Art direction plays a role in all facets of life. It’s especially important in advertising and magazines. The visuals in ads and magazines often are presented in a way that evokes an emotional reaction and leaves us with a lasting impression.

From new tools to code snippets to typefaces that will make your design life better, this month’s design newbies are a lot of fun to play around with. My favorites include a task management app that’s free, a new website builder that is incredibly easy to use, and a tool that can help you clean up all those old forks on GitHub.

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. 

It’s not all the time that a major brand of vodka redesigns its website to be extra artsy, but that’s precisely what Stoli Vodka has recently done. The famous Russian vodka’s site underwent a radical redesign that’s characterized by a dynamic homepage that sees fresh content every 24 hours. What also stands out to visitors landing there is the vibrancy and loudness of the colors.

In an era where using the cloud has become something of the norm, it’s worthwhile to look at how this technology and way of working can be implemented into your design workflow to help improve the way in which you and your team work.

If you don’t write a lot of CSS yourself, you might think of CSS Grid as that thing Rachel Andrew keeps tweeting about. Well, it’s a whole new system for layout, and Zurb is apparently following her feed. So are most browser vendors.