Month: October 2024

In my previous article, I explained how to fine-tune OpenAI GPT-4o model for natural language processing tasks.

In OpenAI DevDay, held on October 1, 2024, OpenAI announced that users can now fine-tune OpenAI vision and multimodal models such as GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini. The best part is that fine-tuning vision models are free until October 31.

In this article, you will see an example of how to vision fine-tune the GPT-4o model on your custom visual question-answering dataset. So, let's begin without ado.

You will need to install the OpenAI Python library.

!pip install openai

In this article, we will be using the following Python libraries. Run the following script to import them into your Python application.

from openai import OpenAI
import pandas as pd
import json
import os
from sklearn.utils import shuffle
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score

We will fine-tune the GPT-4o model on a visual question-answering dataset you can download from Kaggle.

The following script imports the CSV file containing the question, the image ID, and the corresponding answer to the question.

#Data download link
#https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/bhavikardeshna/visual-question-answering-computer-vision-nlp

dataset = pd.read_csv(r"D:\Datasets\dataset\data_train.csv")
dataset.head()

Output:

Here is the image with the id image100. You can see cups on the shelves.

For vision fine-tuning, you must pass image URLs to the OpenAI API. Hence, we will upload our images to a cloud service (Github for this article). The dataset consists of over 1500 images. However, I only uploaded the first 495 images to GitHub. You can upload more images if you want.

We will fine-tune the GPT-4o model on 300 images and will test the model on 100 images.

The following script extracts the digit part from the image_id column of the dataset and filters the images with IDs less than 495, as I uploaded only the first 495 images to GitHub.

dataset['image_num'] = dataset['image_id'].str.extract('(\d+)').astype(int)
filtered_data = dataset[dataset['image_num'] < 495]

filtered_data.head()

Output:

You must convert your dataset into the following JSON format for vision fine-tuning OpenAI models.

{
  "messages": [
    { "role": "system", "content": "You are an assistant that identifies uncommon cheeses." },
    { "role": "user", "content": "What is this cheese?" },
    { "role": "user", "content": [
        {
          "type": "image_url",
          "image_url": {
            "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Danbo_Cheese.jpg"
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    { "role": "assistant", "content": "Danbo" }
  ]
}

We will convert our CSV file into the above JSON format. First, we will divide the dataset into training and test files with 300 and 100 records, respectively.

Next, we will iterate through all the rows in the training set and set the system role, which instructs the model on how to respond to model queries.

Subsequently, we will set the first user role content with the value from the question column and the second with the image URL. Note that we concatenate the base GitHub URL with the image ID to generate the full URL.

Finally, we set the assistant role content with the value from the answer column.

We will perform the above tasks for all the training set records and create our training JSON file.

We will use the test data later for model evaluation.

# Base URL for the images
base_url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/usmanmalik57/daniweb-articles/refs/heads/main/vqa_images/"

# Shuffle the dataset
shuffled_dataset = shuffle(filtered_data)

# Split the dataset: first 300 for training, next 100 for testing
training_data = shuffled_dataset[:300]
test_data = shuffled_dataset[300:400]

# Create the JSONL structure for training data and save each entry on a single line
training_output_file = r'D:\Datasets\dataset\training_data.jsonl'

with open(training_output_file, 'w') as f:
    for index, row in training_data.iterrows():
        # Update image URL
        image_url = f"{base_url}image{row['image_num']}.png"
        entry = {
            "messages": [
                {"role": "system", "content": "You are an assistant that answers questions related to images."},
                {"role": "user", "content": row['question']},
                {"role": "user", "content": [
                    {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": image_url}}
                ]},
                {"role": "assistant", "content": row['answer']}
            ]
        }
        # Write each entry as a single line in the JSONL file
        f.write(json.dumps(entry) + '\n')

print(f"Training JSONL file saved as {training_output_file}")

Output:

Training JSONL file saved as D:\Datasets\dataset\training_data.jsonl

We are now ready to fine-tune the GPT-4o model.

The vision fine-tuning process remains the same as text fine-tuning as I have explained in a previous article. The only difference lies in the training file which contains image URLs for vision fine-tuning.

Let's quickly walk through the fine-tuning process.

First, create a client object for the OpenAI class and pass it your OpenAI API key.

Next, you need to upload the training file to the OpenAI server. You can do so using the files.create() method of the OpenAI client object. This method returns the training file data, including the training file ID.

client = OpenAI(
    # This is the default and can be omitted
    api_key = os.environ.get('OPENAI_API_KEY'),
)

training_file = client.files.create(
  file=open(training_output_file, "rb"),
  purpose="fine-tune"
)

To start fine-tuning, call the fine_tuning.jobs.create() method and pass it the ID of the training file you just uploaded to the OpenAI server.

fine_tuning_job_gpt4o = client.fine_tuning.jobs.create(
  training_file=training_file.id,
  model="gpt-4o-2024-08-06"
)

The training process will start in the background. Using the fine_tuning.jobs.list_events() method, you can see various training events.

# List up to 10 events from a fine-tuning job
print(client.fine_tuning.jobs.list_events(fine_tuning_job_id = fine_tuning_job_gpt4o.id,
                                    limit=10))

Once the fine-tuning is completed, you will receive an email containing the model ID of your fine-tuned model. Alternatively, you can retrieve the model ID using your fine-tuning job ID, as the following script shows.

ft_model_id = client.fine_tuning.jobs.retrieve(fine_tuning_job_gpt4o.id).fine_tuned_model

Let's now evaluate the model on the test data.

We will add the full_image_path column to the test data, which contains image URLs from the GitHub repository of images.

test_data['full_image_path'] = test_data['image_num'].apply(lambda x: f"{base_url}image{x}.png")
test_data.head(10)

Output:

Next, we will define the get_single_prediction() function, which accepts as parameters the query (question), the full image path, the OpenAI model ID, and the system role and returns the answer to the user's query.

def get_single_prediction(query, image_path, model_id, system_role):

    try:
        # Make the API call to get the response from the model
        response = client.chat.completions.create(
          model= model_id,
          temperature = 0,
          messages=[
                {"role": "system", "content": system_role},
                {"role": "user", "content": [
                    {"type": "text", "text": query},
                    {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": image_path}
                    }
                ]}
          ]
        )


        # Extract the prediction from the API response
        prediction = response.choices[0].message.content.strip().lower()
        return prediction
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error making prediction: {e}")
        return None  # In case of failure

Let's first make a prediction using the default GPT-4o model.

image_path = test_data["full_image_path"].iloc[1]
query = test_data["question"].iloc[1]
system_role = "You are an assistant that answers questions related to images."
model_id = "gpt-4o-2024-08-06"
response = get_single_prediction(query, image_path, model_id, system_role)

print(f"Image path: {image_path}")
print(f"User Query: {query}")
print(f"Model Response: {response}")

Output:

The above output shows that the default GPT-4o model correctly predicts the answer. However, the output is not a single word as it was in our dataset.

Let's now make a prediction for the same image using our fine-tuned model.

image_path = test_data["full_image_path"].iloc[1]
query = test_data["question"].iloc[1]
system_role = "You are an assistant that answers questions related to images."
model_id = ft_model_id
response = get_single_prediction(query, image_path, model_id, system_role)

print(f"Image path: {image_path}")
print(f"User Query: {query}")
print(f"Model Response: {response}")

Output:

The model response contains the single word printer, which shows that the fine-tuned model has learned the patterns from the dataset.

We will define the make_predictions() function, which predicts all the records in the test data. The function accepts the dataset, the model ID, and the system role as parameter values.

The function iterates through each record in the dataset and uses the get_single_prediction() function to predict the response. The function then appends the response to the predicted_answers[] list. Finally, the actual_answers list containing the actual answers is compared with the predicted_answers list to calculate the model's accuracy.

def make_predictions(dataframe, model_id, system_role):
    actual_answers = []
    predicted_answers = []

    # Initialize a counter to track record numbers
    record_number = 1

    # Iterate through each row in the dataframe
    for _, row in dataframe.iterrows():
        image_path = row['full_image_path']
        query = row['question']
        actual_answer = row['answer'].lower()

        # Get the predicted answer from the API
        predicted_answer = get_single_prediction(query, image_path, model_id, system_role)

        if predicted_answer:
            # Append actual and predicted answers for accuracy calculation
            actual_answers.append(actual_answer)
            predicted_answers.append(predicted_answer)
        else:
            print(f"Skipping record #{record_number} due to prediction error.")
            record_number += 1
            continue

        # Print the status indicating the record number processed and the response
        print(f"Record #{record_number} processed. Response: {predicted_answer}")

        # Increment the record number for the next iteration
        record_number += 1

    # Calculate accuracy using sklearn's accuracy_score
    accuracy = accuracy_score(actual_answers, predicted_answers) * 100
    print(f"Accuracy: {accuracy:.2f}%")

    return accuracy, predicted_answers

Let's first calculate the default model accuracy on the test data. Notice that the following system prompt contains more details than the fine-tuning prompt since we want the default model to generate predictions similar to those in our dataset's answers column.

model_id = "gpt-4o-2024-08-06"
system_role = """
You are an assistant that answers questions related to images.
Return your response in a single word without period at the end.
For digits you should return digit number and not word. "
"""
gpt_4o_predictions = make_predictions(test_data, model_id, system_role)

Output:

Accuracy: 29.00%

The above output shows that the model achieves 29% accuracy for precisely predicting the answers to questions related to images in our dataset.

Let's now make predictions using our fine-tuned model. Here we will use the same system prompt we used for fine-tuning the model.

model_id = ft_model_id
system_role = "You are an assistant that answers questions related to images."
gpt_4o_fine_tuned_predictions = make_predictions(test_data, model_id, system_role)

Output:

Accuracy: 36.00%

The above output shows that the model achieves 36% accuracy, which is much better than the default model.

Note: These results may seem poor, with very low accuracy values. However, here, the accuracy is calculated based on exact string matching, which is difficult to get right. Furthermore, the accuracy for this dataset is in the range of 15-25% on Kaggle with the default neural networks, which shows that our fine-tuned model performed quite well.
You can further increase the model performance by fine-tuning on the complete dataset.

Let's plot actual answers, the default and fine-tuned mo,del predictions side by side to further understand the.

comparis furtheron_df = pd.DataFrame({
    'Actual Answers': test_data['answer'],
    'Default GPT-4o': gpt_4o_predictions[1],
    'Fine-tuned GPT-4o': gpt_4o_fine_tuned_predictions[1]
})

# Display the new DataFrame
comparison_df.head(20)

Output:

The above output shows that the default and fine-tuned models sometimes predicted the correct answer but in different words. For example, our fine-tuned model predicted chalkboard for blackboard, which are semantically similar.

To overcome this problem, we will ask the GPT-4o model to return True if two predictions are semantically similar. This will give us a better picture of the model's performance.

The following script defines the compare_answer function that takes the actual answer and the prediction as inputs and returns True if the two are semantically similar.

def compare_answer(answer, prediction):

    content = f"""
    Compare the actual answer and prediction and check if the actual answer and prediction have the same meaning.
    They dont have to be the exact match but the meaning must be similarl.
    Actual answer {answer}.
    Prediction: {prediction}.
    Return True if the have same meaning, else return False. Do not return anything else.

    """
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model= "gpt-4o-2024-08-06",
        temperature=0,
        max_tokens=10,
        messages=[
            {"role": "user", "content": content}
        ]
    )

    response = response.choices[0].message.content.strip().lower() == 'true'
    print(f"{answer} -> {prediction} -> {response}")
    return response

Next, we will define the count_matching_answers() function which takes two lists as inputs and returns the count of semantically similar values in corresponding items of the two lists.

def count_matching_answers(answers, predictions):
    count = 0
    # Iterate through both lists together using zip
    for answer, prediction in zip(answers, predictions):
        # Call the compare_answer function and increment count if True
        if compare_answer(answer, prediction):
            count += 1
    return count

Let's first check the count of semantically similar outputs for the default GPT-4o model.

matching_count = count_matching_answers(test_data['answer'], gpt_4o_predictions[1])
print(f"Number of matching answers: {matching_count}")

Output:

Number of matching answers: 36

The model shows an accuracy of 36%, better than the 29% achieved previously.

Similarly, the script below calculates the accuracy for the fine-tuned GPT-4o model.

matching_count = count_matching_answers(test_data['answer'], gpt_4o_fine_tuned_predictions[1])
print(f"Number of matching answers: {matching_count}")

Output:

Number of matching answers: 40

The accuracy now reaches 40% for our fine-tuned model.

OpenAI recently released a much-awaited feature: vision fine-tuning of the OpenAI models. In this article, you saw how to fine-tune the OpenAI GPT-4o model for visual question-answering. Try fine-tuning the GPT-4o model on your custom dataset and see if you get improved results. The fine-tuning is free until October 31, 2024, so trying wouldn't cost a dime anyway ;)

Hi DW, I'm having an issue here, I have 3 forms namely start.h,home,Form1 in their order of execution, the problem starts when I include Form 1 to any of these forms then I get LNK2005 'unsigned short MyprojectName::m_hservice' (?m_hservice@MyprojectName@@$$Q3GA) Already defined in home.obj

NB these forms are completely different, the first one which is start.h only let the user to click a button then show home which home is a password form when a user keys the correct credentials then it should now show Form1 but when I #include 'Form1.h' to home.hI get this error but hoeme.h doesn't have m_hservice at all being defined by myself so I don't know where it's taking it from because I never did that and it's not there as well.

Anyone who knows how I can solve this problem?

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

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Comic Photo Effect PSD Template

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Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

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Cartoonize Photo Effect for Photoshop

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Retro Cartoon Photoshop Action

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Cartoon Artistic Photoshop Action

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Soft Oil Cartoon Photoshop Action

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Cartoonish – Modern Cartoon Photoshop Action

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Cartoon Painting Photoshop Actions

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Realistic Photoshop Cartoon Effect

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Netta – Free Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

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Free Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

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Photo To Cartoon Photoshop Actions

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Free Cartoon Art Photoshop Action

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Free Comic Poster Photoshop Actions

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Smudge Painting Photoshop Action

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Photo to Vector Cartoon Photoshop Action

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Kartoon Painting Photoshop Action

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Caricature – Fun Cartoon Photoshop Action

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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.

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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

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Cartoon Oil Action – 10 Effects

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Cartoon Photoshop Photo Effect

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Paint Cartoon Photoshop Action

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Smudge Cartoon Photoshop Action

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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.

Accessibility is key in modern web design. A site that doesn’t consider how its user experience may differ for various audiences — especially those with disabilities — will fail to engage and serve everyone equally. One of the best ways to prevent this is to approach your site from a bottom-up perspective.

Understanding Bottom-Up Design

Conventional, top-down design approaches start with the big picture before breaking these goals and concepts into smaller details. Bottom-up philosophies, by contrast, consider the minute details first, eventually achieving the broader goal piece by piece.

This alternative way of thinking is important for accessibility in general because it reflects how neurodivergent people commonly think. While non-autistic people tend to think from a top-down perspective, those with autism often employ a bottom-up way of thinking.

Of course, there is considerable variation, and researchers have identified at least three specialist thinking types within the autism spectrum:

• Visual thinkers who think in images;
• Pattern thinkers who think of concepts in terms of patterns and relationships;
• Verbal thinkers who think only in word detail.

Still, research shows that people with autism and ADHD show a bias toward bottom-up thinking rather than the top-down approach you often see in neurotypical users. Consequently, a top-down strategy means you may miss details your audience may notice, and your site may not feel easily usable for all users.

As a real-world example, consider the task of writing an essay. Many students are instructed to start an essay assignment by thinking about the main point they want to convey and then create an outline with points that support the main argument. This is top-down thinking — starting with the big picture of the topic and then gradually breaking down the topic into points and then later into words that articulate these points.

In contrast, someone who uses a bottom-up thinking approach might start an essay with no outline but rather just by freely jotting down every idea that comes to mind as it comes to mind — perhaps starting with one particular idea or example that the writer finds interesting and wants to explore further and branching off from there. Then, once all the ideas have been written out, the writer goes back to group related ideas together and arrange them into a logical outline. This writer starts with the small details of the essay and then works these details into the big picture of the final form.

In web design, in particular, a bottom-up approach means starting with the specifics of the user experience instead of the desired effect. You may determine a readable layout for a single blog post, then ask how that page relates to others and slowly build on these decisions until you have several well-organized website categories.

You may even get more granular. Say you start your site design by placing a menu at the bottom of a mobile site to make it easier to tap with one hand, improving ease of use. Then, you build a drop-down menu around that choice — placing the most popular or needed options at the bottom instead of the top for easy tapping. From there, you may have to rethink larger-scale layouts to work around those interactive elements being lower on the screen, slowly addressing larger categories until you have a finished site design.

In either case, the idea of bottom-up design is to begin with the most specific problems someone might have. You then address them in sequence instead of determining the big picture first.

Benefits Of A Bottom-Up Approach For Accessible Design

While neither bottom-up nor top-down approaches dominate the industry, some web engineers prefer the bottom-up approach due to the various accessibility benefits this process provides. This strategy has several accessibility benefits.

Putting User Needs First

The biggest benefit of bottom-up methods is that they prioritize the user’s needs.

Top-down approaches seem organized, but they often result in a site that reflects the designer’s choices and beliefs more than it serves your audience.

Consider some of the complaints that social media users have made over the years related to usability and accessibility for the everyday user. For example, many users complain that their Facebook feed will randomly refresh as they scroll for the sake of providing users with the most up-to-date content. However, the feature makes it virtually impossible to get back to a post a user viewed that they didn’t think to save. Likewise, TikTok’s watch history feature has come and gone over the years and still today is difficult for many users to find without viewing an outside tutorial on the subject.

This is a common problem: 95.9% of the largest one million homepages have Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) errors. While a bottom-up alternative doesn’t mean you won’t make any mistakes, it may make them less likely, as bottom-up thinking often improves your awareness of new stimuli so you can catch things you’d otherwise overlook. It’s easier to meet user’s needs when you build your entire site around their experience instead of looking at UX as an afterthought.

Consider this example from Berkshire Hathaway, a multi-billion-dollar holding company. The overall design philosophy is understandable: It’s simple and direct, choosing to focus on information instead of fancy aesthetics that may not suit the company image. However, you could argue it loses itself in this big picture.

While it is simple, the lack of menus or color contrast and the small font make it harder to read and a little overwhelming. This confusion can counteract any accessibility benefits of its simplicity.

Alternatively, even a simple website redesign could include intuitive menus, additional contrast, and accessible font for easy navigation across the site.

The homepage for U.K. charity Scope offers a better example of web design centered around users’ needs. Concise, clear menus line the top of the page to aid quicker, easier navigation. The color scheme is simple enough to avoid confusion but provides enough contrast to make everything easy to read — something the sans-serif font further helps.

Ensuring Accessibility From The Start

A top-down method also makes catering to a diverse audience difficult because you may need to shoehorn features into an existing design.

For example, say, a local government agency creates a website focused on providing information and services to a general audience of residents. The site originally featured high-resolution images, bright colors, and interactive charts.

However, they realize the images are not accessible to people navigating the site with screen readers, while multiple layers of submenus are difficult for keyboard-only users. Further, the bright colors make it hard for visually impaired users to read the site’s information.

The agency, realizing these accessibility concerns, adds captions to each image. However, the captions disrupt the originally intended visual aesthetics and user flow. Further, adjusting the bright colors would involve completely rethinking the site’s entire color palette. If these considerations had been made before the site was built, the site build could have specifically accommodated these elements while still creating an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly result.

Alternatively, a site initially built with high contrast, a calm color scheme, clear typography, simple menus, and reduced imagery would make this site much more accessible to a wide user base from the get-go.

As a real-world example, consider the Awwwards website. There are plenty of menus to condense information and ease navigation without overloading the screen — a solid accessibility choice. However, there does not seem to be consistent thought in these menus’ placement or organization.

There are far too many menus; some are at the top while others are at the bottom, and a scrolling top bar adds further distractions. It seems like Awwwards may have added additional menus as an afterthought to improve navigation. This leads to inconsistencies and crowding because they did not begin with this thought.

In contrast,

Bottom-up alternatives address usability issues from the beginning, which results in a more functional, accessible website.

Redesigning a system to address a usability issue it didn’t originally make room for is challenging. It can lead to errors like broken links and other unintended consequences that may hinder access for other visitors. Some sites have even claimed to lose 90% of their traffic after a redesign. While bottom-up approaches won’t eliminate those possibilities, they make them less likely by centering everything around usage from the start.

The website for the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, showcases a more cohesive approach to ensuring accessibility. Like Awwwards, it uses menus to aid navigation and organization, but there seems to be more forethought into these features. All menus are at the top, and there are fewer of them, resulting in less clutter and a faster way to find what you’re looking for. The overall design complements this by keeping things simple and neat so that the menus stand out.

Increasing Awareness

Similarly, bottom-up design ensures you don’t miss as many accessibility concerns. When you start at the top, before determining what details fit within it, you may not consider all the factors that influence it. Beginning with the specifics instead makes it easier to spot and address problems you would’ve missed otherwise.

This awareness is particularly important for serving a diverse population. An estimated 16% of the global population — 1.6 billion people — have a significant disability. That means there’s a huge range of varying needs to account for, but most people lack firsthand experience living with these conditions. Consequently, it’s easy to miss things impacting others’ UX. You can overcome that knowledge gap by asking how everyone can use your site first.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down: Which Is Best for You?

As these benefits show, a bottom-up design philosophy can be helpful when building an accessible site. Still, top-down methods can be advantageous at times, too. Which is best depends on your situation.

Top-down approaches are a good way to ensure a consistent brand image, as you start with the overall idea and base future decisions on this concept. It also makes it easier to create a design hierarchy to facilitate decision-making within your team. When anyone has a question, they can turn to whoever is above them or refer to the broader goals. Such organization can also mean faster design processes.

Bottom-up methods, by contrast, are better when accessibility for a diverse audience is your main concern. It may be harder to keep everyone on the same overall design philosophy page, but it usually produces a more functional website. You can catch and solve problems early and pay great attention to detail. However, this can mean longer design cycles, which can incur extra costs.

It may come down to what your team is most comfortable with. People think and work differently, with some preferring a top-down approach while others find bottom-up more natural. Combining the two — starting with a top-down model before tackling updates from a bottom-up perspective — can be beneficial, too.

Strategies For Implementing A Bottom-Up Design Model

Should you decide a bottom-up design method is best for your goals, here are some ways you can embrace this philosophy.

Talk To Your Existing User Base

One of the most important factors in bottom-up web design is to center everything around your users. As a result, your existing user base — whether from a separate part of your business or another site you run — is the perfect place to start.

Survey customers and web visitors about their experience on your sites and others. Ask what pain points they have and what features they’d appreciate. Any commonalities between responses deserve attention. You can also turn to WCAG standards for inspiration on accessible functionality, but first-hand user feedback should form the core of your mission.

Look To Past Projects For Accessibility Gaps

Past sites and business projects can also reveal what specifics you should start with. Look for any accessibility gaps by combing through old customer feedback and update histories and using these sites yourself to find issues. Take note of any barriers or usability concerns to address in your next website.

Remember to document everything you find as you go. Up to 90% of organizations’ data is unstructured, making it difficult to analyze later. Reversing that trend by organizing your findings and recording your accessible design process will streamline future accessibility optimization efforts.

Divide Tasks But Communicate Often

Keep in mind that a bottom-up strategy can be time-consuming. One of the reasons why top-down alternatives are popular is because they’re efficient. You can overcome this gap by splitting tasks between smaller teams. However, these groups must communicate frequently to ensure separate design considerations work as a cohesive whole.

A DevOps approach is helpful here. DevOps has helped 49% of its adopters achieve a faster time to market, and 61% report higher-quality deliverables. It also includes space for both detailed work and team-wide meetings to keep everyone on track. Such benefits ensure you can remain productive in a bottom-up strategy.

Accessible Websites Need A Bottom-Up Design Approach

You can’t overstate the importance of accessible website design. By the same token, bottom-up philosophies are crucial in modern site-building. A detail-oriented approach makes it easier to serve a more diverse audience along several fronts. Making the most of this opportunity will both extend your reach to new niches and make the web a more equitable place.

The Web Accessibility Initiative’s WCAG standards are a good place to start. While these guidelines don’t necessarily describe how to apply a bottom-up approach, they do outline critical user needs and accessibility concerns your design should consider. The site also offers a free and comprehensive Digital Accessibility Foundations course for designers and developers.

Familiarizing yourself with these standards and best practices will make it easier to understand your audience before you begin designing your site. You can then build a more accessible platform from the ground up.

Additionally, the following are some valuable related reads that can act as inspiration in accessibility-centered and user-centric design.

• Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind by Regine M. Gilbert
• Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility: A Comprehensive Guide to Access Needs by Ashley Firth
• Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

By employing bottom-up thinking as well as resources like these in your design approach, you can create websites that not only meet current accessibility standards but actively encourage site use among users of all backgrounds and abilities.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

• “Getting To The Bottom Of Minimum WCAG-Conformant Interactive Element Size,” Eric Bailey
• “How To Make A Strong Case For Accessibility,” Vitaly Friedman
• “A Guide To Accessible Form Validation,” Sandrina Pereira
• “Creating A High-Contrast Design System With CSS Custom Properties,” Brecht De Ruyte

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.

Hi all,
My team and I is making an open-source library for running AI models on the phone. We are planning to create a very simple SDK which will allow you to download a model and use it on your phone. We plan to release an initial version in a month. Our library is based on llama.cpp and whisper.cpp.

We are looking for app developers who want to build mobile apps with this functionality in order to understand their needs better. Have in mind that models will be running slower on the phone than they can run on a laptop. We want to understand what uses this library could have.
If anyone is planning to build a mobile AI app, please let me know.

Easy, fast, and unified. We’ve talked to a lot of customers about what they need from their tools to grow, and it always comes back to these three words. So why does go-to-market feel so hard, slow, and disconnected? Two words: legacy CRM.

The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) has existed for decades, and there are more tools than ever for understanding and engaging with customers.

The problem is, legacy CRMs have never fully delivered on the promise of being the source of truth about your customer. They are too hard to use and adopt and, even in the base case scenario, they struggle to capture engagement data about your customer.

We now have many great tools to help fill in the gaps, but they’re disconnected, often creating more work and a worse experience for your team.

AI has the promise to change the way we work and engage with customers, but runs the risk of becoming a disconnected burden. The only way to grow is with a unified customer platform, with AI that has access to your customer data and powers your engagement tools. Everything is easy to use with fast time to value, so you can truly grow.

But I want to talk about one of those attributes in particular: easy.

Today, the average company switches between 15 separate apps just to manage their customer interactions. Let’s contrast this with the fact that 82% of customers expect immediate problem resolution from brands, while 78% want personalized interactions. When it’s hard to even manage the tools you’re using to interact with customers, it’s even harder to meet their expectations.

This is where AI comes in. It’s not just the topic du jour, we’re already seeing real value from customers when their AI is easy to use. Early adopters of our AI features are not just accelerating their productivity, but their growth.

Our customer Sandler used our AI tools for creating content and personalizing outreach. They cut their sales cycles by half — from 90 days to between 30 to 45 days. Another customer in the manufacturing space, Aerotech, is now winning one in every four deals because they use our AI to qualify leads and guide seller actions.

We want to make it easy for everyone to grow with AI, which is why we recently launched Breeze, our AI that powers the entire customer platform. We’ve made it easier than ever to use AI everywhere you work, and to get value fast.

4 Ways AI Can Help Teams' Go-to-Market Strategies

Most GTM teams have spent 2024 trying to fit AI into their strategies. When AI is a breeze, it’s easy to implement and teams can see value fast. Here are my four tips for using AI in your GTM:

1. Start with Data Enrichment

Who it helps: Marketing, Sales, RevOps, Customer Service, Customer Success

How It Improves the Strategy

Your AI is only as good as the data that powers it. The problem is, data about your customers is all over the place. It’s scattered across the internet like puzzle pieces, and unless you can put it all together, you aren’t getting the full picture.

While the data in your CRM that captures your interactions with customers is great, just this data alone is no longer enough. You need to know what signals your customers are giving you based on their behavior on the internet, and you need to have a unified view of that behavior in your CRM.

Now, with Breeze Intelligence, you can get the most unified view of your customer yet. Breeze Intelligence includes a data set of over 200 million company profiles and buyer intent signals, and unifies that with data you have in your Smart CRM.

This complete customer picture just became the context that feeds Breeze, and your AI tools are now working with the most holistic and up-to-date information on your customers.

2. Analyze Customer Signals

Who it helps: Marketing, Sales

How It Improves the Strategy

As a sales rep, you want to spend your time talking to prospects who are most likely to close a deal. AI can analyze buyer intent signals like viewing a pricing page. Automated lead scoring helps sales reps understand who to focus on.

Lead scoring isn’t just for sales. AI can take dozens of data points about your lead’s behavior — what I like to call their digital body language — to assign them an engagement score and a fit score. With these signals, you can send segmented marketing content to nudge prospects to buy, re-engage, or buy again.

3. Create and Remix Content at Scale

Who it helps: Marketing

How It Improves the Strategy

Marketers tell us that finding ideas for new content is the number one challenge they face. Not anymore. AI tools can brainstorm, write, and illustrate relevant content. They can even create videos.

Embedding AI into your content strategy is more than just a volume play. It helps you reach different audiences.

Ask five customers for their favorite marketing channel, and you’ll get five different answers. AI can remix and reformat content for every channel where your customers spend time. You can turn a single video into a full AI campaign with clips, ads, audio for podcasts, and social posts.

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The marketing strategies that got you where you are won’t get you where you’re going. Producing more of the same posts or videos isn’t the end goal. AI-assisted content means you can adapt and react quickly to whatever comes next.

4. Put Agents to Work

Who it helps: The entire Go-To-Market and your Customers

How It Improves the Strategy

Nowhere is the promise of AI as great as Agents. Simply put, Agents are software that uses AI and tools to accomplish goals with multiple steps. They work for your business. You can think of it like automation 2.0, but instead of configuring a workflow, you simply ask the agent to do a task for you and it completes it from start to finish.

We just launched four new agents in Breeze: Content Agent, Social Media Agent, Prospecting Agent, and Customer Agent. Businesses can use these Agents to transform their growth. For example:

• Content Agent generates blogs, landing pages, podcasts, and case studies.
• Social Agent analyzes social performance, company details, audience, industry, and best practices to create social media content for multiple channels.
• Prospecting Agent engages leads by researching them, personalizing communication, and automating the outreach process.
• Customer Agent is the 24/7 service team member that responds directly to customer inquiries.

With these team members at the ready to help you automate the mundane work, you will free up time for the critical human touch in the most strategic areas of your GTM — and your growth will skyrocket.

How HubSpot Can Help

So, let’s return to our three essential growth ingredients: easy, fast, and unified. That's where HubSpot comes in.

Instead of disconnected tools, we give you a total customer platform. Every feature is easy to use and works together, including over 1,700 apps in our ecosystem. We deliver value fast, so you can see results in days, not months.

Finally, we obsess over unifying the customer platform. Everything works in harmony together, and you always get a complete customer picture.

Whether you’re a marketer, a sales rep, or a customer success leader, remember this: You hold the key to growth in your business.

The only way to grow is with a platform that’s easy, fast, and unified. Period. We’re as obsessed with your growth as you are, and that’s why we promise to keep prioritizing these three things.

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.

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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.

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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.

Black Friday trends: Understand the best practices and favorite tools for your WooCommerce store's Black Friday marketing strategy.

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.

About Björn

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.

On Working With Color

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.

On Color Perception

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.

On Creating Oklab

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.

On Oklab Adoption

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.

On Okhsl

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?

On Color Compromises

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.

And, Finally…

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!

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