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15 Instantly Helpful Tools and Resources for Designers and Agencies (Updated for 2022 )

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Experienced web designers are always on the lookout for tools or resources that will (1) introduce them to the latest design trends, (2) enable them to incorporate features and functionalities that will make their products more competitive, (3) allow them to improve their workflows or all the above.

Apply one or more of these new design tools and resources. Then you could realize anything from incremental to game-changing improvements. The better the tool or resource, the more you are apt to realize your investment.

The 15 tools and website design resources selected for this article are the best in their respective categories. The degree of improvement you can realize when using one or more of them may depend on your own business needs. Or on the actual needs and wants of your clients as opposed to what you are currently able to deliver.

Browse the list, and you should be able to put your finger on one or more of these products or services. They could lead to improvement in one or more areas of your work. Look closer, and you might come across a genuine game-changer.

Happy shopping!

1. Be – The Biggest WordPress and Portfolio WordPress Theme

If your website design activities are proving to be exercises in tediousness, or you’re tired of working around a design tool’s limitations, you need BeTheme.

BeTheme can be a game-changer in that it gives you the flexibility to design what you want. Be makes building a complex high-performance website quick, smooth, and easy.

  • BeTheme’s 650+ customizable pre-built websites are designed to get your website-building project off to a rapid start. They are responsive, UX-ready, importable with a single click, and incorporate the latest design trends.
  • You’ll love working with the recently launched BeBuilder, the fastest and most flexible page builder for WordPress with which you can import from Be’s pre-built website’s 1000+ pages.
  • There’s an absolute gem of a BeBuilder Woo you can work with to create your shop or single product layouts.
  • BeTheme features a wealth of design aids, options, and settings to work with.

BeTheme is Elementor ready and is regularly updated. Click on the banner to find out more about Be’s 40+ powerful core features.

2. Total WordPress Theme

Put Total to work, and 2022 could be a very good year for your website design undertakings.

Total has it all insofar as design aids and options, website-building tools, and design flexibility are concerned regardless of the type or style of website you plan to build:

  • Pick any of Total’s 45+ customizable quick import theme demos, and you are off to a quick start.
  • 90+ section templates, 75+ pre-styled post entry cards, and more than 500 live customer settings give you more design flexibility than you are ever likely to need. 
  • The page builder of choice is an extended version of WPBakery. With it at your fingertips, you can easily drag and drop your way to building precisely the website you have in mind.

Click on the banner to discover everything Total can do for you.

3. LayerSlider

What could LayerSlider do for you to help make 2022 a banner year? Look over any of your past website designs to see if any of them could profit from adding a little spice or pizzazz because that’s what LayerSlider does best. 

LayerSlider is an animation and website-building tool that can be used on any website to transform its look & feel with modern graphics, eye-catching animations, and interactive features. LayerSlider is one of the most established and popular products with millions of active monthly users.

  • LayerSlider has 150+ website, slider, and popup templates. Templates are a great way to learn as well as an ideal starting point for new projects.
  • LayerSlider comes with a very easy-to-use and modern editor interface similar to professional desktop applications. Anyone can use it without prior experience.
  • LayerSlider is not just for sliders. It can also create image galleries, popups, landing pages, animated page blocks, or even full websites.

Click on the banner to see what LayerSlider could do for you.

4. wpDataTables

Most table or chart building table plugins on the market either limit the amount of data that can easily be processed or the types of tables or charts that can be produced. wpDataTables has neither of these limitations.

With the wpDataTables premium WordPress plugin, you can –

  • create responsive, interactive, and frontend editable tables and charts
  • process huge amounts of data from various sources and in various formats
  • highlight or color code key data.

5. Uncode – Creative & WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Uncode is a top-selling pixel-perfect creative and WooCommerce theme. More than 80,000 sales have been made to date to freelancers, bloggers, agencies, and small businesses.

Uncode’s key features include –

  • a suped-up Frontend Page Builder.
  • an advanced WooCommerce builder with supporting capabilities that include a Single Product builder and a host of customer-centric design elements and options.
  • a Wireframes Plugin and 550+ section templates.
  • a gallery of inspirational user-created websites.

6. Trafft

With Trafft, you can schedule meetings, events, on-site and virtual appointments, manage staff schedules, send reminders, and accept payments — all from a single platform.

  • Special features include custom domains, coupons, and custom fields.
  • Trafft also manages group bookings and can serve multiple locations.

This game-changer integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, Google Meet, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, Zoom, and Mailchimp.

7. WHATFONTIS 

WHATFONTIS is a hidden gem in the world of font identifiers that allows you to find a font from your uploaded image in a matter of seconds.

  • Powerful AI algorithms and a database of 850K+ fonts provide the basis for this app’s impressive search capabilities.
  • Positive identification is achieved 90% of the time. Premium support is on hand should AI yield an awkward result.
  • Cursive fonts can be identified once the letters are separated.

8. Mobirise Website Builder Software

Mobirise is fast, easy to use, and the best offline website builder on the market.

  • Mobirise does not tie you to a specific platform; you can edit your site locally and host it wherever you want.
  • Full access to HTML allows you to code.
  • 4,000+ website blocks and 300+ elegant home page templates are guaranteed to make your website-building adventures short and sweet.

The Mobirise website builder is free for both personal and commercial use.

9. GetIllustrations’ Stock Illustrations Bundle

Downloads from this library of premium illustrations can change the way you go about designing your websites, apps, and presentations.

  • GetIllustrations, with its 10,000+ illustrations library, is the biggest of its kind.
  • Featured formats include Vector AI, PNG, Sketch, SVG, Figma, and Adobe XD.

Illustrations you download come with a commercial license and are yours to keep without limitations.

10. Slider Revolution

If you have trouble bridging the gap between what your clients want and what you can provide, Slider Revolution could be exactly what you need to fix the problem.

Slider Revolution is THE cutting-edge WordPress plugin for addressing today’s over-the-top web designs. It features –

  • 200+ awesome website and slider templates.
  • eye-catching WebGL slide animations.
  • 25+ powerful addons.
  • the ability to import dynamic content from social media outlets.

11. Amelia

Amelia offers an automated, highly customizable solution to any business that relies on a manual or semi-automated operation for booking client appointments.

  • Amelia is an excellent choice for beauty, healthcare and fitness, and educational and training enterprises.
  • Clients can make or change appointments online 24/7.
  • Amelia can manage individual and group bookings, events, and employee schedules at multiple locations.
  • Amelia integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, WooCommerce, and Zoom.

12. 8bio – Link in Bio Tool 

Many social media platforms allow you to include a link that allows followers to visit your website or an important landing page. With 8bio, you can create a link that a visitor can’t resist clicking on.

Your link can – 

  • Present a brief biographical profile of your business or yourself.
  • Feature an image or catchy animated background.
  • Showcase your product or service at no cost.
  • Use your existing domain or a “yourname” .8b.io domain.

13. Essential Grid

The premium Essential Grid WordPress gallery plugin developers assembled a collection of aesthetic, easy-to-customize plug-and-play templates that make creating a breathtaking portfolio gallery a fun and easy task.

  • Your galleries will load lightning fast.
  • They will display perfectly on all devices.
  • You can choose from a variety of layouts and mix and match adjustable grids to get precisely what you want.

14. Pixpa – Portfolio Websites for Designers

Pixpa provides an all-in-one platform from which creatives can manage their online portfolios, blogs, galleries, and eCommerce sites.

  • Choose among Pixpa’s beautiful and mobile-friendly customizable templates and customize them to achieve exactly what you want. 
  • Put Pixpa’s drag and drop website builder into play to tie everything together, exactly as you want.
  • Add content, connect with your custom domain, and into your social profiles, and you are good to go.

15. XStore – Best WordPress WooCommerce Theme for eCommerce

XStore is a feature-packed Envato WooCommerce theme that is incredibly simple to work with has acquired more than 30,000 enthusiastic customers.

  • XStore’s 110+ customizable shops make creating your own shop as easy as can be.
  • XStore integrates seamlessly with the premium Elementor and WPBakery page builders.
  • $510 worth of carefully handpicked “must-have” premium plugins are included.

There are plenty of tools and resources for designers on the market. You could use them to create websites that are a little better than the ones you have already built or are using.

What you should really be looking for is a special design tool or resource. When using it for a small investment could markedly improve both your productivity and your design efforts to make 2022 by far your best year ever.

That’s the reasoning for publishing this selection of top 15 design tools and resources. Selecting one or more could make your day.

 

[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of Be -]

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Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022

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We’re going to have some fun this month. There are so many new tools and resources out there for designers that make life easier, and others are simply enjoyable.

Here’s what is new for designers this month …

Polka Dot Generator

Polka Dot Generator is exactly what you think. Adjust colors, dot size, shadow, and fuzziness, and then export the CSS for use in your projects. This could make for fun effects or backgrounds.

Design Memes

Design Memes is just a lot of fun. It’s a collection of memes based on design culture updated daily. It’s a little silly and a little reflective. Yes, it’s completely ok to laugh at yourself.

Pppointed

Pppointed is an SVG arrow-making tool that helps you create cool pointers without a lot of effort. Just pick a color, shape, and style, and you are ready to go. Save your custom arrows as SVG files or copy the code and use them on the web whenever you want to point at things visually.

Open Source Color System

Open Source Color System is a set of palettes that include carefully picked colors to help you overcome interface challenges. For example, it is one of the only color tools out there that includes palettes for light and dark modes. It’s also designed with accessibility in mind to help you create a complete and usable system.

Cowsay

Cowsay is a nifty little web interface of the same name made with Svelte and HTML Canvas. Play with it and then copy your art as ASCII or an image.

Minze

Minze is a simple JavaScript framework for native web components. It’s tiny and fast, modern, shareable, framework agnostic, and uses TypeScript to scale your component library. Plus, you can get started with it right away.

Tally

Tally is a simple – and free – online form builder. You can use it without coding, and it works like a document file, so there’s no learning curve. You can create unlimited forms, integrate with other tools, set logic, collect payments, and more. There’s a pro version as well if you need even more features.

Hue.Tools

Hue.Tools is another color tool to help you maximize effort when creating palettes. Generate a color you like, see specs and values in all the different color spaces, inspiration from design sites, and colors that work with it. It’s fun and functional.

Sturdy

Sturdy is a low overhead code collaboration platform for fast-moving teams. With Sturdy, you work in the open with your team. Discover and interact with draft code as it is written. Those team drafts are like live pull requests (Figma or Google Docs) but using your local editor.

Mage

Mage is a tool that transforms your data into predictions. Build, train, and deploy predictive models in minutes with no AI experience required. This is a premium tool, but you can try it for free.

Huemint

Huemint is a machine-learning-based color scheme generator for websites, graphics, and branding. There are many options to play with, and you can generate some pretty interesting combinations that ordinarily you might not think of.

CSSUI

CSSUI is another tool you’ll love because it includes pure CSS interactive components without any JavaScript. It’s easy to customize, uses standard HTML, is easy for all levels to use, is tiny and fast, and supports pretty much all modern browsers. It’s an open-source tool that you can download and use immediately.

UI Icons Line – Free

UI Icons Line – Free is a set of 1,000 free vectors for use in your projects. Who doesn’t need a robust set of icons?

Skill Icons

Skill Icons is a set of icons to help you showcase your design and development skills on your resume or GitHub. They all look great and match.

Ambient Design

Ambient Design is a mobile app design market where you can get mobile UI kits for Figma. Purchase kits separately, or buy quarterly or yearly plans to access all current and future UI kits.

TextFrame

TextFrame lets you create animated tutorials for your users to get the help they need. It integrates directly with WordPress or any other website with just a couple of lines of code and includes plenty of customizable options to make it easy for you to help others understand how to use the website. The tool is free for one site and just a few bucks per month for additional sites.

Booqsi

Booqsi is a fun new social media network for book lovers. The platform is still in beta and lets you save and share books, create shelves for reading, and doesn’t force a connection to Amazon. It’s just all about the books. And there’s a bonus: every link from the site goes back to bookshop.org to help you find and support local bookstores.

Stylo

Stylo is an open-source WYSIWYG interactive editor for JavaScript. It is made to bring great user experience and interactivity to the web, for everyone, with no dependencies. It has an interactive design, is customizable, and is future-proof.

Tutorial: How to Favicon in 2022

How to Favicon in 2022 is an excellent lesson on the five icon files every website needs (plus one JSON file). If you are creating more than that, this is a must-read.

Tutorial: Creating Generative SVG Grids

Creating Generative SVG Grids is an in-depth, step-by-step tutorial for anyone who wants to create a more artistic SVG. It uses a handful of tools, including SVG.js, Generative Utils, TinyColor, and GSAP.

Fromage

Fromage is a new and beautiful premium typeface family from Adam Ladd. It includes 14 styles with an interesting serif and alternative sans option. The high-contrast design is great for a variety of projects.

HD Colton

HD Colton is a premium super sans serif typeface with a whopping 91 styles and family package options. It would make a bold statement as a display option.

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16 Best Typeface Micro-Sites

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Are you looking for a unique font that will make your next project shine? Or maybe you need a typeface with a beautiful design and rich history behind it. Luckily, mini-sites for fonts allow us to creatively explore a font’s origins and history. We know (from our own experience) how important it is for UI and UX designers to have a variety of fonts for our designs.

Now that 2022 is here, it’s time to expand our font collection. That’s why, after extensive research, we have created the ultimate list of the best 16 creative mini websites for fonts.

Are you ready to take a look at the most creative, cute, and fun font websites available on the market?

1. GT Eesti

This website is about the history of one of the most popular fonts on the market, GT Eesti. As you will notice, the typeface has a long history (more than 80 years) and was recently reborn in Switzerland.

As for the font, GT Eesti is a flexible geometric sans serif that can be used in almost any project. As one of the most creative websites for fonts, full of animations and interesting information, GT Eesti quickly made it onto our list.

2. Ultra Font

Are you looking for a font that combines calligraphy and elegance and sits between the sans and serif styles? 

Then GT Ultra is just what you need. We loved how the creator tells the story and structure of Ultra with beautiful animations on this unique, one-page website.

3. Maru Typeface

Maru is by far the cutest design on this list. The website is a vertical narrative of the typeface’s history. 

The typeface was inspired by the designer’s travels to Japan, and the mini-site fully reflects that. Best of all, Maru also includes a great collection of cute emojis and stickers.

4. GT Flexa

GT Flexa is a very flexible font that you can easily use for a responsive UI design. We enjoyed navigating through the minimalist mini-site and exploring the creation and history of Flexa. 

Flexa also offers a free trial that allows you to try the font before you buy.

5. Super

Super’s mini-site reminded us of earlier decades. GT Super is a vintage typeface inspired by the serif fonts of the 70s and 80s. 

Therefore, it can beautifully frame nostalgic designs. The font was designed by Noel Leu and is available in two styles (text and display).

6. GT Zirkon

GT Zircon is located in a place where creativity meets minimalism. This is one of our favorite mini-sites for fonts. 

The site showcases Zirkon’s history and design process through creative graphics, videos, and animations.

7. America Font 

This mini-site allows you to explore the history, style, and character overview of GT America, a contemporary font family. 

The designer has used elements from American Gothic and European Grotesque to create one of the most flexible typefaces available.

8. Alpina

Reto Moser recently designed one of the most popular GT typefaces, the Alpina “Workhorse” serif. 

This innovative, one-page website tells us the story of Alpina and explains how the designer jazzed up, posed, and flexed the classic book typography to create a wide range of typeface variations.

9. Cinetype

As the name suggests, this mini-site is inspired by classic cinematic movie reels. If you’re looking for a font inspired by the fascinating world of cinemas, Cinetype is simply the best choice. And on this creative website, you will learn all the reasons why.

10. Haptik Typeface

When it comes to monolinear geometric typefaces, Haptik is one of the best. This innovative mini-website tells how the Haptik font came to be and highlights the history of the font. 

The hand gesture gifs at the bottom of this one-page site are some of the most creative mini-videos we have seen in a long time.

11. Walsheim

Walsheim is a typeface designed by Noel Leu. This mini-site explains how the designer was inspired by the fascinating poster designs of Otto Baumberger, a successful Swiss painter of the 20th century (1889-1961). If you like fonts with a deep backstory, Walsheim is a must-have for you.

12. Prospectus

The Prospectus mini-site is specially designed to look like a newspaper. And let us say: the result is extraordinary. 

This one-page website explores the origins, construction phase, and classifieds of the Prospectus typeface, allowing us to experiment in real-time with the weight, height, tracking, and size of the typeface.

13. Mort Modern

Mort Modern is a unique serif typeface designed by Riley Cran in 2018. The mini-site provides information about the typeface in a creative, cartoon-like way. 

We really liked this responsive, one-page website because it is elegant and colorful at the same time. The font is available in 56 (!) styles and promises to beautifully frame any kind of modern design.

14. Tofino

The Tofino mini-site is a creative, one-page portal that allows us to discover one of the most adventurous Swiss-style fonts on the market. 

Tofino is a top choice for any travel-related project and comes in 75 unique styles. When it comes to creating a well-crafted report on a font, there’s nothing better than this.

15. Faction Typeface

We love websites that offer both a dark and light theme. And the Faction mini-site is one of them. 

In this mini-site, you’ll learn how the Faction typeface was created and why it’s one of the most popular display typefaces for modern designs.

16. Moriston

If you’re looking for a unique sans serif font with extended multilingual support, Moriston is the font for you. 

In this one-page mini-site, Riley Cran tells the story behind this typeface and explains why Moriston is the best choice for Risograph posters, monograms, and more. 

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How to Use Hand-Drawn Elements in Web Design

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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. 

The Value of Hand-Drawn Graphics in Web Design

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. 

The Value of Hand-Drawn Features in Web Design

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:

  • A memorable experience: Web illustrations are becoming more popular among leading brands like Innocent Smoothies and Dropbox. However, the time that goes into these components means that they’re still scarce. If you want to stand out online, illustrations can help you do that. 
  • Brand personality: One of the most significant benefits of hand-drawn web design is showcasing your brand personality. The blocky lines of imperfect content that go into illustrated images highlight the human nature of your company. So many businesses are keen to look “perfect” today to make the human touch much more inviting. 
  • Differentiation: As mentioned above, hand illustrations are still rare in the digital design landscape. If you’re struggling to find a way to make your brand stand out, this could be it. Although there needs to be meaning behind your design, the result could be a more unique brand if you can convey that meaning properly. 

Tips for Using Hand Drawn Elements in Web Design 

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:

Create Separation

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.

Engage Your Audience

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.

Highlight Headers with Typography

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. 

Set the Mood

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.

Animated Elements

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.

Finishing Thoughts on Hand-Drawn Elements

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?

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What’s the Difference Between Good UI and Good UX?

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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.

What Is the Biggest Difference Between Good UX and UI?

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?

Ensuring Effective UX Design

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?

1. Create a Good Structure

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.

2. Choose Beautiful Aesthetics

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.

3. Communicate With Site Visitors

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.

4. Add Clear Direction

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.

5. Break Down Complex Data

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.

Embracing Effective UI Design

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?

1. Set Standards

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.

2. Choose the Right Colors

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.

3. Focus on Cognitive Matters

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.

4. Prevent Errors

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.

How Do UX and UI Work Together?

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.

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A Beginner’s Guide to High-Performance Computing in Python

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Ever since the Python programming language was born, its core philosophy has always been to maximize the readability and simplicity of code. In fact, the reach for readability and simplicity is so deep within Python’s root that, if you type import this in a Python console, it will recite a little poem:

    Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. The complex is better than complicated. The flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts…

Simple is better than complex. Readability counts. No doubt, Python has indeed been quite successful at achieving these goals: it is by far the most friendly language to learn, and an average Python program is often 5 to 10 times shorter than equivalent C++ code. Unfortunately, there is a catch: Python’s simplicity comes at the cost of reduced performance. In fact, it is almost never surprising for a Python program to be 10 to 100 times slower than its C++ counterpart. It thus appears that there is a perpetual trade-off between speed and simplicity, and no programming language shall ever possess both.
But, don’t you worry, all hope is not lost.

Taichi: Best of Both Worlds

The Taichi Programming Language is an attempt to extend the Python programming language with constructs that enable general-purpose, high-performance computing. It is seamlessly embedded in Python, yet can summon every ounce of computing power in a machine — the multi-core CPU, and more importantly, the GPU.
We’ll show an example program written using taichi. The program uses the GPU to run a real-time physical simulation of a piece of cloth falling onto a sphere and simultaneously renders the result.
Writing a real-time GPU physics simulator is rarely an easy task, but the Taichi source code behind this program is surprisingly simple. The remainder of this article will walk you through the entire implementation, so you can get a taste of the functionalities that taichi provides, and just how powerful and friendly they are.
Before we begin, take a guess of how many lines of code this program consists of. You will find the answer at the end of the article.

Algorithmic Overview

Our program will model the piece of cloth as a mass-spring system. More specifically, we will represent the piece of cloth as an N by N grid of point-masses, where adjacent points are linked by springs. The following image, provided by Matthew Fisher, illustrates this structure:
The motion of this mass-spring system is affected by 4 factors:
  • Gravity
  • Internal forces of the springs
  • Damping
  • Collision with the red ball in the middle
For the simplicity of this blog, we ignore the self-collisions of the cloth. Our program begins at the time t = 0. Then, at each step of the simulation, it advances time by a small constant dt. The program estimates what happens to the system in this small period of time by evaluating the effect of each of the 4 factors above, and updates the position and velocity of each mass point at the end of the timestep. The updated positions of mass points are then used to update the image rendered on the screen.

Getting Started

Although Taichi is a programming language in its own right, it exists in the form of a Python package and can be installed by simply running pip install taichi.
To start using Taichi in a python program, import it under the alias ti:
import taichi as ti
The performance of a Taichi program is maximized if your machine has a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU. If this is the case, add the following line of code after the import: ti.init(arch=ti.cuda)

If you don’t have a CUDA GPU, Taichi can still interact with your GPU via other graphics APIs, such as ti.metal, ti.vulkan, and ti.opengl. However, Taichi’s support for these APIs is not as complete as its CUDA support, so, for now, use the CPU backend: ti.init(arch=ti.cpu)And don’t worry, Taichi is blazing fast even if it only runs on the CPU. Having initialized Taichi, we can start declaring the data structures used to describe the mass-spring cloth. We add the following lines of code:

Python

  

 N = 128 x = ti.Vector.field(3, float, (N, N)) v = ti.Vector.field(3, float, (N, N))

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20 Best New Websites, January 2022

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So here we are, in a brand spanking new year—time for looking forward with fresh ideas and renewed hope for the year ahead. We are kicking off 2022 with a mixed bag and, we hope, something for everyone.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration to update your site or a fresh approach to work for a new client or want to spend a little while browsing around some corners of the internet you might not usually, welcome to the first collection of the year. Enjoy!

Justice Reskill 

Justice Reskill offers a learning platform and support for people who have been through the justice system. Information is presented clearly in a positive, uplifting tone, emphasized by a bright color scheme and friendly type.

TBD Post 

TBD Post’s site is fuss-free, clean, and pleasant to navigate. Work is well presented, in an organized way, with just the right amount of supplementary information.

Speedy 

Speedy is an online business bank, and this is a pretty standard, slick fin-tech site for the most part. The added extra is that the five versions of the site–with the same content in each–have different color accents based on the flag of the specific country listed.

Nuka 

This site for Nuka eternal stationery is a beautifully simple single page. The use of handwritten type in places adds an intimacy while emphasizing the nature of the products.

Omono 

This site for online business management app Omono presents a lot of information clearly, and with a calmness projected by the use of blues and greys and subtle animation.

Pienso 

A combination of bold type, a slightly tweaked red, green, and blue color scheme, and on-scroll animations makes this site for Pienso pop.

Maison Margiela 

Maison Margiela fully embraces the digital alternative to a live catwalk with this blend of single video and edited clips.

Marie O’Shepherd 

This portfolio site for book designer and art director Marie O’Shepherd takes a minimal approach and allows the work to take center stage.

Angry Ventures

Angry Ventures add personality and humor to their site to draw the user in and entertain, while their actual portfolio is only available on request.

Chapter One 

Chapter One’s site has light and dark theme options and some engaging animated graphics.

Vesti il Futuro 

Vesti il Futuro for Mani Tese uses comic book-style interactive graphics to raise awareness of issues surrounding the environment and fast fashion.

Gazelle No.1 

Some scroll-activated video enlivens this single-page site for Gazelle’s No.1 model.

TROA 

This site for creative agency Troa is an excellent example of the effectiveness of a monochrome color scheme, and there are some pleasing transitions too.

BDCC 

BDCC’s site has a bold, slightly jumbled feel that works really well. The falling lozenge menu items are a nice feature.

Mekanism

This is a great example of a stylish website for an agency portraying itself as well-established and super polished.

Redbrick 

Redbrick’s site has a youthful, vibrant feel with colors that change to match the product branding.

Accounting Box 

This site for Accounting Box makes good use of split-screen swapping from a vertical split on desktop to a horizontal split on mobile. The animations are pleasing too.

François-Joseph Graf 

The design for François-Joseph Graf’s site does the right thing by getting out of the way to avoid competing with the rather stunning products on show.

Monsta Cats 

Monsta Cats is a site dedicated to community focussed NFTs. The site is suitably anarchic and fun to browse.

Bien Fondé 

And finally, some customizable good wishes for the year ahead from digital agency Bien Fondé.

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