OroCRM is a customer relationship management software. It is a simple and low-cost CRM system ideal for small and medium-sized enterprises.
OroCRM is an integrated CRM, marketing automation, and live chat platform that helps marketers build genuine relationships with their prospects and customers. It has all the features to create, manage, measure, and optimize customer journeys. OroCRM streamlines the management of large amounts of data to provide accurate insights for better decision-making.
Type foundries have been putting out some really interesting fonts these last few months. Based on the collection of the best new fonts for February 2022, it looks like we’re going to see lots of throwbacks to the ‘70s in the coming year.
Do we have Burger King’s most recent and successful rebranding campaign to thank for that? I don’t know, but it looks like many font designers are going to try and emulate those fun retro vibes going forward.
Crafty Signs is a display font that draws inspiration from old game shows — think Family Feud or anything on Nickelodeon in the ‘90s. This playful bubble font would work well for brands targeting children or ones that have a big personality and old school vibe.
Epicene is a Baroque font with beautifully exaggerated calligraphic details (like swirls and strokes). There are two families within Epicene — one for Display and one for Text — so you can use this single font collection to style your entire site.
It’s hard to call Kingsad a sans serif font when it has such a distinctly unique design to it. The font’s creator suggests using Kingsad for branding. I’d add that the curious structure of the characters would make this font perfect for branding in the science and tech spaces.
Lucius is a lively-looking font, combining serif and sans serif characteristics. There are eight weights in this font family, which can be used both for display and text purposes.
Manju is a retro font that the designer describes as “soft and chewy”. You don’t see it as much in the thinner styles, but the bolder, thicker styles definitely feel like the kinds of fonts you’d see on food packaging and candy wrappers in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Midnight Sans is a font that comes in a single weight (Black) and also has two variants: Midnight Sans RD and Midnight Sans ST. It was originally designed for When Midnight Comes Around, a book about the emerging punk music scene in NYC in the ‘70s, so it has a somewhat grungy, nostalgic feel to it.
Nagel is technically still in beta, so this may not end up being the finished font when it’s done. For instance, they still have the italic and variable styles to develop. That said, it’s a neat-looking sans serif font — easy to read, but has a bit of an edge to it as well.
What you see is what you get with Painless. It has just one style — a textured, bold sans serif. Because of its casual, hand-brushed feel, it won’t fit well with just any brand. Where it would look cool is on websites for brands that sell hardware, furniture, and other DIY products.
Recipient is a monospaced font inspired by the typefaces that appeared on old typewriters. With five weights and a set of matching italics, this font can be used for standard paragraph text as well as for smaller headlines.
Sea Angel is a beautiful serif font with elegant curves. This easy-on-the-eyes font would look great on websites for high-end retailers, luxury magazines, museums, fashion brands, beauty companies, and more.
Comic books and graphic novels will never go out of style. Especially as their stories branch out into other channels, like TV and movies. Smack Boom will enable you to bring that exciting and heroic look to your logos and web designs.
Stoner Sport is an outline display font that brings a modern touch to a retro sporty style. This font would work especially well for sporting industries as well as businesses that are associated with them—retailers, sports complexes, automakers, publications, and so on.
Stormland is a good example of what makes Scandinavian design so striking. The lettering is clean and simple, built using uniformly sized lines. However, the characters are wide, which gives them a sturdy and strong feeling as well.
Tellumo is a humanist sans serif font family, ranging in styles from Thin to Extra Bold. What you see in the example below demonstrates some of the charm and warmth you can add to branding and designs with Tellumo’s swash caps. However, if you want to keep things simple and reap the benefits of the font’s clean and tidy design, you can use the regular character set.
Yamet Kudasi is a script font that comes in just the one style. Based on where it’s used (like in a signature line vs. a hero image) and the background it’s framed against, this versatile font can be used in a variety of ways and for various niches.
The post 15 Best New Fonts, February 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
While working on establishing short- and long-term goals with a client, my focus was establishing horizon two and three objectives in the McKinsey Three Horizons Model.
For those who are not aware of this framework, horizons two and three focus on new and next-generation features and functionality. At the top of my priorities’ list for this project was the adoption of an API gateway.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: January 31, 2022 – February 6, 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The central principle of cloud engineering is adopting software engineering practices. Refactoring is a technique for making changes to code that improve maintainability, enhance performance, scalability, and security without changing its external behavior. In DevOps, refactoring often occurs with modern applications; however, we can apply those same techniques to cloud infrastructure with infrastructure as code.
Refactoring results in many advantages. First and foremost, the code is more readable and easier to understand for other team members –this aids in maintainability and well-organized code, providing a solid foundation for future releases. Overall, if done well, refactoring reduces complexity which makes future changes more efficient.
What stands out as an incredible web design project for you? Do you count your creation as a success if it’s modern, minimal, and accessible? Maybe you’re the kind of designer that’s constantly experimenting with the latest dynamic design tools or state-of-the-art technology. Perhaps your websites are vivid, animated, and brimming with unique components?
Sometimes, creating the ideal design means thinking carefully about what you want to accomplish for your client. The purpose of your web creation has a significant impact on the components that you need to consider. For instance, if you’re hoping for a highly emotive and human design, it may be worth combining some of your sleek lines and graphics with hand-drawn elements.
Hand-drawn elements are just like the other components of web design; that way may use to express individuality in a cluttered digital environment. In a world where everyone focuses on futuristic and virtual creations, hand-drawn elements can pull attention back to the importance of humanity in your content.
As web designers, we know that visual components often impact people more than text-based content. Illustrations are highly engaging functional elements that capture audience attention and convey relevant information.
The main difference between hand-drawn elements and graphics built with vectors and other digital components is that one appears to be more influenced by the human hand than the other. Even if your illustrations are created on a screen, just like any other web design component, it pushes an audience to see something more straightforward, more natural, and authentic.
For a brand trying to convey innocence and humanity in its personality, hand-drawn design can speak to the part of the human psyche that’s often unappreciated by web design. Perhaps more than any other visual, the content reminds your audience that there’s a human behind the web page.
Any image can have a massive impact on the quality of your web design. Visuals deliver complex information in an easy-to-absorb format. In today’s world of fast-paced browsing, where distractions are everywhere, visuals are a method of capturing attention and delivering value fast.
However, with hand-drawn elements, you go beyond the basic functionality of images to embrace the emotional side of the content. Benefits include:
Hand-drawn components, just like any other element of visual web design, demand careful strategy. You don’t want to overwhelm your websites with these sketches, or you could end up damaging the user experience in the process.
As you work on your web designs, pulling hand-drawn elements into the mix, think about how you can use every illustration to accomplish a crucial goal. For instance:
Hand-drawn design components can mix and match with other visual elements on your website. They work perfectly alongside videos and photos and help to highlight critical points.
On the Lunchbox website, the company uses hand-drawn elements. This helps make the site stand out, and it provides additional context for customers scanning the website for crucial details.
Sometimes, hand-drawn elements are all about connecting with end-users on a deeper, more emotional level. One of the best ways to do this is to make your hand-drawn elements fun and interactive pieces in the design landscape.
One excellent example of this is in the Stained Glass music video here. This interactive game combines an exciting web design trend with creative interactive components so that users can transform the web experience into something unique to them.
Sometimes, the best hand-drawn elements aren’t full illustrations or images. Hand-drawn or doodle-like typography can also give depth to a brand image and website design.
Typography styles that mimic natural, genuine handwriting are excellent for capturing the audience’s attention. These captivating components remind the customer of the human being behind the brand while not detracting from the elegance of the website.
This example of hand-drawn typography from the Tradewinds hotel shows how designers can use script fonts to immediately capture customer attention. Notice that the font is still easy to read from a distance, so it’s not reducing clarity.
Depending on the company that you’re designing for, your website creation choices can have a massive impact on the emotional resonance that the brand has with its audience. Hand-drawn elements allow websites to often take on a more playful tone. They can give any project a touch of innocence and friendliness that’s hard to accomplish elsewhere.
A child-like aesthetic with bright colors and bulky fonts combines with hand-drawn elements on the Le Puzz website. This is an excellent example of how web designers can use hand-drawn elements to convey a mood of creativity and fun.
Finally, if you want to combine the unique nuances of hand-drawn design with the modern components of what’s possible in the digital world today, why not add some animation. Animated elements combined with illustrations can help to bring a website to life.
In the Kinetic.com website, the animated illustrated components help to highlight the punk-rock nature of the fanzine. It’s essential to ensure that you don’t go too over-the-top with your animations here. Remember that too many animations can quickly slow down a website and harm user-friendliness.
Hand-drawn elements have a lot to offer to the web-design world.
Even if you’re not the best artist yourself, you can still simulate hand-drawn components in your web design by using the right tools and capabilities online.
Although these features won’t fit well into every environment, they can be perfect for businesses that want to show their human side in today’s highly digitized world. Hand-drawn components, perhaps more than any other web design feature, showcase the innocence and creativity of the artists that often exist behind portfolio pages and startup brands.
Could you experiment with hand-drawn design in your next project?
The post How to Use Hand-Drawn Elements in Web Design first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
SQL is the only 22nd century tool available in 21st century
Here are the previous articles comparing architecture, database objects, data types, and data modeling of Oracle with Couchbase. This will focus on SQL support.
Oracle was the first and staunch supporter of SQL. Oracle’s SQL implementation beat IBM to market by two years. That changed the fortune of one or two people. :-) All of the modern relational databases implement SQL. So much so, the relational databases are sometimes called SQL databases, much to the chagrin of C. J. Date. Nations are known by their languages… English, French, and American(!). It’s not a stretch for a class of database systems to be known by their languages as well. SQL has been so effective, many big data and non-relational systems have picked up SQL as the lingua franca. SQL is here to stay, even for NoSQL systems.
Have you ever been sent a file and asked to find important information buried within it? Your coworkers would be very impressed if you could query the files in a quick and efficient manner. But… how exactly are you going to achieve such a feat?
As you probably know, SQL allows you to modify database data quickly and easily. When trying to work with data files, developers usually load data into a database and manage it via SQL. In a perfect world, you could just query the database to get the information your company needs. But in real life, there’s a catch: data loading is often not straightforward.
User Experience (UX) design and User Interface (UI) design are two terms people sometimes mistakenly use interchangeably. While aspects of each are interconnected, there are distinct differences between UI/UX design.
According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 1.9 billion websites, but not all are active at the same time. No matter how you slice it, there’s a lot of competition to grab and keep user attention. Good UX is just part of the equation. For a genuinely stellar site, you must also offer an excellent interface.
Learning the ins and outs of good UI and UX requires a bit of knowledge of how the two differ and what works. Although they weave in and out of the same design, they are different.
UI is the functionality of the design and what users see. How do they interact with various elements? UX is more the way things come together — both visual and interactive features — to create a feel for the user. You can certainly see why people confuse the two as they both apply to interacting with a website or app.
Top design firms often have team members specializing in each discipline. However, UX designers are also aware of UI, and UI designers are also mindful of UX. How can you ensure you’re offering excellent UI/UX design while covering the full spectrum of requirements for each?
Good UX design increases conversion rates by 400% or more. The site visitor walks away feeling understood and not frustrated. What are some of the most important aspects of good UX design?
What is the hierarchy of your site? What is the first thing the user sees when they pull it up? How do they navigate from one page to the next? A well-designed website classifies different aspects of the page, and new content naturally falls into the appropriate category as it grows.
When creating a structure for your site, think about how it might expand in the next five years. You want the hierarchy to work from day one, but you also want to think through significant shifts in the content you might see down the road.
Even your navigational hierarchy should accommodate new areas easily. Plan for the unexpected, so you know how to work it into the overall design when you must.
You have a few seconds to make an excellent impression on your site visitors. Take the time to make sure your design functions and is visually appealing. Your color palette should work, images should be crisp and relevant, and typography should be readable and engaging.
Step back from your computer and look at your design from a distance. Does anything stand out that isn’t pleasing to the eye? Get feedback from visitors about what they like and dislike. Since the focus is on user experience, your best source of constructive criticism is from your target audience. Listen to their concerns and ideas.
Most experts agree that users want an element of interactivity on sites and apps. People want to know you hear them and get a response. Some ideas include adding a live chat option to your site or engaging in SMS customer support.
Put yourself in their shoes. A customer may visit your site for the first time, having never heard of your brand. They have no reason to trust you or that you’ll follow through on your promises. Potential leads may have a few questions before parting with their hard-earned dollars.
Adding various ways to communicate shows them you’ll be there should they have a problem. It’s much easier to trust a company when you know you can phone, engage in live chat or shoot off an email and get an almost immediate response.
Excellent UX is intuitive. You should add calls to action (CTAs) and images pointing the user where they should go next. You can use graphics of arrows, people looking or pointing toward the next step, words, or CTA buttons.
Get feedback on how clear the directions are and tweak them as needed. The user should never have to stop and ponder what to do next. Everything on the page should guide them toward the ultimate goal.
Every industry has complicated data that is difficult for non-experts to understand. Part of good UX is breaking down complex information and sharing it in a simplified way.
One example might be the registration process. Instead of just showing text, a good UX designer would number the steps. Visualizations help add to understanding.
User Interface impacts UX and involves how the design works. The UI designer thinks through visitor expectations and then creates an interface that isn’t frustrating. UI works within the framework of a website to develop functional features. User experience isn’t the complete focus of UI, but it does tie into the planning phases. What are some elements of good UI design?
For a design to have good UI, it must perform as expected. Have you ever clicked on a button, and nothing happened? Determine how you want things to work and the minimum acceptable standards for your site.
For example, what happens when someone clicks on a link or button? How does the user know their action created the expected result? Consistency is crucial to how a site performs.
While UX designers look at the emotional impact of various colors, UI designers look at whether the shades match branding and how well the different ones contrast for readability and usability. UI/UX design often bridges a single designer’s work, so the employee ensures everything works as intended, both emotionally and functionally.
You may work with another designer to make the site aesthetically pleasing while also tapping into the emotions driving users. For example, some people love blue, so a blue button can have positive results.
UX and UI designers utilize split testing to see which users respond best to. Then, make adjustments as indicated by how site visitors respond.
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, people can only retain around five things in their short-term memory. Designers should work with recognition instead, as users tend to rely on cues to find what they need.
UI designers may develop an intuitive navigation system and then use the same cues on every page, such as placement, color, and language. Users can then recognize the system without having to memorize it.
Your job is to ensure errors are kept to a minimum when designing a website or app. One of the most significant parts of a designer’s job is testing and retesting.
Think about all the potential problems a user might run into, such as broken links, images not showing, or incomplete actions. How can you keep those problems from occurring in the first place?
Error prevention is particularly vital when designing software as a service (SaaS) or apps. Users grow frustrated quickly and will find another solution rather than troubleshooting an issue. You’re much better off avoiding the error in the first place.
You’ve likely already figured out how closely UX and UI entwine to create a usable experience. The UX designer pays attention to function and interactivity, and the UI designer thinks through how the interface looks.
UX pays attention to the flow of the website and where users start, go next and end up. On the other end, UI figures out how the elements look to the viewer and where everything is placed.
The UX team may decide to add an extra button to the page. The UI team must determine where to place it, if any sizing needs must occur, and how it impacts usability on desktop and mobile devices.
Although each has a different function, user experience and user interface must work together to create a usable site the target audience responds to. You can’t have excellent UX without excellent UI, and vice versa. The best designers consider both and implement them to their fullest potential.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post What’s the Difference Between Good UI and Good UX? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Zato is an integration platform and backend application server which means that, during most of their projects, developers using Zato are interested in a few specific matters.
The platform concentrates on answering these key, everyday questions that Python backend developers routinely ask:
