you can, do it outside away from your computer. Create some distance and recharge your batteries.

Next week, we’ll start putting together the assets you will use to present your business professionally.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

The post How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Two first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

10 août 2022/par Service comm.

Quiz: The Baffling Branding Brainteazer

Actualités, Actualités

Branding is a core skill for designers. Even designers who don’t work on brand design, work with it by following style guides and creating designs to complement a brand’s voice.

How much do you really know about the process of branding, its history, and key terminology? Take our fun quiz to find out!

Featured image via Pexels.

Source

The post Quiz: The Baffling Branding Brainteazer first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

17 décembre 2021/par Service comm.

Square Rebrands As Block

Actualités, Actualités

A few days ago, the big tech news was that Jack Dorsey was stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO to focus on Square, the payment processor he founded in 2009.

Two days later, it was announced that Square will now rebrand under the umbrella of Block. Like Meta and Alphabet, Block is a parent company — Square will remain Square, just as Facebook is still Facebook. The only actual product name change is that of Square Crypto will now be known as Spiral.

The move has reportedly been in the works for over a year. However, despite the marketing team’s best efforts to spread around the reference, it’s reasonably clear that Block is a reference to blockchain, the technology that powers cryptocurrency.

Dorsey has been a longtime advocate of cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. With PayPal and Mastercard entering the crypto space, it was only a matter of time before Square’s focus was redirected away from legacy money.

The recent Meta rebrand was much scorned, but the new Block brand has been received with considerably more positivity. So what’s the difference?

Typically corporate rebrands, especially those in fintech, are detestable exercises in cowardice, where all trace of personality is driven out in favor of a nice safe sans-serif and a logomark as some form of tick or wave. Not so the Block branding, which feels like a cross between an Apple store and a hardcore night out in Berlin.

Yes, the logotype is sans-serif — it’s Pilat, to be precise. But the characters are pleasingly wide, and the overall shape of each is a rounded square. So much so that the ‘K’ feels a little out of place due to the rounded characteristics of the other letters. Most obviously of all, it’s uppercase, which in itself is nothing new, except that it breaks from the recent trend for lowercase. It’s incredibly refreshing to look at a brand that doesn’t mimic everything else in the space.

The logotype is crowned with a pleasantly brave mark; a morphing, twisting cube across the surface of which rainbows of gradients dance and play as it flips and spins. Interestingly, the logomark’s animated form is considered the primary version, with static versions only to be used when required.

The logo isn’t perfect — clearly, a design so dependent on color lends itself far better to dark mode than anything else — a good logo should be robust enough to work well in any context. However, I really like the design’s ambition to define itself, and the playfulness with which it does it.

Source

The post Square Rebrands As Block first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

3 décembre 2021/par Service comm.

Making Your Mark: 6 Tips for Infusing Brand Essence into Your Website

Actualités, Actualités

What makes a company special? There are hundreds of organizations out there selling fast food, but only one McDonalds. You’ve probably stumbled across dozens of technology companies too, but none of them inspire the same kind of loyalty and commitment as Apple. So why do people fall in love with some companies more than others?

Most of the time, it comes down to one thing: brand essence. Your brand essence, or brand identity, represents all of the unique components of your business that separate it from the competition. It’s not just about your logo or the brand colors you choose for your website. Your brand essence entails all of the visual assets you use and those less tangible concepts like brand values and personality.

When your customers decide which companies to buy from, they’re not just looking for another dime-a-dozen venture with the cheapest products. Instead, your audience wants to buy from a business that they feel connected with. That’s where your brand comes in.

Infusing brand essence into your website helps give your digital presence that extra touch that differentiates you from other similar companies.

So, how do you get started?

What is Brand Essence?

Your brand essence is a collection of core characteristics responsible for defining your brand. More than just a single asset, your essence encompasses everything from your unique tone of voice, from your brand image, your message, and even what you stand for.

More than just a single asset, your essence encompasses everything

When you’re trying to boost your chances of sales, a brand essence helps build a kind of affinity with your customers. Your clients see aspects of your character that they can relate to, such as a modern and playful image or a commitment to sustainable practices. It’s that affinity that convinces your customer to choose your company instead of your competition time after time.

Your website is one of the first places that your customer will visit when looking for answers. They might happen across your site when searching for a key phrase on Google or stumble onto it from social media. When they arrive on your product or home page, everything there should help them make an immediate emotional connection.

The only problem?

It’s challenging to portray a unique brand identity through a standard website template. If your site looks the same as a dozen other online stores, how can you convince your customers that you’re better?

Why Your Website Needs Brand Essence

First impressions are a big deal.

In a perfect world, your visitors would land on your website and instantly fall in love with what they find there. So everything from the unique design of your homepage to the pictures on your product pages should delight and impress your audience.

Unfortunately, if just one element is wrong, then you could also make the wrong impression entirely on your customers too. Adding elements of brand essence to your site will:

Build trust with your audience: Your brand should be a consistent component of everything your business does, from selling products to interacting with customers. When your consumers land on your website, everything from your logo to your chosen colors should remind them of who you are and what you stand for. This consistency will lead to better credibility for your business.
Make you stand out: How many other companies just like yours are on the internet today? Your brand essence helps to differentiate you as special by showing what’s truly unique about you. It’s a chance to remind your audience of your values and make them forget all about your competitors.
Create an emotional connection: Brand essence that shows off your unique values, mission, and personality will help create an emotional link with your audience. Remember, people fall in love with the human characteristics behind your brand!

Easy Ways to Add Brand Essence to your Website

Since there are so many elements that add up to a strong brand essence, there are also a variety of ways you can add your brand to your website. Whether it’s using specific colors to elicit an emotional response from your fans or adding your unique tone of voice into content, there’s no shortage of ways to show off what makes you special.

1. Use Your Brand Colors Carefully

Brand colors are an important part of your brand essence. Walk into Target, and the bright shades of red will instantly energize you. Likewise, when you see a McDonalds, that golden arch logo might instantly remind you of joy and nourishment.

Color psychology plays a significant role in every brand asset you create, from the packaging you choose for your products to the shades in your logo. With that in mind, you should be using your colors effectively on your website too. Stick with the same selection of shades in every digital environment online.

For instance, the Knotty Knickers company uses different shades of pink and white to convey feelings of femininity and comfort. Not only is the website packed with this color, but the company also follows through with similar shades on its social media pages too.

Everything from the highlights on the Knotty Kickers Insta to the decorations in their images feature the soft tones of pink that make the company recognizable.

Remember, consistent use of color is psychologically proven to help improve recognition by up to 80%. So let your colors shine through.

2. Know Your Type

Your colors are just one component of your brand essence.

Fonts and typography are other components that your customers use to recognize and understand your business. There are many different styles of font, and new ones appear all the time. However, your company should have a specific selection of fonts that it uses everywhere.

If you have a typeface logo, then you might have one specific kind of font for this, like Original Stitch’s logo here:

On top of that, you may also use one font for the “heading” text on your website and something slightly different for the body text. Your heading and body text need to be extremely clear and easy to read on any device if you want to appeal to your target audience.

However, there’s more to getting your fonts right than choosing something legible. The fonts you pick need to say something about your company and what it stands for. For example, the modern sans-serif font of Original Stitch’s website conveys a sense of forward-thinking cleanliness and style.

The fonts feel trendy and informal, perfect for a luxury fashion company. Alternatively, a serif font like Garamond might look more formal and professional. So what do you want your customers to think and feel when they see your typography?

3. Know Your Images

Stock images look out-of-touch, cliché, and fake. If you cover your website in images like that, then you’re not going to earn the respect of your customers. Instead, it’s up to you to ensure that every graphic on your website conveys the sentiment and personality of your brand.

Bringing your brand essence into your website design means thinking about how you can convey your values in every element of that site. From the photos of your team that show the real humans behind your products and services to the pictures that you use on your product pages, choose your graphics wisely. If you have dedicated brand colors, you can even include these in your photos.

Of course, the most valuable graphic on your website should always be your logo. This is the thing that you need to include on all of your website pages to ensure that your audience knows who they’re shopping with. So ensure that no matter how much visual content you have on your page, your logo still stands out.

Firebox places its logo at the top of the page in the middle of your line of sight, no matter where you go on the website. This ensures that the logo is the thing that instantly grabs attention and reminds consumers of where they are.

Remember to ensure that each of the images you do include in your website is surrounded by plenty of white space so that your customers can see them properly too.

4. Use the Right Tone of Voice

It’s easy to get stuck focusing on things like logos and colors when you’re trying to make your brand essence shine through in your website. However, one of the most common things that your customer will recognize you by is your tone of voice.

Your brand tone of voice is what gives the content you share online personality and depth. It can come through in the kind of words you use, including slang and colloquialisms. In addition, you can add humor to your voice (if it’s appropriate) and even include emojis if that makes sense for your brand.

With formal words, you can make sure that you come across as reliable, dependable, and sophisticated. With informal words, you’re more likely to convince your audience that you’re friendly and relatable. Sticking with the Firebox example, look at how the company writes its product descriptions.

Everything from the length of the sentences to the humor in the tone of voice helps to convey something unique about the brand.

Like all of the elements that bring your brand essence into your website, your tone of voice must remain consistent wherever your customers see it. Make sure that your customer service agents know how to use your voice in chat with customers and that you include that personality on social media too.

5. Focus on Your Message

The tone of voice and personality that you showcase in your website and content is crucial to driving success for your business. However, under all of that, the most important thing to do is ensure you’re sending the right message. In other words, what do you want your customers to think and feel when they land on your website?

If your whole message is that you can make great skincare easy to obtain without asking people to compromise on animal safety, this should be the first thing that comes across when someone arrives on your homepage. That’s why Lush combines clean, simple web pages with credibility-boosting badges that tell customers everything they need to know instantly.

Ensuring that your message can come across correctly means learning how to use all the different brand assets you rely on consistently and effectively. Everything from the colors on your website to how you place trust badges along the bottom of every page makes a difference to how significant and believable your message is.

Notably, when you know what your core message is, it’s important to repeat it. That means that you don’t just talk about what your ideals and values are on your homepage. You also include references to your message on every product page and the “About” page too. Lush has an entire “ethical charter” on its website, where you can learn more about its activities.

Having a similar component included within your web design could be an excellent way to confirm what your most crucial considerations are for your customers.

6. Never Copy the Competition

Exploring other website designs and ideas created by your competitors is one of the easiest ways to get inspiration. Competitive analysis gives you an insight into the trends and design strategies that are more likely to work for your target audience. It’s also an opportunity for you to learn from your competitors’ wrongs and what they’re doing right.

However, it would be best if you never allowed your initial research and exploration to go too far. In other words, when you see something great that your competitor is doing, don’t just copy and paste it onto your own website. This is more likely to remind your customers of the other company and send them to that brand than it is to improve your reputation.

Instead, focus on making your website unique to you. If you’re having trouble with this, then start by looking at your About page. How would you describe your background and your mission as a business to someone who has never heard of you before? What makes your company different from all of the other organizations out there?

Take the unique features that you rave about on your About page and the personality you try to convey through your employees and bring it into the rest of your website design. The whole point of bringing brand essence into your web design strategy is that it helps to differentiate you from the other companies out there.

It’s a good idea to protect any assets that other people might try to steal from you too. Copyrighting your logo, your name, and other essential components of your brand will stop people in your industry from treading on your toes too much.

Make the Most of Your Brand Essence

Your website is one of the most valuable tools that you’ll have as a brand. It’s an opportunity for you to share your products and services with the world, capture the attention of your target audience, and potentially make sales too. However, it’s important not to forget that your website is also a chance for you to demonstrate what your brand is truly all about.

Through your brand essence, you can share the unique values and messages that make your company special. But, more importantly, you can use those components to build a deeper relationship with your audience – the kind of connection that leads to dedicated repeat customers and brand loyalty. People connect with other people – after all, not just faceless corporations.

Once you’ve identified your brand essence, the next step is to make sure that you know how to connect with your customers consistently. Every aspect of your website, application, social media pages, and anything else you make for your business sends the same message.

Source

The post Making Your Mark: 6 Tips for Infusing Brand Essence into Your Website first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

22 juillet 2021/par Service comm.

25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021

Actualités, Actualités

Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day.

Here’s what new for designers this month:

April’s Top Picks

Charts.css

Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts. It’s accessible, customizable, responsive, and open source. There’s a quick start option and available source code to work with.

Haikei SVG Generator

Haikei is a web app that helps you generate SVG shapes, backgrounds, and patterns in all types of shapes to use in projects. Everything can be exported into the tools you are already using for easy integration, and every element is customizable. The tool is free right now – no credit card needed – and you get access to 15 generators and can export in SVG and PNG format. A premium option is on the way, and you can sign up to get notified for access.

Fluid Space Calculator

Fluid Space Calculator helps you create a related space system and export the CSS to implement it. The calculator allows you to add space value pairs and multipliers and see the impact on the screen before snagging the related code. It’s great for determining how things will look in different viewports and for creating custom space pairs.

Night Eye WordPress Plugin

Night Eye WordPress Plugin helps you create a dark mode option for your WordPress website with ease. It’s completely customizable, schedulable, and one of those things that users are starting to expect. The plugin has free and paid versions – the only difference is a link to credit the developer.

3 Productivity Boosters

Macro

Macro is a supercharged checklist app for recurring processes. It’s designed to help teams document, assign, track, and automate for maximum efficiency. Now is the time to test this tool because it is free in public beta.

Writex.io

Writex.io is a free writing app that uses AI and smart features to help you write more efficiently. It can check readability as you write, make suggestions, check spelling, and allows you to work with versioning. All the settings are customizable, so you can get help and suggestions when you want them and avoid things you don’t want.

Taloflow

Taloflow, which is in beta, is a tool that helps you find the top cloud and dev tools for your use case. This is designed to be a time-saving solution to finding the right infrastructure and API products for your work.

8 Kits with Illustrations and User Interface Elements

Skribbl

Skribbl is a collection of free, hand-drawn illustrations in a light and fun style. The black and white sketches are friendly, and the collection keeps growing. Plus, the illustrators are allowing them to be used free for any use.

Mobile Chat Kit

Mobile Chat Kit is a free starter kit for building apps in Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. It includes more than 50 screen options with mapped-out flows for a quick-start project.

Flowchart.fun

Flowchart.fun is exactly what the name implies. The app allows you to type, create nodes, and link elements to develop simple flow charts quickly. Then you can alter shape and size with drag and drop. Export it for use as an SVG, JPG, or PNG.

Shuffle

Shuffle is a marketplace packed with UI libraries to help you with a variety of digital projects. There are more than 1,500 pre-built components to choose from with professional designs. This premium tool comes with a monthly subscription or lifetime license.

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack is a set of icons with fun colors in three-dimensional shapes that you can use to represent different crypto elements. The pack includes 55 #D icons in PNG and BLEND formats.

Stratum UI Kit for Figma

Stratum UI Kit for Figma includes nine free screens that are ready to use. Options include API documentation, Kanban, document, data dashboard, ecommerce product list, ecommerce product options, payments spreadsheet, cloud storage, and newsfeed.

Conic.css

Conic.css is a collection of simple gradients that you can browse and then click to copy the code into your CSS to use them in projects. It’s quick and easy while using trendy color options.

Artify Illustrations

Artify Illustrations is a Figma plugin that allows you to access more than 5,000 SVG and PNG illustrations within the app. It’s got a built-in search feature, everything is high-resolution, and the huge library includes various styles.

2 Tutorials

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components is an amazingly comprehensive guide from Smashing Magazine with everything you need to know about accessible components. From tabs to tables to toggles to tooltips, you’ll find it all here and learn how to use it the right way.

Grid CheatSheet in 2021

Grid CheatSheet in 2021 is a useful guide of everything you can do with CSS Grid. Plus, it has plenty of fun illustrations and an accompanying video.

8 Fresh and Fun Fonts

Athina

Athina is a modern display serif with beautiful connector strokes. The free version is a demo, and there’s a full family that you can buy.

Brique

Brique is a free (personal and commercial) display font with a wide stance and uppercase character set. The letters have a lot of personality and a readable configuration.

Code Next

Code Next is a great geometric sans serif with a full family of styles. Including two variable fonts. It’s highly readable and would work for almost any application.

Inter

Inter is a simple and functional sense serif family with everything from extra light to heavy weights. The extra character personality makes this a fun and functional font option.

Nothing Clean

Nothing Clean is a fun grunge-type option. It’s an all uppercase character set with alternates.

Playout

Playout is a fun, hand-drawn style typeface with interesting glyphs and alternate characters. The most fun feature might be the pawprint characters in the demo set.

Rockford Sans

Rockford Sans is a geometric typeface with subtly rounded edges. It has eight weights and italics. With its large x-height and round features, it’s legible and friendly. It’s suited to cover a wide variety of tasks from editorial to brand design and advertising.

SpaceType

SpaceType is a fun and funky typeface in regular and expanded styles. The stretched letterforms make interesting alternates for display purposes.

Source

The post 25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

19 avril 2021/par Service comm.

Branding 101: Choosing the Right Business Name

Actualités, Actualités

When starting a new business (or even venturing into the world of freelancing for the first time), there are some really big, important steps you have to take.

Step #1 is choosing the right business name for your brand identity.

Your business name isn’t something you can casually choose either — especially if you have lofty long-term goals for your company. It’s not as though you can’t change the name down the road, but that comes with a ton of work and will require you to rebuild pretty much everything all over again: your visual brand identity, your reputation, and your SEO…

So, it’s a good idea to spend time choosing a business name that’s going to work for you now and long into the future.

Today, we’re going to go through the process of how to name your brand. These questions will have you thinking beyond just “What name do I like the sound of?” and have you more focused on important questions like “What is my unique value proposition?”.

Let’s get started:

How to Name Your New Business

For those of you considering taking the easy way out and using a business name generator tool, let me show you why that’s a bad idea:

This is a list of business names suggested to me when I told the generator that my business is related to “design”:

Design
Normal Design
Regional Design
Design Partner
Design Stock

Even the more unique names on the list are unusable; they have no connection to me personally or to the kind of business I plan to start.

This is why it’s so important to sort out your brand identity and make sure you pick a business name that resonates with you, and your target audience. To do this yourself, answer the following seven questions:

1. What Services Will You Provide Or Products Will You Sell?

The one thing that name generators get right is including a descriptive word related to your business. That way, it doesn’t take an actual visit to your website or a look through your portfolio to figure out what you do.

Even if you have a very niche specialty, sum up your offering in one or two words. For instance:

Web design
Digital design
Design & development
UX design
Graphic design

Unless you run your business through your own name (which I’ll talk about shortly), your business name should include a simplified version of your offering in it.

2. Who Is Your Target User Persona?

A user persona is a fictional character created using the demographics and psychology of your ideal customer or client. You can use Hubspot’s Make My Persona generator to create a card that documents these details:

Once you sort out who you serve, what makes them tick, and how it fits into the bigger picture of their business, you can better pitch your solution to them.

For instance, Joanna above is a real estate agent and owner whose primary goal is to capture leads and generate sales. You know how effective a real estate website can be for improving an agent’s visibility online and streamlining how they earn money.

So, including words in your business name that speak to that persona as well as their goals might be really useful.

Just keep in mind that web designers don’t always commit to one niche or stick with the same niche over the long run. So, you might not want to make your business name too specific to an industry (e.g. “Real Estate Design Solutions”) and more related to higher level themes and goals.

3. What Are The Names Of Your Top Competitors?

Do you know who your main competitors will be upon entering this space? If not, now’s the time to look them up.

When it comes to business names, you want to see if you can identify common threads among them. Perhaps they use puns or include location-specific descriptors. Or they just stick with the names they were born with.

While you don’t want to come off as a copycat, you can imbue your business name with a similar theme or tone if it’s proven to be successful with your shared audience.

4. What Makes You Different?

Every business has a unique value proposition (UVP) — something that sets them apart from everyone else in the space. What’s yours?

Do you operate within a large metropolitan area where your prospective clients’ industry is booming?

Did you previously work in the industry for which you now build websites?

Are you an SEO expert who builds enterprise websites that rank?

In business, it’s good to be different — so long as it benefits your clients.

If you have a particular UVP that’s going to make you stand out, you’re going to use it everywhere to market yourself — your website, social media, sales pitches, etc. So, you might want to consider using a unique keyword from it within your business name.

5. Where Do You Envision Yourself In Five Years?

No one’s future is set in stone. However, if you’re seriously thinking about starting a new web design business, you have some ideas about where you want to go with it:

Do you like the idea of being a lifelong freelancer or digital nomad?
Would you like to operate your own design agency?
Do you have aspirations to build and sell website products, like plugins, themes, or UI kits instead?

If you expect to pivot your business at some point, be careful about choosing a business name that paints you into a corner. Keep it broader so that prospects don’t have to wonder what it is you really do.

And if you plan on scaling your business beyond yourself, using your own name might not be the best idea. You’ll want clients to associate the brand name with your agency, not with you specifically.

6. Will Your Business Name Be Easy To Remember?

At this point, you have some business names brewing. So, now we need to look at the more technical aspects of naming your brand.

Here’s what you need to do.

a. Write down no more than three to five business names you like.

For example:

Honeymooners Web Design
Charles Murphy Design & Development
FoREver Websites
SOLD Web Design Agency

b. Mash each name into one long lowercase string. Don’t include any punctuation.

For example:

honeymoonerswebdesign
charlesmurphydesignanddevelopment
foreverwebsites
soldwebdesignagency

c. Are any of the names difficult to read? Too long? Do any of them cause confusion and look like they mean something else?

If so, get rid of them as a matching domain name won’t work. Or, if you absolutely love them, fix the name so it’s clear, readable, and short. For instance:

charlesmurphydesignanddevelopment becomes charlesmurphydesign or just charlesmurphy.

7. Does The Name You Want Already Exist?

It’s a good idea to have a backup name in case you discover that the name you want already exists. Due to trademarking issues as well as possible confusion for your clients, you’ll want to avoid using a name that overlaps with or is the same as any other company (in or outside of web design).

Do a Google search for the business name you want to use. Check out the top 10 search results to see if there are any other matches.

You’ll also want to test out the domain name. Go to Domain.com and run your business name string through it:

You have a few options if this happens:

Choose a different top-level domain (e.g. .tech, .io, .design).
Use an abbreviated version of your business name (e.g. solddesignagency.com).
Move your backup business name to the front of the line and see if it’s available.

It all depends on how attached you are to the business name you’ve chosen. Just make sure that any changes you make to it (like shortening the domain name or using an alternate TLD) doesn’t cause confusion for prospects who look you up online. You don’t want them confusing someone else’s domain name for yours if business name and domain name don’t line up.

Choosing a Business Name Is Just the First Step…

Once you’ve settled on your business name, share it with a few people you trust. They’ll let you know if you’ve totally missed the mark or if it’s something you should be excited to run with.

As soon as you’re 100% sure it’s the right name, buy the domain name and register your company. Then, it’ll be official!

Of course, this isn’t the end to branding your new business. In our next Branding 101 post, we’re going to look at the next step: How to create the visual identity for your business.

Stay tuned!

Featured image via Pexels.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

14 octobre 2020/par Service comm.