Popular Design News of the Week: September 24, 2018 – September 30, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

16 CSS Border Animations

 

DebugBear – Front-end Code Monitoring

 

Scheme Color – The Quick, Simple and Easiest Way to Browse Color Schemes

 

Framer X is Awesome, but it’s not Ready

 

Stop Using Select Menus for Known User Input

 

Reviewed: New Name and Logo for Dunkin’

 

New Ghostery Browser for Android

 

Preparing for Better Typography in Augmented Reality

 

A Lightbulb is not an Idea!

 

7 Bad Graphic Design Habits to Lose

 

Design Thinking is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo

 

Stress Testing your Designs so that They are Flexible

 

Torch: The Design Platform for Augmented Reality

 

Manyverse – A Social Network Off the Grid

 

Infographic: How to Prioritize Projects so You Meet Every Deadline

 

How to Use Instagram Stories for Marketing (And Why You Should)

 

Linux Developers Threaten to Pull “kill Switch”

 

Pride and Prejudice and Personas

 

10 Inspiring Cities for Designers

 

8 Foolproof Font Combinations for Non-Designers

 

The Future of Design

 

Re-Approaching Color

 

Vivaldi Browser V2.0 Released

 

ColorBox by Lyft Design Reset

 

Case Study: Louis Ansa Portfolio 2018

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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The Freelancer’s Guide to Paying Tax

When you take the leap into freelancing and self-employment, it’s really exciting at the start. Eventually, the honeymoon phase wears off and you comfortably adjust to life as a freelancer, which, in all honesty, is a really great deal.

You get to run your design business the way you want. Work with clients you like. Make as much money as your schedule allows for. Live and work from anywhere in the world (and move as frequently as you want!) This business is yours to shape and mold into whatever you want it to be and to support whatever sort of lifestyle you want to lead outside of it.

That said, while the structure of the business may fully be under your control, the income you make from it is not.

Every country holds its residents accountable for paying taxes. When you have an employer, they typically handle this for you. However, since you’re self-employed, the responsibility lies solely with you—which is no easy feat. In the following post, I’d like to first take a look at freelancer’s biggest concerns when it comes to taxation. Then, we can dig into best practices for managing and paying your taxes on time.

Biggest Concerns About Wages & Taxes

In a survey provided by QuickBooks Self-Employed, I discovered some frightening statistics regarding freelancers and taxation. The survey was conducted earlier this year and focused on the experiences of self-employed individuals in the U.S. Since tax code differs from country to country, I’m going to focus on the points most relevant to freelancers everywhere:

Top Tax-Related Challenges for Freelancers

• 30%: preparing tax forms correctly;
• 30%: keeping track of tax-related information;
• 23%: estimating tax payments;
• 20%: saving money to pay taxes;
• 17%: knowing what to deduct to reduce overall tax burden.

Most Common Reasons Freelancers Miss Tax Payments

• 42%: incorrectly estimated tax payments due and came up short at the deadline;
• 30%: didn’t make enough to pay off taxes in full;
• 16%: were unaware they had to pay taxes;
• 16%: forgot to pay their taxes;
• 10%: were unaware of how to pay for their taxes.

Reasons Why 36% of Freelancers Don’t Pay Their Taxes

• 9%: there was no reason for the failure to pay, they just didn’t do it;
• 17%: didn’t make enough to owe anything;
• 10%: business losses exceeded profits and so they didn’t owe taxes.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on here. Many freelancers worry about preparing tax payments correctly (which is a valid concern) while others simply don’t know they have to make them. Then there are the 32% of freelancers who choose not to report all of their income to the government.

Rather than be confused or misinformed about what taxes mean for your business, or improperly handle your taxes and put your business in danger as a result, let’s talk best practices.

Best Practices for Managing Your Taxes Throughout the Year

If you want to enjoy the rewards of running your own business and making money from said business, then you need to reduce any concerns or confusion you have around taxes. You can do that by becoming more mindful of these best practices when managing taxes:

1. Figure Out Who You Owe Taxes To

This will be different based on where you live as well as where your home country is (if different). Here are some things to consider:

• In some countries, you have to pay a federal (national) tax as well as a state (regional) tax;
• Goods and services taxes (also referred to as GST and VAT) come into play in some countries;
• Different business structures are taxed at different rates as well;
• If you work abroad, be sure to brush up on the rules for taxation. You can usually find these under a “taxes for expats” search. (This is especially important so that you don’t get doubly taxed by your home country and country of residence.)

2. Watch Your Income and Expenses

One of the reasons freelancers struggled to make tax payments on time, according to the QuickBooks survey, was because they hadn’t calculated estimates correctly. Now, that’s likely to happen anyway, but it usually works in favor of the freelancer… unless the error is because you made more money than expected.

To avoid this problem, pay closer attention to your income. Download reports every month that provide data on how much money you made (and by “made”, I mean actually collected from clients) compared to how much went out the door in expenses. By staying on top of your changing revenue stream, you can more accurately estimate how much you owe in taxes. You can also adjust your rates if you find that you’re not making enough to stay up on payments.

3. Mark Your Calendar

In some countries, taxes are owed to the government quarterly. In others, you only have to pay once a year. In my opinion, neither option is ideal as it can lead to a more lax attitude about saving up enough money to make payments on time.

Instead, I would suggest you mark your calendar once a month. Even if you don’t want to go through the hassle of submitting payments to the government every 30 days, you can at least do your calculations and put that money aside in a dedicated account. The dedicated account is crucial as it keeps that taxed income safe from other expenses and ensures you don’t have to face any late payment penalties later on.

4. Use Accounting Software to Automate

Hiring an accountant can be quite expensive, even if you only retain their services during tax season. Thankfully, accounting software can automate a lot of the work an accountant would otherwise do for you. It will also spare you the trouble of having to manually keep track of your finances on a regular basis.

Of course, you’ll still have to file your own taxes, but accounting software will:

• Pull in data about business-related transactions (income and expenses);
• Categorize those transactions for easier filing of taxes;
• Estimate tax payments based on your earnings/losses for the month/quarter/year;
• Alert you to upcoming tax deadlines.

Some accounting software may even integrate with your tax software, so the uploading of the year’s financial information can be streamlined as well.

Wrapping Up

It doesn’t matter if you’re working full-time or part-time as a web designer. If you’ve earned revenue for your business, and it exceeds the minimum taxable amount defined by your government, then you have to pay taxes. The matter of taxes can get complicated, though, if you wait too long to handle them, so have a plan in place that allows you to prepare for tax payments all year long.

 

Featured image via Depositphotos.

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Mailchimp Unveils Quirky Rebrand

If any single tech company embodies the spirit of web-savvy, then it is Mailchimp. Since its beginnings as a side-project in the early-2000s the marketing service has walked the line between creative experiences, and simple usability. Mailchimp is one of those companies that saunters onto the court, lobs a shot over its shoulder, and gets nothing but net.

Now, with their latest rebrand courtesy of brand agency Collins (as ever, alongside an in-house team) Mailchimp has got almost everything right. Almost.

Chimp lovers will be relieved to discover that Freddie has survived the rebrand, and remains as the logomark, albeit redrawn in a simpler form. He’s lost his “M”, a bit of fur’s gone, the ear’s simpler. Essentially Freddie is more usable, more translatable, more international.

The most visually arresting element of the rebrand is the new brand color. Yellow is tough to design with, but it’s by far the most satisfying color when it’s got right, which in this case it is. It is used to tie the whole identity together in a way that wouldn’t work with anything less bold.

The most interesting—not necessarily in a good way—decision has been to abandon Jessica Hische’s much-loved redrawing of the original Mailchimp script. It’s been replaced with an oddly proportioned, retro-feel sans that lacks rhythm, and the syllables of which are crowbarred apart by an obnoxious “c”; strange given that the brand is keen to deemphasise that letter—it’s “Mailchimp” now, not “MailChimp”. There’s a half-baked explanation offered about the script’s incompatibility with the Freddie logomark. Initially I hated the new logotype; a hour later, I loved it; now I’m back to hating it again. The logotype seems destined to divide opinion, but at least it isn’t a geometric sans-serif.

Coupled with this logotype Mailchimp has adopted Cooper Light as its corporate typeface, giving everything a distinctly 1970s feel.

It’s not really any surprise that Mailchimp have labored to retain their quirky edge, it is after all what made them stand out (they have “chimp” in their name!) but what might come as a surprise is just how quirky Mailchimp have gone, particularly with their illustrations, which lie somewhere between Dr Seuss, and Quentin Blake, by way of Tove Jansson. The black and white illustrations with a strategic touch of brand yellow are sourced from illustrators around the world. (Although individual illustrations haven’t been attributed, several appear to be in the distinctive hand of Amber Vittoria.)

Mailchimp have also introduced a brand photography style that is easy to overlook amidst the joyful illustration. The photo examples themselves are well-taken, but their inclusion feels superfluous.

The rebrand is mostly excellent. The quirkiness is courageous and fitting. The color choice is striking. The type is debatable. The photography is questionable. But the whole is nothing if not fun. The biggest success is that despite growth—over 1 billion emails per day, 14,000 new users daily, $525m annual revenue—Mailchimp hasn’t lost sight of what made it a tool we wanted to use in the first place.

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Grid Vs Flexbox: Which Should You Choose?

My New SEO Tool: Ubersuggest 2.0

I promised you months back that I was going to release a newer, better version of Ubersuggest for free.

And can you guess what?

I just released it!

Before I go into the features of the new Ubersuggest and how it works, I just want to tell you that not all of the features have been released yet.

For the first release, I focused on keyword research.

So let’s dive into the new Ubersuggest.

Keyword Overview

The keyword research is broken down into 3 main sections: overview, keyword ideas, and SERP analysis.

The overview looks like this:

The first section is a graph that breaks down the search volume over time.

You can see the search volume for any keyword in any country and language over the course of the last 12 months.

The graph will show you if the keyword is gaining or declining in popularity or if it has seasonality.

In addition to that, it breaks down the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, and the paid difficulty.

The difficulty scores are from 1 to 100. The higher the number the harder it will be to compete for that keyword. And the lower the number the easier it is to compete.

Keyword Ideas

The second part of the keyword research is the ideas section.

This is the section that is most similar to the prior Ubersuggest but with a few more features.

You’ll see a list of keyword ideas.

The keywords are pulled using both Google Suggest and AdWords recommendations. This way you can get a comprehensive list of potential keywords you may want to rank for.

And similar to the overview section, you’ll also be able to see volume data for each keyword as well as cost per click (CPC), paid difficulty (PD), and SEO difficulty (SD) data.

Now on the right side of the keyword ideas report you’ll see all of the sites that rank in the top 100 for that term.

This is my favorite part of the keyword ideas report because you can easily see the estimated visit count based on rankings.

This metric looks at whether a keyword has seasonality and if there are any rich snippets or paid listings for the term.

In addition to showing you the estimated visits based on rank, you’ll also see how many social shares each URL has and its domain score.

Domain score is a metric between 1 and 100. The higher the number, the more authoritative a domain is and the harder it will be to beat that site.

As for the social shares, this will tell you how much people loved that particular web page. If more people are sharing it, they must have really enjoyed it.

The last feature in the keywords idea report (other than the exporting to CSV feature which doesn’t need much of an explanation) is the filtering.

This is where you can filter the keyword results based on any data point you want. From limiting the results to just Google Suggest or AdWords or by filtering keywords based on their popularity and competition.

If there are also too many results like the screenshot above, you can exclude or include certain terms or phrases. This will help you filter the results even faster.

And if you want to focus on long tail terms, just “uncheck” the “Google Ads” option and you will see all of the long tail terms.

SERP Analysis

The last section, SERP analysis, shows you a simple view of the top 100 sites that rank for any given term.

I know many of you are doing keyword research in different languages and regions and you’ll be able to do that with all of the reports, including the SERP analysis.

Eventually, I’ll showcase rich snippets and paid advertising data in this report.

We are already taking those two things into account when we run our calculations on estimated visits.

And of course, you’ll also see social share data and domain score.

So, what’s next?

I wish I was able to release everything at once, but development is never easy or fast. I have an amazing team… but good things just take time.

A few of the features I want to release over the next few months include a traffic analyzer report, which shows how much traffic a domain receives from Google.

Another feature I will release will be a report that showcases top pages for any given website and the search terms that each of those pages rank for.

Once I release the traffic analyzer report, the team will be focusing on the content ideas report.

The content ideas will be part of the keyword research section.

When you research any keywords, you’ll be able to see the most popular articles on that subject based on search traffic and social shares (similar to Buzzsumo).

Conclusion

What do you think about the new Ubersuggest? If you haven’t used it, go check it out.

And if you find any bugs, please email them to support@neilpatel.com so my team and I can work on fixing them.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is a work in progress and other amazing features are already being worked on for future release. A lot of these ideas come from you guys so, please, the more feedback the better.

So, what do you think about the new Ubersuggest?

The post My New SEO Tool: Ubersuggest 2.0 appeared first on Neil Patel.

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