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

/par

When UX Goes Bad (and How to Fix It)

,

Designing for user experiences is what all designers do. UX is often thought of as the preserve of app or web designers; however, even a print designer laying out a magazine anticipates reader reaction to the scale of type, the placement of adverts, and the art direction of successive stories.

Because all designers design user experiences, the role of UX Designer has come to mean someone focused on creating a product or service utilizing research and testing to guide decision-making.

To research and test anything, you need metrics: a baseline and a target against which to measure. No one set of metrics is suitable for all projects, but because UX tends to be for financial profit, the Pirate Metrics Framework — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — is a good starting place.

You might seek out very different metrics in some cases. For instance, a museum might measure the success of its education program based on how many students go on to study paleontology. However, those types of metrics are notoriously difficult to quantify. Excepting a few niche cases, successful UX increases user productivity, decreases errors, reduces the cost of support, and increases sales.

So if it’s as easy as counting dollars, why does UX go bad?

UX vs. Design Principles

To understand what UX is, you need to understand what UX is not.

One of the most straightforward design principles to understand is hierarchy: bigger is more important, i.e., a heading is visually stronger than a sub-heading, a sub-heading is visually stronger than the body text.

Design principles stem from one thing: human-centered design. At the most basic level, bigger is more important because the bigger a saber-toothed tiger appears, the more likely it intends to eat me.

The evolution of human beings is so slow that had a smartphone existed at the time, a neanderthal would have been able to tap a button with the same level of precision as me. Prehistoric man shares the same minimum button size as modern man: 48 x 48px. Design principles don’t change, don’t require research, and don’t need verifying with tests.

On the other hand, a neanderthal would not have understood a smartphone, let alone an app. You only need to step back by a single generation to find perfectly intelligent people baffled by a commonly employed design pattern.

Unlike design principles, user experience is a house built on sand. When the sand shifts, the walls crack. The bricks are still solid, but the rain gets in.

Because effective UX is temporary, so is the ROI.

Technology Breaks UX

Technology unfolds at a rapid pace. As technology develops, the user experience defined by that technology changes.

The classic example is the mobile revolution, but technological change does not necessarily mean hardware. One of the most significant shifts in UXD (User Experience Design) in my career has been the popularisation of AJAX — the process of using JavaScript to load new data without refreshing the page. This seamlessness has been around since the early 2000s, but it’s only in the last ten years, as the code to achieve it has simplified, that it’s been widely used.

Jakob’s Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites and, as a result, prefer your site to function like other sites by following familiar design patterns.

Even if your UX is rigorously tested and optimized, when other sites and services carry out their own research, they are testing against the background of younger technology, and the “other sites” Jakob Nielsen refers to begin to change. As a result, the UX of your site is gradually eroded.

The consequence of continual technological change is that user research is constantly invalidated. The UX of an app, site, or service begins to degrade as soon as it is created.

User-Experience Lifecycle

Human beings have two deep-seated motivations: survival and procreation. The most important, survival, depends on discovery — new food sources, new routes through dangerous territory, new ways to skin a mammoth. We are biologically programmed to seek out the new.

A typical user passes through three phases of a relationship with a site, app, or service: discovery > comfort > boredom. Churn, or drop-off, tends to occur in the discovery phase (if the comfort phase is too slow in developing) or the boredom phase. The sweet spot is the comfort phase. That’s the part of the business-customer relationship in which the customer requires minimal support and is least likely to drop off.

The most effective form of UX — meaning the one that satisfies most metrics — rapidly moves a user from discovery to comfort and then continually eases the user back to the start of the comfort phase without tipping back into discovery.

This can be achieved with numerous micro-discoveries, tiny chunks of new experience, from simple functionality tweaks to style revisions.

Summary

All UXD, regardless of the quality, level of investment, and skill of the practitioner, begins to degrade the moment it is created.

Design principles like simplicity are good indicators of successful UID (User Interface Design) and are timeless; comprehensive design systems, brand assets, and content offer good ROI.

The most effective UX is broadly familiar and continually refreshed in small ways, allowing users to enjoy the comfort of the familiar while also experiencing the excitement of discovery again and again.

 

Featured image uses photos by Wolfgang Hasselmann & Shainee Fernando.

Source

The post When UX Goes Bad (and How to Fix It) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

/par