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9 Amazing Design-Resource Package Sites

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Every designer has their own preferred strategy for collecting resources. Some pluck brushes, fonts, and templates from different “stock photo sites” and public marketplaces. Others collect graphics from swipe files and forums around the web.

The never-ending desire for themes, visual content, and graphical components has prompted an influx of “design packages” to appear around the web. These all-in-one bundles, ranging from Envato Elements to Elegant Themes, promise a selection of valuable creative content in exchange for a single fee or monthly subscription. 

If you’ve been planning to seek out a few of these high-value subscriptions yourself, you’re in the right place! Today, we’re going to talk about some of the top designer resources available on the market. 

1. Envato Elements

Probably the best-known of all the designer resource marketplaces, Envato Elements advertises itself as the unlimited creative subscription. On this website, you’ll be able to access around 54 million creative assets through a single subscription. There are endless resources to unlock here, ranging from templates for your graphics to video templates, audio, and stock photos. 

Unlike most marketplaces, Envato gives you peace of mind by promising only the highest quality designs and graphics. Your content comes with quality assurance, and there are many PSD elements on the site, too, including stationery and web design templates, mock-ups, and more. Categories for your creative content include:

  • Stock photos
  • Video templates
  • Music
  • Sound effects
  • Graphic templates
  • Graphic designs
  • Presentation templates
  • Fonts
  • Photos
  • Web templates
  • Add-ons
  • CMS templates
  • WordPress resources
  • 3D content

Pricing: Pricing starts at only $16.50 per month, and this gives you unlimited access to everything on the site, including millions of digital assets and stock photos. You’ll also be able to use various courses and tutorials on the website too.

2. Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is an all-in-one creative resource for website themes. The solution offers you access to some of the most popular WordPress themes worldwide. 

You’ll also get access to a visual page builder as part of the kit. When you sign up for the Elegant Themes subscription, you get access to all of the resources within, including the Divi page builder and WordPress theme, Extra, Monarch, Bloom, and more. If you’re a site builder or work on building pages for clients, this is a must-have subscription. 

Elegant themes are currently the go-to resource for more than 750,000 people. It’s also home to some of the highest-rated themes around. Features include:

  • Divi WordPress page builder
  • Endless WordPress themes
  • Page editing tools
  • Monarch, Bloom, and Extra 
  • Hundreds of website packs
  • Lifetime premium support
  • Unlimited website usage

You can either pay for yearly access with Elegant Themes or pay a one-off price for lifetime access. For most, the lifetime option is likely to be a pretty appealing one. You don’t have to worry about renewing your subscription this way.

3. Template Monster

Template Monster offers the “ONE” web development membership, perfect for creative professionals. The MonsterONE offering is a complete unlimited subscription for all of your creative needs, with access to unlimited downloads, new weekly items, and simple licensing. You also get plenty of support from the Template Monster Team. 

A goldmine for anyone who needs to upgrade their selection of video and photo assets, graphic templates, HTML templates, or anything else, Template Monster is packed full of amazing resources for any project. You can also find new products from fresh contributors all the time, so the value of your membership is constantly increasing. 

Features include:

  • HTML templates
  • Presentation templates
  • CMS templates
  • Graphic templates
  • Video assets
  • 3D models
  • Audio assets
  • WordPress themes and plugins

Pricing starts at a tiny $6.90 per month, with a slight discount if you pay yearly. The lowest-cost package gives you access to all of your graphic and design assets, but you won’t get any eCommerce or WordPress themes. However, if you upgrade to the all-in-one package at $14.95 per month, you get a more extensive range of resources.

4. Creative Market

Creative Market is another one of those amazing all-in-one environments for creatives and designers. This marketplace is supplied by thousands of independent artists from around the globe, each offering a host of top-quality designs and resources. You’ll find photos, graphics, templates, fonts, web themes, and countless other tools on the Creative Market. 

If you’re looking for sheer size, it’s hard to find another company that competes with the Creative Market package. There are literally millions of ready-to-use products available, including Instagram templates, textures, and procreate brushes. 

You’ll have access to 3D content for your immersive website designs and a host of purchasing products. Although there’s no “subscription model” per-se for this marketplace, you can invest in a credit plan that allows you to set how much you spend on your assets each month. 

Features include:

  • Millions of creative products
  • Huge selection of independent designers
  • Brushes, textures, templates 
  • Fonts and web content available
  • Huge selection of stock photos
  • Convenient credit plan

The individual purchasing plan is likely to appeal more to people just beginning to test Creative Market for the first time. However, if you want a subscription experience, we’d recommend using the credit plan to estimate how many credits you’ll need each month.

5. Adobe Stock

All web designers know Adobe. The chances are that no matter what kind of creative work you do, you’ve developed a few skills with an Adobe product, from Photoshop to Lightroom. Adobe Stock is also one of the leading platforms for images on any topic. 

Although Adobe Stock doesn’t compete with other marketplaces in terms of versatility, it still stands out as one of the main resources for designers. There are hundreds of millions of stock images, videos, editorial content, and vectors. You can also access a premium collection of custom content and 3D resources too. The great thing about Adobe stock is that you can easily create your own libraries and download content into your Adobe software. Resources include:

  • Stock photos
  • Premium images
  • 3D content
  • Vectors and brushes
  • Stock video footage
  • Royalty-free templates
  • Vector art and illustrations
  • Stock music and audio
  • Integration with Adobe software

Adobe Stock is a little pricier than some of the other marketplaces available today, but it’s still pretty impressive. You’ll pay around $29.99 per month for 10 assets per month, or you can access a full annual plan at $199.99 per month. The amount you pay will depend on the quality of the resources that you want to download.

6. Motion Elements

If Elegant Themes is the go-to resource for designers searching for WordPress themes and web design solutions, Motion Elements is the top choice for “motion” content. Here, you’ll find videos, SFX content, images, music, 3D solutions, and so much more. 

Though it’s located in Asia, Motion Elements is available worldwide. The marketplace offers a monthly subscription plan wherever you can download unlimited products to suit your needs. There are tons of resources to choose from here, including After Effects elements, tools for Lottie, Premiere Pro, FCPX motion, DaVinci Resolve, and more. 

Features include:

  • After Effects elements
  • Premier Pro resources
  • FCPX Motion
  • DaVinci Resolve
  • Video and audio content
  • Stock images
  • SFX resources
  • 3D content

Pricing starts at $16.50 per month for an unlimited annual plan. This means that you can download as much as you like without having to pay any more. There is a small discount if you pay for a full year of access in one go.

7. Creative Tim

Simple but effective, Creative Tim is an amazing resource for front-end and back-end content bundles. You get fully coded UI tools here that can help you create various mobile and web apps and a huge selection of dashboards and templates. If you’re the kind of designer who likes working on top of things like Bootstrap, React, Angular, Laravel, Node.js, and more, then Creative Tim has you covered. 

This is one of the more technical creative resource packages that we’ve looked at so far, but it has a lot of value to offer. That’s probably why there are already more than 1.5 million people using the service. You can search through administration dashboards, UI kits, premium templates, free content, and design systems. Of course, everything is easy to access too. Features include:

  • Frontend design technologies for endless platforms
  • Soft design, light design, paper design, and more
  • Bootstrap content 
  • Resources and third-party tools
  • Complete design and web kits
  • UI kits and templates
  • Admin and dashboard templates

There’s a free version of Creative Tim available for beginners if you want to keep your costs low, but it’s generally much better to sign up for the premium subscription. You can also purchase kits and templates on a one-off basis if you prefer to start small. However, the best prices generally come from buying the bundles from Creative Tim’s subscription side. 

8. Storyblocks

Similar in style to Motion Elements, Storyblocks is a creative design resource for any designer getting involved with the video world. This website is home to some of the best free-to-use videos around, with simple licensing available at a click. Aside from high-quality videos and templates, you also get audio and sound effects as part of your subscription and images or illustrations. 

The unlimited access pass gives you all the resources you might want, from 4K and HD footage to music and sound effects, After Effects templates, and photos, vectors, or illustrations. You can also export a host of your own video projects with access to the Maker video editor, which allows you to make various changes to your custom video content. Features include:

  • HD and 4K video footage
  • After Effects Templates
  • Sound Effects and Music
  • Photos, Illustrations, and Vectors
  • Unlimited video exports
  • Video editor access
  • Licensing support

The standard all-access plan from Storyblocks starts at a very affordable £39 per month for all of the content you might want. In addition, everything you get here is unlimited, so you don’t have to worry about running out of credits. There’s also an enterprise option available if you want to share access to resources with your team.

9. Motion Array

Motion Array is an all-in-one video creation platform for those with an eye for visual content. This fantastic resource center is packed full of valuable tools, from Da Vinci Resolve templates to Adobe Premier Pro Content. As part of your subscription payment, you’ll get endless presets, audio effects, plugins, video footage, tutorials, and more. 

Though a little more expensive than some of the other premier subscription services on the market, Motion Array does offer a lot of content that you can’t get anywhere else. There’s an unlimited marketplace constantly updating with access to royalty-free footage, stock photos, music, and sound effects. You also get plugins built for Premiere Pro. Features include:

  • Adobe Exchange elements
  • Final Cut Pro and DaVinci resolve templates
  • Royalty-free music and sound effects
  • Stock footage and video
  • Photos and images
  • Time-saving integrations with your favorite apps
  • Portfolio site builder
  • Stock media requests

There’s a free subscription option for Motion Array, which you won’t find from most alternatives. This only gives you access to some basic stock photos and assets, but it’s a nice way to start. When you are ready to upgrade, you can pay $29.99 per month for the full stock media library, as well as requests for custom media assets and exclusive plugins.

Start Stocking Up on Designer Resources

As a designer or creative professional, keeping a constant stack of resources available is crucial to your ongoing productivity. Fortunately, there are tons of premium marketplaces out there today, making it easier to access everything you need. 

Whether you’re looking for full UI kits and templates, or you want some free-to-use images and videos for the website content you’re creating, there’s something for everyone. With most monthly subscription services available at a highly affordable price, you could even sign up for multiple sites at once. 

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Start Using a Smart DAM and Image Optimization Stack

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Asset management and website performance optimization are two of those unavoidable headaches faced by every website owner.

A digital asset management (DAM) platform can provide centralized asset repositories with intuitive dashboards to help you manage assets. On the other hand, an image CDN can help you get rid of that messy responsive syntax and provide dynamic asset optimization with huge performance boosts.

The problem is that website performance has become such a competitive factor that DAMs with other priorities tend to fall short. On the other hand, specialized image CDNs don’t solve the problems associated with image management, particularly within organizations.

With that in mind, I propose solving these problems for good by putting together image management and optimization stack using ImageEngine and Cloudinary. Instead of being a comparison between these two tools, this article describes the benefits of using them to complement each other.

Features and Asset Management Capabilities

As a DAM, Cloudinary provides you with a visual interface to store, manage, and edit your image and video assets. In that way, it’s not much different from any other professional image managing software such as Adobe Bridge, except that it’s an online, browser-based service.

Using the Media Library, you can upload, delete, and organize images in folders, for example. The visual image editor allows you to make advanced transformations and image touch-ups and see the results instantaneously using tools like sliders, dropdowns, etc. You can even chain transformations together for multi-layered effects.

Cloudinary also allows you to manipulate images and videos this way using their URL-based API.

Cloudinary has additional auxiliary features that make asset management easier (especially in organizations), such as backups, role-based multi-user admin, and feature extensions via third-party integrations and add-ons.

This is something most image CDNs don’t provide. Instead, they allow you to access and transform images using URL manipulation. Transformations are usually made using string-based parameters or directives. A serverless, headless DAM, if you will.

However, the advantage of using a dedicated image CDN like ImageEngine, is that it can usually provide enhanced asset optimization. ImageEngine, for example, is an intelligent image CDN that uses WURFL device detection to finely read the context an image is accessed from (device model, PPI, OS, browser, resolution, etc.) and then chooses the optimal image for that configuration.

This frees up website owners from having to do any additional optimization. This business logic is also built-in to all of their global PoP servers, and ImageEngine specifically delivers cache-hit ratios close to 100%. The following performance section will illustrate the difference this can make in practice.

Check out the key differences between ImageEngine and Cloudinary. And, for a deeper insight, see the comparison with other similar CDNs, like imgix and Cloudflare

Performance

Just to cover our bases and prove that this is an effective asset management and optimization stack, I’m also going to affirm it using a Lighthouse performance audit. Here is a quick summary of the results:

For this test, I built a web page with a tonne of images with overly large file sizes. In this first Lighthouse audit, I didn’t apply any optimization to the images. Here’s the result:

As you can see, we had some major problems when it came to the loading time of our assets. Overall, the page took more than 10 seconds to load. One of Google’s crucial user-centric performance metrics, LCP, scored a miserable 7.5s. Lighthouse suggested that some of the main problems encountered were the asset file size, inefficient cache policies, using non-optimal image formats, and improperly sized images.

Both Cloudinary and ImageEngine are supposed to address all of these factors with their auto image optimization. In the next audit, I used the same page and content but served my images via Cloudinary:

As you can see, there is improvement in most factors. FCP is now in the green, and both the Speed index and LCP times have almost halved. Even TTI and CLS improved slightly. That being said, it’s still nowhere near optimal, and we’re still falling short of the all-important 3-second loading time ceiling.

So, finally, let’s do another Lighthouse audit – this time using ImageEngine on top of Cloudinary. Here are the results:

With ImageEngine, I finally scored in the green with 95. All the metrics that have to do with the sheer speed at which image content loads improved. The Speed Index and LCP, which is the most important, improved dramatically. CLS scored worse, but this typically varies from test to test.

You can find another and more extensive breakdown of the performance and pricing comparison here.

Transformations, Bandwidth Utilization, and Cost

Cloudinary’s pricing plans work on a credit-based system. Starting with the free account, you get 25 credits/month. Each credit can be used for 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of net viewing bandwidth. The other two packages cost $99 for 225 credits and $249 for 600 credits, respectively.

You should plan to generate a minimum of 5 transformations per image. In effect, that limits you to around 200 images with the free plan, excluding whatever manual transformations you make.

ImageEngine’s Basic plan costs $49 and provides you with 100 GB of Smart Bytes. Smart Bytes are based on optimized image content and translate to roughly 400-500 GB of raw images.

So, with Cloudinary, you have to compromise between bandwidth and storage usage as well as the number of transformations you can make. Transformations for Cloudinary are counted as they are dynamically generated on-demand.

However, if you use ImageEngine for optimization, you can switch off Cloudinary’s auto-optimization. When a new image variant is needed, it will be generated and delivered via ImageEngine. Considering variant count isn’t limited by ImageEngine, this will drastically cut down on the number of credits you’ll need to spend on transformations.

Effectively, that means you could use the bulk of your Cloudinary credits purely for storage and specific transformations. For example, advanced cropping, applying effects, or color adjustments. These are, after all, the main functions of a DAM.

With this setup, ImageEngine’s Basic plan and Cloudinary’s free plan should be adequate for most websites, saving around $50 a month.

How to Implement Cloudinary with ImageEngine

Signing up for Both Services

As it will house all of your image assets, the logical place to start would be to sign up with Cloudinary.

Create a (free) account, and make sure to take note of your “cloud name” during the setup wizard. This will be the name of your designated storage location on the Cloudinary platform and is usually a garbled string like di2zgnxh0 by default. However, you can change this to something more meaningful.

Once you’ve signed up, you can start uploading your image assets and creating different versions/transformations of them. Setting up Cloudinary integration on a CMS, like WordPress, is usually straightforward. Just indicate the CMS you’ll be using, copy the API key, install the plugin, and activate it.

Next, sign up for a free trial with ImageEngine. There will also be a short setup wizard during which you will:

  1. Provide ImageEngine with the website where your images will be delivered.
  2. Supply your image origin (in this case, your Cloudinary web folder). For now, you can only add the Cloudinary, e.g., res.cloudinary.com.
  3. Get your ImageEngine image-serving domain, e.g., {randomstring}.cdn.imgeng.in

When in your ImageEngine dashboard, you’ll see this domain listed under “Engines” as well as an entry for Cloudinary under “Origins.” Edit the latter and under “Advanced,” add your Cloudinary folder to the “PATH” field.

That’s it, you should now be able to store and manage images via Cloudinary and serve them via the ImageEngine CDN.

Dynamically Loading Specific Image Variants

Let’s take a look at a use case for loading different transformations of individual images on your site. This example will showcase how you can use Cloudinary’s advanced image editing tools to transform images while still reaping the optimization rewards of using ImageEngine as your image CDN.

A popular practice today is to use rounded images for team, client, or profile portraits. Using Cloudinary, you can load this transformation using the following URL:

https://res.cloudinary.com/myimages/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/profile.jpg

This will resize the image to 400 by 400px, focus on the face, and apply the maximum amount of radial cropping around it – to a width of 200px.

The same image can then be accessed via your ImageEngine delivery engine simply by swapping out the domain:

https://images.myimageengine.com.imgeng.in/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/profile.jpg

NOTE: I added my Cloudinary folder designation (“myimages”) as the path to my image origin. With that config, I don’t need to include it every time I use the image URL.

For example, you can set up the origin like this:

And, then under advanced:

If I specifically wanted to load the profile picture in WebP format (for transparency support, for example), I could add the ImageEngine directive f_webp:

https://images.myimageengine.com.imgeng.in/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/?imgeng=/f_webp/profile.jpg

ImageEngine and Cloudinary – The Wrap Up

Both ImageEngine and Cloudinary are superb platforms that can make managing image and video assets easier and improve your website maintenance. However, both services have their specialty in which they outperform each other.

For ImageEngine, it’s delivering blisteringly fast image loading times in next-gen formats and with a minimal loss of visual quality.

For Cloudinary, it’s providing a visual interface to organize, store, and edit your image and video assets.

As a further incentive, letting each of these services handle what they’re best at can lead to lowering your long-term operating costs.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

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Setting Advanced Options of SQL Connection Pools

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In this article, we will cover the details of how Zato SQL connection pools can be configured to take advantage of features and options specific to a particular driver or to the SQLAlchemy library.

SQL Connection Pools

First, let’s review the basic Zato Dashboard form that creates a new SQL connection pool.

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25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021

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Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day.

Here’s what new for designers this month:

April’s Top Picks

Charts.css

Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts. It’s accessible, customizable, responsive, and open source. There’s a quick start option and available source code to work with.

Haikei SVG Generator

Haikei is a web app that helps you generate SVG shapes, backgrounds, and patterns in all types of shapes to use in projects. Everything can be exported into the tools you are already using for easy integration, and every element is customizable. The tool is free right now – no credit card needed – and you get access to 15 generators and can export in SVG and PNG format. A premium option is on the way, and you can sign up to get notified for access.

Fluid Space Calculator

Fluid Space Calculator helps you create a related space system and export the CSS to implement it. The calculator allows you to add space value pairs and multipliers and see the impact on the screen before snagging the related code. It’s great for determining how things will look in different viewports and for creating custom space pairs.

Night Eye WordPress Plugin

Night Eye WordPress Plugin helps you create a dark mode option for your WordPress website with ease. It’s completely customizable, schedulable, and one of those things that users are starting to expect. The plugin has free and paid versions – the only difference is a link to credit the developer.

3 Productivity Boosters

Macro

Macro is a supercharged checklist app for recurring processes. It’s designed to help teams document, assign, track, and automate for maximum efficiency. Now is the time to test this tool because it is free in public beta.

Writex.io

Writex.io is a free writing app that uses AI and smart features to help you write more efficiently. It can check readability as you write, make suggestions, check spelling, and allows you to work with versioning. All the settings are customizable, so you can get help and suggestions when you want them and avoid things you don’t want.

Taloflow

Taloflow, which is in beta, is a tool that helps you find the top cloud and dev tools for your use case. This is designed to be a time-saving solution to finding the right infrastructure and API products for your work.

8 Kits with Illustrations and User Interface Elements

Skribbl

Skribbl is a collection of free, hand-drawn illustrations in a light and fun style. The black and white sketches are friendly, and the collection keeps growing. Plus, the illustrators are allowing them to be used free for any use.

Mobile Chat Kit

Mobile Chat Kit is a free starter kit for building apps in Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. It includes more than 50 screen options with mapped-out flows for a quick-start project.

Flowchart.fun

Flowchart.fun is exactly what the name implies. The app allows you to type, create nodes, and link elements to develop simple flow charts quickly. Then you can alter shape and size with drag and drop. Export it for use as an SVG, JPG, or PNG.

Shuffle

Shuffle is a marketplace packed with UI libraries to help you with a variety of digital projects. There are more than 1,500 pre-built components to choose from with professional designs. This premium tool comes with a monthly subscription or lifetime license.

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack is a set of icons with fun colors in three-dimensional shapes that you can use to represent different crypto elements. The pack includes 55 #D icons in PNG and BLEND formats.

Stratum UI Kit for Figma

Stratum UI Kit for Figma includes nine free screens that are ready to use. Options include API documentation, Kanban, document, data dashboard, ecommerce product list, ecommerce product options, payments spreadsheet, cloud storage, and newsfeed.

Conic.css

Conic.css is a collection of simple gradients that you can browse and then click to copy the code into your CSS to use them in projects. It’s quick and easy while using trendy color options.

Artify Illustrations

Artify Illustrations is a Figma plugin that allows you to access more than 5,000 SVG and PNG illustrations within the app. It’s got a built-in search feature, everything is high-resolution, and the huge library includes various styles.

2 Tutorials

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components is an amazingly comprehensive guide from Smashing Magazine with everything you need to know about accessible components. From tabs to tables to toggles to tooltips, you’ll find it all here and learn how to use it the right way.

Grid CheatSheet in 2021

Grid CheatSheet in 2021 is a useful guide of everything you can do with CSS Grid. Plus, it has plenty of fun illustrations and an accompanying video.

8 Fresh and Fun Fonts

Athina

Athina is a modern display serif with beautiful connector strokes. The free version is a demo, and there’s a full family that you can buy.

Brique

Brique is a free (personal and commercial) display font with a wide stance and uppercase character set. The letters have a lot of personality and a readable configuration.

Code Next

Code Next is a great geometric sans serif with a full family of styles. Including two variable fonts. It’s highly readable and would work for almost any application.

Inter

Inter is a simple and functional sense serif family with everything from extra light to heavy weights. The extra character personality makes this a fun and functional font option.

Nothing Clean

Nothing Clean is a fun grunge-type option. It’s an all uppercase character set with alternates.

Playout

Playout is a fun, hand-drawn style typeface with interesting glyphs and alternate characters. The most fun feature might be the pawprint characters in the demo set.

Rockford Sans

Rockford Sans is a geometric typeface with subtly rounded edges. It has eight weights and italics. With its large x-height and round features, it’s legible and friendly. It’s suited to cover a wide variety of tasks from editorial to brand design and advertising.

SpaceType

SpaceType is a fun and funky typeface in regular and expanded styles. The stretched letterforms make interesting alternates for display purposes.

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Stark Launches Public Library For Accessibility

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Inclusive design is all about designing sites with everyone in mind instead of designing for your own preferences. It’s an essential component in a professional-grade site and the cornerstone of a successful project.

Accessibility (A11y for short) is the technical branch of inclusive design. Accessibility is a science: it knows what markup is required to make the text available to the visually impaired; it knows the minimum button size for someone with limited motor control; it knows how complex navigation can be for someone with cognitive dysfunction. Accessibility is the engine that powers an inclusive design.

Because accessibility is so complex, it takes a huge wealth of knowledge to do it well. Luckily for you and me, there’s now a free resource you can use to brush up on your skills and improve the ROI of your site.

Stark has just acquired a11yresource and relaunched it as the Stark Public Library — reportedly the largest accessibility resource on the web. The library contains around a thousand different resources. You’ll find blog articles, checklists, formal courses, tools, links to web standards, and a whole lot more. As the library grows, the expectation is that Stark will add new features aimed at fostering a community.

Stark is a suite of accessibility tools for designers that integrates with XD, Sketch, and Figma. It’s free to use the basic package, and the commercial plan is $60 per year. The Public Library is free for everyone to access.

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15 Useful Tools & Resources Worth Checking Out

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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.

Amelia can service multiple business locations.

6. Uncode – Creative Multiuse & WooCommerce WordPress Theme

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.

The 8b website builder:

  • 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.

XStore’s key features include:

  • 100+ customizable ready-to-go shops;
  • $500+ worth of premium WordPress plugins;
  • A Single Product builder and a Header builder.

14. Goodiewebsite

GOODIE’s web development platform assists clients who are eager to get a professionally-coded website quickly up and running.

GOODIE’s services focus on:

  • Web designers seeking a development partner;
  • 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.

Source

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How to Draw Directions on a Map in React Native

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Today we’re going to draw directions route on a map in React Native, showcasing the path between two different locations. We’re going to make use of react-native-maps which is a powerful library, allowing us to draw polylines between multiple coordinates. We are also going to use Google Directions API in order to fetch precise directions routes between two coordinates.

It is important to note that the react-native-maps library as of the time of this writing only officially supports the polyline module on the latest React Native version due to the increasing changes in the React Native ecosystem that are not easy to keep up with.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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27 Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2021

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Looking for something new to get you excited about design work? This list is packed with all kinds of goodies to help you feel inspired and ready to work.

Here’s what new for designers this month.

Top Picks for March

Same Energy

Same Energy, in beta, is a visual search engine. You can search with a minimum number of words or an image. The website is designed to help you find art, photography, decoration ideas, and practically anything. It uses deep learning and algorithms to create images on the home page, and you can create feeds in the same manner. The coolest part of this tool is that it tries to match the visual and artistic style you ask for with image mood and objects.

SVG Repo

SVG Repo is a collection of more than 300,000 SVG vectors and icons that you can download and use in projects for free (even commercial use). The site has a powerful search tool to help you find the right image, and the platform is designed so that you can contribute.

Penpot

Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform for cross-domain teams. It is a web-based tool that isn’t dependent on any operating system and works with open web standards. It’s designed to be zippy and interactive so your team can work fast.

Directual

Directual is a no-code platform for building scalable apps using a visual interface. (Perfect for designers with less development experience.) It includes integrations with other popular tools and is free to use while figuring out how the app works and how you can make it fit your business goals.

HTML Boilerplates

HTML Boilerplates helps you start web projects by generating a custom HTML boilerplate that you can download. Just choose the elements you want to include and then copy and paste the code into your editor.

6 Productivity Boosters

Rows

Rows is a spreadsheet tool with built-in web integrations that’s made for team collaboration. It works with other tools you already use, such as Google Analytics, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, and so many others. Without scripts, you can use it to automate workflows, analyze data, share dashboards, and build forms and tools that make work simpler.

Form.Taxi

Form.taxi is a premium web-based form tool. You can create web forms without code or programming and connect them to your website. The tool then stores information, filters for spam, and notifies you of form submissions.

Verbz

Verbz is a voice productivity app that allows you to create notes, assign tasks, make announcements, run standups, or chat. Talk or type, listen or read. It works as your own voice assistant for teams. It’s available in Beta from the App Store, and there’s a waitlist for Android users.

Flameshot

Flameshot is a tool for grabbing screenshots. It has a customizable appearance, is easy to use, and lets you draw and edit screenshots as you work.

Kitemaker

Kitemaker is a collaboration tool for development processes. It can help you keep track of everything from tools such as Slack, Discord, Figma, and Github in one place. It helps you structure projects and keep discussions about work moving forward in one place.

This Code Works

This Code Works is a place to save code snippets that work for when you need them again. You can group and organize snippets and share with others. You might think of it as the “Pinterest of code.”

3 Icons and User Interface Elements

Sensa Emoji

Sensa Emoji is a collection of common emoji icons that you can use in your materials. Every element is fully vector and free to use.

Google Fonts Icons

Google Fonts now supports icons, starting with Material Icons. Choose between outlined, filled, rounded, sharp, or two-tone options in the open-source library.

Toolbox Neumorphism Generator

Toolbox Neumorphism Generator is a design tool that helps developers to generate CSS in the soft UI /neomorphism style for the elements with real-time output.

3 Tutorials and Demos

An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions

An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions explains everything you need to know about this great animation tool for website designers. This tutorial digs in with code and examples to help you create more polished animations and is designed for anyone from beginners to experienced designers with some pro tips throughout.

About Us Pop-Out Effect

The About Us Pop-Out Effect adds a special element to any team or contact page with a nifty pop animation. Each person seems to lift out of the circle frame in this pen by Mikael Ainalem.

Interactive Particles Text Create with Three.js

Interactive Particles Text Create with Three.js is a web element you could play with all day. Text shifts into particles and follows mouse movement in a fluid motion in the pen by Ricardo Sanprieto.

10 Fresh Fonts and Text Tools

Bitmap Fonts

Bitmap Fonts is a collection of various bitmap typefaces all pulled and stored in a single location. This is the perfect solution if you are looking for a bitmap option.

Uniwidth Typefaces

Uniwidth Typefaces for Interface Design is another collection of fonts for a specific purpose – here universal widths for interface design. Uniwidth fonts are proportionally-spaced typefaces where every character occupies the same space across different cuts or weights. This is both a tutorial on the type style as well as font collection.

Bubble Lemon

Bubble Lemon is a typeface for projects with a childlike feel. With an outline and regular style, the thick bubble letters look like some of the sketches you may have done in grade school.

Core Font

Core Font is an open-source project with a funky and modern style. It has a full upper- and lower-case character set, numerals, and a few punctuation marks.

GHEA Aram

GHEA Aram is a superfamily with a Central European flair, according to the type designer. The premium typeface includes everything from light to black italic and even some Armenian ligatures.

Make Wonderful Moments Duo

Make Wonderful Moments Duo is a script and sans serif font pair with a lighthearted feel and highly readable character set. The regular (sans serif) only has uppercase characters.

Ribheud

Ribheud is a slab-style display font with a heavy look and strong presence. What makes it interesting is the left-outline/shadow on each character.

Rose Knight

Rose Knight has an old-style feel that can take on multiple moods, depending on supporting design elements. All of the characters are uppercase with alternates. It could make a fun branding option.

The Glester

The Glester is a beautiful premium typeface in a calligraphic style. The most interesting element of this typeface is all of the extra decorations that allow you to change individual characters (380 glyph alternates).

Velatus

Velatus is a vintage-style typeface with plenty of swashes and flourishes that make it unique. It comes with 157 characters and 96 glyphs.

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Developing and Using Angular Libraries

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In the AngularAndSpring project charts are displayed. To display the charts I have developed the ngx-simple-charts library. The design goal is to be D3.js based, have a typesafe Angular API, and be so simple and small that it can be migrated fast to new Angular versions. Currently the library supports line charts, bar charts might be supported in the future. 

Creating and Configuring the Angular Library

The Angular CLI can generate a library shell with this command: ng generate library <library_name>

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