Month: October 2024

Photoshop offers many amazing tools for creating visual effects. For example, Photoshop actions let you transform your photos into paintings or cartoon drawings with just a single mouse click.

While these effects are fun to play with, they are also quite useful in creating attractive graphics for various designs like posters and flyers. That’s why it’s always a good idea to keep a few Photoshop actions and effects in your library to help create such graphics in an instant.

In this collection, we showcase different types of Photoshop cartoon actions, effects, and filters you can use to turn photos into cartoons as well as create unique designs. Have a look and add them all to your personal collection.

Retro Comic Photo Effect for Photoshop

This is a uniquely crafted Photoshop template that adds a comic cartoon effect to your images. This easy-to-use template, equipped with meticulous details, allows you to transform your images and graphics with a cartoon effect instantly. It’s fully editable, compatible with 300DPI projects, perfect for print, and features well-organized layers.

Comic Photo Effect PSD Template

A dynamic Photoshop template designed to apply a comic or caricature-inspired transformation to your images. Ideal for pictures with resolutions between 1000px to 3000px, this template applies a vibrant, energetic, and oily effect for a variety of visuals, whether fashion-focused, lifestyle-themed, or product-based.

Cartoonize Photo Effect PSD

This is a dynamic Photoshop template designed to convert your images into lively cartoon effects. It’s ideal for a range of pictures, like fashion, lifestyle, and even product shots. The template is most effective on photos with a resolution between 1000px to 3000px.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This is a professional-grade Photoshop action, ideal for photographers and designers looking to cartoonize their images. It provides striking effects that work beautifully on a wide range of images, even transforming them with just a single click. Adjustments can be made to suit individual photos.

Cartoonize Photo Effect for Photoshop

Another dynamic Photoshop template designed to convert your regular images into vibrant and energetic caricature-style pictures. This versatile asset offers various effects including, but not limited to, oily paint, glamour oil, portrait oil, oil retouch, and cartoon effects.

Retro Cartoon Photoshop Action

The Retro Cartoon Photoshop action is a fun and creative preset designed for photographers and graphic designers. This easy-to-use PS action can be used to instantly transform your photos into cartoon graphics and illustrations. The action is compatible with newer versions of Photoshop, from CS5 and above.

Cartoon Effect Converter PS Action

This PS Action is a quick, easy-to-use tool that can easily convert your photos into stunning painted artwork. It requires no specific skill set and offers customizable features to meet your unique requirements. Suitable for all versions of Photoshop CS4 and beyond.

Cartoon Artistic Photoshop Action

With easy setup, this Photoshop action quickly transforms images into cartoony artwork and it’s most suitable for graphic designs. The package includes a detailed help file and a YouTube tutorial to assist with language settings, making it accessible for anyone desiring fun and unique image edits.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This PS Action provides an array of striking effects, including the Portrait Oil Painting Effect, dramatic oil, oily, painting oil, glamour oil, portrait oil and oil retouch. The package includes one-click actions, an ATN file, and a helpful guide to facilitate easy installations.

Cartoon Oil Paint Photoshop Action

This PS action features a creative cartoon-style oil painting effect. It works with various Photoshop versions, from CS5 to CC. This action set stands out for its simplicity – you just load actions, choose your action, and then hit play.

Colorized Cartoon Effect Photoshop Action

This is a quick and simple PS Action that transforms your images into vibrant paintings within seconds, with a simple click. It’s user-friendly, doesn’t require any extensive Photoshop skills and provides room for personal customization to suit your needs. Compatible with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Paint Beast Photoshop FX PS Action

Offering intense customization possibilities, this PS action works seamlessly with Photoshop CS4 and all advanced versions. It’s ideal for professional graphic designers to add a unique touch to your various projects.

Futuristic Cartoon Effect Photoshop Action

This is a fantastic tool that transforms your images into stunning paintings in seconds with just one click. Very easy to use, all it requires is to load and play the actions. You can heavily customize the end results to suit your needs. It’s compatible with all versions of Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Cartoon Effect FX Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action also offers extensive customization options and it comes with a creative cartoon-style effect, ideal for portrait photos. Compatible with Photoshop CS4 and all later versions.

Soft Oil Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is ideal for photographers and graphic designers. The final result offers a soft, oil-cartoon aesthetic. The asset includes an ATN file and helpful instructions. It’s especially perfect for generating art for posters and flyers.

4 in 1 Cartoon & Vector Art Photoshop Actions

This is a bundle of Photoshop actions that includes 4 different cartoon effects. It has effects for converting photos into cartoon drawings, vector art, and paintings. Each action creates effects with organized layers so you can easily adjust the effect to your preference. You can apply them with just one click as well.

Cartoonish – Modern Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action will allow you to transform portrait photos into cartoon drawings without effort. It features 10 different colorful effects that add a modern cartoon look to photos. The actions work with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Actions

If you’re an Instagram influencer or a blogger, this Photoshop cartoon action will definitely come in handy. It allows you to add a unique cartoon effect to your photos to make them look like a scene out of a cartoon film. It’s great for making your Instagram photos stand out from the crowd.

Balaclava – Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

If you want to create more complex and advanced cartoon effects, you’ll need a Photoshop plugin. This Photoshop plugin allows you to create more realistic cartoon effects using some of the built-in features of Photoshop CC. It will completely transform your portraits with face styles, backgrounds, and color effects.

Cartoon Style Photoshop Text Effects

Want to create titles and headings with cartoon designs? Then you’ll need this Photoshop text effects bundle. It includes editable PSD files with ASL files you can easily customize to create fun and quirky titles with cartoon designs.

Toon Artist – Free Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

A high-quality Photoshop effect crafted by a professional designer. This action allows you to create an amazing cartoon effect with your photos with just a few clicks. The action is free to download and use.

Comic Vintage Vector Tracing Cartoon PS Action

This is a must-have Photoshop action for graphic designs. With this action, you can create a vintage vector design look using photos. The textured cartoon look will turn your photos into a page from a comic book.

Cartoonica – Creative Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action also creates very creative cartoon-like designs from photos. It works well with portraits and photos with objects. The end result will look a lot like a cartoon drawing.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

Another creative cartoon Photoshop action for transforming portrait photos. This action is very easy to use and customize. And it seems to work perfectly for selfies and portrait photos. It’s especially great for Instagram.

Realistic Vector Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action allows you to easily change the look of your photos with a vector cartoon effect. It’s great for graphic designs, posters, flyers, and even website designs. The action works with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Anime Speed Lines Photoshop Action

You can use this Photoshop action to quickly generate cool anime-style backgrounds for your graphic designs. There are 15 different actions in this bundle featuring all kinds of anime speed lines background effects.

Free Oil Painting Cartoon Photoshop Actions

A free Photoshop action featuring an oil painting effect. This action will instantly turn your portrait photos into cartoon-like designs. You can apply the effect with just one click. And it works with Photoshop CS3.

Cartoonizer – Photoshop Cartoon Action

Convert your photo to cartoon in Photoshop with the help of Cartoonizer, a high-quality action that will help you achieve the desired results with minimal effort. It’s a versatile Photoshop cartoon filter that can be used for a range of professional and creative applications.

Cartoon Effects Photoshop Text Plugin

Here we have a Halloween-themed Photoshop cartoon plugin that gives your text a cartoonish touch in just a few easy clicks. It’s a great choice for kids’ projects, Halloween party posters, flyers, and invitation cards.

Realistic Photoshop Cartoon Effect

Give your pictures a realistic cartoon look with the help of this amazing Photoshop action that works well with almost any sort of photography. You also get a video tutorial that helps you make the most of this cartoon effect Photoshop plugin.

Netta – Free Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

Searching for the easiest way to transform your pictures into anime scenes? Look no further than Netta, a free Photoshop cartoon filter that will put all your worries about how to make cartoon in Photoshop to rest.

Free Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This free Photoshop action lets you add a realistic painting effect to your portrait photos. It will also make photos look like a still from a cartoon film.

Zombie Grime Art Photoshop Cartoon Effect

A very unique Photoshop action that creates a different style of a cartoon effect by combining cartoon style with real-life images, also known as Grime art. Using the PS action, you can make yourself look like a cartoon zombie in portrait photos. The effect requires a few additional steps to apply but the included video tutorial will help you learn how it’s done.

Cartoonize – Photoshop Cartoon Action

With this Photoshop action, you can create a realistic cartoon effect mixed with an oil painting look and feel. It creates a non-destructive effect that you can easily adjust to your preference. And it’s compatible with Photoshop CS3 and higher.

Cartoon Vector Painting Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is perfect for giving a cartoon drawing look to your portrait photos. It’s especially perfect for making your selfies look more creative for Instagram and Facebook. The best part is this PS action even works with older versions of Photoshop, starting with CS3.

Free Photoshop Cartoon Action

Take your everyday pictures to a whole new level with this Photoshop cartoon plugin that’s not just easy to install, but also fun to play around with all the customization options. Drop everything, and grab it right now.

Vector Converter – Cartoon Avatar Photoshop Plugin

Another advanced Photoshop plugins you can use to create cartoon avatars using portrait photos. It will basically turn your ordinary photos into vector cartoon drawings. The plugin requires the Oil Paint filter to function so it’s only compatible with Photoshop CC 2015 and higher.

Photo To Cartoon Photoshop Actions

Use this simple one-click Photoshop action to instantly turn your photos into cartoon drawings. It’s ideal for Instagram selfies and social media graphics. The effect can also be easily customized to your preference to change its strength.

Free Cartoon Art Photoshop Action

Another free Photoshop action you can use to apply a cartoon effect with just a few clicks. This action works well with portrait photos and lets you create a non-destructive cartoon filter.

Free Comic Poster Photoshop Actions

Use this free Photoshop action to add a comic book-like cartoon effect to your photos. This action works with Photoshop CS3 and higher. The effect is fully customizable to your preference.

Smudge Painting Photoshop Action

With this Photoshop action, you can create a cartoon painting-like effect in just a few clicks. It’s a high-quality action that will allow you to create professional results. And, of course, you’ll be able to customize the effect to match different portrait photos as well.

Anime Style Cartoon Photoshop Action

After featuring so many cartoon effects for portraits, we finally have one for outdoor photos. This Photoshop action allows you to apply a subtle anime cartoon effect to your outdoor and nature photos. It creates a fully editable effect with layers and elements.

Photo to Vector Cartoon Photoshop Action

Create vector paintings and cartoons with your photos using this advanced Photoshop action. It creates a non-destructive cartoon effect with your portraits to turn them into cartoon drawings. The effect is compatible with Photoshop CS6 and higher.

Kartoon Painting Photoshop Action

Another simple yet effective effect for adding a cartoon look to your selfies, portrait photos, and even pet photos. The PS action works with just a few clicks and allows you to customize the effect afterward. It works with Photoshop CS6.

Caricature – Fun Cartoon Photoshop Action

Want to give a fun and quirky cartoon look to your photos? Then this Photoshop action is perfect for you. It comes with a weird cartoon effect that gives a funny distorted look to your portrait photos. Perfect for making people laugh.

MicroPro – Cartoon Oil Photoshop Action

Another cartoon Photoshop action for outdoor landscape photos. This action lets you apply a cartoon oil painting look to your outdoor photos. It also works quite well with cityscape, nature, and food photos as well. The action is compatible with Photoshop CS1 and higher.

Free Modern Art Cartoon Photoshop Action

While this free Photoshop action is made for giving a modern art look to your photos, it can also be used to create a cartoon look with just a few tweaks and adjustments. There’s a tutorial on how to use the action as well.

80 Free Smart Easy PSD Text Effects

This is a big bundle of text effects for Photoshop. All text effects are available as PSD files that you can customize to paste your own text. You’ll find a few text effects with cartoon designs in the bundle.

Toon-Me – Photoshop Cartoon Action

With this Photoshop action, you can give a truly cartoonish look to your photos. It adds several effects to portrait photos to make them fun and more cartoon-like. The effect is compatible with Photoshop CS3 and higher.

Cartoon Filter Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is designed to make photos look like paintings. And it adds a subtle cartoon effect to photos at the same time. It’s perfect for giving an artistic look to your portraits.

GTA Style Cartoon Photoshop Action

Gamers will surely find this Photoshop action useful as it allows you to make your photos look like the loading screen art from Grand Theft Auto games. This bundle comes with Photoshop actions, 5 frame templates, 5 collage templates, and more.

Cartoon Oil Action – 10 Effects

You can use this collection of Photoshop actions to add a creative cartoon oil painting look to your portrait photos. It includes 10 variations of the effect that can be customized to your preference.

Cartoon Photoshop Photo Effect

If you want to add a subtle cartoon look to your photos, this action is the best choice for you. It features a simple effect that only adds a light cartoon effect to portrait photos.

Paint Cartoon Photoshop Action

For another ultra-realistic and modern-looking paint effect that will help you cartoonize any photo, this fun cartoon filter for Photoshop promises high-quality results using versions CS3 and higher and includes full supporting documentation to get you editing straight away.

Smudge Cartoon Photoshop Action

The Smudge Photoshop cartoon plugin will help you cartoonize a photo with a sleek and realistic painted effect that features sharp edges and vibrant colors and is compatible with Photoshop versions CS3 and above. It’s a great choice if you’re after a fun and professional cartoon painting look.

Retro Comic Book Photoshop Cartoon Action Kit

Next, we have a retro-inspired action kit that allows you to cartoonize a photo in an authentic, hand-drawn comic book style. It works best with images that offer a resolution between 72 and 300 DPI, and all comic elements are vector graphics which enables you to scale and tweak the effects as much as you want.

Oil Vector Art Photoshop Cartoon Action

This cartoon filter for Photoshop adds a vector art look to your images that’s inspired by the texture and color profile of a real-life oil painting, and can be applied with amazing results in just a few clicks. You can create up to 40 different color effects, and adjust each layer to your preference.

Balaclava – Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

Balaclava is a Photoshop cartoon plugin containing tools and techniques that help you achieve the most modern, professional, and eye-catching cartoon effects in just a few clicks. The cartoon effect Photoshop Action offers 4 editable Photoshop cartooning styles, 5 face styles, 8 backgrounds, and more than 20 color variations.

Looking for more? Then be sure to check out our best Photoshop actions collection.

Want to give your design a quick facelift? Using new and interesting typography trends might be the answer. Designers are using bold colors, cutouts, gradients, and even customizations to create lettering that stands out.

Changing typefaces or recreating an image or header in a trending style can give a design a fresh look without a full-scale overhaul. Not sure where to start? This list features typography trends with examples to use as inspiration for how to use them.

Here’s a look at the top typography trends this year.

1. Brutalism Typography

Brutalism design is one of the few and rare design trends that survived many decades. This trend dates back to the 1950s. It started out as a design trend in architecture and later inspired many print and digital designs, including graphic design, web design, and even typography.

Brutalist typography is simple and straightforward. There are no fancy typography elements or decorative shapes necessary to convey the idea. It’s simply text with clean, clear-cut letterforms and it gets the job done.

More designers are adopting this design trend to create striking typography for various designs ranging from posters to website headers. It especially works well for bold, raw, and Monochromatic-style designs.

2. Liquid Text

Giving a melting or liquid look to your typography is nothing new. You’ve probably seen it used by food and drink brands. However, there’s a new variant of this trend sweeping across the digital design world.

This new variant of liquid text design only liquefies parts of the letters to create a unique hybrid look. Designers are using this trend in various ways by combining it with other design trends like outline text and retro fonts.

The unique look this trend creates fits perfectly for trendy brands and timely marketing campaigns, especially for fashion and lifestyle branding designs.

3. Ink Traps

Ink trap is a popular technique used in print design when printing in small sizes where corners get removed from letters to trap the ink. So when it gets printed, the ink spreads to those removed areas, preventing the ink from spreading outward.

Ironically, this inspired a new trend in modern digital typography. We are now seeing new fonts being created inspired by ink traps featuring letterforms with deep corners, mimicking the ink trap-style design.

It certainly adds a very unique look to typography and gives a distinctive vibe to titles and headings.

4. Bubbly Text

Bubble fonts and typography are making a comeback. Inspired by typography designs from the groovy 1970s, this bubble text trend can now be seen everywhere.

The fun, creative, and playful look it adds to the text is unmatched. It’s one of the many reasons why designers choose this style to create titles and text for brands with playful vibes.

The bubbly text trend also comes in many different styles and variations, including ones with balloon-style letterforms as well as urban graffiti-style letters.

5. Big, Chunky Titles

When it comes to creating titles that instantly grab attention, nothing beats a good old-fashioned big, chunky letter design. That’s part of why this typography trend has survived many decades and is still relevant today.

Designing titles and headings with big, chunky letterforms is the most effective way to craft typography that stands out. This trend also has diverse use cases across various genres. With a slightly playful font, you can make it fit in with a lifestyle brand. Or with a clean-cut letter design, you can use it for a luxury brand.

6. Art Deco Typography

The beautiful symmetrical lines and sharp edges of the Art Deco style completely transform the look and feel of typography. The blend of elegance and sophistication it brings is unmatched by any other design trend. It’s no wonder why this typography trend has survived longer than a century.

Over the past few months, we saw many brands and marketers use the Art Deco trend to their advantage to create typography that evokes a sense of nostalgia and takes people back to a time when things were simpler.

Art Deco typography is also often used in visual storytelling, especially on websites, posters, and packaging designs. Clearly, it’s a trend that will evolve and stay relevant for many more years ahead.

7. Psychedelic Fonts

The psychedelic design trend has been a popular choice among designers who seek to break free from the traditional and common ways. And it has now made its way over to typography as well.

The bold shapes, curves, and distorted letters of the psychedelic fonts give logos, titles, and badges a unique look inspired by the aesthetics of the 1960s and the hippy culture. The psychedelic typography trend does a great job of bringing out a chill and relaxing feeling while also mixing a sense of a rebellious vibe.

8. Urban Graffiti Titles

Lately, we’ve been seeing less and less graffiti art out on the streets. Graffiti art is one the purest forms of creative expression, especially the graffiti typography is something that always catches your eye. So we’re glad to see this art form transform into the digital world.

Designers have been using graffiti-style typography with various types of graphic designs over the past few years and it seems to be growing in demand. The main reason for the popularity of this typography trend is its ability to create a bold, urban vibe with a gritty aesthetic. The raw, real-world look of the graffiti typography is quite unmatched.

9. Retro Disco Text

The disco era is a time period that everyone longs for regardless of age. The current revival and popularity of disco-style music among modern musicians prove that even the younger generations are enjoying this trend.

As a result of this newfound desire for the disco era, disco-style retro typography is also making a comeback. Nothing beats this typography trend when it comes to creating titles and text that exude fun and energetic vibes.

The blend of retro rainbow colors, sparking elements, and classic weathered textures make this trend one of the best for designing typography for everything from posters to brand logos and much more.

10. Elegant Royal Fonts

This growing typography trend is the go-to choice among many luxury and high-end brands that seek to convey a sense of authority and class. The way it creates a sophisticated and regal look often adds a Royalty-like vibe to any logo, badge, label, or packaging design.

Often used in combination with gold colors, royal-like ornaments, and stylishly curved letterforms, the royal typography trend often succeeds in enhancing the luxurious feel of various types of designs.

Elegant royal-style fonts are also a great choice for adding an authentic and traditional look to create a timeless feel for any digital and print design.

11. Neo-Futuristic Techno Vibes

When talking about futuristic techno-style designs your mind often goes to neon colors and Cyberpunk-style designs. But that’s not what this new trend is all about. Neo-futuristic techno typography offers a much more gritty and bold vibe for creating a strong futuristic industrial look.

This trend is often seen on modern websites and poster designs as it helps create better visibility for your text and titles. The fonts designed in this style often have sharp letterforms with monospaced characters. It also uses strong contrasting colors to make your text pop with a clean, minimal, and stylish look.

12. 3D Text

The 3D typography trend is evolving beyond just blocky, extruded text into more creative styles with perspective views and unique letterform designs.

With easier access to 3D modeling tools like Blender and new 3D tools in Adobe Illustrator, crafting these unique 3D typography designs is now much easier than ever.

Especially when designing with a retro-futuristic style, the 3D text and typography fit perfectly for creating a more immersive look and feel. This trend will likely evolve beyond this year and last for many more years ahead.

13. Variable Fonts

Variable fonts are slowly gaining in popularity as more designers are choosing the new format for their design projects. There are many benefits to using a variable font in your designs and having flexibility is one of them.

When using variable fonts, you have the flexibility to create unique typography with different styles of letterforms, weights, and features without having to use multiple fonts. Variable fonts come with multiple styles packed into one font.

Designers are now finding unique ways to take advantage of this technology to create incredible typefaces with inventive designs.

14. Rounded Typography

The rounded typography trend has been around for several years. However, designers are now taking this trend to new heights by leveraging the new tools available in design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

These new rounded typography designs feature more geometric-style rounded letterforms with a soft and aesthetically pleasing look for big titles and headings. Today, the trend is often used in branding designs and packaging designs.

15. Vertical Text

Usually, we don’t recommend throwing readability out the window but it appears to be the latest trend to take over the design world, especially website designs. This trend will have you tilting your head sideways, literally.

Actually, it’s a clever way to grab attention and engage with the website visitors. It arouses your curiosity and makes you tilt your to read the text.

Designing text and titles sideways in a vertical alignment will also work for banners and posters. You should use large and bold fonts with a clean letter design for this strategy to work more effectively.

16. Unaligned Text

Oftentimes, when designers defy the rules and guidelines, things don’t go well. This new trend is a rare exception where we can disregard the guidelines to make unique typography creations.

Keeping text aligned is an important part of designing typography. This guideline is quite important when designing websites as well as other mediums of digital and print designs. However, breaking this rule seems to be one of the most popular typography trends these days.

We’ve been seeing this unaligned text trend everywhere from websites to posters, album covers, social media posts, and everything in between. Without a doubt, we’ll be seeing it throughout this year too.

17. Mixed Typefaces

Surely, you must’ve thought about this once or twice while designing fun title designs for projects. Mixing multiple typefaces to design a title sounds fun but we are often afraid to go there. Well, now you have permission to try it out thanks to this new trend.

The BMW Motorrad website uses clever animation to infuse this mixed typeface design in a subtle way. However, you don’t have to go to such extreme levels. You can start by blending a few outline and condensed fonts with your regular typography designs.

Admittedly, we haven’t seen this trend a lot but we hope it will catch on this year.

18. Stretched-Out Titles

We’ve seen ultra-condensed title designs, tall and narrow typography designs, but this new trend combines them together to spawn a new way to craft titles by simply stretching them out as much as you can.

It doesn’t matter which way you stretch it. You can stretch it vertically or horizontally. You could also stretch just a couple of letters while the rest of the letters stay the same. The result will always be something pretty wild.

The good news is you don’t always have to go into free transform mode to stretch your text. There are now fonts out there with stretched-out letter designs made for this new trend.

19. Fullscreen Titles

The title is arguably the most important element of most graphic and web designs. You often try different trends and strategies to try and bring more attention to it. So, why not make it as big as the entire canvas and be done with it?

Well, that’s exactly what this new trend is all about. Basically, you just make the title as big as the screen or the design canvas. You can use tall and bold fonts to grab extra attention as well.

It’s a very simple and easy way to make your typography designs stand out, especially for making bold statements.

20. Pixelated Fonts

Pixelated style of text and typography designs is quite popular among tech brands and startups. It adds a subtle tech-savvy look to any design that’s also relatable and familiar to many people who grew up playing pixel-art video games.

Intentionally adding a pixelated look to text is now much easier with many pixelated fonts to choose from. These fonts come in various styles ranging from the classic 8-bit style to modern pixel art designs.

Whether it’s to add a bit of nostalgia to your designs or to make titles look more playful, this is a typography trend that’s worth keeping an eye out for this year.

21. Neon Outline

This isn’t exactly a new trend but it is something that we are likely to see growing this year. Inspired by the bright neon signs from the 80s and the 90s, this typography design gives a classic retro look to your titles with neon glowing outline letters.

Adopting this trend is also much easier than most other trends on our list. All you have to do is find an outline font and apply a neon glowing effect.

You can add more style and appeal to it with animations. In the above example, the website uses a subtle flickering effect to make the text look more like a glitching neon sign.

22. Thin and Condensed

The next two trends have a very yin and yang feel to them. Here, thin and condensed lettering is gaining popularity. Once taboo, a predominance of high-resolution screens has made this style of typography more readable and easier to work with.

Again, this trend needs just the right words and typeface to be effective and works best when you aren’t delving into exceptionally long blocks of text.

In the example above, thin and condensed lettering perfectly fits the style of the overall design and is complemented on the scroll with a monospaced, highly readable option.

23. Slabs

On the other end of the spectrum from thin typefaces is the use of slabs.

While bold headline options have always been rather popular, many designers have shied away from going all-in with slabs because, like caps, they can seem to scream at users. The trick is to combine spacing, short phrasing, and readable typefaces so that usage is an asset, not a challenge.

What we love about the example above is the use of a smaller slab headline at the bottom of the homepage, with super friendly and soft imagery to balance the weight of the font itself. It highlights the importance of the words in an approachable way.

24. Outline Fonts

Outline fonts are a big deal.

You’ll find this trend mostly in the hero area of web pages for the main copy. While uses vary somewhat there are a few elements that you’ll find almost every time:

• Sans serif typeface
• All caps text for outline letters
• Paired with filled lettering
• Oversized text elements

Outline font options can be a lot of fun to use. You just have to be cautious when it comes to readability. Letters can get lost in background images and videos quickly. So take care with color, contrast, and placement.

And don’t overdo it. An outline font works best for a point of emphasis, not to create your entire message.

25. “Unreadable” Layers

The next two typography trends and somewhat similar and both break an unexpected rule: They are a bit unreadable. But that’s ok because the rest of the design fills in the blanks and keeps the site interactive.

In this example of the trend, oversized text elements are in a layer behind a foreground element. Every other type element on the screen is highly readable to provide plenty of support for the element that isn’t.

The foreground object also, in the example above, fades in and out over the text so that you can read it back and forth.

The final element that helps pull it all together is the idea that the word isn’t vital to the design. It’s the brand name, which you might know from the logotype, but is less important than what the company/website does.

26. Text That Goes Off the Screen

Following the trend of “unreadable” layers are text elements that lose readability because they animate on and off the screen. This typography effect is all over the place and often paired with an oversized font and just a couple of words that scroll toward the left side of the screen.

This typography trend works best when there’s not a lot of other motion on the screen and the words are readable with just a few seconds of watching. If the text is too complicated, you risk users never figuring out what the words say.

As with the previous example, make sure the supporting text elements provide plenty of information so that people know exactly what the design is about.

27. Experimental Typefaces

Experimental typefaces are all the rage with expressive and interesting styles that add plenty of personality to design projects. Experimental typefaces come in a lot of different forms – they may include funky shapes or strokes, color, or animation.

The best part about these type-styles is that they can inject a unique, and very specific, vibe into a project.

You can find experimental typefaces from several different foundries or independent type designers. If you want to take a peek at some new experimental options, head over to Typelab.

28. Short, Fat Fonts (Low X-Heights)

Another type style that is trending in a major way is typefaces that have short stature and wide stance. Many of these typefaces feature all-caps character sets, but when they feature lowercase letters, can be identified by a low x-height.

This type style tends to work best when there’s not a lot competing with it on the canvas. It’s also best suited for shorter words or phrases, due to readability.

These short, fat fonts also work best for designs that have a super-modern feel. They are almost futuristic in scope and design in many instances.

29. Handwriting Styles

The Sharpie marker style is quite popular among website designers when it comes to display typefaces. And there are plenty of handwriting typefaces to choose from so that you get just the right look and feel.

Much of the current handwriting typeface trend is focused on printed letters with upper and lowercase characters with thicker strokes and a bit of roughness to them.

Typefaces might also include little extra embellishments that make certain characters feel even more special. When it comes to handwriting styles with more cursive or script-type designs, you are likely to find long tails and elaborate swashes.

30. Subtle Gradients

Designers just can’t seem to get enough of gradients. (I’ll admit to being one of them!)

Subtle gradients as an accent in typography are the next evolution of this trend.

What’s nice about the trend is that gradients are so subtle that you might not even see them at first. There’s just a slight variance in the color that helps pull the eye across the lettering.

Gradients are best used with thicker typefaces and to accent specific words or phrases.

Be careful not to overdo it too much. A good text gradient maintains consistent contrast across the word so that it’s not jarring to read and so that it stands apart from the background.

31. Animated Typography

One of the biggest overall trends in design is animation. And there’s no reason this can’t apply to typography as well.

More designs are using lettering that moves, shifts, or is impacted by a hover state (such as the example above). All of these techniques can lead to a more interactive, richer user experience.

When animating text, it’s important to consider how and where users will be reading the information (some animated elements such as video don’t work well on all mobile devices yet). Make accommodations so that even if the animation doesn’t work properly, there’s still a worthwhile user experience where messaging is clear.

In that regard, the best text animations often start with lettering that is clear and easy to see. Animation comes into play after a delay or as part of user interaction. This can delight and surprise users (maybe even resulting in more time on-site).

Consider speed carefully with typography animations – if the text moves too fast, users will miss the message completely; if the text moves too slowly, users might click away before reading all of the content. It must be just right. (User testing can help you find an ideal speed.)

32. Stacked Text Blocks

While typography is trending toward being somewhat smaller in size, it still carries just as much weight. Designers are stacking multiple lines of text, particularly in hero headers, for a weighted message with more words.

The trend is important to note because it shows a shift in trying to communicate a little more fully with users and less of an expectation that one word will be enough to entice someone to engage with a design. More information presented in a visually engaging way can be a better solution that leads to more user engagement.

The key considerations when it comes to stacking multiple lines of text are to find a typeface that is readable when used with more letters (or even when used in all caps, which is a popular option), has adequate linespacing so that lines are easy to distinguish and that breaks in the copy are logical. When stacking text, there should be a distinct flow from line to line that’s both obvious in how to read the words and that users should move to the next line of copy before any other part of the design.

Because of challenges with line breaks and ease of reading, text stacks are often on one side of the screen so that the designer has more control. This structure can also create harmony between a text element and another visual on the screen for an asymmetrical balance that’s appealing to look at.

33. Color Fonts and Type

Color fonts are a class of type of their own and have popped up all over the place. They’re more popular than many originally expected and have fun applications in design projects.

You can read all about color fonts here in our beginner’s guide. The concept of color fonts has opened up more projects to color in typography overall as well.

While there was a lot of black and white text in more minimalist styles, colors are roaring back. Many designers are using bright color typography with minimal styles, such as the Tilted Chair, above. Color can add extra visual interest and emphasis on the words in color.

Bright options, such as the red in the example, help draw the eye and serve as a great springboard for messaging, building brand identity, and drawing users into the design.

34. Cutouts and Overlays

Layered effects are a great way to make a design look a lot less flat. Doing it with typography can be a nice option.

Cutouts and overlays refer to text elements that have no color fill. A cutout allows whatever is in the background layer to show through the type design, such as the animated sports imagery in the example above. An overlay is often transparent lettering over a background so that you can see the background through letters while still reading them.

Both of these techniques have a lot of visual interest and can be fun to create. They work best with large lettering, not many words, and a display typeface.

Overlays work great with photos, textures, or even video backgrounds. Just make sure to avoid a lot of other design effects when using this technique. (You don’t want to overwhelm the user.)

35. Layering with Other Elements

In most projects, text elements and other elements are kept fairly separate. But that idea has changed quite a bit and designers aren’t shying away from allowing text and other elements to overlap. The end result can be pretty cool and actually help users focus on the words on the screen a little more.

While the most common uses of the typography trend in practice are text elements that overlap boxed images or color, MJND kicks it up a notch. This design merges the person in the image with typography so that it is cut out around him (like the person is walking into the words).

This is a technique that comes from print design where it is more popular – and quite honestly easier to execute – and can create a stunning display. The trick is having the right image and maintaining the readability of every single letter. (Be careful not to create unintended words because of missing character strokes or parts.)

36. “Overdone” Effects

It’s not often that “overdone” is used favorably when talking about any design technique. But when it comes to the overdone typography trend, it can work.

This type trend has a retro feel and is characterized by text and text effects that are so over the top that you must read the words. There are outlines and shadows and bevels and fades and crazy colors. No effect is off the table.

And the more effects you pile on, the more users might look. This style works best with a simple design scheme, such as Schnitzel Love, above.

Conclusion

When using these trends in your designs, remember to carefully analyze your brand style and target audience to ensure they match the message your designs are conveying.

Be sure to bookmark and follow our Trends category to stay on top of all kinds of design trends.

As the cloud computing landscape continues to evolve, choosing the right platform for your project can be challenging. Firebase, AWS, and Azure are three leading cloud providers, each offering a range of services tailored to different needs. Whether you’re building a web app, a mobile app, or a complex enterprise solution, understanding the strengths and …

Continue reading "Comparing Cloud Giants: Firebase, AWS, and Azure for Your 2024 Projects"

The post Comparing Cloud Giants: Firebase, AWS, and Azure for Your 2024 Projects first appeared on Lucid Softech.

Kate Kaplan hits on something over at Nielsen Norman Group’s blog that’s been bugging me:

The challenge with this icon is sparkle ambiguity: Participants in our recent research study generally agreed that it represented something a little special. But, what was that something? And why was it special? That was less obvious. We encountered widely and wildly varied interpretations.

Man, I hate those sparkles. Correction: I loathe it as an icon but I use the heck out the ✨ emoji. I may even go so far as to say that my favorite thing about Dave Rupert’s introduction to web components is that it is littered with ✨ emoji every time the word “superpower” is evoked.

(Correction for the correction: I love everything about Dave’s introduction to web components. Take the full course!)

Sparkles get closer to becoming the unofficial AI icon every time a new one makes its way into some new app’s UI — the same way some menus became hamburgers and others became kebabs.

It’s ambiguous, right? I will say that I was stoked to see Notion roll out a fresh new icon for their AI feature just this week:

A face is interesting! I find human heads less compelling, especially when they’re realistic. Same deal with robot heads, which is another theme you can spot in the wild. But a face, particularly one that’s on the whimsical side as a line drawing, looks like it could work in this context that’s specific to Notion. I imagine another company or app having a tough time pulling off the same icon because this one is so closely tied to Notion’s overall branding:

I also like how Notion has several versions of the icon for use in different situations.

And, yes, it animates as well:

I’m not saying Notion’s landed on a silver bullet. What I am saying is that they’re doing a great job transitioning from an ambiguous one to a more meaningful one, something that Kate articulates extremely well:

[S]parkles are used frequently to represent not only AI features and capabilities but also completely unrelated features and content, such as visual effects, deals or rewards, personalized ads, and new content.

I get worked up about this because I own a pessimistic and assumptive view that the proliferation of sparkles icons reeks of marketing. There’s no way for me to know this, of course, but I’ll unabashedly don my tinfoil hat for this one.

Anyway, Kate’s article is a much more thorough investigation that’s worth the deep dive — it’s a selection pulled from an entire book on the topic of successful icon design. I’ll leave you with a sobering quote:

Finally, I also predict that the icon’s association with AI-driven features will get stronger in the immediate future. So, for the time being, using it to indicate AI-driven features (or even simply new features) may be useful. Over time, as AI-driven features become more common or even expected across interfaces, there will be less of a need to call them out. It won’t matter that the features are AI-driven; it will matter only that they are present and meet user needs.

The Proliferation and Problem of the ✨ Sparkles ✨ Icon originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The future of brand tracking is here — and it’s powered by AI.

Brand tracking is an essential marketing strategy for measuring brand performance, customer loyalty, and market positioning.

Traditionally, companies rely on surveys, panels, and market research to gather this data. But these methods can be slow, often taking weeks or months to deliver insights, which makes it hard for businesses to adapt to market changes in real time. Brand tracking can also be expensive and time-consuming, putting it out of reach for smaller teams with limited budgets.

AI is a potential solution, offering more accessible, faster, and cost-effective results. But what practical marketing applications does AI have for brand tracking — and how accurate is it?

In a recent Marketing Against the Grain episode, Kieran and I used HubSpot as a test case to explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude could streamline brand tracking. By comparing the AI-powered insights with our own internal company data, we also assessed how closely AI can match up to traditional tracking methods and its potential for broader use.

AI-Powered Brand Tracking Opportunities

AI offers a more efficient way to track and evaluate brand performance, providing faster insights faster, with more flexibility. Here, Kieran and I explore three practical applications.

Understand why customers choose your brand over competitors.

AI isn’t just about quantitative analysis; it also helps marketers understand the qualitative ‘why’ behind customer decisions by analyzing online customer feedback, reviews, and discussion forums.

When we prompted AI to analyze why customers choose HubSpot, it identified core themes like ease of use, integration capabilities, and customer support. These findings closely matched our internal data, showcasing AI’s ability to quickly extract accurate insights from public platforms.

This offers a valuable window into customer behavior, enabling marketers to improve brand messaging and shape acquisition strategies around the attributes that resonate most with their audience.

Estimate your NPS score.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key indicator of customer loyalty and brand satisfaction — but it’s often expensive and time-consuming to measure.

While AI isn’t a complete replacement for NPS surveys (yet), it can give quick, informal estimates by aggregating online feedback and analyzing customer sentiment. This helps marketing teams regularly monitor customer satisfaction and make timely adjustments between formal NPS assessments.

In our experiment, we asked AI to estimate HubSpot’s NPS using online data. The AI produced a score range that was surprisingly close to our actual figures, along with a detailed rationale, demonstrating AI’s potential as an effective proxy for traditional NPS tracking.

Measure aided brand awareness.

Aided awareness, or how familiar consumers are with a brand when prompted with its name or logo, is a key metric for evaluating brand visibility and competitive positioning in the market.

Traditionally, this involves hiring research firms to build and run extensive surveys, but AI again offers a faster, more accessible alternative by analyzing publicly available data and consumer sentiment.

In our experiment, we used AI to estimate HubSpot’s aided awareness within a target market segment — companies with 200 to 2,000 employees. Interestingly, the two models produced slightly different results, with Claude offering a more accurate estimation compared to ChatGPT-4.

This discrepancy highlights the value of consulting multiple AI models for a more well-rounded picture of your company’s brand awareness.

Tactical Tips for Optimizing AI for Brand Tracking

AI is great — but it’s not perfect. Being thoughtful about how you implement and manage your AI marketing tools maximizes the value AI brings to your brand tracking strategy.

Here are five actionable tips to ensure you're getting the best results.

1. Craft precise prompts for accurate AI results.

The quality of AI output is directly tied to how well you structure your request. Clearly define your target audience, goals, and context to help AI generate more focused and actionable insights.

2. Monitor for outliers and know when to validate.

Set your AI agents to flag outliers and notify you when results deviate from expectations. This helps determine when you should invest in resources like manual analysis or additional surveys to validate findings.

3. Integrate AI with your existing tools and internal data.

Improve contextual accuracy by integrating your AI marketing tools with internal data — like sales calls, social media interactions, and website analytics—to capture more personalized AI insights that reflect your brand’s unique context and positioning.

4. Regularly evaluate and update your AI toolkit.

AI models are constantly evolving, so it’s essential to confirm you’re always using the most up-to-date version. Regularly check and update your AI tools to make sure they align with your marketing team and business goals, giving you the most effective results over time.

5. Build your marketing AI ecosystem now.

“AI is going to be exponentially better in 12, 18, 24 months,” says Kieran. Therefore, the time to build your marketing AI infrastructure is now, so you'll be well-positioned and agile enough to integrate future AI improvements as soon as they are available.

Adopting AI in brand tracking empowers your team to react faster to market shifts and customer behaviors, while also future-proofing your AI marketing strategy. To learn more about AI for brand tracking, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into ideas shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they unpack growth strategies and learn from standout founders and peers.

Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand style guide. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments present a unified vision of the brand to the public.

The best brands stick in our brains because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. Once we see them enough, they become instantly recognizable. All of this is possible when each member of your team adheres to a cohesive brand style guide.

So, what is a brand style guide? In this article, I'll go over the elements of a style guide and share some amazing examples of them in action to help inspire your next branding project or website redesign.

Table of Contents

• What are brand guidelines?
• The Elements of a Brand Style Guide
• Style Guide Examples
• Branding Guidelines Tips
• Build a Memorable Style Guide of Your Own

Picture the most recognizable brands you can think of.

Chances are, you've learned to recognize them due to one of the following reasons:

• There's a written or visual consistency across the messaging.
• The same brand colors are reflected across every asset.
• The language sounds familiar.
• It‘s all very organized, and while not rigid, it’s cohesive.

But before you sit down to create your branding guidelines, I'd recommend taking a step back and defining your brand’s mission statement and buyer personas. These strategic elements will help you dive into the tactical components of your brand style guide later.

Brand Guidelines Mission Statement

Your brand guidelines mission statement ensures that all your content is working toward the same goal and connecting with your audience. It can also guide your blog and paid content, ad copy, visual media, and slogan.

Brand Guidelines Buyer Persona

Your brand guidelines buyer persona guides your blog content, ad copy, and visual media, which can attract valuable leads and customers to your business. You can create one quickly with our free persona tool.

The Elements of a Brand Style Guide

A brand style guide encompasses much more than just a logo (although that’s important, too). It visually encompasses everything your brand is about — down to your business' purpose.

Here are some key elements that I believe make or break a brand style guide, with links to in-depth articles if you need more guidance or info:

• Logo. Logos are a powerful way to determine how your brand is perceived. We’ve got a nine-step guide to walk you through it.
• Color palette. Your brand color palette affects every aspect of your design, especially visual impact and user experience. We’ve got 50 unforgettable palettes to inspire you.
• Typography. Typography plays a critical role on any website by ensuring we can comfortably read and process all its text-based content. If a website’s typography works, we won’t notice. If it fails, chances are we’ll bounce off the page.
• Imagery and iconography. Ensure the best possible user experience with these icon best practices.
• Brand voice. Build your best brand voice using our free brand-building guide.

1. City of Chicago

See the full City of Chicago brand guide.

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What I like: Chicago’s brand guidelines rest on the beauty and simplicity of the city’s flag, both in terms of color and design. Plus, the tone of the guide is fun and casual — like its acknowledgement of how popular Chicago stars are in tattoo designs.

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A fun detail: The custom font, Big Shoulders, comes from the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago,” which gave the city its nickname “City of Big Shoulders.”

2. Olympic Games

See the full Olympic Games brand guide.

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What I like: The Olympic Games still use the logo and colors from 1913, but the brand was refreshed in 2022 by Ben Hulse (whose work shows up a few times in this list). The bold interpretation of the Olympic colors embody the brand characteristics: hopeful, universal, inclusive, vibrant, and progressive.

3. Amnesty International UK

See the full Amnesty International UK brand guide.

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What I like: Amnesty International UK spells it all out on the cover: bright, bold, and positive. The pink, yellow, and blue brand colors are cheerful, optimistic, and bold. This guide also does a particularly nice job of illustrating do’s, don’ts, and exceptions.

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4. Sonic the Hedgehog

See the full Sonic the Hedgehog brand guide.

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What I like: Even cartoons need a style guide. Sonic the Hedgehog’s include phrases for each character, which is a fun and novel way to ensure brand consistency.

5. Burger King

See the full Burger King brand guide.

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What I like: Burger King says that everything it does should make the food “even more craveable” — including the shape of the font, which is custom-designed to evoke the shapes of food.

6. Eurovision Song Contest

See the full Eurovision Song Contest brand guide.

What I like: The font is so customized that no other characters exist other than the ones in the word “Eurovision.” That gives the brand an unmatched distinctiveness.

7. OpenAI

See the full OpenAI brand guide.

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What I like: OpenAI has put a lot of thought into the symbolism behind all its color choices. For instance, it uses a lot of black and white in its branding to signify that “OpenAI is an empty vessel that adapts to its content.”

8. DC Comics 1982

See excerpts from the DC Comics 1982 brand guide.

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What I like: What’s not to like? Even MCU apologists can appreciate the storytelling that went into DC Comics’ 1982 style guide. Superheroes are grouped by color palette, and each character includes a written introduction with catchphrases, mythology, and other details.

9. Reporters San Frontières

See the full Reporters San Frontières brand guide.

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What I like: One of RSF’s slogans, “Fight for facts,” is simple but powerful, which is reflected in RSF’s three colors: black, white, and a vibrant pinkish-red. The guide specifies how to use accent colors — red or black should only make up 20% of a design, with white using the other 80%. That reinforces RSF’s spare but muscular branding.

10. Major League Soccer

See the full Major League Soccer brand guide.

What I like: Major League Soccer’s style guide has to include color combinations for 20 teams. To ensure brand cohesiveness, MLS has a single logo mark, the crest, with no design variations. It also includes specific guidance on applying color layers to images.

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11. Czech Railway

See the full Czech Railway brand guide.

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What I like: The Czech Railway’s beautiful color palette is centered around a dark blue and deep orange, and the logo mark evokes railway tracks.

12. Coronation 2023

See the full Coronation 2023 brand guide.

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What I like: This 23-page guide covers one thing and one thing only: The emblem used for the coronation of Great Britain’s King Charles in 2023. As such, it’s a fascinating case study in detail. The guide includes half a dozen examples of how to use the emblem on royal swag, and it’s exceedingly specific in its do’s and don’ts.

13. EPA (1977)

See excerpts from the EPA brand guide.

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What I like: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 1977 brand guide is a favorite of graphic designers for good reason. Check out the patterns designated as program identifiers, like “toxic substances,” “noise,” and “radiation.”

The EPA’s jewel-toned rainbow of brand colors includes a muddy green called “Pesticides Green” and a color called, ahem, “Solid Waste Brown.” The EPA must have been a fun place to work in the 1970s.

14. Docusign

See the full Docusign brand guide.

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What I like: Docusign includes a page of colored pie charts to demonstrate the correct color ratios. Docusign also stands out with a zinger of an accent color — a bright coral that beautifully contrasts with the purples in the brand palette.

15. Zagreb Airport

See the full Zagreb Airport brand guide.

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What I like: Zagreb Airport in Croatia uses a simple triangle as a building block for complex iconography that references Croatian heritage and culture.

16. Oxford Student Union

See the full Oxford Student Union brand guide.

What I like: The addition of colo(u)r combinations is a nice touch here. I’m one of those people who can take a perfectly lovely color palette and make a muddy mess of it, so this is something I’d love to see in more style guides.

17. Fiat 2019

See the full Fiat 2019 brand guide.

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What I like: The four diagonal lines in Fiat’s logo are mesmerizing. Fiat has incorporated those simple four lines across its branding in playful, creative ways, like changing the length of half the lines, as it’s done on the cover (above).

18. Team Canada

See excerpts from the Team Canada brand guide.

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What I like: Even though only a few excerpts are available from the full 88-page brand guide, I’m including this because it’s simply gorgeous. Canada’s red maple leaf could have been a tired symbol, but the designers reimagined it with complex geometric patterns and bold colors.

19. Hulu

See the full Hulu brand guide.

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What I like: Hulu does a lot with a relatively limited palette, mixing it up with bold typefaces and whimsical illustrations. I also like this shade of green — despite being a common color, Hulu has landed on a standout hue.

20. Brasil Governo Federal

See the full Brasil Governo Federal brand guide.

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What I like: Brasil Governo Federal’s bold style and brash colors are eye-catching, to say the least. The style guide includes information on how to use the logo in video, which in my experience is a brand question that often goes unanswered.

21. IBM

See the full IBM brand guide.

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What I like: IBM’s brand guide is an incredible interactive experience with videos and custom typeface previews. It’s also among the most comprehensive of this entire list, since it includes support for non-Latin scripts like Arabic and fonts that support alternate glyphs and even ligatures. There’s even an entire section dedicated to data visualization.

22. American Airlines

See the full American Airlines brand guide.

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What I like: American Airlines’ style guide has a ton of examples, including specifics like what part of the airplane can be shown in a photo. Considering how many different types of ads the airline runs, it’s useful to have so many specific details to help avoid human error and inconsistencies.

23. British Rail

See the full British Rail corporate identity manual.

What I like: British Rail’s corporate identity manual collects several decades of brand changes — it’s worth a look just to trace the subtle differences over time.

24. Elizabeth Line, Transport for London

See the full Elizabeth Line brand guide.

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What I like: TfL, London’s transport authority, created a brand guide for its newest addition, the Elizabeth line. It even includes a section on “design idiom flexibility,” which provides guidance on how much Elizabeth line branding to use on a scale of “localness” to “Elizabeth line-ness.”

25. Medium

See the full Medium brand guide.

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What I like: Medium‘s simple brand style guide emphasizes usage of its logo, wordmark, and symbol. Medium’s logo is the brand's primary graphic element and was created to feel “confident, premium, timeless, and modern.”

26. Walmart

See the full Walmart brand guide.

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What I like: The guide includes the brand‘s logo, photography, typography, illustrations, iconography, voice, editorial style, and more. Walmart’s color palette is so integral to its brand identity that its primary color is called “Walmart Blue.”

27. Asana

See the full Asana brand guide.

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What I like: Asana‘s simple style guide highlights its logo and color palette. It also explains how to properly use the brand’s assets.

28. Spotify

See the full Spotify brand guide.

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What I like: Spotify‘s color palette includes three color codes, while the rest of the company’s branding guidelines focus on logo variation and album artwork. The style guide even allows you to download an icon version of its logo, making it easier to represent the company without manually recreating it.

29. Starbucks

See the full Starbucks brand guide.

What I like: Starbucks' interactive brand style guide includes details about how to use its core elements such as the iconic Siren logo and green color palette. Plus, the guide features a visual spectrum of how their creative assets can be used across different channels.

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30. Paris 2024

See the full Paris 2024 brand guide.

What I like: Paris 2024's brand identity pays homage to the 1924 Olympic Games through Art Deco-inspired design. Best of all, designers applied eco-branding methods to reduce the amount of ink and paper needed for physical materials as well as limit the power and data consumption on digital elements.

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This brand guide also reinvents all 62 pictograms from the Olympic and Paralympic Games as “coat of arms that serve as rallying cries for sports fans.” Each pictogram is designed on an axis of symmetry that reinforces the coats of arms iconography. Go straight to the pictogram guidelines to take a look. The ones below represent surfing, swimming, table tennis, and taekwondo.

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31. Urban Outfitters

See the full Urban Outfitters brand guide.

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What I like: Photography, color, and even tone of voice appear in Urban Outfitters‘ California-inspired brand guidelines. Plus, the company includes information about its ideal consumer and what the brand believes in.

32. Love to Ride

See the full Love to Ride brand guide.

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What I like: Love to Ride, a cycling company, is all about color variety in its visually pleasing style guide. The company's brand guidelines include nine color codes and tons of detail about its secondary logos and imagery.

33. Barbican

See the full Barbican brand guide.

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What I like: Barbican, an art and learning center in the United Kingdom, sports a loud yet simple style guide focusing heavily on its logo and supporting typefaces.

34. I Love New York

See the full I Love New York brand guide.

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What I like: Despite its famously simple T-shirts, I Love New York has a brand style guide. The company begins its guidelines with a thorough explanation of its mission, vision, story, target audience, and tone of voice. Only then does the style guide delve into its logo positioning on various merchandise.

35. TikTok

See the full TikTok brand guide.

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What I like: TikTok‘s style guide isn’t just a guide — it's an interactive brand book. First, it provides an in-depth look into how it brings its brand to life through design. Then, it gives an overview of its logo, co-branding, color, and typography.

36. University of the Arts Helsinki

See the full University of the Arts Helsinki brand guide.

What I like: The style guide of the University of the Arts Helsinki is more of a creative branding album than a traditional marketing guide. It shows you dozens of contexts in which you‘d see this school’s provocative logo, including animations.

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37. Western Athletic Conference

See the full Western Athletic Conference brand guide.

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What I like: The Western Athletic Conference's brand style guide includes extensive information about its history, mission, and vision. It also highlights its member universities and athletic championships and awards it is involved with.

38. Discord

See the full Discord brand guide.

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What I like: Discord‘s brand guide is as colorful and playful as the communities it serves. The brand’s motion elements are based on the dot, which represents the Discord user interacting with others in the communities it belongs to.

39. Netflix

See the full Netflix brand guide.

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What I like: As far as its public brand assets are concerned, Netflix is focused primarily on the treatment of its logo. The company offers a simple set of rules governing the size, spacing, and placement of its famous capitalized typeface.

40. NASA

See the full NASA brand guide.

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What I like: NASA‘s “Graphics Standards Manual” is as official and complex as you think it is. At 220 pages, the guide describes countless logo placements, color uses, and supporting designs. And yes, NASA’s space shuttles have their own branding rules.

41. New York City Transit Authority

See the full New York City Transit Authority brand guide.

What I like: Like NASA, the NYCTA has its own Graphics Standards Manual, and it includes some fascinating typography rules for the numbers, arrows, and public transit symbols the average commuter takes for granted every day.

Branding Guidelines Tips

If you want to take your branding style guide to the next level, let HubSpot's Brand Kit Generator do some of the heavy lifting for you.

I'd also recommend following the best practices below, which the HubSpot Creative team has used to disseminate branding information to the rest of the HubSpot Marketing team.

This has not only made my job as a blogger easier, but also makes our branding feel well thought-out and cohesive.

1. Make your guidelines a branded document.

Whether you’re publishing your branding guidelines online or creating an internal presentation, consider making the guidelines themselves a branded document.

Ensure the published document follows your established brand voice, uses the symbols and imagery you’ve created, and employs the colors and typography that makes your brand feel like you.

Insights from HubSpot's Creative Team

When our Creative team rolled out a visual identity refresh for the HubSpot brand, we all received access to a branded playbook that summarized all the changes and described how we should represent HubSpot online moving forward.

Not only was I a huge fan of the refresh, but also of the way it was presented to our team in a branded document.

You can do the same, regardless of your budget. Our Creative team actually used a free tool, Google Slides — so it’s totally doable for a small or freelance brand!

2. Name your brand's colors.

You’ve already chosen your color palette — why not go as far as naming the colors?

Giving your colors unique names (aside from “blue” or “orange”) can help you tie the tactical elements of your branding into an overall theme or ethos.

Not to mention that it’s awesome to be able to refer to company colors by a unique name. Imagine if we called Solaris, HubSpot’s primary brand color, “HubSpot Orange” — that simply doesn’t have the same ring.

Insights from HubSpot's Creative Team

In our visual identity refresh, our Creative team brightened and intensified our color palette, then renamed the individual hues.

They wrote, “Every color, tint, and shade is based on central themes. [...] Whether it’s a subway line in Paris, or a flower-lined street in Japan, the secondary color names are a veritable tour of important cultural and geographical touchstones from HubSpotters all over the world.”

Think about what makes your brand unique, and why you chose the colors that you did. For instance, if you work at a law firm that specializes in car accident cases, you might choose red as one of the brand colors and call it “Stop Light.”

3. Create easy-to-use branded templates.

Alongside your branding guidelines should be templates to empower your team to easily design branded assets, even if they’re not designers.

Insights from HubSpot's Creative Team

At HubSpot, we keep all of our templates in our team’s Canva account. There, anyone (myself included) can edit pre-made designs for any number of use cases.

As a writer on the HubSpot blog, I have to create graphics to supplement the information I’m sharing.

The branded templates made by our Creative team have made my work a great deal easier, and I can imagine that it’s the same for our Social Media team.

Not everyone is a designer, but with templates, you can ensure your brand looks professional no matter who creates an asset.

4. Ensure your branding is optimized for all channels.

Your branding guidelines should include different specifications for different channels.

Or, alternatively, you should have assets and designs that can be adjusted for various channels and mediums. Not only for sizing purposes, but for accessibility purposes, too.

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For instance, if you primarily market your brand over Instagram and on your website, then your branding should have web accessible colors, as well as Instagram-friendly designs and sizes.

However, you don’t want to significantly change your branding from channel to channel. It should work relatively well no matter where you’re marketing your brand.

Build a Memorable Style Guide of Your Own

Once you build your unique brand style guide, customers will recognize your brand and associate it with all the visual cues you want them to.

I hope you were inspired by our list of amazing brand style guides and wish you luck in creating a timeless style of your own.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, it’s time to prepare for the delicious Thanksgiving dinners and big bellies. And of course, it’s also time to bring out your fall and Thanksgiving fonts for all the banners, flyers, posters, and greeting card designs.

In this roundup, you’ll find a blend of free and premium fonts ready for your festive designs. Whether you’re working on a Thanksgiving dinner invitation, an autumn-themed blog post, or a fall sale advertisement, these fall and Thanksgiving fonts will add a seasonal touch to your projects, helping your designs stand out with a seasonal vibe.

From elegant serifs to playful scripts, each Thanksgiving font selection has been crafted to give your designs a stunning aesthetic appeal, enhance readability, and engage your audience. So dive in, and let’s get ready to transform your autumn and Thanksgiving design projects with these beautiful and versatile fall fonts.

Gratefully – Slab Serif Thanksgiving Font

Gratefully is an exciting slab serif font with a unique ‘fall’ theme, ideal for creative Thanksgiving projects. Its bouncy, handmade letters deliver a fun and unique result, perfect for cutting, printing, greeting cards, and merchandise. Offering standard uppercase, lowercase, numerals, symbols, and select ligatures, it fits various software formats including otf, ttf, and woff (Web Font).

Thankful Sunday – Thanksgiving Font Duo

Thankful Sunday is a unique, hand-written font duo, perfect for your Thanksgiving-themed designs. It includes a primary font and an additional doodle font packed with charming illustrations. Available in otf, ttf, and woff file types, this third-party design tool is excellent for adding a personal and festive touch to your projects.

Fall Pies – Modern Handwritten Fall Font

Fall Pies is a modern, handwritten font that is perfect for a variety of uses. Whether you’re designing greeting cards, invitations, posters, or logos, Fall Pies adds a charming, autumnal touch to your work. The font, provided in .otf and .ttf formats, includes both uppercase and lowercase varieties. Try it out for a fresh, seasonal look.

Hello Thankies – Thanksgiving Themed Font

Check out Hello Thankies, a delightful Thanksgiving-themed font duo that’s designed to infuse warm, festive vibes into any project. This unique collection includes two fonts, along with an exclusive ‘Thankies Doodle’ for an added touch of creativity. Whether it’s for branding, posters, clothing, or for that special Thanksgiving decoration, Hello Thankies is a charming solution.

Autumn Brush – Thanksgiving Font

Autumn Brush is a colorful, handcrafted font that brings an energetic and realistic touch to your design projects. With its lively, textured character set, it’s ideal for logos, posters, invites and anything requiring a dash of creativity and warmth.

Holifall Autumn – Tropical Fall Font

Holifall Autumn is a unique and authentic display font perfect for diverse needs. Offering a variety of themes and font styles, it comes in regular OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats. This font is perfect for giving a simple and creative fall vibe to your various seasonal design projects.

Golden Harvest – Fall Font

Golden Harvest is a contemporary, handwritten style font that provides a captivating touch to your designs. It includes upper and lower case letters, numerals, and standard punctuations. It also showcases accents, stunning ligatures, and stylistic sets.

Happy Thanksgiving – Handwritten Script Font

Happy Thanksgiving is a charming handwritten script font that seamlessly melds the warm, festive ambiance of numerous holidays. Beautifully encapsulating the essence of autumn and the cheer of the holiday season, this versatile font adds a touch of artful creativity to your projects.

Beauty Autumn – Simple Handwritten Font

Beauty Autumn is a versatile font perfect for sprucing up your digital and printed materials. Its handwritten style brings an intimate, personal touch to your projects, whether it’s for branding, posters, or social media posts. With included OTF, WOFF, and TTF files, it meets diverse design needs effortlessly.

Autumn Silent – Modern Handwritten Script Font

Autumn Silent, a modern handwritten script font, is an elegant addition to your digital and printed creations. With its stylistic appeal, it’s an incredible choice for enhancing posters, social media posts, branding, and personal projects. It is conveniently offered in OTF, WOFF, TTF and italic versions.

Retro Fall – Cute Fall Font

Retro Fall is a groovy, vintage-inspired font well-suited for various creative ventures. Its playful and authentic vibe makes it ideal for blog posts, logos, greeting cards, branding, or even planners and photo albums. The zip file includes both OTF and TTF files, allowing diverse usage for this unique typeface guaranteed to enhance your designs with a touch of nostalgia.

Lemon – Fall Thanksgiving Font

Lemon Font is a fun, refreshing blend of display and cute styles that add a burst of lively color to your creations. Ideal for seasonal and fun occasions, this whimsical font is perfect for projects that radiate positivity. Lemon Font brings the vibrant spirit of changing seasons to your crafting, decor, and embroidery projects.

Wonderland – Christmas & Thanksgiving Font

Wonderland is an elegantly designed, handwritten font that adds a touch of warmth and sophistication to various projects. Ideally suited for special occasions and festive themes, its graceful style enhances creations from wedding invitations and greeting cards to embroidery designs and unique crafts.

Thanksgiving Joy – Playful Font

Thanksgiving Joy is a cheerful, playful font that’s perfect for celebrating the festive season. The font comes with nine decorative options, all inspired by classic Thanksgiving motifs. Easy to install and use, it’s great for designing invitations, decorations, or logos for the holiday season.

Orange Leafy – Autumn Themed Font

Orange Leafy is a captivating Autumn-themed font. Its playful and vibrant style is great for Autumn branding, logos, invitations, stationery, social media posts, product packaging, merchandise, and more. Offering otf and ttf formats, ligatures, and multilingual support.

Falling Dried – Modern Fall Sans Serif Font

Falling Dried is a beautifully modern sans serif font exuding warmth and recalling the natural splendor of autumn. Its clean and minimal design gives letters a tranquil, soft look, making it perfect for projects that capture the season’s charm. The font, which comes in several formats including otf and ttf, works well for invitations, posters and more.

Fall Season – Handwritten Font

Fall Season is a somewhat wistful, handwritten font with a relaxed vibe that gives each design a unique and captivating touch. It’s perfect for logos, branding, and quotes, offering uppercase, lowercase, symbols, numerals, ligatures, alternates, and multilingual support. The font comes in OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 files, making it versatile for various projects.

Gobbie Gobble – Fun Thanksgiving Font

The Gobbie Gobble font evokes the playful spirit of Thanksgiving with its endearing handwritten style. Available in uppercase and lowercase, along with numerics and symbols, it offers versatility for your creative designs. Alongside, it includes 26 unique Thanksgiving-themed doodles accessible by typing A-Z, enhancing your artwork further. File formats include otf, ttf, and woff for the font and doodles.

Thanks Autumn – Handwritten Fall Font

Thanks Autumn handwritten font is an appealing, artistically crafted font that embodies the heart and warmth of the fall season. Displayed entirely in caps, it includes two different heights, numbers, symbols, and multilingual support. The asset provides OTF, TTF, WOFF files to suit your project needs. Perfect for any charming autumn-inspired project.

Barthley – Handlettering Fall Font

Barthley is an appealing handwritten font with a unique, natural style. Its versatility makes it ideal for a wide variety of designs. The font is user-friendly, easy to install on both PC & Mac and works seamlessly with popular software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and more. It’s PUA encoded which allows for easy access to all its glyphs and swashes.

Gratefully – Slab Serif Thanksgiving Font

Gratefully is a playful, fall-themed slab serif font with a unique, handmade feel. Its bouncy and scribbled characteristics make it perfect for a range of creative projects like Thanksgiving invitations, greeting cards, and posters. Offering a variety of features, including standard uppercase, lowercase, numerals, symbols, and some ligatures, this font is compatible with most software platforms and comes in .otf, .ttf, and web font formats.

Savor Fall – Modern Fall Font

Savor Fall is a modern display typeface that captures the spirit of fall through its distinctive style that instills a warm sense of nostalgia. With delicate lines and gentle curves, the font lends softness and tranquility to your designs. Ideal for invitations, greeting cards, or posters, it infuses every project with an irresistibly natural touch. Available in both otf and ttf formats, with uppercase and lowercase options.

Maple Memories – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

Maple Memories is a beautifully intricate handwritten font that enhances any design with its versatile style. Offered in three formats (.otf, .ttf, .woff) and featuring multilingual support, from English to Zulu, it’s perfect for beginners and experts alike. The additional beginning and ending swash augment its elegance. Designed by Attype Studio, this creative asset is sure to bring your Fall and Thanksgiving projects to life!

Autumn Atmosphere – Creative Fall Font

Autumn Atmosphere is a distinctive and genuine display font, perfect for various branding projects like logos, seasonal decorations, greeting cards, and beyond. Its bold and adaptive style stands out in numerous contexts. The package includes OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats.

Happy Fall – Modern Handwritten Font

Step into Autumn with the Happy Fall handwritten font. Perfect for projects that want to carry the enchanting essence of fall, like invitations, greeting cards, or posters. This charming font features uppercase and lowercase versions along with multilingual support. It will sprinkle a natural and captivating touch on your design, wrapping it in a cozy autumn ambiance. Available in otf and ttf formats.

Turning Leaf – Fall Themed Font

The Turning Leaf is a charming fall-themed creative font. Its delicate lines and gentle curves evoke nostalgia for changing leaves and autumn tranquility, adding a dimension of softness to any design. This font, available in both uppercase and lowercase, is perfect for any project needing a warm, natural touch. It works beautifully on invitations, greeting cards, and posters, and supports multiple languages.

Warm Autumn – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

Warm Autumn is a distinctive, genuine display font with bold characters. It’s versatile enough for a variety of branding tasks, such as creating logos, greeting cards, and other projects that embrace the spirit of Autumn or summer. Available in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, Warm Autumn is a standout choice for a broad set of scenarios.

Lord de Ayodilla – Thanksgiving Style Font

The Lord de Ayodilla is a delightful font for livening up your holiday or spring-themed projects. Its dazzling serif-script style uniquely compliments any cheerful occasion. Perfect for creating engaging social media posts or holiday greeting cards, it even includes foreign language glyphs for added versatility. This font is available in .OTF and .TTF formats.

Autumn Orange – Fall Themed Font

Autumn Orange is a standout, genuine display font that lends a bold finish to various branding projects, including logos, greeting cards, and seasonal-themed graphics. Its versatility is unmatched as it stands out in myriad contexts. Available in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, Autumn Orange is perfect for injecting vibrant, fall-inspired creativity into your designs.

Happy Today – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

The Happy Today font is a versatile, bold display font. Great for branding projects such as logos or greeting cards and perfect for seasonal Autumn and Summer themes, it stands out in various contexts. It comes in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, offering practicality for multiple use cases.

Best Free Thanksgiving Fonts

Free Thanksgiving Font

This free font is designed with Thanksgiving-themed projects in mind. It features a beautiful script-style letter design that will add a more modern and more festive look to your typography designs. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Free Script Fall Font

Another free script font. This font is made for fall-themed design projects. It comes with a set of creative characters suitable for greeting cards, logos, and social media posts. The font is free for personal use only.

With Farmhouse – Free Fall Font

You can use this font to craft beautiful greeting cards and packaging designs for your fall-themed projects. It’s free to download and use with your personal projects.

Sweet November – Free Fall Themed Font

This font has a sweet romantic vibe with a mix of fall-season looks. It’s perfect for designing titles for greeting cards as well as for flyers and posters. The font is free for personal use.

Blushing – Free Fall Font

Blushing is a free fall-themed font that comes with a handwritten-style letter design. The font is ideal for custom prints such as t-shirts, mugs, and greeting cards. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Oklab is a new perceptual color space supported in all major browsers created by the Swedish engineer Björn Ottosson. In this interview, Philip Jägenstedt explores how and why Björn created Oklab and how it spread across the ecosystem.

Note: The original interview was conducted in Swedish and is available to watch.

Philip Jägenstedt: Tell me a little about yourself, Björn.

Björn Ottosson: I worked for many years in the game industry on game engines and games like FIFA, Battlefield, and Need for Speed. I've always been interested in technology and its interaction with the arts. I’m an engineer, but I’ve always held both of these interests.

Philip: For someone who hasn’t dug into colors much, what’s so hard about working with them?

Björn: Intuitively, colors can seem quite simple. A color can be lighter or darker, it can be more blue or more green, and so on. Everyone with typical color vision has a fairly similar experience of color, and this can be modeled.

However, the way we manipulate colors in software usually doesn’t align with human perception of colors. The most common color space is sRGB. There’s also HSL, which is common for choosing colors, but it’s also based on sRGB.

One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception. When using those tools, you sometimes get surprising results, like purple in the gradient.

Philip: How do humans perceive color?

Björn: When light enters the eye and hits the retina, it’s processed in many layers of neurons and creates a mental impression. It’s unlikely that the process would be simple and linear, and it’s not. But incredibly enough, most people still perceive colors similarly.

People have been trying to understand colors and have created color wheels and similar visualizations for hundreds of years. During the 20th century, a lot of research and modeling went into color vision. For example, the CIE XYZ model is based on how sensitive our photoreceptor cells are to different frequencies of light. CIE XYZ is still a foundational color space on which all other color spaces are based.

There were also attempts to create simple models matching human perception based on XYZ, but as it turned out, it’s not possible to model all color vision that way. Perception of color is incredibly complex and depends, among other things, on whether it is dark or light in the room and the background color it is against. When you look at a photograph, it also depends on what you think the color of the light source is. The dress is a typical example of color vision being very context-dependent. It is almost impossible to model this perfectly.

Models that try to take all of this complexity into account are called color appearance models. Although they have many applications, they’re not that useful if you don’t know if the viewer is in a light or bright room or other viewing conditions.

The odd thing is that there’s a gap between the tools we typically use — such as sRGB and HSL — and the findings of this much older research. To an extent, this makes sense because when HSL was developed in the 1970s, we didn’t have much computing power, so it’s a fairly simple translation of RGB. However, not much has changed since then.

We have a lot more processing power now, but we’ve settled for fairly simple tools for handling colors in software.

Display technology has also improved. Many displays now have different RGB primaries, i.e., a redder red, greener green, or bluer blue. sRGB cannot reach all colors available on these displays. The new P3 color space can, but it's very similar to sRGB, just a little wider.

Philip: What, then, is Oklab, and how did you create it?

Björn: When working in the game industry, sometimes I wanted to do simple color manipulations like making a color darker or changing the hue. I researched existing color spaces and how good they are at these simple tasks and concluded that all of them are problematic in some way.

Many people know about CIE Lab. It’s quite close to human perception of color, but the handling of hue is not great. For example, a gradient between blue and white turns out purple in CIE Lab, similar to in sRGB. Some color spaces handle hue well but have other issues to consider.

When I left my job in gaming to pursue education and consulting, I had a bit of time to tackle this problem. Oklab is my attempt to find a better balance, something Lab-like but “okay”.

I based Oklab on two other color spaces, CIECAM16 and IPT. I used the lightness and saturation prediction from CIECAM16, which is a color appearance model, as a target. I actually wanted to use the datasets used to create CIECAM16, but I couldn’t find them.

IPT was designed to have better hue uniformity. In experiments, they asked people to match light and dark colors, saturated and unsaturated colors, which resulted in a dataset for which colors, subjectively, have the same hue. IPT has a few other issues but is the basis for hue in Oklab.

Using these three datasets, I set out to create a simple color space that would be “okay”. I used an approach quite similar to IPT but combined it with the lightness and saturation estimates from CIECAM16. The resulting Oklab still has good hue uniformity but also handles lightness and saturation well.

Philip: How about the name Oklab? Why is it just okay?

Björn: This is a bit tongue-in-cheek and some amount of humility.

For the tasks I had in mind, existing color spaces weren’t okay, and my goal was to make one that is. At the same time, it is possible to delve deeper. If a university had worked on this, they could have run studies with many participants. For a color space intended mainly for use on computer and phone screens, you could run studies in typical environments where they are used. It’s possible to go deeper.

Nevertheless, I took the datasets I could find and made the best of what I had. The objective was to make a very simple model that’s okay to use. And I think it is okay, and I couldn’t come up with anything better. I didn’t want to call it Björn Ottosson Lab or something like that, so I went with Oklab.

Philip: Does the name follow a tradition of calling things okay? I know there’s also a Quite OK Image format.

Björn: No, I didn’t follow any tradition here. Oklab was just the name I came up with.

Philip: I discovered Oklab when it suddenly appeared in all browsers. Things often move slowly on the web, but in this case, things moved very quickly. How did it happen?

Björn: I was surprised, too! I wrote a blog post and shared it on Twitter.

I have a lot of contacts in the gaming industry and some contacts in the Visual Effects (VFX) industry. I expected that people working with shaders or visual effects might try this out, and maybe it would be used in some games, perhaps as an effect for a smooth color transition.

But the blog post was spread much more widely than I thought. It was on Hacker News, and many people read it.

The code for Oklab is only 10 lines long, so many open-source libraries have adopted it. This all happened very quickly.

Chris Lilley from the W3C got in touch and asked me some questions about Oklab. We discussed it a bit, and I explained how it works and why I created it. He gave a presentation at a conference about it, and then he pushed for it to be added to CSS.

Photoshop also changed its gradients to use Oklab. All of this happened organically without me having to cheer it on.

Philip: In another blog post, you introduced two other color spaces, Okhsv and Okhsl. You’ve already talked about HSL, so what is Okhsl?

Björn: When picking colors, HSL has a big advantage, which is that the parameter space is simple. Any value 0-360 for hue (H) together with any values 0-1 for saturation (S) and lightness (L) are valid combinations and result in different colors on screen. The geometry of HSL is a cylinder, and there’s no way to end up outside that cylinder accidentally.

By contrast, Oklab contains all physically possible colors, but there are combinations of values that don’t work where you reach colors that don’t exist. For example, starting from light and saturated yellow in Oklab and rotating the hue to blue, that blue color does not exist in sRGB; there are only darker and less saturated blues. That’s because sRGB in Oklab has a strange shape, so it’s easy to end up going outside it. This makes it difficult to select and manipulate colors with Oklab or Oklch.

Okhsl was an attempt at compromise. It maintains Oklab’s behavior for colors that are not very saturated, close to gray, and beyond that, stretches out to a cylinder that contains all of sRGB. Another way to put it is that the strange shape of sRGB in Oklab has been stretched into a cylinder with reasonably smooth transitions.

The result is similar to HSL, where all parameters can be changed independently without ending up outside sRGB. It also makes Okhsl more complicated than Oklab. There are unavoidable compromises to get something with the characteristics that HSL has.

Everything with color is about compromises. Color vision is so complex that it's about making practical compromises.

This is an area where I wish there were more research. If I have a white background and want to pick some nice colors to put on it, then you can make a lot of assumptions. Okhsl solves many things, but is it possible to do even better?

Philip: Some people who have tried Oklab say there are too many dark shades. You changed that in Okhsl with a new lightness estimate.

Björn: This is because Oklab is exposure invariant and doesn’t account for viewing conditions, such as the background color. On the web, there’s usually a white background, which makes it harder to see the difference between black and other dark colors. But if you look at the same gradient on a black background, the difference is more apparent.

CIE Lab handles this, and I tried to handle it in Okhsl, too. So, gradients in Okhsl look better on a white background, but there will be other issues on a black background. It’s always a compromise.

Philip: Final question: What’s your favorite color?

Björn: I would have to say Burgundy. Burgundy, dark greens, and navy blues are favorites.

Philip: Thank you for your time, Björn. I hope our readers have learned something, and I’ll remind them of your excellent blog, where you go into more depth about Oklab and Okhsl.

Björn: Thank you!

“If you build it, they will come” may have worked for Kevin Costner, but I think we all know that marketing a cornfield baseball diamond would take just a little more work.

Websites are no different. Even the best content needs readers, and if you’ve struggled to increase your website traffic, you're in good company.

According to 2024 research from Content Marketing Institute, more than half of B2B content marketers say it’s a challenge to consistently create the right content for their audience.

We’ve got a list of 33 ways to increase website traffic, generate more leads, and improve ROI (and none of them involve waiting in a cornfield for ghost baseball players).

Table of Contents

• Free Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
• Paid Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

1. Content Creation

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your company. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through blogging.

To brainstorm content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you must first understand the buyer persona you’re targeting. Once you know your audience, you can create content that naturally attracts them to your website.

But how do you write a good blog post that will draw in the right audience? Follow these five steps:

• Identify your buyer persona: Find out more about your target market. Understand everything from job title to pain points.
• Conduct keyword research: Learn what your audience is searching for on search engines so you can provide the best content.
• Ideate topics: Identify topics that appeal to your audience’s pain points and experience high search volumes. Tools like our Blog Ideas Generator can help with the brainstorming process.
• Write a draft: Begin by drafting a post that answers your audience's questions. Use interesting angles to make your post stand out.
• Publish: Publish your post on your blog site. Use SEO tools to optimize your content.
• Promote: Promote your blog post on social media and email newsletters to generate traffic. The more traffic your post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines.

Pro tip: Learn how to implement a blogging strategy with our step-by-step guide and templates.

Want to take your blogging to the next level? Explore our Free AI Blog Writer to streamline your content creation process with the power of artificial intelligence.

2. Topic Expertise

Ranking higher in Google will increase your site's organic traffic. At HubSpot, we do this by using the pillar/topic cluster model. Google favors sites known to be topic experts on the subject matter they're writing about.

To be seen as an expert, you can create a pillar page, which is essentially a longer blog post that broadly covers all aspects of a topic.

Then, you write “cluster content,” or supporting blog posts, targeting long tail keywords that show you've covered a topic exhaustively. Focusing on long-term traffic will help you rank higher on search engines.

Christina Perricone, a former senior blog manager at HubSpot, says, "The pillar cluster model organizes content on your site around a single topic and search term through internal linking. This organization helps search engines easily crawl and categorize all of the content that you have on a particular topic, thereby making it easier for you to rank for that search term."

She continues, "When the model is done right, it also helps visitors navigate your site and move through related pages, boosting traffic for all of the pages in your topic cluster."

3. Organic Social Media

Organic social media is not a new strategy, but it's still something marketers should pay attention to. Besides posting on social media platforms, you can also use Instagram Stories, live video on Instagram or TikTok, or Facebook Messenger.

It's important to have a diverse social media strategy and use the right social media platforms — not just Facebook, Instagram, and X. Platforms like YouTube and even Pinterest can generate a lot of traffic to your site.

And as we saw during the transformation of Twitter into X, users can jump ship during major platform changes — so don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Henry Franco, a former HubSpot marketing manager, recommends two things regarding organic social media.

“First, don't spam your audience — it costs a user nothing to scroll past your post, and if you don't offer them any value, that's exactly what they'll do. Know your audience, and craft content that speaks directly to them,” Franco says.

“Second, stay active with community management. People love when brands like and reply to them — it'll humanize your business, and keep people coming back for more content.”

For instance, HubSpot uses fun carousels on Instagram about your office personality, a lighthearted way of engaging our audience (I am a bi-coastal baddie only by virtue of constantly mixing up time zones.)

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Pro tip: Check out our social media marketing guide to learn more.

4. Website Analysis

Let‘s do a little reverse-engineering of our thought process. Before you drive traffic to your website, it’s important to learn about your audience.

To do this, analyze your website to see where you're losing and gaining visitors. There are plenty of third-party tools, like Crazy Egg, and HubSpot has a free website grader you can use.

With this information at your disposal, you can create the right content to drive the right traffic to your website.

5. Influencers

We know that customers are more likely to buy from organizations with excellent word of mouth, but how do you create great word of mouth marketing?

First, delight your customers. Second, work with influencers.

Influencer marketing isn‘t a passing fad. In fact, it’s a budget-friendly option to drive traffic to your website. When influencers post discount codes, links, reviews, or giveaways, you are tapping into their audience to drive traffic to your website.

6. Email List Building

Using your current readers and customers is a great way to drive traffic to your website. When you post a new blog or content offer, you can promote it to your followers/subscribers for a quick traffic boost. With content-heavy websites, repeat readership is helpful for traffic goals, conversions, and lead generation.

To get started, build an email list or grow your current list. Below are a few strategies you can use:

• Content offers: Publish content that requires visitors to share their email to access it. Include CTAs for content offers on your website.
• Easy-access newsletter sign-up: Include sign-up forms on your website, from your homepage to your about page. If a visitor has a delightful experience on your site, they’re more likely to sign up for your newsletter.

Use HubSpot’s free forms tool to easily add a form to your site and start growing your email list.

• Social media: Promoting your email newsletter on social media, whether through a post or contest/giveaway, is a great way to convert your current followers into subscribers.

Pro tip: Learn how to build an email list from scratch or grow your email list.

7. Community Engagement

The more brand recognition you have, the more traffic you will drive to your website. One way to achieve brand recognition is to be active and engaged within the market.

You can implement an engagement strategy today by participating in Facebook group discussions in your industry, answering questions on public forum websites, and interacting with your followers on social media.

One of my favorite brands on social media is Taco Bell. Taco Bell delights its customers on social media just about every day. See a couple of examples from the company’s X account below.

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In the example above, Taco Bell uses a simple tweet from a customer to engage with them and build community organically. The brand also just likes to have fun:

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Just remember to be helpful and human. No one likes spammy links or self-serving rhetoric when they're asking a quick question online.

8. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO can help your website rank higher in search engines and bring in more traffic. Some on-page SEO elements include the page title, header, meta description, image alt-text, and the URL (plus more). Showing up in search engines will generate more traffic for your site.

Pro tip: To get started, check out our ultimate guide to on-page SEO.

9. Quality Backlinks

In order to drive traffic to your site, you need to rank high in search engines. In order to rank higher in search engines, you need to be an authority in your industry.

One way to do that, besides the topic/cluster model described above, is by acquiring quality backlinks. If websites with high authority link to your site, that gives you more credibility.

Irina Nica, senior product marketing manager at HubSpot says, "There are two main ways in which high-quality backlinks can help drive more traffic to a website: boosting ranking and driving referral traffic."

She continues, "Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for every major search engine out there. By constantly earning high-quality backlinks from relevant websites, you'll improve your rankings in SERP and, as a result, see a lift in your organic traffic."

Nica adds, "Backlinks can also drive a substantial amount of referral traffic. That‘s something to be expected if you get mentioned on a popular news website. You can also see referral traffic coming through if you’re mentioned (and linked to) in an article that's already ranking well for high search volume keywords and is getting a constant flow of traffic.”

Pro tip: Want to learn how to earn backlinks? We’ve got 10 creative ways.

10. Video Marketing

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If video marketing isn’t already part of your content strategy, you’re missing out on a huge potential audience. Statista reports that Google Sites, which owns YouTube, reaches 258 million U.S. viewers.

It’s predicted that by 2028, digital video advertising spending will increase to nearly $90 million, up from $59 million in 2024. And those numbers are just for mobile.

You can create videos for Instagram Stories or Reels, do live videos, start a YouTube channel, etc. Want to get started today? Learn everything you need to know in our ultimate guide to video marketing.

11. Content Repurposing

Need content to drive traffic to your site but struggling to come up with ideas? I get it. A great way to overcome this hurdle is to repurpose old content. Take a well-performing blog post and repurpose that into a video.

Or if you have a podcast that did really well, write up a blog post on that topic. Using content that has already performed well will continue to drive traffic to your site.

You can also repurpose written content by taking advantage of industry trends. If you have a handful of older content about AI, for instance, you could freshen them up with recent statistics and quotes, package the blog posts together, and promote it as an ultimate topic guide.

12. LinkedIn Creator

LinkedIn is actually more popular with millennials than other social networks. And with millennials now in their 30s and early 40s, there’s a good chance they form a significant part of your target market.

Unlike LinkedIn Influencers, anybody can become a LinkedIn creator. You can repurpose blog posts (or write new ones!), host live audio events, and even start on-platform newsletters.

LinkedIn has great resources for anybody looking to boost their reach, like its content best practices, which suggest that you post at least four times per week and treat each post as the start of a conversation.

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13. SEO Tools

To drive traffic to your website, it's important to be a student of SEO. Learning how to use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and SEMrush will help you develop a strategy to generate traffic to your website.

These tools will help you learn and analyze what‘s working on your site and what isn’t. Plus, these help you come up with ideas for content that has the potential to generate high traffic. Check out our roundup of the best SEO tools to monitor your website.

14. Historical Optimization

Historical optimization is the process we use at HubSpot to update old blog content and generate more traffic and leads. If you're anything like us, a majority of your monthly blog views and leads come from older posts.

Pamela Vaughan, a marketing fellow who works on web strategy at HubSpot — and the person who introduced us to the concept of historical optimization — has written about this extensively.

She says, “Historical optimization is a tactic best-suited for a blog that's been around for several years because you need to 1) be generating a significant amount of organic search traffic, 2) have built up a critical mass of blog subscribers and social media followers, and 3) have a sizable repository of old posts at your disposal.”

Vaughan adds, “Historical optimization should be a piece of your overall blogging strategy — not the whole strategy.”

Pro tip: Follow her step-by-step process for historical optimization.

15. Voice Search Optimization

Remember in “The Little Mermaid” when Ariel wanted to go where the people were? That same principle applies to digital marketing. In order to drive traffic to your website, it's important to show up where people are searching.

Voice search is an increasingly important area in which to rank, especially with the advancements in AI we’ve seen in just the last year or two. According to eMarketer, the number of U.S. users who use voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant will grow from 145.1 million in 2023 to 170.3 million in 2028.

Here are a few tips to get started:

• Research long-tail keywords: When people use voice search, they speak in full sentences rather than short phrases. To optimize for voice search, start researching longer-tail keywords.
• Write answer-focused content: The content you write should answer your audience's questions.
• Optimize for snippets: Smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home look for short, concise answers. Writing quick summaries in your posts makes it easier for search engines and smart speakers to find the answer they need.

16. Local SEO

If your company is a brick-and-mortar store, local SEO is an important factor to consider. In her comprehensive guide to local SEO, former HubSpotter Kelsey Smith wrote that search engines gather information for local search by “[relying] on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results."

For example, when someone types in “best soul food restaurant” on Google, the results are generated by the user's location. Tools like Google My Business and Moz Local help businesses manage their directory listings and citations so they show up in local searches.

Here’s a restaurant that shows up for that search in Chicago:

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To rank for local search:

• Ensure your name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent on your Google My Business and social media pages.
• Use a directory management tool to monitor directories like Yelp, Foursquare, Best of the Web, etc.
• Research and use location-based search terms on sites like Google Trends, which analyzes popular search terms across various regions.

17. QR Codes

Marketers love a good QR code. And now that smartphones can natively scan them, so do consumers.

QR codes can drive trackable traffic to your website, but you have to give the user a reason to scan them.

Think of it as creating a real-life CTA button. If you make it enticing and accessible enough, people will scan it, and you’ll get to assess the success of that QR code’s placement in real-time.

When you use a dynamic QR code generator, your QR code will remain the same and still be accessible even if your web address changes later.

18. A/B Testing

You know you're a marketer when your motto is “Test, test, and test again.”

A/B testing is a split test that helps you determine what version of a campaign performs best. These tests can give you key information about your audience so you can create tailored content and offers that drive traffic to your site. There are a lot of tools you can use to get started.

Pro tip: Check out our roundup of the best A/B testing tools.

19. Internal Linking

When a visitor comes to your blog, your goal is to keep them there.

That‘s why internal links — links to other pages on your site — are very important. When visitors continue to other pages of your website, they’re more likely to convert and become brand enthusiasts.

For example, you can create an internal linking structure using the pillar/cluster model described above. Pillar and cluster pages link back and forth, which boosts your site's credibility on search engines, while also increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

20. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the backend of your website to see how the pages are technically set up and organized.

Factors include elements like page speed, crawling, indexing, and more. Matthew Howells-Barby, HubSpot's former director of acquisition, has written about how updating our technical SEO gave HubSpot more than a 50% increase in organic traffic.

To get started with your technical SEO, use some of the tips from Howells-Barby's article, including:

• Fix broken links and redirects.
• Create an XML sitemap for your subdomains.
• Set up language meta tags.
• Add custom H1 and introductions to topic pages.

21. E-E-A-T

Google has long prioritized content it deems the most helpful to users. For many years that was summed up in the acronym E-A-T, or expertise, authority, and trust.

In 2022, it added an “E” for “experience,” meaning that content should be produced by people with firsthand, real-world experience with the topic.

“E-E-A-T is hands-down one of the most underrated content SEO practices,” says Amanda Sellers, the manager of EN blog strategy at HubSpot.

If you have an established blog or large content library, take the time to audit for these E-E-A-T best practices:

• It’s helpful content.
• Experts created it.
• It’s trustworthy.
• It’s regularly updated.

Simply adding a personal perspective and expert quotes to existing content can go a long way toward boosting your content in the SERPs.

Pro tip: Here’s how adding “experience” to a HubSpot blog post increased clicks by 724%.

22. Community Building

Building a community of brand enthusiasts is a great way to continuously drive traffic to your website. You can build a Facebook group, Instagram Live events, a LinkedIn Group, or Quora Space specifically for your followers and others in your industry where you create value, while also linking back to your site.

You can even do this from your own website — think about Apple’s support community, which I have used more than a few times to diagnose something on my iPhone or laptop. Lego’s online community lets users of all ages participate in activities and challenges and even submit their ideas to Lego designers.

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23. Content Offers

Content offers, sometimes referred to as lead magnets, are a way to use content to drive traffic to your site and generate leads. Content offers vary depending on what stage of the buyer's journey your customer is in, but can include webinars, guides, reports, trials, demos, checklists, and more.

Pro tip: Learn about different types of content offers and find the best one for you and your business.

24. Media Coverage and Public Relations

Earned media coverage is a great way to drive brand awareness for your company and traffic to your website. If your marketing and public relations teams work together, you can generate traffic to your site and create excellent word of mouth.

Ellie Flanagan, a former HubSpot senior corporate communications manager, says, "Although most outlets these days try to stay away from including backlinks in their stories (it‘s usually against their editorial guidelines), that doesn’t mean that a good story won't drive folks back to your site.

Media coverage provides great third-party validation for your company. Stories about new products or services, your company culture, or even industry thought leadership can all be great drivers for a reader who maybe hadn't heard of your company before and wants to learn more."

25. Social Share Buttons

Social share buttons are links that make it easy for your readers to share your content on social media. When your readers become promoters of your content, your traffic will increase. Here's a quick cheat sheet on creating social share buttons.

Once you've created your social share buttons, how do you get people to share your content? Here are a few tips to get started:

• Ask people to share on social media.
• Create strong content.
• Include quotable content.
• Add multimedia such as images, videos, infographics, etc.

26. CTR Optimization

Once your content is posted and you begin ranking on search engines, make sure people are clicking through to read your posts.

Your click-through rate (CTR) measures who clicked on your post and read it against the number of people who viewed the link to your post (e.g., the landing page, email, or advertisement) in total.

A great tool to measure your organic CTR is Google Search Console. To get more people to click through and drive traffic to your site, it's important to write compelling and apt meta descriptions and titles.

To write quality meta tags that are click-worthy, make sure your titles are short and snappy, and your description leaves visitors wanting more. This ties into on-page SEO, described above.

27. Academy and Knowledge Base Posts

One form of content that can drive traffic to your website is educational content. If you create courses, certifications, or educational posts that are helpful to your audience, you'll likely see an increase in traffic.

For example, HubSpot uses HubSpot Academy to generate content that is helpful to our audience. We provide videos, certification courses, and knowledge base articles to answer questions. See an example of a knowledge base article below.

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28. Social News Sites

Reddit is no longer a playground for internet trolls — it’s a hugely valuable resource for knowledge and information. I often use it while researching HubSpot articles to see what the hot topics are or what questions users are asking about a certain subject.

Reddit and similar sites, like Quora, are social news sites, and they can be great traffic-drivers. By nature, these platforms are similar to social media because they foster asynchronous connections between users.

The difference is that these types of sites engage people around a question or topic, and external content can be shared to help explain the users’ points of view.

Another way external sites benefit from increased traffic via social news sites is when they’re shared in popular channels. You can share your website’s content on these sites yourself if you’re just starting out, but do so carefully.

Just like on traditional social sites, too much self-promotion is frowned upon in the Reddit and Quora communities. You’ll fare best when you share your content in context of the topic and when it’s the best information to answer the user’s question.

1. Paid Advertising

You can drive traffic to your website quickly with paid advertising. With search engines, you can run pay-per-click or retargeting ads. With social media you can run display ads or sponsored posts.

Your strategy will most likely include a combination of different types of advertising like social media, display, and search ads.

The 2024 CMO Survey from Deloitte says that marketers are anticipating a 12.1% increase in social media spending in 2025.

Pro tip: Get started with our step-by-step guide on paid advertising.

2. Contests and Giveaways

A simple way to drive traffic to your website is through contests and giveaways. This can give you a quick boost, while also rewarding your followers. You can host giveaways on social media, through your email list, or both.

Perhaps start with something smaller than beverage company Liquid Death, which ran a giveaway in summer 2024 for … a jet. A real one. (Pilot not included.)

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Implementing a strategy like this can be simple. Just follow these six steps:

• Decide what platform on which to host your giveaway. (You can use multiple.)
• Choose a prize. (Free tickets, discount, etc … )
• Select the criteria. (Website comments, email sign up, etc … )
• Write the ad copy.
• Create the graphics.
• Post and promote the contest or giveaway.

3. Guest Posting

In that same vein, writing guest posts can generate traffic to your site. Guest posting shows you're active in your community, while also linking to your website (and I’ve got more on generating backlinks below).

To implement a guest posting strategy, you need to find a site that’s a good fit for your company, draft a blog post, and then write a pitch.

Caroline Forsey, a marketing manager on HubSpot’s content growth team, says, "I'm always particularly intrigued with a guest pitch if it shows me the writer has done their research ahead of time.”

“For instance, I‘d pay much closer attention to a pitch if it tells me how this piece could appeal to my readers. Additionally, I’m impressed when a writer can recognize gaps in our content and how their piece will fill those gaps, rather than competing with existing content."

As an example, here’s what HubSpot looks for in guest posts on the Marketing Blog.

4. Guest Podcasting

Similar to guest posting, being a guest on a popular podcast can raise brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

You may already have some favorite podcasts that would be a great fit; you can also use a “matchmaking” company specifically for podcast guests, like Interview Connections and PodMatch.

Just make sure you do your own research. Listen to a few episodes to get a sense of the tone and subject matter, research the host(s), read reviews, and see if the podcast has published numbers like subscribers or downloads.

5. Thought Leadership

According to Edelman’s and LinkedIn’s research, more than half of decision-makers and C-level executives spend an hour or more each week reading thought-leadership content.

If that’s your audience, it’s time to dedicate more of your editorial calendar to thought leadership. (And even if your target audience isn’t in the C-suite yet, sharing thought-leadership content can boost your brand’s credibility and visibility — and help you create genuinely useful content.)

When choosing a thought leader, don’t limit yourself to your own industry. Influential thought leaders often have transferable knowledge that can help your readers, regardless of their industry and experience.

And although “leader” suggests somebody well-established in their career, there are lots of younger professionals who are disrupting industries, trying out new tactics, and catching the attention of their peers. More than anything, look for a good storyteller — somebody you are excited to sit down and talk to.

Website Traffic Is Waiting For You

Driving traffic is a never-ending task, but it’s one that can yield long-term results.

There are so many paths your future customers can take to reach your website — all you have to do is find the one that works best for your business.

Try one of these methods in your next quarter’s demand generation strategy to see a significant traffic boost.

You want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), but where do you start? We were all SEO beginners once, so take heart: There’s lots to learn, but I’ve got plenty of expert advice and a step-by-step guide to get you started.

We’ll start with some basic SEO vocabulary, review a step-by-step SEO tutorial to help you get your SEO strategy off the ground, and get tips from HubSpot SEO pro Victor Pan and SEOFOMO newsletter founder (and one of the world’s best-known SEO experts) Aleyda Solís.

Table of Contents

• SEO Basics
• How to Learn SEO
• SEO Step-by-Step Tutorial

SEO Basics

Understanding the foundational SEO vocabulary is important. Let’s dive into a few key terms:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Tactics to optimize your website to provide the high-quality information searchers look for. Good SEO also helps you rank higher in search results for specific keywords so people can find your content.
• On-page SEO: Any website optimizations that improve search rankings, like the keywords used in your content or back-end elements like site structure.
• Off-page SEO: Any actions that improve your search engine rankings outside your website, like backlinks from other websites.
• Link building: Links to your website from other high-quality websites that build authority and credibility.
• SERPs: Search Engine Result Pages are the results page you see when you conduct a search on Google or another search engine.
• White-hat SEO: Optimization tactics that align with accepted and recognized best practices.
• Black-hat SEO: Optimization tactics that manipulate search engine algorithms to rank websites higher in SERPs. These tactics are often unethical.
• E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. It’s part of Google’s search quality rater guidelines and one of the factors Google uses to determine a page's relevance and authority.
• Keyword: Words or phrases users type into a search engine to find content related to their search. As an SEO, you want to include relevant keywords in your content that align with search intent so your site appears in related searches.
• Keyword research: The process of finding keywords people enter into search results related to your business to help you inform the words to use in your website pages and content.
• Organic/organic results: Any results in SERP that are unpaid and that appear because of a page’s relevance to the search query.
• Organic traffic: Organic traffic is traffic that comes from organic results.
• Rank/page ranking: Where your site falls in SERPs for a specific keyword.
• Ranking factor: A ranking factor is an element that impacts where your site may fall in search results, like your page authority.
• Search intent: Search intent is why a user conducts a search.

How to Learn SEO

Learning SEO is a big task, and because SEO best practices change over time, international SEO consultant Aleyda Solís “highly, highly recommends that you don’t go to a single source.” It’s why on her own site, LearningSEO.io, she’s compiled guides and information from many different resources.

Solís offers this pro tip: “See what works for you within your context,” because even if the information is accurate, “it might not be right for your circumstances.”

Here’s a few ways you can accomplish that:

1. Read and watch reliable resources.

There are a lot of educational resources out there to read and watch that will help you build your knowledge of SEO. Here are some of my recommendations.

• The HubSpot Marketing Blog (we cover a variety of topics for different skill levels)
• The HubSpot YouTube Channel
• Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• LearningSEO.io
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Land
• SEMrush

Google still has a little more than 90% of the search market worldwide, so add its Search Central Blog and Search Quality Rater Guidelines to your list.

AI-powered search engines are a fast-growing segment of the search landscape, so if you want to see how AI perceives your website and brand, take HubSpot’s AI Search Grader tool for a spin (it’s pretty cool).

2. Take free courses.

If you benefit from structured and guided learning, an SEO course is another option to build on your SEO skills. A bonus is that many courses offer certificates upon completion. These are some high-quality options:

• HubSpot Academy SEO Training Certification (free): Best for beginners
• Google Analytics Academy (free): Beginner and advanced learning paths
• MOZ Academy (paid): Courses for multiple levels
• Semrush Academy (free): Courses for multiple levels

3. Stay on top of the trends.

Especially with the advent of AI-powered search, SEO changes and evolves on a sometimes daily basis. Algorithms get updated, new trends surface, and consumer behaviors change.

For example, in December 2022, Google added an E for experience to the old E-A-T guidelines. Experience ensures that content is helpful, relevant, and created by someone with experience in the subject at hand.

(And it’s a key differentiator between computers and humans, as AI-generated content scrambles to get a robotic foot in the door.)

One of the most important factors in becoming an SEO expert is staying on top of the trends so you can pivot when major industry shifts happen. We cover changes in the SEO landscape on the HubSpot Blog, and Google also maintains a running list of major updates that can impact your SEO success.

4. Study your competitors.

Learning from your competitors is a great way to understand the keys to their success.

Pan suggests looking at websites that are doing well and seeing what other pages they link to, so that when you’re “thinking about creating content, it’s not just a single piece of content you’re creating, but the whole journey that a user might go through.” Your content should cover a natural progression of topics.

You can conduct a competitor analysis to uncover new keywords, where competitors get backlinks (also called inbound links) from, and other new opportunities to capitalize on.

Featured Resource: Our free Competitive Analysis Templates help you conduct a thorough analysis of competitors in your niche, and this step-by-step guide walks you through how to use the template for an SEO competitive analysis.

5. Learn by doing.

Once you feel confident, you can take a hands-on approach and enact some SEO strategies.

Solís says to adopt “a mindset of being proactive — always testing, always curious, always skeptical, and always thinking from a strategic perspective.”

If you already have a website, you can practice by doing a competitor analysis and updating your current strategy based on your findings. If you don’t have a website, consider building one, implementing your new SEO knowledge, and monitoring metrics.

One of the best things about SEO is that a wide variety of tools are available to help you along every step of the way.

6. Use SEO tools.

Considering the breadth and depth of the internet, it would be a nightmare to do some of the essential SEO functions by hand — this is where SEO tools come in to save the day. They’ve saved me significant time and energy and quickly brought me the results I’m looking for.

Here’s a list of tools I recommend:

• HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software offers SEO recommendations to improve your site, optimize page content, and measure ROI.
• AI Search Grader, another HubSpot tool, analyzes how visible your brand is to AI search engines.
• Our Website Grader scores your site based on factors like mobile friendliness and SEO optimization.
• Google’s Search Console can help you measure your site traffic and fix SEO performance issues.
• Google Analytics helps you view important metrics to understand your SEO efforts, like the measure of organic vs non-organic traffic.
• Ahrefs is a favorite of HubSpot bloggers. It helps you conduct keyword research and stats their important stats like search volume and CTR.
• Jasper is an AI writing assistant that can help write SEO-optimized blog posts with target keywords.

Once you’re more fluent in the vocabulary of SEO, it’s time to jump in and get hands-on. Since I’ve promised you the shortest SEO tutorial ever, I’ve broken it down into three very broad categories for beginners: content, technical, and sharing.

As you get more familiar and comfortable with SEO, you can build out strategies in each of these categories using the links I’ve provided below.

1. Content SEO: Write great content.

My number one tip for content SEO is simple, if not entirely straightforward: Write really good content.

There are caveats, of course. What Google deems “really good” has changed over the years, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly, so this advice still requires at least a passing interest in industry trends.

And no matter how great it is, if your content covers a topic that not many people are asking questions about, you’re not going to see a flood of traffic.

So I’ve got some tools and roadmaps to help you structure your SEO — but even as you incorporate these tips, writing great content should be your north star.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a cornerstone of good content SEO. It’s a great starting point for SEO beginners, so we’ll spend the most time here.

A dedicated tool like Ahrefs or SemRush can be useful for SEOs whether you’re a newbie or a pro, but you can also begin by simply listing words and phrases relevant to your business.

For instance, if you sell roasted coffee, you might opt for “roasted coffee,” “Colombian coffee,” and “local coffee roaster.”

List these keywords in a spreadsheet or document for you to keep track of.

Then, pick one word or phrase to use on one page of your site. In other words, you don’t want to target different keywords on one page. You want to target one keyword, as well as any keywords it’s semantically related to, so that you’re capturing user intent.

Continuing with the example from above, I might create a page for “local coffee roaster.” That would be my main keyword, but I can also target semantically related terms such as “local coffee,” “coffee roaster near me,” “coffee roaster [city name],” and “locally roasted coffee.”

This begins with keyword research, but Pan says not to stress out about it too much: Start by making a list of what the natural things people would search for. Put some of those keywords into Google and see what else people search for.

I asked Google, “is Jurassic Park real,” and here are some related common search terms, heaven help us:

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You’ll do better as a beginner to try to rank higher on keywords that have a lower search volume — trying to outrank well established sites on keywords with high difficulty is not going to earn you a lot of visitors. But if you’re an expert on a somewhat more niche topic, it’s your time to shine.

Once you’ve got some keywords in hand, here’s a few ways to use them to your advantage:

1. Use the keywords in the page title
2. Use them in your URL
3. Use them in your meta description
4. Use them in your H1
5. Use them in your page content — naturally. If you’re trying to force it, you may have chosen the wrong keywords for your content.

Consider this:

“We have seen some indie publications close because of overreliance on Google traffic. More than ever, this is a good reminder for SEOs to not necessarily rely only on Google. Try to diversify through all the channels and platforms that people are now using to search.” —Aleyda Solís

Search Intent

Why a user types a specific query into Google or another search engine is as important as the term itself.

For instance, if I search for “is Jurassic Park real” because I want a job training velociraptors, I’m expecting very different results from somebody using the same query to find out whether the movies were filmed at real-life nature parks that I could go visit.

Generally speaking, users want to learn something, to investigate a brand or product, to complete an action like buying a certain product, or to find a specific website.

Media Richness

Rich media includes audio, graphics, video, polls, or other interactive features. Think like a user: Do you want to read a 4,000-word block of text, or do you want animations or graphics to help break that up?

By structuring this data in the backend, you can optimize your content to make it more appealing in the SERPs.

Internal Linking

As you build out your content library, it’s important to link to your own content, which can help boost traffic and, over time, build your page authority.

The HubSpot blogs have thousands (and thousands) of posts that predate me, so to find relevant blog content to link to, I type “site:blog.hubspot.com” into Google, followed by the term or phrase I’m looking for.

From there, I can decide what to link to based on recency and relevancy. (And thank goodness for this, because my brain is too full of old song lyrics to remember anything useful.)

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Historical Optimization

If you’re doing SEO for a property that has a large content library, chances are good that some of that content is outdated. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless — far from it.

At a previous job, I reorganized and rewrote event recaps that were no longer serving their original purpose. Because each event centered around a specific topic or theme, it was easy enough to update the titles, headings, and images. I also updated statistics, the content itself, and the publish date.

It didn’t happen overnight, but those pages crept back up in Google’s rankings once they became relevant to our audience again.

Another way to optimize older content is to add more examples and make sure any existing examples are still correct. Double-check links and anything else that may have changed, like step-by-step instructions.

2. Technical SEO: Improve the technical elements of your website.

Even the best content on the internet won’t get any readers if Google can’t find it.

I once worked on a website relaunch that began with an audit of our URL structure. We had to create a logical way of structuring our URLs before we could think about things like redesigning graphics.

Technical SEO can seem complicated if you don’t have a lot of technical experience. Don’t try to do everything at once — the goal here is to set a strong technical foundation so that Google and other search engines can easily find and crawl your website so that it shows up in search results.

Pro tip: Choose a good CMS — like, ahem, HubSpot — that will take care of the more technical aspects so you don’t have to.

Go deeper into technical SEO with our technical SEO guide, which begins with the fundamentals you’ll need to run an audit. It also takes you through crawlability, indexability, renderability, rankability, and clickability.

3. Sharing and Backlinking: Make sure that users can find your website.

Because your content is great, people want to share it. Congratulations! Now let’s talk about how to build those backlinks.

Pan says to ask yourself, “Why do people want to share what you created?”

He identifies three simple answers to that question. “One, you’re super local, so it’s very relevant. You might even be the only person talking about it.”

“Two, you could have data or a perspective that only your site can share, because of access that you have,” like original research or other proprietary data.

And lastly, “your content triggers an emotional response.”

One simple thing I do for HubSpot articles is provide quote cards to the subject matter experts I’ve talked to. It’s an easy way to encourage link sharing beyond your own network, and it doesn’t take much time.

It’s also important to understand the different types of backlinks — for instance, you might be able to write a guest blog on another high-quality website and link back to your own.

We’ve got a complete guide on backlinking when you’re ready to give it a shot.

This SEO Step-by-Step Tutorial is Just the Beginning

Your learning doesn’t have to stop here. With the SEO 101 vocabulary I mentioned above and the step-by-step tutorial, you can easily start creating an effective search engine optimization strategy.

Our starter pack, linked below, will help you ramp up your SEO plans and boost the likelihood of your website ranking on the first page of SERPs.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Add a gritty, textured feel to your designs with our collection of dust brushes and effects for Photoshop.

Whether you’re aiming to create a vintage look, enhance your artwork with subtle imperfections, or add a layer of realism to your designs, dust textures and effects can make all the difference. These elements bring depth, character, and a raw, weathered quality that elevates everything from photo edits to poster designs.

In this post, we bring you some of the best dust brushes and textures for Photoshop, perfect for creating everything from cinematic photo effects to distressed typography. Have a look.

Dust Photoshop Actions & Effects

Dust Explosion Photoshop Action

This is a dust explosion Photoshop action for designers and photographers needing a fresh and appealing approach to their creations. It can enhance various projects, including CD covers, posters, flyers, and advertising campaigns. Compatible with Photoshop CS3 and newer versions, the action lets you create a non-destructive effect.

Sand Dust Powder Explosion Photoshop Action

This is a high-quality Photoshop action that adds a unique sand dust animation effect to your images. Developed with great care and precision, it’s compatible with Photoshop CC+ and is most effective in its English version.

Dust Storm Animation Photoshop Action

This is a high-quality Photoshop dust storm action that can transform your images instantly. Easy to use, it adds an animated dust storm effect and works only with the English version of Photoshop CC+. A handy video tutorial is included with the download for set-up and customization pointers.

Color Dust Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action can instantly add a vibrant burst of color dust to your images. It works best with photos of figures and models. In addition to creating eye-catching effects, the action also includes 10 color presets for quick customization. Final compositions are fully layered for further editing.

Dust Powder Explosion Effect PSD

This is a Photoshop template designed to add drama to your images with a dynamic, explosive dust powder effect. It can convert photos into caricature effects with an energetic, oily, painting oil, glamour oil, portrait oil, or cartoon feel. Best used with photos of 1000px to 3000px resolution, the filters work well with a range of images, including fashion, lifestyle, and product shots.

Dust and Scratch Photo Effect PSD

Another Photoshop template that facilitates high-quality dust and scratches visual effects with just a few clicks. With a 4500 x 3000 resolution and 300 DPI, it ensures sharp, well-organized layers for easy editing. This tool involves a simple process of a double click on the smart object, editing, and saving.

Stardust Glitter Dust Transparent Overlay

This pack offers 20 high-resolution celestial dust overlays compatible with Photoshop. Perfect for enhancing outdoor photography, studio photoshoots, and social media images, these overlays come in both PNG and JPG files.

30 Vintage Film Grain Dust Photo Overlays

This is a professional overlay collection for adding a dreamy, vintage effect to your photos. With 30 high-quality overlays offered, simply place these on your photo and tweak the blending mode. It’s compatible with mobile and desktop platforms, including Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Snapseed, and Picsart, and more.

Dust Photoshop Brushes

15 Real Dust Photoshop Brushes

Explore the artistic potential offered by this collection of unique dust Photoshop brushes. Of high quality and 5000px, these brushes provide realistic dust and hair textures, enhancing any digital art or design project. Conveniently provided in ABR format, the collection is skillfully crafted and sure to enrich your Photoshop toolkit.

Dust Particles Brushes for Photoshop

A creative set of Photoshop brushes featuring 8 distinctive dust particle brushes for adding a touch of magic to your digital works. This carefully crafted tool comes with an ABR file and comprehensive instructions. It works best when used with the “Screen” or “Color Dodge” blend mode.

45 Ash Dust Photoshop Stamp Brushes

Check out this set of 45 ash dust photoshop brushes, compatible with Photoshop CS6 – CC. The high-resolution texture brushes, with over 3000 pixels size, elevate your digital projects with their versatility. Great for photo overlays, digital manipulation, adding special effects in games, or enhancing your artwork, these brushes can transform your creations, injecting a unique aesthetic quality into them.

60 Grunge Dust Photoshop Stamp Brushes

Looking for a unique finishing touch for your digital project? Then this grunge dust brushes collection is perfect for you. It’s compatible with all Photoshop versions from CS2 to CC. With 60 high-resolution brushes up to 2500 pixels, you can add intriguing texture to your photos, create eye-catching visual effects for games or artwork, or simply add some grungy charm to your designs.

Dust Explosion Brushes for Photoshop

This collection of Photoshop brushes can help you design splendid dust and powder explosion effects with ease. This high-resolution set includes eight distinct brush styles, with pixel dimensions ranging from 3805 – 4968 px. The brushes are user-friendly and compatible with numerous CS6 to CC 2023+ Photoshop versions.

Stardust Brushes for Photoshop

Stardust brushes for Photoshop is a brush pack designed to add sparkly celestial dust effects to your work. This pack features 20 high-resolution (4096 x 4096 px) brushes that are simple to use. The brushes are perfect for various types of creative digital design projects.

90 Fractal Dust Stamp Brushes

Fractal dust brushes is an expansive brush collection of intricate fractal shapes and textures specifically crafted for Photoshop CS6 – CC. Housing a robust eruption of 90 high-resolution brushes, this universal pack allows compatibility with any application that opens .ABR files. Its distinctive designs can add an instant flair to web constructs, art pieces, presentation design, and various print essentials like cards, covers, and posters.

Flour Dust Brushes for Photoshop

This is a unique brush pack that breathes life into your designs with incredible powder, explosion, and dispersion effects. This set includes eight high-quality, high-resolution brushes, all simple and user-friendly. Compatible with multiple Photoshop versions (CS6 and all CC versions).

Dust Textures & Backgrounds

10 Dust Texture Overlays

Add a touch of nostalgia with this dust texture overlays pack, which offers ten unique vintage dust textures in high resolution (6000 x 4500 px, 600 dpi). Compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and any graphics program that can read JPG files, this asset is a fantastic tool for breathing life into your creative projects with a vintage touch.

Light Bokeh Dust Textures

This is a set of 20 distinct model overlays designed to add an artistic touch to your visuals. Each model is available in a 6000x4000px size with 300 DPI, packaged in a JPG format. Ideal for any creative project, these textures, full of fine detail and depth, are sure to elevate your imagery.

Vintage Dust Texture Pack

Explore the charm of bygone eras with this vintage dust texture pack. This creative asset brings authenticity to your designs with high-resolution texture images featuring subtle dust particles and delicate scratches—hallmarks of classic photos and memorabilia. Easily integrated into a range of design projects, it’s perfect for photo overlays, digital artworks, or evocative backgrounds. The pack includes 10 textures in both JPG and PNG format.

10 Dust & Scratches Textures

A versatile collection of high-resolution JPG files with dust textures, perfect for enhancing your design projects. Ideal for use as overlays, backgrounds, masks, and more, these 4000x4000px files can be adapted for any creative work. Compatible with Photoshop or any program capable of reading JPG files, these textures offer endless possibilities for bringing your ideas to life.

Colorful Dust Explosion Backgrounds

A collection of high-quality, dynamic backgrounds featuring colorful dust explosions. With a variety of 10 colors available in a 3000×2000 pixel JPG format, these backgrounds offer a vibrant explosion of dust reminiscent of India’s Holi Festival. Suitable for use in numerous settings, ranging from yoga studios to social media platforms, these textures can inject life into a dull design or enhance a presentation.

10 Dust & Grunge Textures

This pack offers a collection of high-resolution dirty wall textures featuring dust, grains, speckles, and more. Ideal for digital artworks, these textures can be used as backgrounds for graphics, texts, business cards, websites, and social media banners among others. Available in both JPG and PNG formats, they are compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC or higher versions.

Free Dust Photoshop Brushes & Effects

Free Dust Photoshop Text Effect

This is a text effect template you can download for free to craft cool titles for your design projects. It features a stylish dust dispersion-style effect. The text is easily customizable as well.

Free Dust Dispersion Photoshop Effect

This PSD template is also free to download and it comes with a creative dispersion effect that you can instantly apply to your photos. The template features smart object layers for easy editing as well.

Free 68 Dust Brushes for Photoshop

This is a big collection of dust brushes for Photoshop. You can download it for free to use in your personal projects. The brushes come in both Photoshop and Affinity Photo formats.

Free Sand Dust Photoshop Brushes

Another collection of dust-themed Photoshop brushes. This pack includes 15 brushes that feature sand dust-style brush designs. They are perfect for adding grain and texture to your designs.

Free Powder Dust Photoshop Brushes

This free Photoshop brush pack also includes 15 different high-quality brushes in 2500px size. The brushes feature powder dust-style brush designs with a realistic look and feel.

April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (which has 2M downloads). 

She helps businesses streamline their messaging, and loves teaching business leaders to leverage the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they're trying to say. 

Keep reading to learn her three tips when it comes to storytelling, selling what you love, and making the customer the hero. 

1. Lead with what you love.

If this sounds a little too similar to the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to marketing.

Don’t "do what brings you the most money"... Just do something for the joy of it. Plain and simple. 

"You need to be selling the products that bring you the most joy. Why are you pushing something you hate doing? Don't do that," Hawkins tells me. 

"I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who are in a rut because they've backed themselves into selling something they don't actually like selling," she says. 

That doesn’t mean you need to stop offering those products entirely, especially if they’re keeping the lights on. 

But when you care about what you’re selling, Hawkins says, your customers can feel it. Lean into the stories or values that matter most to you, and you'll find yourself connecting more deeply with your audience.

Now how do I make a career out of reading rom-coms and drinking frozen margs? 

2. Your customer is the hero. Not you. 

Hawkins sees too many marketers position their brand as the heroes, and she says it's one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.

"Everybody wakes up the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you're trying to draw in… The story needs to be about them."

In other words, you’re not Batman — you’re Alfred.

Take a recent example: Hawkins was working with a jewelry brand that creates products in Malawi and pays their workers 3-5X the minimum wage. Naturally, they wanted to shout that from the rooftops. Who wouldn't?

But Hawkins stepped in and pointed out that the brand isn't supposed to be the hero. The customer is. 

"We rewrote the campaign to ask, 'How can these pieces help people celebrate a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?" 

Suddenly, the jewelry wasn’t just jewelry; it became a badge of a customer's big (and small) life moments.

Have you ever landed on a website and read the first few sentences and thought, Wow, is this person in my head? That's the end-game: For your customers to feel like you get them. 

"When we can position our products to align with what our customers are feeling, it creates that 'ding, ding, ding' moment — 'That's me! This is for me!'" Hawkins says. "That's what we're looking for." 

3. Marketing is just storytelling. 

April Sunshine Hawkins is, as it turns out, exactly what you'd expect — bright, warm, and exceptionally joyful. 

She also loves a good story, which is why she works for a company (StoryBrand) that helps businesses sharpen their messaging through a provided framework. 

"It's just nice to have a framework to go to, so when you're like, 'Oh no, there's a blinking cursor again. What am I supposed to say?' You have a framework to work off of," she tells me. 

Here's the nugget of wisdom: As marketers, we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. If marketing is really just storytelling, then it's vital to treat your messaging the same way you'd write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable challenge, and a triumphant ending. 

Greetings, I'm having an issue, I want to set my form to display at the very top right hand side corner of a screen, I've achieved this in vb.net using this code

Location = New Point(Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea.Width - Width, 0)

Does anyone know how I can do this in VC++?