DevConf.US 2021 has kicked off their call for papers this last month and of course it will be a virtual event (hopefully for this one last time) hosted on September 2-3. It’s the 4th annual, free, Red Hat sponsored technology conference for community project and professional contributors to Free and Open Source technologies coming to a web browser near you!
There is no admission or ticket charge for DevConf.US events. However, you are required to complete a free registration. Talks, presentations and workshops will all be in English.
From dev tools to productivity to a little bit of fun with sudoku, this month’s collection of new tools is packed with something for everyone.
Here’s what new for designers this month.
May’s Top Picks
Am I FLoCed?
Am I FLoCed? Is a tool to see if you are part of a Google Chrome origin trial. It tests a new tracking feature called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). According to Google, the trial currently affects 0.5% of users in selected regions, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. The page will try to detect whether you’ve been made a guinea pig in Google’s ad-tech experiment.
According to the designers of Am I FloCed: “FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other ‘similar’ people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web. This makes it easier to identify you with browser fingerprinting, and it gives trackers a head start on profiling you.”
Uncut
Uncut is a Libre typeface catalog that just got started in April. It features contemporary typefaces and styles and is set to be updated regularly. Sort by sans serif, serif, monospace, or display typefaces. Plus, you can submit a typeface for inclusion.
Dashblock
Dashblock allows you to build automations without coding. Use it to create visual automations, or turn blocks into use-cases. (It is a premium tool, but comes with a 14-day free trial to test it out.)
Instant
Instant is a fast and secure one-click checkout tool that works with WooCommerce. Users fill out a short form the first time they shop and then join the network to enable instant, frictionless, 1-click checkouts without passwords. It makes shopping easier and cuts abandoned carts.
5 Image Tools
Triangula
Triangula uses a modified genetic algorithm to triangulate images. It works best with images smaller than 3000px and with fewer than 3000 points, typically producing an optimal result within a couple of minutes. The result is a nifty-looking image.
Content-Aware Image Resizing in Javascript
Content-Aware Image Resizing in Javascript solves that problem with images where you have a photo but it just doesn’t quite fit. A crop doesn’t work because you lose important information. The carver slices and cuts photos to give you the image elements you want in the size you want them. It’s probably a good idea to read through the tutorial before jumping into the open-source code on GitHub.
Globs Design
Globs Design uses toggles and drag and drop to help you create funky shapes and fills that you can save in SVG format for projects.
Root Illustrations
Root Illustrations is a stylish set of people-based illustrations that you can customize to create scenes for your projects. Construct a scene and then snag your set of vector graphics that also work with Sketch and Figma. The set includes 24 characters, more than 100 details, and the ability to change colors and styles.
Make Your Photo 16×9
Make Your Photo 16×9 is as simple as it sounds. It is a cropping tool that allows you to upload any shape of photo – even vertical – and pick options to fill the space to make it fit the standard 16×9 aspect ratio.
6 Dev Tools
Devbook
Devbook is a search engine for developers that helps them to find the resources they need and answer their questions faster. Fast, accessible right from a code editor, and fully controllable with just a keyboard.
Madosel
Madosel is a fast, advanced responsive HTML front-end framework that’s in an alpha version. The open-source tool is made to create websites and apps that look great on any device. Plus, it is semantic, readable, flexible, and customizable.
Say Hello to CSS Container Queries
Say Hello to CSS Container Queries helps solve a problem with media queries and smart stacking of elements. CSS Container Queries allow you to make a fluid component that adjusts based on the parent element and everything is independent of viewport width. This post takes you through everything you need to do to implement this yourself.
Frontend Toolkit
Frontend Toolkit is a customizable dashboard that you can use to keep up with recurring tasks. It’s one of those little tools that can speed up workflows.
Flatfile
Flatfile is a production-ready importer for SaaS applications. It allows you to auto-format customer spreadsheets without manual cleaning of data and you can do it all without a CSV parser. The tool also includes an elegant UI component to guide users through the process.
Plasmic
Plasmic is a visual website builder that works with your codebase. It’s designed to speed up development with developers focusing on code (not pixel pushing) and allows non-developers to publish pages and content. The premium tool works with any hosting, CMS, or framework and you can adapt it by the component, section, or page.
2 Productivity Tools
Calendso
Calendso is an open-source calendar scheduling tool. It’s flexible with the ability to host it yourself or with the makers of the calendar. It is API-driven and allows you to control events and information. The interface is simple and sleek and can integrate into your website.
Slidev
Slidev is a set of presentation slides for developers. What’s different about this presentation deck is that you can write slides in a single markdown file with themes, code blocks, and interactive components.
4 Icons and UI Kits
Iconic
Iconic is a set of pixel-perfect icons that gets updated each week. The collection of 24×24 px elements in SVG format contains 160 icons and counting. The simple style is easy to implement and you can search for just what you need by category.
5 Dashboard Templates for Figma
5 Dashboard Templates for Figma is a set of free ready-made screens with light and dark modes for each that you can use with components such as calendars, charts, tables, and more. The free elements are a preview of a larger premium Figma set if you like how they look and work.
Free Mobile Chat UI Kit
Free Mobile Chat UI Kit is a tool of components for Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD that includes more than 50 messaging screens with light and dark modes.
Stratum UI Design Kit
Stratum UI Design Kit is a collection of more than 9,000 consistent elements for Figma. It’s packed with elements and tools that make this premium UI kit a tool that gets projects moving quickly.
4 Type Tools and Fresh Fonts
Fluid Typography
Fluid Typography is a nifty tool that allows you to test headings in any size at different viewports to ensure it looks great everywhere. Then you can copy the CSS and use it in your projects.
Eighty-Eight
Eighty-Eight is a funky block-style typeface for display use.
Harmonique
Harmonique is a robust typeface family with lovely serifs and alternates. It’s a type family of two styles that work in harmony together to add distinction and personality to your own typographic compositions. Harmonique’s low contrast forms have the appeal of a humanist sans serif typeface.
Sketchup
Sketchup is a charming display typeface that has a nice pen style. The free version has a limited character set.
Just for Fun
Generating and Solving Sudokus in CSS
Generating and Solving Sudokus in CSS by Lee Meyer for CSS-Tricks is a fun deep dive into using CSS for something you might not expect. It’s a complicated – but fun – look at some of the things CSS can do with plenty of code snippets. The final result is a solvable puzzle with 16 squares.
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Red Hat Single Sign-on (RH-SSO) is the enterprise-ready version of Keycloak, and one thing that is most commonly asked, especially for big customers is, « How do we audit all the events? »
https://ankaa-pmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/integrating-red-hat-single-sign-on-with-amq-streams-for-auditing-events.jpg375600Service comm.https://ankaa-pmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-Ankaa-engineering.pngService comm.2021-05-01 20:08:222021-05-01 20:08:22Integrating Red Hat Single Sign-On With AMQ Streams for Auditing Events
Have you ever wondered why we’re so amazed by motion? A moving image is more likely to grab your attention than a static one. Motion is exciting and attention-grabbing – plus, it allows us to access more information in a short space of time.
For a while now, companies have been experimenting with all kinds of motion and animation in their design choices. We’ve seen the rise of animated website backgrounds or live-playing videos instead of images on a home page. There are videos and 360-degree pictures on product pages to help people get a better view of certain items and immersive AR experiences on apps.
So why has the power of motion not made its way into the logo design landscape yet?
Sure, there are a few examples of animated logos out there, but they haven’t had the same long-lasting impact as animated websites. Perhaps that’s because people don’t have the right tools to bring their animated logos to life?
Today, we’re going to cover some top tips for live logo design.
1. Understand What “Live Logo” Means
An animated logo or live logo can be a powerful tool in a company’s branding strategy. Although there’s more to a company’s identity than its logo, it’s fair to say that logos make a huge difference to how we feel about brands and their identity.
A powerful logo can make an emotional connection with your target audience and help your brand to thrive in virtually any environment. Live logos, or animated logos, bring more attention to the brand image, by helping a customer to focus on the logo’s action. A live logo might tell a story about what the business does through motion, or just be eye-catching.
The level of animation varies depending on the designer, but it can go all the way from a short video presentation to a few simple moves. The Skype logo is an excellent example of something simple, that multiple designers have played with to great effect.
Today, there are plenty of open-access tools helping to create more immersive animated graphics in the logo design world. Additionally, the types of animation available are becoming more impressive all the time.
2. Explore the Types of Logo Animation
The next stage of properly leveraged live logos, is knowing what kinds of logo animation are available. There are plenty of different styles of animation to explore today, depending on the kind of impact you want to have.
For instance, sometimes the animation you choose will be connected to your business. A vehicle company might have a logo that seems to “drive” into the central space on the screen. An electricity company might choose a logo that pulses like an electric charge. This animated FedEx logo is an excellent example of how animation can show what a business does.
Options for animation might include:
Rotation: Make an emblem stand out by moving it to the sides or allowing it to move on its axis. Rotation gives a logo a sense of 3D space.
Appearance/Disappearance: You can make a logo grow on the screen by bringing to life one pixel at a time, or have it dissolve and disappear in a similar way.
Transformation: Your logo doesn’t have to start out in the shape it’s going to achieve. You might start with a seed that gradually grows into a tree-shaped logo for a gardening company, for example.
Replacement: Another great way to tell a story is to replace a graphic related to the company in question with the logo through an immersive animated experience.
3. Set Goals for the Live Logo
If you’re not sure what kind of animations to experiment with, then it’s a good idea to start with some solid goals. Your goals will give you a direction to move in with your logo choices. An animated logo can be a dynamic and modern way to present a brand to an audience, but it’s only going to be effective when implemented carefully.
Let’s look at some of the goals you can choose for your live logo:
Differentiation: While it’s true that animation and live content is gaining more attention lately, it’s still relatively new as an overall concept. With an animated logo, you could help a brand to create a more unique image for themselves, which sets them apart from the other organisations in the same space.
Storytelling: As mentioned above, animated logos can tell a story about what the company or product actually does. In this example for Firefox, for instance, the logo mimics a loading wheel to demonstrate a speedy internet browser.
Brand awareness: Dynamic logos and animations are more likely to capture your audience’s attention than static images. They’re also more of a novel experience, which means that customers might want to share them with other people too.
Memorability: Today’s customers are bombarded by hundreds, if not thousands of logos all the time. They need something special to convince them that one image deserves a spot at the front of their mind. Animation can help to make a business more memorable.
4. Do Your Research
Doing your own research is an excellent way to get some inspiration for a live logo or animation. Ideally, you’ll want to focus on the industry you’re already working in, as this will give you some guidance as to the kind of movement that can attract the most attention from the correct audience.
Watch as intros to brand videos and check out as many live logos as you can. Check out the kind of animations that people use in their videos when they’re showcasing products online. You can learn a lot about what works just by evaluating what other people have done before. Just be careful not to simply copy what you’ve found elsewhere.
The aim of your live animation should be to tell a unique story about the company
The aim of your live animation should be to tell a unique story about the company in question. If you’re not sure how to start with differentiating the image, check out the brand guidelines for the company in question. The guidelines that the company used to choose the right brand colors, fonts, and other visual assets can work just as well for your animation strategy.
Remember, the aim here is to tell a specific story, send a message, or evoke a certain emotion. Don’t make the mistake of designing something that looks cool but doesn’t have much of a purchase. Most human beings will naturally look for the meaning behind the content that they see. If there isn’t anything there, it’ll just lead to confusion.
5. Use Live Logos on Brand Websites
The most obvious way to begin experimenting with animated logos in web design, is to implement live logos into a client’s website. Some companies have a “welcome screen” for their site which uses an animation to introduce visitors to the home page and other navigation options. There are also brands out there who love the impact that animation can have but want to use it more subtly.
In these cases, live logos can be an excellent way to draw the eye to a specific spot on a website, perhaps the area just above the “contact” button that encourages a client to reach out. Crucially, to avoid weighing down the website and distracting visitors, companies and designers will need to make some important choices.
Although it might be tempting to keep the animation looping at all times, just in case someone misses the first round, this requires a lot of extra processing power. Too much animation also makes it harder for businesses to push the focus of their visitors to other points on the website, like landing pages for products, or testimonial pages.
Often, as with most innovative decisions in web-design, the best bet is usually to start small and work your way up. Don’t over-do it with animation on day one. See how the visitors to the website respond first.
6. Find the Right Balance
Animations in a live logo are there to grab attention quickly, and effectively. They shouldn’t go on for too long, or you risk overwhelming your audience before they have a chance to browse the rest of the website or check out other content. A live logo should only be active for a few seconds at most, and in that time, it needs to say something valuable.
Often, the best strategy is to start by building up curiosity, and getting your viewer engaged so that they’re keen to see more. Every frame will count to pull the customer in and make them feel connected to the brand in question.
Make sure that the logo animation is dynamic so that it doesn’t just capture the attention of the viewer but maintain their interest for the full time required. During the motion, the viewer’s brain should be working to figure out what’s going to happen next.
Just like most logo design and graphic animation strategies, the key to success is finding the right balance between clever experiences, and simplicity. You want to do something meaningful that earns your viewer’s attention, but you need to compete with the fact that attention spans are plummeting all the time.
7. Explore Logo Animation in Video
One of the best ways to use logo animation, is to draw interest for a company at the beginning of a video. Video is gaining incredible levels of popularity lately, particularly in a world where you can view video content almost anywhere. Companies are adding videos to their product pages, social media accounts, applications, websites, and so much more .
For the majority of companies, a live logo at the start of a video can help their brand to seem more professional. It’s a reminder to viewers of the brand that they’re learning about with that video content. Plus, a logo at the beginning of a piece of video content can also build on the consistency that companies attempt to create by using the same brand assets in various mediums online.
(Starting a video with an animated logo is great for presentation, but it can also be frustrating to customers in certain pieces of content where they’re looking for quick answers to questions. If an animated logo is more than a couple of seconds long, it may be better placed at the back of a video instead.)
With videos for news reports or announcements where you want to get straight to the point and generate excitement about a new product or service, it can be better to jump straight into action. Ending a video with a live logo keeps the brand image front of mind for the customer for longer, even after the message has ended. On the other hand, ending a video with a logo could increase the chances that customers miss the animation, because they click away from the content too quickly.
If you’re new to adding live logos into videos, consider experimenting with different strategies to see which works best. Different companies might get unique results.
8. Bring Logo Animation to the Real World
Another interesting option for live logo design, could be to step outside of the computer screen for a while. In today’s digitally transforming landscape, it’s becoming more common to see the real and digital worlds converging. Most events and trade-shows come with presentations that rely on digital content, like animated presentations and slide shows.
Depending on the signage solutions available at industry events, companies could even use an animated logo above their booth to draw attention in a cluttered environment. Around 48% of exhibitors agree that a more eye-catching stand or booth is often the most effective way to attract visitors and customers at an event.
Animation and live logos may have started life on the computer screen, but they can appear in much more diverse environments today. Offices could use a live logo in the reception room or lobby to make their on-premises environment more appealing. Retail locations could display ads on digital signage, followed by live logos that work to both separate messages, and keep shoppers entertained when they’re enjoying the bricks-and-mortar experience.
9. Include Live Logos in Brand Signatures
Remember, a live logo doesn’t just have to sit on a company’s app or website until someone discovers it. Sometimes, the right logo can also be a powerful way to “sign off” on a message from a brand or its management team. For instance, email remains to be one of the most valuable tools for business marketing and customer relationship building today.
It’s the third most influential source of content and news for a lot of B2B audiences, and yet, most companies aren’t taking full advantage of what their email marketing software solutions are capable of. If you can display gifs and animated videos in an email (which most software solutions can), then you can also add a live logo to the brand signature.
The important thing to remember is that if you’re going to be adding a signature to a lightweight thing, like an email, it needs to be lightweight too. Don’t make the live logo too long and complicated, or it might prevent the email from loading properly.
Outside of email, don’t forget to consider options for live logos in things like social media profile pictures too. According to experts, around 80% of companies use visual assets in their social media marketing. A live logo is a great way to go beyond the basics with a company’s imagery. Motion grabs attention, and video content is quickly gaining steam on a lot of social media platforms.
Embracing a New World of Live Animation
Designers are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with animated logos. For many companies, live logos are an excellent way to capture audience attention and encourage engagement with a brand.
A live logo at the beginning of a video, at the start of an app loading screen, or even at the top of a website can differentiate a company and make them stand out. As technology continues to evolve, and customer expectations continue to expand, the options for live animation could continue to grow. You might even be able to infuse live logos with elements of VR and AR, to impart brand essence in a brand-new digital world.
If you haven’t begun experimenting with live logo design yet, now could be the time to start.
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As a web designer, you face plenty of challenges, both good and bad. One of the bad ones is to suddenly find out that you’re either in danger of missing a client’s deadline or will be unable to meet it at all.
A missed deadline could be due to something beyond your control and no fault of your own. There are measures you can take to avoid what you do have control over. Such as not having the right design tool or design resources to do a task that has to be done.
An ounce of prevention can definitely be worth a pound of cure in this case. Before starting a project, make sure the tool or tools you will be using will be up to the task.
The 15 design tools presented here are the tops in their respective categories. You should be better able to handle whatever is thrown at you.
1. Be Theme
Its more than 200,000 sales to date have certainly established the BeTheme multipurpose WordPress theme as an all-time favorite among web designers.
In truth, “multipurpose” doesn’t do BeTheme justice. Users might argue that “all-purpose” would be a more accurate description.
Be’s 40+ core features give web designers plenty to work with in terms of page-building tools, design aids, design options, and special effects.
Most notably:
The Muffin Builder, which when used with other core features, makes building a website quick, easy, and coding-free;
The Admin Panel/Shortcode Generator combo gives all the flexibility designers need;
BeTheme’s 600+ customizable pre-built websites could well be the star of the show. They cover 30 business sectors and all the popular website types, they are customizable, responsive, and feature cool UX features, and they can get any project off to a rapid start.
Click on the banner to learn more about Be’s other core features.
2. Timezy Booking Software
Timezy will help you create a booking environment that works best for your business by allowing clients and customers to book your services as easily as possible. You can then integrate Timezy into your website to streamline and speed up your booking operation.
Clients and customers can book appointments online 24/7;
They can receive real-time email notifications and reminders;
Timezy can be integrated with Zoom;
You can reorder steps on the booking form to fit your needs;
Timezy can be used to manage employee assignments and schedules, vacations, and special days.
If you lack a website of your own, Timezy will provide you with a modern web page you can customize to fit your brand for clients to book appointments at any time.
3. wpDataTables
wpDataTables is the top-selling and most powerful WordPress table and chart-building plugin on the market. There are other good ones, but their table and chart-building capabilities quickly become inadequate as you go down the list of what wpDataTables can do that most others cannot.
wpDataTables key features and capabilities:
The ability to create interactive and responsive tables and charts;
The ability to create frontend editable and easily maintainable tables and charts;
The ability to rapidly process massive amounts of data that come in various formats and from various sources;
The ability to build tables and charts using real-time data.
You can also brighten up or improve a table or chart’s readability by highlighting or color-coding key information.
Click on the banner to find out more about what this plugin can do for you.
4. LayerSlider
LayerSlider is not for sliders only. This multipurpose WordPress tool can also be used to create eye-catching animations and engaging content.
Add a little spice to a stale website;
Create popups with stunning effects to interact better with visitors;
Avoid coding, since LayerSlider is drag and drop.
This popular design tool has been assisting web designers for nearly a decade and serves millions of active monthly users.
5. Amelia Booking Plugin
Amelia is a user-friendly WordPress booking plugin you can use to manage your appointments and events on a single platform.
Clients can instantly book, change, or cancel appointments online 24/7;
Employees and customers can manage meetings, appointments, and events from their own dashboards;
Amelia can be integrated with Zoom to conduct training or consultation sessions;
Amelia can also create packages of services with discounts and validity periods.
With its more than 80.000 sales to date, Uncode has become one of ThemeForest’s all-time best sellers.
You can create custom layouts and designs with Uncode’s Dynamic Content feature and use them as templates for category pages;
Uncode features the WooCommerce Product Builder, custom Checkout, Cart, My Account, Quick-View, etc.
Uncode has a comprehensive library of tutorial videos and a showcase of user-created websites that is well worth visiting.
7. Total WordPress Theme
Created with perfection in mind, Total is nonetheless an extremely user-friendly WordPress theme.
This drag and drop website building tool’s extreme flexibility allows users to create any type or style of website;
The WPBakery page builder is accompanied by an assortment of custom modules;
Total is RTL and Translation-ready and easily integrates with WooCommerce;
Total is developer-friendly.
Click on the banner to learn more.
8. Dr. Link Check
Dr. Link Check saves you the inconvenience of having to periodically conduct a manual search of your site for broken links.
Dr. Link Check inspects for:
Broken links and improper URL formatting;
Blacklisted malicious content links;
Websites that do not contain any valuable content, including ad-only sites.
Dr. Link Check publishes downloadable daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
9. Mobirise Website Builder
Mobirise is not only a top tool for creating fast, responsive, user-friendly websites. It also has the advantages of being offline. Mobirise is also free.
Factors that contribute to Mobirise’s excellent performance include:
Google Amp and Bootstrap 4 frameworks;
Professionally-crafted website templates, popups, sliders, and eCommerce features;
Mobirise is all drag and drop.
Click on the banner to download your very own copy.
10. 8b Website Builder
When a website builder is fast, free, responsive, user friendly, and Google-friendly as well, it is certainly worthy of consideration.
Allows you to create websites at home or on the go on any device;
Features templates and website sections designed to get projects off to a rapid start;
It gives your site a Google ranking with a couple of clicks;
It can be hosted wherever you want.
Download your copy now.
11. WHATFONTIS
WhatFontIs, with its database of more than 700K commercial and free fonts and font-finding AI functionality enables you to identify fonts from images you upload.
This top-of-the-line font-finding tool:
Identifies an uploaded font 90% of the time;
Gives answers in seconds;
Identifies cursive fonts (the letters in the image must be separated);
Displays 60+ similar fonts for each uploaded image.
12. Litho – The Multipurpose HTML5 Template
Litho is a responsive multipurpose Bootstrap 4 HTML5 template that gives startups, design agencies, and other businesses an ideal website-building starting point.
Litho’s features include:
Cool selections of ready-made home pages, inner pages, and template blocks;
Page styles for portfolio, shop, and blogging sites;
Sliders, banners, forms, and other creative design elements.
Litho offers 5-star professional support.
13. XStore – The Most Customizable WooCommerce Theme Ever
XStore may be the best tool anyone could have at their fingertips when looking for a fast and easy way to create a high-performance eCommerce website – for only $39.
Startups looking for ways to test their ideas and concepts;
Small businesses seeking an online presence or improvement of an existing one.
GOODIE’s specialties include 1-10 page, WordPress, and eCommerce websites.
15. Heroic Inbox
There are several excellent reasons for letting Heroic Inbox manage your business’s departmental email inboxes.
They include:
Encouraging efficient staff collaboration on email assignments and responses;
Helping staff members accomplish and maintain Inbox Zero status;
Tracking key team performance metrics.
Two key Heroic Inbox features are its smart workflows and a fast and friendly UI.
Every web designer owns a toolbox of tips and tricks they use in their website building projects. Even when a toolbox is superbly stocked, it is always challenging to keep it up to date. Doing so requires maintaining a knowledge of the latest and greatest web design resources and tools—some of which you may need to meet ever-changing industry demands.
This article features the top tools & resources for designers and agencies for 2021. Choosing one or more of them could not only help you stay on top of your game but could even make your day.
If you’re paying attention to anything that’s happening in the development world, you’re likely familiar with the term “observability.” We’re seeing more and more monitoring companies from all different backgrounds jumping on the term to describe their solutions, many claiming their observability tool to be the factor that will take businesses to the next level.
Growing out-of-control system engineering, observability allows dev teams to unify and study the behaviors of various IT systems through the external outputs of the internal systems. In the case of software, that’s log events, distributed tracing, and time-series metrics. By unifying the data streaming through today’s complex IT environments, it certainly gives SREs and DevOps practitioners a leg up from traditional monitoring. But the data alone is no longer enough.
There are some interesting shake-ups on the horizon for ecommerce: Experiential shopping, Virt-ical worlds, Au naturale models.
We’re starting to see signs of them already — many of them spurred on thanks to the events of 2020. Below, we’re going to explore what’s going on with these new ecommerce trends and technologies and take a look at a bunch of sites that are setting really cool examples for each.
1. Experiential Shopping
With many stores, either closed to in-person shopping during the pandemic or their capacities severely limited, online shopping and BOPIS became much more attractive options for consumers.
That said, buying something like a pair of jeans or a new pair of glasses is much different than the pack of toilet paper someone’s bought for years. There are just some things you have to try to know if you’re going to like it and make sure it fits.
Augmented reality and other immersive shopping tools are bringing those “try-on” capabilities to people’s homes.
There are a number of technologies built specifically for this purpose:
Obsess is a particularly noteworthy one. It’s an ecommerce platform that enables retailers to build virtually immersive shopping experiences. Charlotte Tilbury is one such retailer that is taking advantage of it.
At the end of 2020, Obsess announced that it had received $3.4 million in seed funding, so expect to see more Obsess-powered ecommerce sites and apps.
ByondXR is another platform that empowers brands to design immersive experiences for online shoppers:
Retailers like Lancome, Procter & Gamble, and Calvin Klein have used ByondXR’s immersive commerce technology.
This technology is interesting as you’re not just creating a virtual store. You can also design a 3D model of a brick-and-mortar shop that in-store shoppers can use to get in and out quickly.
2. Virt-ical Worlds
There’s a new trend brewing, and we see it most commonly on websites for fresh and youthful brands. I wouldn’t say it’s nostalgic design, per se, though there are certainly some elements reminiscent of the bold, in-your-face style of the web in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
No, I think what we see here is a creative reimagining of our world.
With so many people having spent time in their homes and with their faces glued to screens, there’s been a blurring between our VIRTual and physICAL worlds. This new web design trend is one I’m going to call the Virt-ical World. While parts of these sites look like the websites we’ve designed in years past, there are motion, color, and sizing elements that feel more like a trippy virtual simulation.
Let’s look at some examples.
Starface is a company that creates acne-fighting products.
This is one of the more experimental designs in this set of examples. Still, it’s one that shows us how far the boundaries can be pushed without totally compromising the online shopping experience.
Billie is another company having fun with this trend. I’d say this is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
For the most part, this ecommerce site looks similar to other small retailer sites. However, the fun, candy-colored palette, the bobbing products, and the color shifts add a somewhat surreal element to the design.
Catching THEO is another ecommerce brand playing around with this Virt-ical World.
See what I mean by this style feeling somewhat nostalgic? Thankfully, this site commits to today’s good, clean, responsive design while only using some of the more fun and quirky elements from the past.
Au Naturale Models
When I talk about au naturale models, I’m really referring to the makeup-less faces, relaxed hairstyles, and casual apparel that we’re seeing ecommerce models don these days.
I think it’s safe to say we have the pandemic to thank for this. And it’s not just because many of us took a more casual approach to getting dressed during the week. It’s also because the pandemic wiped away the glitz and glamour from many of our lives.
I don’t know about you, but it was kind of nice seeing fewer Instagram influencers flaunting their luxurious lifestyles and more real people rocking their matching pajama sets. I think brands have sensed this change in mood over the last year, and they’re now putting forward their own simple and casual styles for us to connect to.
There are tons of ecommerce websites we’re seeing this on in 2021.
Here’s Dove’s homepage, where they specifically call attention to the lack of digital distortion in the photo:
Thinx also uses more natural and realistic-looking models to show off its undergarment products:
Madison Reed takes a unique approach with this trend:
While the hair color brand does a great job of using diverse models around the site, it also has this scrolling bar showing off its customers’ very natural and real faces.
Wrap-Up
It feels like ecommerce trends and technologies are changing at a rapid pace these days. To help you stay on top of what’s new in ecommerce, stay tuned to this blog for more interesting news and changes to the landscape.
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When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally.
Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts up with a nice bow.
But Google Analytics is also slow, extremely bad for privacy — both yours and your users’ — and for many people, it’s too unwieldy, having grown organically over the years into a relatively complex UI.
Some alternatives are fast, privacy-friendly, and geared towards different specialisms. Today we’re rounding up the best…
1. Heap
Heap is an event-based analytics platform. That means you can tell not just how many people visited your site but what actions they took when they were there. This isn’t a unique proposition, but Heap is one of the best implementations.
Heap offers an auto-track tool, which is ideal for new installations because you can get up and running immediately and fine-tune the details later. That makes it great for startups, although it’s also the choice of major corporations like Microsoft.
Heap’s free plan includes 60k sessions per year and 12 months of data history, but when you outgrow that, the business plans start at $12,000/year.
2 ChartMogul
ChartMogul is geared towards SaaS that offer subscription plans, staking a claim as the world’s first subscription data platform.
Services like Buffer and Webflow use ChartMogul to monitor their revenue and analyze the ROI of changes to their features, design, and user experience.
Ideally suited for startups, ChartMogul pricing is based on monthly recurring revenue; it has a free plan for up to $10,000 MMR; after that, pricing starts at $100/month.
3. Fathom
Fathom is an awesome, privacy-first analytics solution. It offers a simple dashboard and is ideal for anyone looking for simple analytics information to verify business decisions.
Fathom is ideally suited to freelancers, or entrepreneurs with multiple projects, as it allows you to run multiple domains from a single account. Fathom is entirely cookieless, meaning you can ditch that annoying cookie notice. It’s GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant.
There’s a seven-day free trial; after that, Fathom starts at $14/month.
4. FullStory
FullStory is designed to help you develop engaging online products with an emphasis on user experience.
FullStory is a set of tools, making it ideal for large in-house teams or in-house teams working with outside agencies or freelancers. It pitches itself as a single source of truth from which everyone from the marketing department to the database engineers can draw their insights, helping digital teams rapidly iterate by keeping everyone in the same loop.
FullStory uses AI to track and interpret unexpected events, from rage clicks to traffic spikes, and breaks those events down to a dollar-cost, so you can instantly see where your interventions will have the most impact.
There’s a free plan for up to 1k sessions per month; once you outgrow that, you need to talk to the sales team for a quote.
5. Amplitude
Amplitude has one of the most user-friendly dashboards on this list, with tons of power behind it. For project managers trying to make science-based decisions about future development, it’s a godsend.
The downside with Amplitude is that to make the most of its powerful data connections, you need to pump a lot of data in. For that reason, Amplitude is best suited to sites that already have a substantial volume of traffic — among those customers are Cisco and PayPal.
Amplitude provides a free plan, with its core analytics and up to 10m tracked actions per month. For premium plans, you have to contact their sales team for a quote.
6. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a little bit more than an analytics program, aiming to be a whole suite of web tools it has ventured into split testing and notifications.
Mixpanel is laser-focused on maximizing your sales funnel. One look at the dashboard, and you can see that Mixpanel, while very well designed, has too many features to present them simply; Mixpanel is ideally suited to agencies and in-house development teams with time to invest — you probably want to keep the CEO away from this one.
Mixpanel has a generous free plan for up to 100k monthly users, with its business plans starting at $25/month.
7. Mode
Mode is a serious enterprise-level solution for product intelligence and decision making.
Ideally suited to in-house teams, Mode allows you to monitor financial flow and output the results in investor-friendly reports. You can monitor your entire tech stack and, of course, understand how users are interacting with your product. Wondering who handles the analytics for Shopify? That would be Mode.
Mode has a free plan aimed at individuals, but this tool’s scope is really beyond freelancers, and the free plan’s only likely to appeal to high-price consultants and tech trouble-shooters. For the full business plan, you need to contact Mode’s sales team for a quote.
8. Microanalytics
Microanalytics is a relatively new analytics program with a lightweight, privacy-focused approach.
Microanalytics provides a simple dashboard with acquisitions, user location, technology, and the all-important event tracking to monitor user behavior. Microanalytics is compliant with the web’s most stringent privacy laws, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA. The tracking code is just 1kb in size, meaning that you’ll hardly notice its footprint in your stats.
Microanalytics is free for up to 10k pageviews/month; after that, the monthly plan starts at $9.
9. GoSquared
GoSquared is another suite of tools, this time aimed at SaaS. Its primary product is its analytics, but it also includes live chat, marketing tools, and a team inbox.
If you’re tired of comparing multiple tools to help make the most of your startup, GoSquared kills several birds with one stone. Perhaps most importantly, if you’re beginning to build a team and don’t have any engineers onboard yet, GoSquared has an award-winning support team and an idiot-proof setup process.
GoSquared has a free plan that’s fine for evaluating the suite and integrating data from day one. As you begin to grow, paid plans start at $40/month.
10. Segment
Segment is a little different from the other analytics tools on this list; Segment is a layer that sits between your site and your analytics. It integrates with many of the tools on this list.
There are several benefits to this approach. The main one is that different teams within your enterprise can access analytics data in a form that suits them — designers can access complex data, and management can stick to revenue flow. It also means that you can switch analytics programs with a single setting in Segment and even migrate historical data into new apps. If you’re an enterprise that wants to future-proof its customer intelligence gathering, Segment is worth considering.
Segment is trusted by some of the web’s best-known names, from IBM to Levis, and…ahem…Google.
Segment is free for up to 1k visitors per month, and after that, the team plan starts at $120/month.
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20 years ago, Wikipedia was started with the ambitious aim of creating a free encyclopedia for the whole world.
Looking back 20 years, the world was a very different place: the Dot Com Bust had just passed; the average US house price was just $136k; Jack Bauer was only 24 hours into saving the world; President Obama was several years away from the US Senate; Destiny’s Child were topping the charts; the appalling events of 9/11, and everything that followed, were still months away.
Some startups from the same era have gone on to raise billions of dollars, a few have even turned a profit, while most have slipped into the realm of permanent 404s, Wikipedia has determinedly stuck to its original altruistic intent.
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Wikipedia is highlighting some of the 280,000 volunteers who edit entries every month, keeping the site on point.
With 21,000,000,000 searches per month (give or take) Wikipedia has become an unparalleled authority for the web. With most-viewed articles from the past ranging from Darth Vader to Avengers: Endgame, to COVID-19, humans across the planet have a source of news that is transparent, independent, and democratic.
So happy birthday to Wikipedia, may we be celebrating again in 20 years.
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Here we are into a brand new year, and although we’re far from out of the woods yet, there is a feeling of renewed hope on many fronts.
In this first collection of the year, we have a mix of retrospectives, brand new ventures, and business as usual. There is an eclectic mix of styles on offer, from glossy and slick to minimalist and brutalist, but all confident and looking to a better world in the year ahead.
Clar
Brand strategists Clar have a simple but strong site. Aside from a few personnel profile shots and the odd bit of line animation, it is all text. The typography is good, and the use of color holds interest.
Ebb Dunedin
This boutique hotel, opening in March 2021 (COVID permitting), has bucked the usual luxury hotel trend and bravely gone for a more minimal design style to complement its interiors.
Aplós
Perfect for Dry January, Aplós is a new, non-alcoholic spirit that can be drunk on its own, with a mixer or in a cocktail. The site design and branding aesthetic is sophisticated calm.
Malala Fund COVID Initiative
Subtle color and simple line decorations keep this site for the Malala Fund’s COVID Initiative clean but warm and appealing.
Taubmans Chromatic Joy
This micro-site promoting Taubmans’ new paint color collection is bursting with color and makes a big nod to the Memphis style of the 1980s.
Myriad
Myriad video production agency’s site uses small amounts of bright colors really well. And they quote Eleanor Shellstrop.
The Ocean Cleanup
Cleaning all the plastic crap out of the oceanic garbage patches is a grim job, but it’s getting done, and The Ocean Cleanup site explains how and why in a not grim way.
Photo Vogue Festival
This site displaying the work and talks from Vogue Italia’s 2020 Photo Festival mixes a hand-drawn style with clean type and a strong grid.
Zero
Zero is a digital branding agency. Their site is glossy with lots of high-quality images, smooth transitions, and a clear structure. The background options are a fun touch.
Fluff
This site for cosmetics brand Fluff takes an old school approach to designing for different viewports — sticking a fullscreen background behind your mobile view for desktop sounds like a terrible idea, but here it works.
Patricia Urquiola
The new site for Patricia Urquiola design studio is bright, bold, and assured, inspiring confidence.
Breathing Room
Breathing Room describes itself as a volunteer creative coalition that designs spaces for black people to live without limits through art, design, and activism. The design radiates confidence and optimism.
A Year in Review
A microsite from Milkshake Studio, highlighting their work over the past year. Some good scrolling animation.
Umamiland
Umamiland is an animated interactive introduction to Japanese food, with links to Google search results for individual items or where to get them.
Acqua Carloforte
Carloforte is the town on the island of San Pietro, near Sardinia, and the scents of the island inspire the perfumes of Acqua Carloforte. Cue beautiful photography.
Eugene Ling
Eugen Ling’s portfolio site is simple and straightforward with little or no marketing-speak and a lovely, understated slider transition.
CWC Tokyo
Cross World Connections is an Illustration and Creative Agency based in Japan and represents illustrators from all over the world.
Lions Good News
Following the cancellation of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in 2020, this site was set up to highlight good news in creativity during the pandemic. A carousel of paper flyers forms the main navigation and creates a lo-fi, DIY feel.
G!theimagineers
G!theimagineers is a production studio for events and entertainment. White lines on black, horizontal concertina navigation, and lots of circles.
Sgrappa
Sgrappa is handmade grappa with attitude, and this site has an uncompromising, in your face vibe.
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