Happy Friday!

Welcome to TWID - the only design newsletter on the internet written (in a Wendy’s parking lot) by me.

Those of you that care even a little 🤏 bit, might be asking why did I not publish any new issues over the last couple of weeks. Good question, mind your business. Mercury was in gatorade, & I’m pretty sure November isn’t even a real month, so nothing of value was lost.

We’re back now though, and I’ll do my best to make it up to you (but I probably won’t).

Thanks for being here, let’s get into the sauce 🥫

WK48

@reddit gets a makeover

A few days ago, Reddit revealed their refreshed brand identity, and while I’ll never forgive them for killing Apollo, the new direction get my upvote.

I don’t have to tell you that Reddit has been around forever (for better or for worse) – so it makes sense that they’ve accumulated tons of design debt over the years.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the new identity (& the international orange 🍊), but design twitter is, of course, divided on this.

I’m with Lara on this one. Pentagram absolutely knocked it out of the park, and the case study is definitely worth reading.

There’s lots to love about the new identity, but my personal favorite has gotta be the skeuomorphic Snoo (snoomorphic, if you will …. 🥁).

Flat design is dead 🪦

Speaking of skeuomorphism, we have a time of death on flat design (again).

Like pretty much everything else, design trends are cyclical. If you’ve been online recently, you probably noticed the beginning of a shift from flat interfaces to slightly more tactile ones.

I doubt we’ll see hyper realistic knobs and leather patinas again, but I’m all for the added depth. But, not everyone feels the same way.

Jokes on you Mantas, I already spend 5 hours finding good gradients 🤨

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@linear style deemed “unconstitutional”

I think it’s safe to say that a good chunk of design twitter would agree that Linear created a beautiful landing page pattern beloved by many. Too many… probably.

The “Linear style” of landing page has become somewhat ubiquitous in SaaS. Some might even say that this horse has been beaten so hard that even a really good vet would struggle to keep it alive.

Listen, I understand that inspiration and iteration is a huge aspect of design, but I’m honestly tired of seeing so many clones. It feels like web design (at least in tech) has almost converged on a single style that we can’t get away from anymore.

I’m a huge fan of Linear’s site, but imho - it feels cheapened by the number of blatant clones out there.

I don’t want to read into Karri’s tweet too hard, but I hope we get to see a new landing page from Linear (that we can all copy) in the near future 👀

@figma wrapped

This one was fun (mainly because it’s my tweet – thank yew).

Every year Spotify does a really fun recap of everything you listened to. And every year all of your instagram friends post these recaps as stories… and every year you don’t really care about it.

But what if we had these wrap-ups for other apps? Obviously this isn’t a unique idea, but I’d love to see one for Figma so I can have a better answer to “Aleks why are you crying?

Ouch.

@fonsmans brings gifts

It’s hard to believe that December is here already… Fortunately we have a pretty sweet design advent calendar to distract us from the seasonal depression.

Like last year, Fons & Framer have partnered to bring 24 design deals to the community. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and I'm eager to see what we’re gunna get 👀

This isn’t a product placement, but if you wanna check it out - hit up design.gifts for the countdown to Christmas 🎄

Design Dopamine 💊

Despite the inherent toxic nature of twitter, my feed has been blessing me with so much design inspiration that I’m starting to feel insecure about my own ability to create anything even remotely good.

Anyways, that’s a conversation I should probably have with my therapist... In the meantime, here’s something that you might enjoy looking at.

Sip to recharge

Saw this on my feed this yesterday and it tickled my brain ✨ just so ✨ → insanely awesome work by the imaginative @laurentdelrey

Laurent is a huge creative inspiration, and if you’re not familiar with their work, I strongly encourage you scroll through this banger of a feed.

That’s a wrap for WK48

Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this issue (or hated it), please let me know in the comments (or tweet at me).

Also, be sure to check out Play - the sponsor of this week’s issue for a big forehead kiss.

If you have an idea for how I can improve TWID or want to suggest something for next week’s issue, be sure to tag @twidfyi on twitter

Love you all, have a great weekend

- @aleksliving