Seamless patterns are versatile and can add depth and richness to your designs, making them suitable for both web and print projects. A well-designed seamless pattern can improve the look of a business card or product packaging, giving it an attractive and professional appearance.

With seamless patterns, you have the freedom to unleash your creativity and make designs that are highly unique and memorable. And the best part? There are countless free, high-resolution, seamless, and tileable pattern sets available that you can download and use in your projects right away.

With so many options to choose from, finding the perfect pattern set for your project can be time-consuming. That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and collected the best free seamless pattern sets from around the web.

From geometric to floral, damask to abstract, and circle to stripe patterns, you’ll find everything you need to bring your designs to life. And these patterns come in various formats, such as Photoshop PAT, Illustrator AI & EPS, JPG, and PNG, making them easy to use in different design tools.

Font Readability

There are a lot of fancy fonts out there that may be tempting. But if they sacrifice readability, it’s almost never worth it. People are far more likely to be accepting of a message that is stated clearly in both words and typeface. This is especially important if you are asking people to do something.

One study shows that, in a test group, people were more likely to make a decision when the message was easier to read. Following that philosophy, creating call-to-actions using highly readable fonts should encourage the most engagement.

Of course, this article suggests that in some cases you might want something a little less accessible, for example, if you want people to spend more at a restaurant.

For many people, if something is difficult to read, the perception is that it is more challenging to do, yet in the food service world, that may mean they won’t mind paying higher prices.

Masculine or Feminine Fonts?

Like many things, even fonts can be classified as masculine and feminine. Feminine fonts can be described as fine, serifed, sleek, and elegant, and masculine fonts can be characterized as being blocky and bold.

When you analyze various collections of masculine or feminine fonts, you find that these generalizations largely hold true.

This insight can be used to help effectively target specific genders in marketing campaigns. Websites or advertisements that are meant to appeal to the male or female demographic can strategically utilize fonts to support that goal.

More elegant curving fonts may serve products intended for women, while items for men could benefit from bolder, more angular typefaces.

For the most part, corporate typography tends to lean toward the more masculine fonts, as they seem to indicate a greater sense of organization and professionalism. And not surprisingly, feminine fonts are still typically the most useful for feeling pathos.

I think there’s a joke about stereotypes in there somewhere, but at the risk of inciting a riot, I’m just gonna leave it alone.

Serif or Sans-Serif?

The oldest debate in the world of fonts has been whether to serif or not to serif. The difference is in the tiny little brush strokes at the end of a letter.

There are plenty theoretical arguments in favor of both styles, but ultimately, there doesn’t deem to be any scientific evidence that endorses the use of one over the other.

Although, it does appear that most users prefer sans serif fonts for websites and email but prefer serif fonts in business documents. That means that Times New Roman might still be the standard for resumes, but Arial is better as the default for your inbox.

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There’s still a lot we don’t really know about the typeface. Can the font you use make your work seem more authoritative? Perhaps there is no significant difference between the serif Georgia (my all-time favorite font) and sans serif Tahoma.

But when you go a little broader and compare the gravitas of Helvetica with, say, the perpetual butt of font jokes, Comic Sans, there’s a major disparity.

Choose Your Font

Font choice can be used to make as much of an impression as the words that comprise the copy. Websites or businesses that are creative or design-based may benefit from more artistic fonts. While institutions that require trust and credibility may want to look for more structured typefaces.

Some situations naturally lend themselves to using a specific genre of typography. In the end, though, deciding on the best font for your purpose and medium largely comes down to a matter of preference and pre-disposition.

As long as your choices are readable, purposeful, and appropriate for the circumstances, most decisions won’t be wrong.

Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just need to use the existing model to propel you forward.

The post The Subliminal Connotations of Our Font Choices appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

While the number of available variable font packages is growing, the selection isn’t huge just yet. And then there’s the whole issue regarding lack of support in older browsers. But those limitations aren’t going to last much longer. Thus, it’s a good idea to study up now.

We’ve collected some fantastic variable font examples to help demonstrate what is possible. Just note that to actually see these examples in their full glory, you’ll need to use the latest version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, or Safari.

Running Free

Glyphs are kind of a big deal these days, with the likes of Font Awesome and Dashicons being in such wide use. In this example, a variable font with a single glyph of an emoji horse was used to create a nifty animation. Through the use of CSS font-variation-settings, the author was able to ensure an ultra-smooth effect.

See the Pen Muybridge galloping horse by Laurence Penney

Animate Your (Font) Weight

One of the big advantages of having the entirety of a font’s styles in one file is that you can transition between them in a snap. In this case, we see a highly-detailed and mesmerizing animation between different weights of the IBM Plex Sans font.

See the Pen Variable font animation by Michelle Barker

Interactive Art

Here’s an example of a variable font being used as part of a larger piece of online art. Instead of animating a single word or headline, this snippet mimics a poster – albeit an animated one. The transition from hollow characters to filled (and back again) is truly slick. The sequencing is spot on. Years ago, this might have taken hours of tedious work in Flash to accomplish.

See the Pen Variable Font Experiment No.2 by Mark Frömberg

Style Slider

Perhaps no snippet in this collection better demonstrates what a variable font is than this one. Use the sliders at the bottom of the screen to add custom weight, stretch and sizing to the Venn VF font. Notice the ease with which the settings changes are displayed.

See the Pen Variable font demo by Frida Nyvall

Have It Your Way

At first glance, this example looks like a nicely formatted poem. But there’s more than just a basic title and text here. Click on the “Jigger the First Stanza” and “Rejigger Title” buttons to the right, and you’ll be in for a treat. Font styles change fluidly and instantaneously. And it’s a great demonstration of how individual characters can be targeted as well.

See the Pen Goblin Market with Variable Fonts by Chris Coyier

The Full Effect

When you combine variable fonts, CSS3 and JavaScript, great things can happen. And you don’t need to look further than this example to see why. This attractive text has a delightful stretchy hover effect, which is cool on its own. But change the included settings panel, and you’ll get an even more in-depth sense of what is possible.

See the Pen Variable Fonts | Compressa by Juan Fuentes

So Slinky

Let’s close things out with something unique. This snippet uses the WHOA variable font to create an incredible 3D effect that shifts the view of this outline text based on your cursor position. Again, this is something that, a few years ago, would require some serious animation software to achieve. Now, the different perspectives are built right into the font. From there, it’s a matter of using some clever coding to put it in motion.

See the Pen Slinky Text – WHOA Variable font demo by Jérôme Sprenger Sèvegrand

A New Era in Typography

With variable fonts, web typography has become an even greater resource for creating a compelling UX. Thanks to their ability to instantly change styles and target specific characters through data splitting, a whole new level of special effects are possible.

As the examples above demonstrate, there is plenty of room for creativity. And what’s really exciting is that the fonts themselves have so many goodies baked right in.

That being said, we’re really just beginning to scratch the surface of what these fonts can do. It will be amazing to see what the future brings.

The post 7 Fantastic Examples of Variable Fonts in Action appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

One of the great things about using an icon font is its scalability. They can be resized without losing quality, making them perfect for responsive web design. With CSS media queries, they can be scaled up for desktop or down for mobile. Icon fonts are also fully customizable, allowing you to adjust the size and edit colors to fit the aesthetic of a UI design.

Adding icon fonts to any web design or mobile app project is easy using CSS. You load the font file using @font-face, and using standard CSS rules, you can set the font-size, color, padding, margin, or other properties.

Although very popular, icon fonts do also have their pitfalls. Ian Feather has discussed his reasons for switching from an icon font to SVG, and CSS Tricks have outlined some considerations when choosing between icon fonts or SVG icons. Both favor SVG.

As a counter-argument, Pictonic has said that icon fonts are 10% faster than SVG. These are just things you should consider before using icon fonts.

To ensure that your icons always load correctly and have reliable fallbacks for browsers that don’t support @fontface, you should take a look at the guidelines set out by the Filament Group, here.