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How to Scale Your Design Process and Improve Handoff

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It’s something every design team dreams about – a better design process and handoff procedure. Your design team is not alone if you are looking for a better solution.

Imagine what your workflow would look like if you could forgo the struggles of image-based technology, design and handoff with accurate components that have interactive features. Projects in the design phase will look more like final products and, most importantly, interact like final products. 

Let’s imagine a new design process together.

Challenges of an Image-Based Design Process

Here’s what we all know – image-based design tools provide pictures of components in the visual form but lack the interactivity and conditions that exist in the end-product. There’s not a high level of functional fidelity there, and it can cause confusion among design teams and rework.

These tools require you to redraw the fundamental components and design with boxes and rectangles, which takes too much time and can create a disconnect between the design and development teams. 

Further, you don’t fully maximize the potential of a design system because of inconsistencies between code-powered systems that developers use and these image-based systems for designers. There’s an innate gap between maintaining the environments and creating consistency in components. 

The final and maybe most difficult challenge with an image-based design process is in usability testing. You just can’t test an image the way you can working components. If the prototype is not interactive enough, you lose valuable feedback in the testing process. Functional fidelity is a must-have design and development tool in 2022. 

Iress, market-leading financial software, had many of these same problems in its design system process. You can probably relate to its story, which includes a designer and engineer who aren’t entirely on the same page, hit the deadline and have to deliver, and then get customer feedback. The result was a lot of extra headaches and work. 

But there is a better way: Import all user interface components into a code-powered design system in sync with a design tool so that your team can work in harmony to build, scale, and handoff projects with ease. 

Scale Design With Accurate Components

Here’s what most design and development teams want en route to building products: Accurate components with built-in interactivity, states, and conditions. No redrawing boxes and rectangles; no trying to figure out what states and interaction should be.

And if you can do it with ten times the speed and agility? Now you’re really in business. 

“It used to take us two to three months just to do the design. Now, with UXPin Merge, teams can design, test, and deliver products in the same timeframe,” said Erica Rider, Senior Manager for UX at PayPal. “Faster time to market is one of the most significant changes we’ve experienced using Merge.”

The time and workflow savings come from the ability to maintain only one environment as a product team. Rather than image-based tools, a code-powered design system that will push updates to components as the design evolves is the modern way to work. This workflow can also eliminate duplicate documentation so that your team has a single source of truth for whole product teams. 

Now you can be more agile in the design process and scale. And as Rider hinted at, there is a solution already available in UXPin Merge. 

Scalability with accurate design components has other benefits as well. 

Teams can onboard people faster because the design system is in the design tool. There’s less searching for answers with drag and drop-ready building blocks. New team members will find more success and be more valuable to the team quicker due to fewer inconsistencies and errors. 

Testing also gets a boost as you scale with a single source of truth. You can actually create better usability tests with a high-fidelity, functional version of the prototype, allowing users to leave more valuable and detailed feedback that can improve your product in the early stages. 

Better Handoffs Start Here

As you imagine a better design process, take it one step further. Better handoffs are a goal for most teams. 

An interactive component-based design tool can eliminate the need for multiple iterations of the same meeting to explain how a prototype works. Everyone can see and interact with it for themselves with accurate, true components that ensure the prototype works the same as the product. 

Designers will feel more like their vision is making it into the final product, and developers have a better idea of how to work. Everyone has the exact same components written in code. Thanks to the single source of truth, devs can speed up as they build the product because they start with components that include production-ready code.

A typical design to developer handoff might have multiple steps: Create vector design elements, create a model for interactions, and then send the prototype with documentation. Not to mention the meetings that are required to make sure everyone is on the same page.

In a model with interactive component elements, the developer handoff is fast and easy; they create a prototype with true components and all the built-in properties. The developer copies the JSX code and pastes it into his tool to build the final product. All the component properties and their coded interactions already exist in the source code. This is possible because the source of truth is the code itself, the source code.

Quick Tool Solution and Technical Use

This solution to this common challenge is not somewhere in the future; it’s already here.

UXPin, a code-based design tool, has Merge technology, which allows you to bring all interactive components into UXPin. Then you can use your own, or the open-source library with the ready-made building blocks to get products ready faster.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with Merge by UXPin:

  • Integrate your developer’s storybook to use it as a single source of truth (works for all frameworks)
  • Import design system components from a dev’s Git repository, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, or others (works with React)
  • Work with the built-in MUI library
  • Add the npm component package to UXPin on your own (no developer required)
  • Design with the confidence that your work can be ideally reflected by developers
  • Create and share a library of interactive components

Summary 

Say bye-bye to redrawing rectangles – build more accurate prototypes easier and end-products faster with Merge by UXPin.

Now is the time to solve one of your biggest design challenges while upgrading and scaling the design process and improving handoffs. 

Merge by UXPin is user-friendly and made for scalable projects of almost any size. The line between design and development blurs with quicker product release and a fully-interactive solution. Request access today.

 

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

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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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GitOps Takes DevOps Teams To Higher Levels of Maturity

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Stream-Aligned and Platform Teams

The 2021 State of DevOps report identifies two types of teams as the way high-maturity teams organize themselves: stream-aligned teams and platform teams. The idea of a « platform » or « internal developer platform » is fundamental to GitOps. While a GitOps pipeline begins with committing code to a Git repository, it is made possible by a platform that paves the way for that new code to move in an automated way from the repository to a production environment.

The platform is how the Ops team provisions resources such as cloud services, storage, service meshes, and security and monitoring tools in a ready-made template. These templates are created even before they are needed and made available to any developer within the organization. The big shift due to this is that developers need not raise a ticket for the resources they need: they can pick a ready-made template and deploy their code in a matter of minutes. From the Ops side, they have peace of mind knowing they have configured this template and that it follows security protocol by default. It does not require developers to separately configure security for deployments.

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What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product?

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“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.

Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.

The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?

Defining the Minimum Viable Product: An Introduction

The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:

  • Introduce new products into the market as quickly as possible;
  • Test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to product development;
  • Create a competitive product with the use of frequent upgrades;
  • Learn what resonates with the target market of the company;
  • Explore different versions of the same product.

Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.

Defining an MVP: What your Minimum Viable Product Isn’t

When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.

However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:

  • A prototype: Prototypes are often mentioned alongside MVPs because they can help with early-stage product validation. However, prototypes are generally not intended for customers to use. The “minimum” version of a viable product still needs to be developed enough for clients and users to put it to the test and provide feedback.
  • A minimum marketable product: An MVP is a learning vehicle that allows companies to create various iterations of an item over time. However, a minimum marketable product is a complete item, ready to sell, with features or “selling points” the company can highlight to differentiate the item from the competition.
  • Proof of concept: This is another similar but distinct idea from MVP. Proof of concept items test an idea you have to determine whether it’s attainable. There usually aren’t any customers involved in this process. Instead, companies create small projects to assess business solutions’ technical capabilities and feasibility. You can sometimes use a proof of concept before moving on to an MVP.

Finding the Minimum in your MVP

When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.

However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.

So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?

1. Decide on Your Goal or Purpose

First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.

Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.

2. Make a List of Features

Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:

  • Competitor analysis: What do your competitors already offer in this category, and where are the gaps in their service or product?
  • User research: Which features or functionalities are most important to your target audience? How can you make your solution stand out from the crowd?
  • Industry knowledge: As an expert in your industry, you should have some basic understanding of what it will take to make your product “usable.”

3. Create Your Iterations

Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.

If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.

Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.

Understanding the “Minimum Viable Product”

Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.

When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:

  • Groupon: Groupon is a pretty huge discount and voucher platform today, operating in companies all around the world. However, it started life as a simple minimum viable product promoting the services of local businesses and offering exclusive deals for a short time. Now Groupon is constantly evolving and updating its offerings.
  • Airbnb: Beginning with the use of the founders’ own apartment, Airbnb became a unicorn company giving people the opportunity to list places for short-term rental worldwide. The founders rented out their own apartment to determine whether people would consider staying in someone else’s home before eventually expanding.
  • Facebook: Upon release, Facebook was a simple social media tool used for connecting with friends. Profiles were basic, and all members were students of Harvard University. The idea quickly grew and evolved into a global social network. Facebook continues to learn from the feedback of its users and implement new features today.

Creating Your Minimum Viable Product

Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.

Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.

Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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5 Creative Management Trends to Watch in 2022

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Yesterday’s creativity won’t keep pace with tomorrow’s requirements; businesses need speed and agility without sacrificing creative quality.

“The creativity that was needed in the past is not the creativity that is needed today,” according to Matthew Rayback, a creative director at Adobe. He’s not talking about the function of creativity but rather about the process of creative management in a marketing context. 

What is needed today? Speed and agility without sacrificing quality. 

Why? Because the pace of change has accelerated. As Rex Salisbury, a deal partner for the venture firm a16z noted early in the pandemic, “Businesses of all kinds are experiencing two years’ worth of digitization compressed into months.”

This accelerated digital transformation has put pressure on marketing teams to turn campaigns around faster. In turn, that places pressure on creative teams to generate the requisite creative for those campaigns. Leaders need to sharpen their awareness of the unfolding creative management trends to keep pace. To that end, below are five such trends to watch in 2022. 

1. In-House Creative Teams Continue to Grow

Companies have been building in-house creative teams for the better part of a decade. A 2018 study by Forrester Research and the In-House Agency Forum (IHAF) found the number of in-house teams has grown 22% in the last ten years or so. As The Wall Street Journal reported, more than half of advertisers (64%) have shifted their creative organizations to an in-house team.  

According to a more recent version of that same study, the in-housing movement didn’t stop throughout the pandemic. It revealed, “80% of respondents said they have brought more marketing assignments in-house since the onset of the pandemic, with 50% saying the increase was directly triggered by the events of the past two years.”

Businesses seem well-satisfied with the results because the urge to in-house is poised to grow beyond creative teams. For example, a recent survey by the customer intelligence company Axciom found about 50% of respondents believe the “in-housing is currently a top marketing objective, and 40% expect it will remain a top priority in the coming years.”

2. Outside Agencies Hired for Specialized Skills

Despite the in-housing trend, there is still opportunity for agencies, consultants, and freelancers, particularly those with specialized skills. Even the consumer-packaged goods giant Proctor & Gamble, a leading example of brands bringing marketing and creative teams in-house, still needs outside service providers.

Indeed, while in-house creative teams produce the lion’s share of creative work, the vast majority (86%) also continue to partner with agencies and freelancers; according to our own research, published in our 2021 Creative Management Report, which was facilitated by Lytho (formerly inMotionNow) and based on a survey of 400 creatives and marketers. 

When the survey asked creatives why they hire outside resources, the top reason was access to specialized skills (60%). That was followed in a distant second by a need for increased capacity (44%), help with developing strategy (24%), and, lastly, to get work done faster (20%). 

“It is very unusual for an in-house team to have no outside resources that they lean on,” wrote Alex Blum of Blum Consulting Partners, Inc. in a written assessment of the survey results.

He says there are two primary ways to partner with agencies. “First, for overflow capacity. There is always a need for more creative resources, and agencies can offer that flexibility without the cost of maintaining larger teams,” he wrote. “Second, in-house teams can divide areas of ownership with an agency based on the skill sets they have in-house.”

3. The Creative Process Evolves

Marketing today is dominated by an insatiable thirst for fresh content, produced and polished by creative teams. The demand for that content continues to explode. 

What does this portend for creative teams? Despite adding headcount, creative requests exceed the creative team’s capacity to produce it – even as lead times shrink. Matthew Rayback, the creative director at Adobe, suggested the creative process must evolve. 

He likens creatives to an auto factory, where “creatives used to be the assembly line to make a single car.” However, today, creatives are tasked with creating more cars, each with unique adjustments such as personalization. 

“The assembly line we built can’t accommodate that speed or volume,” he says. So the whole factory – the entire creative process – must be overhauled to adapt. 

4. Quantitative Measurement Drives Creative Priorities

Current methods for measuring the value of creative teams center on outputs. That is to say, the metrics tracked tend to quantify the number of creative projects in progress, the rounds of review, and the number of projects completed over time. 

These metrics are important, but alone they are insufficient. A complementary way to prioritize large volumes of creative requests is focusing on those tasks most likely to move the business needle. The barrier to achieving this is that most creatives aren’t kept informed as to the outcomes of marketing campaigns fueled by their creative efforts. This must change.

With the growing demand for content, the margin of error for applying creative resources to projects that don’t correlate to business results shrinks. Marketing organizations must build a feedback loop that brings quantitative results back to the creative team. In turn, creative teams must learn to use the data to drive their work priorities in collaboration with marketing. 

5. Creative Resource Management Becomes Essential

Resource management is both a leadership concept and technology (or a combination of technologies). It’s a means to plan, track, collaborate and measure creative operations, including people, processes, and budgets.  

Traditionally, planning and tracking of all things creative and marketing occurred in a spreadsheet. It works well when the future is generally predictable – yet cliché as it may be to say it – we are living in a state of uncertainty. 

Like many trends over the last 18-24 months, the global pandemic “forced virtual experiences, disrupted marketing channels and campaigns, and accelerated companies’ transition to digital marketing,” according to Forrester. The research firm calls resource management “essential” because it helps move “planning from static spreadsheets to a dynamic and real-time environment.” 

Final Thoughts

Yogi Berra paraphrased an old Danish proverb when he said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Even so, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already underway, and these five trends are good examples. More than just watching them, creative and marketing leaders should take steps now to get ahead of them.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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How to Use AR in Brand Experiences

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AR (Augmented Reality) continues to build as one of the most exciting technology innovations to appear in recent years. More accessible than virtual reality experiences, since no specialist headset is required, AR has quickly emerged as a crucial tool for building unique experiences.

Although interest in AR as a tool for customer interaction and experience has been growing, demand has skyrocketed in recent years. In addition, since the pandemic of 2020, companies no longer have the same in-person opportunities available to create meaningful relationships with customers.

To ensure a client is fully invested in your brand today, you need to find a new way of building that emotional link. As an immersive, experience-led solution for brand building, AR can improve a company’s chance of earning brand loyalty. What’s more, around 71% of consumers say they would shop more often if AR technology were available.

The question is, how do you develop your own AR branded experiences?

Creating Branded Experiences in AR

For an augmented reality experience to be effective, you need more than just the right technology; you need a strategy for how you’re going to engage, empower, and support your target audience.

The best AR branded experiences aren’t just multi-dimensional advertisements; they’re tools intended to engage, inform, and entertain your audience in a new, highly immersive realm. Before you can begin to work on your AR app, you need to think about what kind of branded experience you want to develop. Here are some excellent examples to get you started.

AR Try-Before-You-Buy Interactions

Globally, ecommerce sales are growing at an astronomical pace. Going forward, there’s no question that the digital landscape will become the new platform for shopping and transactions. But, unfortunately, there are some limitations when it comes to shopping online.

While the right website developer or designer can create a stunning site packed with information about a product or service, there’s only so much that a webpage can do. Delivering a truly immersive user experience for your target audience involves replicating the kind of in-person experiences they would get in a digital format.

The best example of this is the “try-before-you-buy” AR app. Most commonly seen in the clothing and beauty industries, this app allows customers to use AR filters to see what everything from a new hair color to a shade of lipstick might look like on them. The experience is highly accessible and engaging because it builds on customers’ familiarity with filters and similar effects on social media channels like TikTok and Instagram.

A popular example of an AR try-before-you-buy experience comes from Sephora, with the “Virtual Artist” application. Originally installed within the Sephora app in 2016, the technology uses Modiface to scan and track the eyes and lips of the customer using a smartphone camera. After that, the system can overlay eye-shadows, lipsticks, and other products, to give the customer idea of what they might look like in real-life.

As AR applications become more mainstream, new solutions are emerging for companies concerned about things like privacy. Consumers who don’t want to load their image into a system for try-before-you-buy experiences can still access the benefits of AR with the right tools.

For instance, ASOS created the new “See My Fit” service in 2020 to help customers shop for clothing during the pandemic. The solution allows users to see what clothing will look like on a model with a similar body type to their own. This helps to show shoppers how products realistically look in similar bodies while reducing the risk of returns.

ASOS certainly saw the benefit of this innovation, with an increase in revenues of around 24% in the six months leading to the end of February 2021.

AR for Product Catalogs and Visualization

We all remember what it was like to flick through the glossy pages of a magazine or catalog for our favorite stores. Unfortunately, in today’s digital age, these paper brochures are far from the most efficient tool for shopping. We need a more digital experience that allows us to select products, see what they will look like, and add them to our virtual baskets.

One excellent example of how companies can use AR to improve the overall shopping and visualization experience for customers comes from Home Depot. The brand was one of the first to upgrade its user experience strategy with a new Project Color application in 2015. Although this app might seem a little outdated by today’s standards, it’s still an excellent insight into what companies can do to improve their customer’s brand experience.

The Home Depot app used AR to scan a room and implement the color a customer chose for their walls into that space, considering things like furniture, shadow, and lighting, to allow for a more realistic insight. The app has updated significantly over the years to become increasingly immersive.

Visualizing products in a real, contextual space is hugely beneficial for a customer’s purchasing experience and perception of a specific brand. If your customer sees buying the right product from you as simple and convenient, they’re more likely to stick with your organization long-term.

The product catalog and visualization approach to AR in brand development has grown increasingly popular in the last two years, perhaps driven by the demand for more online shopping opportunities. In 2020, Wayfair announced the release of an updated version of its “View in Room” app, which now uses LiDAR technology to provide enhanced utility when shopping for home products.

According to Wayfair, the LiDAR technology and “RealityKit” software give customers a more authentic and realistic view, so they can make better decisions about what they want to buy. According to Apple, customers are 11 times more likely to buy an item of furniture if they have seen how it looks in their home using AR.

Creating Unique Brand Experiences

AR is one of the technology innovations in our current landscape, helping blur the lines between digital worlds and reality. In a future defined by the rise of the metaverse, AR could have a significant impact on how we spend our time in a more virtual world.

Already, companies are taking advantage of this, with things like virtual pop-up shops and temporary experiences intended to differentiate their brands. For instance, Machine-A, a London-based concept store, is usually committed to showcasing contemporary fashion designs.

When it became apparent that London fashion week for 2020 would be virtual, Machine-A came up with a virtual boutique enabled by AR. By scanning a QR code embedded into billboards and posters across London, users could enter the boutique virtually from their phones and experience the designs themselves.

The concept created by Machine-A has opened the minds of countless business brand teams and marketers to new methods of increasing engagement and awareness among customers. In a world where you can’t necessarily interact with your top customers in person, providing them with a new and immersive experience can be a great way to generate loyalty.

The companies more willing to invest in innovative solutions like AR are also more likely to stand out as innovators in their field. Other companies have experimented with similar “pop-up” experiences and unique ways to capture audience attention. For example, Burberry placed a QR code in a Harrods store, which customers could scan to visit a branded experience, where an Elphis statue walked around in their surroundings through the lens of their smartphone camera.

It’s even possible to use AR experiences to attract the attention of new audience groups. For instance, the retail brand, Pull & Bear launched an AR game created with Facebook to help the company reach the 90% of Gen Z customers who identify as “gamers.”

Provide New Levels of Customer Support

As many of today’s businesses know, memorable branding isn’t just about having the right image or website; it’s also about providing the correct level of customer service and support. Most purchasing and brand loyalty decisions made today are based on customer experience.

Providing customers with unique experiences to improve their shopping journey is sure to make your company stand out in the new digital age. But it’s also possible to go even further with AR in your brand CX strategy too.

Amazon Salon, for instance, the first bricks-and-mortar hair salon created by Amazon, was partially established to test new technology. The “point and learn” service, for example, allowed customers to point a product they were interested in on a display or shelf and immediately access educational content. Users could also scan QR codes to visit the product page on the QR site.

This helps customers immediately get to the product they want to buy without relying on input from human services agents. In a similar vein, AR could be an excellent way to onboard a customer, learning how to use a new product for the first time.

Imagine having a user’s manual your customer can enjoy scanning through, thanks to AR technology. All your customer needs to do is scan the QR code on the back of a product, and they can see the item they need to build or install coming to life in front of them. This reduces the risk of customers having to call for help from tech support and means clients can see the value in their purchases a lot faster.

Companies can embrace AR as a virtual learning experience, helping users collect information and learn how to do things through an immersive first-hand experience. This kind of immersive technology could help to make any brand stand out as more user-experience-focused. Even car companies could essentially provide their customers with a complete virtual HUD showing them how each button and dial on their dashboard works.

Upgrade Website Design

Perhaps the most common way companies will be using AR to create branded experiences today is by updating their website. You’ve probably already seen examples of AR being used in a host of retail sites, with new experiences designed specifically for the age of augmented reality.

360-degree images, for instance, allow customers to essentially “look around” a product, and see it from different angles, just like they would if they were looking at the item in-store. We can see an excellent example of this on the BMW build-your-own web page, where vehicle browsers can see their vehicles from every angle.

The 360-degree product viewing experience lets you check everything from the side molding to the sculpted edges in perfect detail.  

QR codes and app downloads can also allow customers to take their AR experience even further, looking at things like what life would be like behind the wheel of one of these virtually augmented vehicles.

As AR becomes more commonplace and the tools available for designers in this arena continue to expand, there will be even more opportunities available to bring AR into the website experience. Even essential website upgrades today might include allowing customers to upload pictures of themselves or their homes, then using augmented reality technology to implement parts of a product catalog into the space.

AR Virtual Events

Finally, when it comes to exploring all the unique ways you can build a better brand experience and excellent customer relationships with AR, it’s worth looking at the event space. The event landscape has struggled significantly over the last couple of years. The pandemic forced most live events to be canceled, and although the post-pandemic era holds new hope for upcoming in-person experiences, the landscape will be very different.

Going forward, most companies plan to avoid a complete shift back to in-person events by creating “hybrid” experiences and augmented reality events instead. Augmented and virtual reality tools allow customers to step into an event arena from wherever they are.

For instance, the Pot Noodle Unilever brand hosted a virtual alternative careers fair in AR, where people could use their phones to navigate through a range of graduate employer booths. The unique career fair experience was designed to replace the more common in-person interactions graduates might have as they approached the end of their education.

The custom-developed 3D booths featured a range of different employers, and students could tap on the booth screen they were interested in to see a video from each employer. As an added bonus, the connection to the Pot Noodle AR careers fair website meant that students could also instantly apply for any of the jobs they were interested in.

Similar events could help brands recreate some of the meaningful experiential experiences that their customers have been missing out on in the last couple of years. They could also act as a valuable tool for bringing together people in a hybrid event, where someone visiting an in-person demo table could scan a QR code to send virtual demonstrations of a product back to their team.

This would reduce the number of people who needed to be present in an event environment at any given time, reducing the risk of health issues.

Bringing Brands to Life with AR

In the new consumer landscape, brand relationships are more important than ever. As a result, customers are making more careful choices about who they purchase from, based on their understanding of that company’s values and differentiators.

Now that you won’t always have an opportunity to interact with customers in-person to earn their trust, AR could be the solution for a lot of companies in search of new engagement tools. All you need to do is figure out how you’ll leverage all the benefits AR can offer.

Will you be creating an app, building a new website with enhanced 360-degree photos, or designing in-person experiences? Hopefully, these examples have inspired you to start exploring your options.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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How to Prepare for the Immersive Web

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Websites as we know them are going to change very soon. The days of text, images, and basic interactions in a 2D browser window have served us well, but virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences are getting better all the time. Developers and designers need to think beyond the browser window and prepare for an immersive future.

Many have been very skeptical about VR and AR in the past because despite grand promises about what they would achieve, they’ve mostly failed to deliver on the scale that the industry hoped for.

But it’s different this time: industry leaders like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft are pursuing a range of different mixed reality projects; they see the opportunity and are dropping hints about what’s next.

In a survey from Perkins Coie LLP and the XR Association, nearly 9 in 10 respondents said that by the year 2025, immersive technologies—including augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality — will be as ubiquitous as mobile devices.

That’s a bold prediction, but it could be our new reality.

Use Cases

VR and AR aren’t a logical fit for every website, and that’s fine. There’s no need to force an immersive experience on something better suited to a standard viewing experience.

But when they’re done right, 3D experiences can add a lot to your website. Check out the demo experience from Mozilla, the 3D tours from Matterport, and the immersive storytelling from Within.

Here are a few areas where these technologies shine:

  • Retail – VR can be used to provide a virtual showroom where customers browse through products. AR can even bring the products into your home by showing you how a piece of furniture will fit in your room, what a painting will look like on your wall, or in Apple’s case, how a product will look on your desk.
  • News – Coverage of events can be enriched by providing a 360-degree view and placing viewers in the center of the story.
  • Training – AR can generate virtual overlays over physical equipment so employees can have hands-on training that’s more effective.

Define Your Platform

Adding immersive experiences to your website will require various skills based on what you’re trying to create. Whether you’re new to web development or are a seasoned developer with many years of experience, the main difference from classic web development is that you’re switching from a 2D to a 3D experience. Development in VR/AR is much closer to developing 3D video games than creating web applications.

First of all, you need to decide on the hardware that you’re building for. Are your viewers mainly using computers, smartphones, or a headset like the Oculus Quest? Each hardware category offers a different set of capabilities for what’s possible.

Next, when we look at 3D engines and frameworks on the market, some big names like Unity, Unreal Engine, and CRYENGINE stand out. Most of these engines were spun out of game development and are based on programming languages like C, C++, or C#. While very powerful, they’re overkill for anyone trying to create a basic immersive web experience.

The good news for web developers is that the WebXR Device API is an open standard specified by the W3C with a JavaScript API that makes immersive experiences possible in the browser. So if you already have a background in web development, you can use your knowledge of JavaScript to get started.

There are some useful frameworks and platforms that make working with WebXR more convenient:

  • A-Frame – A web framework for building 3D experiences.
  • React 360 – A framework for the creation of interactive 360-degree experiences that run in the web browser. As the name already suggests, it builds on React and reuses the concepts you already know.
  • Amazon Sumerian – A managed service that lets you create and run 3D, AR, and VR applications. Since it’s integrated into the AWS ecosystem, it’s also possible to add AI-enabled elements into your generated world.

Create Your Content

No one wants to read long blocks of text in 3D. Since we’re talking about visual experiences, it’s logical that the emphasis should be on creating content that is pleasing to the eye and interesting to look at. What works on a normal website probably isn’t going to feel natural in a 3D environment, so you need to decide what visuals you should create to suit the format.

What high-resolution images and assets do you need? Can you add videos? How about 360-degree videos? Will viewers just be looking at something, or will they be able to interact with it?

You also can’t forget about sound because it’s a critical part of immersive experiences. What music and sounds should you create to make the content come alive?

Not everyone is going to have the latest and greatest device or 5G coverage. The requirements for bandwidth and transmission quality are much higher with 3D content. A few milliseconds of latency can go unnoticed on a typical website, but in a VR/AR setting, it can make the experience laggy or unusable.

Try to optimize your content to be the highest quality it can be within a reasonable file size. If the experience starts to suffer from too many assets downloading at the same time, it’s better to create a more streamlined experience that maintains a high performance rate.

It’s important to consider your hosting infrastructure, as well. This shouldn’t be a big problem, but it is worth mentioning that you need to add new content types to your configurations, and your CDN needs to support these new types, too.

Make Your Content Flexible

When we’re talking about getting your website ready for immersive experiences, we’re not just talking about having people scroll through your regular website in VR. That isn’t compelling for your audience.

The idea is to take some content that’s already on your website and separate it from the presentation layer so you can use it in a 3D environment or any other platform that you want. Classic content management takes place in silos, which means you cannot easily reuse the content from your website.

This separation can be achieved by using a classic database, but if you want developers and content teams to collaborate, a headless CMS is front-end agnostic and more user friendly.

Start Experimenting Today

Building 3D content experiences may seem intimidating, but as we’ve seen, you likely already have the web development skills necessary to get started and try out some different ideas.

What you build today will prepare you for the 3D future of tomorrow.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Is it Time to Transition to JAMStack?

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Jamstack (JAMstack), is one of the most popular (and rapidly growing) tools for app and website creation. A unique ecosystem of functionality, Jamstack promises developers the support they need to create powerful websites and progressive applications. 

For a while, Jamstack was mostly written off as just another buzzword in the developer space. However, today, it’s growing to become a powerful investment for many business leaders. Even big companies are getting involved, like Cloudflare, with Cloudflare pages, and Microsoft with Azure Static Web Apps. Elsewhere, we’ve seen brands like Shopify, PayPal, and Nike getting involved too.

So, what exactly is Jamstack, and is it time you transitioned over? Let’s find out…

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack, otherwise known as “JAMstack,” is the name of a developer ecosystem made up of JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (hence: JAM). The solution is a web development architecture allowing developers to access static website benefits, such as higher security and better performance, while still unlocking dynamic database-oriented CMS.

The Jamstack solution allows companies and developers to build a dynamic website where real assets are pre-rendered static files in a CDN. The dynamic environment runs on JavaScript client-side, through serverless functions. 

For a better insight, let’s compare Jamstack to the LAMP stack development strategy, which originated from the four open-source components many developers used to build sites: Linux, Apache HTTP, MySQL, and PHP.

With LAMP, each user request for a page forces the server to query a database — unless the page is cached — and combine the result with page markup data and plugins. Jamstack websites serve pre-built optimized assets and markup solutions quickly because the files are already compiled on a CDN. There’s no need to query the database. 

Jamstack workflows dramatically reduce cumbersome issues with development and excess maintenance, making them highly appealing to developers. 

What Are the Benefits of Jamstack?

Jamstack won’t be the ideal development tool for everyone, but it has a lot of benefits to offer. By fetching HTML from a CDN, the system doesn’t have to wait for HTML to be combined and returned to clients. The solution also provides an improved developer experience with static methods. 

Using Jamstack, developers can build fantastic static files ready to serve by request, hosted on a global CDN. Some of the biggest benefits of Jamstack include:

  • Performance: Because you’re serving pre-built static files from a CDN directly, you’ll achieve much faster loading times, unmatched by typical server-side rendering options. Because you’re serving static files, you’re also better equipped to handle any traffic spikes you might encounter, with minimal slowdown.
  • User experience: Better website performance significantly improves user experience and website traffic, as well as SEO efforts. User experience has always been a critical factor in ensuring the success of a website, and it’s essential to keeping your customers around for as long as possible. Websites optimized for performance will always delight users. 
  • Security: With Jamstack, there are no servers or databases to worry about. You use third-party solutions to handle these issues for you. The architecture of Jamstack means the back and front end of your development processes are decoupled, and you can rely on APIs to run server-side processes easily. Jamstack also comes with security benefits other approaches can lack. Clear separation of services is essential here. 
  • Hosting and scaling: Scaling and hosting can often be problematic in the development world, but because you’re serving files from a CDN, you’re less likely to encounter issues. CDNs are almost infinitely scalable, so you get excellent extensibility built into your development environment. CDN hosting for static files is also cheaper than traditional hosting, so you can keep costs low. 
  • Maintenance: Jamstack makes it easy to push your front end to the edge rather than managing infrastructure directly. Ditching plugins, databases, and other hosting services can help you to save more time and money on a significant scale. 
  • Developer experience: From a developer perspective, there are tons of benefits from Jamstack. You get the ease of a Github, CI/CD, CDN flow, and auto previews with simple rollback to reduce the need for backups. Local developer environments and the ability to run and debug cloud functions locally are all fantastic.

Does Jamstack Have any Limitations?

In a lot of ways, Jamstack is an innovative and revolutionary solution for development. It can help you to create a far more engaging website and present your company in an incredible way. Of course, that doesn’t mean there are no limitations to be aware of. 

Jamstack is developer-friendly, for instance, but it’s not beginner-friendly. You will need at least some knowledge of web development to start unlocking the benefits. You’ll need to understand things like Vue or React, but you should develop a tool anyone can use with a bit of work.

There’s also a handful of things you can’t pre-generate, like user-specific and real-time data. So, this means you may not be able to use Jamstack effectively on projects requiring these kinds of data. Building an analytics dashboard, for instance, probably isn’t a good idea with Jamstack. Other issues for some developers may include:

  • API complexity: It can be overwhelming to try and find the right solution for your needs among so many different options. Of course, this could also be something you’d say about the WordPress ecosystem and its huge variety of plugins. An API usually won’t break your production website, at least. 
  • Long building processes: If you have a large number of pages, there’s more likely to be an extensive building process to think about. Whenever you make a change to a single page, even a little one, you’ll need to rebuild your entire website. This is a problem if you run into a website with thousands of pages. There are solutions to this problem available, however.
  • Handling dynamics: Going with Jamstack doesn’t mean abandoning your backend. An important part of the approach is accessing serverless functions, which are becoming more effective over time. These serverless functions can also be executed on the edge. The backend parts of your website will require regular maintenance as they scale.

Best Jamstack Tools to Check Out

Now you know the basics of Jamstack, let’s look at some of the tools you can use to design an incredible website or application within the Jamstack environment. 

The Git Tool Landscape

There are tons of tools within the Git ecosystem common among Jamstack developers. Starting with Git itself. Git represents a powerful free, and open-sourced distributed version control system. With this solution, companies can handle everything from small to enterprise-level projects with efficiency and speed. The solution is extremely easy to use and learn, and outclasses a range of tools like Perforce, ClearCase and Subversion. 

GitHub Pages and GitLab pages are two hosting services for Git repositories with built-in services to host static pages from out of your codebase. This makes the two solutions fantastic for when you’re building a Jamstack website. You can access the functionality for free too. 

GitLab gives you a comprehensive DevOps platform to work with, where you can enjoy a comprehensive CI/CD toolchain out of the box. The comprehensive solution, delivered as a single application, changes the way security, development, and Ops teams integrate and collaborate. Gitlab helps to accelerate software delivery on a massive scale.

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify, created by Amazon Web Services, is a development platform packed full of useful features for people in the Jamstack environment. The Amplify offering aims to reduce the complexities associated with Amazon Web Services for mobile and web deployment. You get 12 months of hosting for free with new accounts, and you get Storage with Amplify too. 

The Amazon Amplify solution dramatically improves the regular AWS workflow, especially if you’re just a novice user. There’s a huge documentation hub to help you too, which is way more convenient than Amazon’s usual documentation solutions. Amplify is still accessed from a somewhat bloated console, however. 

With AWS Amplify, companies can access features like a comprehensive data store to sync data between the cloud and websites. There’s also easy-to-use interface access across all different categories of cloud operations. The service works well with a range of JavaScript central tools. 

Netlify

Netlify is a pioneering solution in the Jamstack environment, allowing users to go dynamic with their websites and applications on their own terms. You can access a range of add-ons and integration, access your favorite tools, and make your own. The flexible environment enables developers to run websites on a multi-cloud infrastructure designed for speed and scale automation. 

Built to be entirely secure from the ground up, Netlify makes it easy to build a site that’s custom-made for performance and deployed directly. You don’t need to worry about managing, scaling and patching web services, which means you can more quickly implement your Jamstack architecture. 

Unlike other large legacy apps, Jamstack projects are neatly separate from your front-end pages and UI from the backend databases and apps with Netlify. Using this service, the entire front-end can be pre-built with highly optimized static assets and pages, and developers can deliver new web projects faster than ever before.

Next.JS

Inspired by the functionality of PHP, Next.JS is a solution for pre-rendered JavaScript modules. The solution allows developers to easily export the components of their apps and perform individual tests to determine how each element works. You can also access a wide range of components and modules from NPM. The Next offering allows developers to save time, removing the need to use webpack bundles and transform with compilers. 

The full solution is extremely intuitive, ensuring developers can create solutions quickly. What’s more, the technology you build will allow you to load only the bundle needed from your JavaScript workflow, rather than all the JavaScript at once. Pre-fetching, one of the features of Next.JS, also picks up where standard code-splitting leaves off, allowing for optimized bundles of code to load seamlessly. 

Next.JS also supports hot-module replacement. This means instead of reloading an entire application when you change the code, you only recreate the modules you’ve altered.

Angular

Probably the most widely-recognized of all the JavaScript frameworks, Angular, designed by Google engineers, appeared first in 2012, offering developers a new way to create dynamic pages. Before this technology, there were other opportunities for creating dynamic pages, but they were nowhere near as convenient or speedy. 

Angular is probably one of the most essential tools companies can use when building a Jamstack website or environment. The front-end web development tool attracts developers from all over the world. Every version is packed with features and constantly upgraded to ensure you can generate the best results. 

Angular extends HTML file functionality with powerful directives, and it requires very little effort to enable these directives too. All you do is add the ng- prefix to your HTML attributes and you’re ready to go. Angular also allows developers to create widgets leveraging editable data with two-way binding. This means developers don’t have to write code that syncs constantly between the model and view. 

With Angular, developers also get access to things like virtual scrolling, which can help with displaying large lists of elements performantly, rendering on the items that fit on the screen to reduce loading times. 

React

Another must-have tool in the JavaScript world for Jamstack, the React solution was launched first in 2013, and has won thousands of customers across the globe thanks to fantastic functionality. Today, the full landscape is maintained by Facebook, along with all the members of the standard developer community. The solution is used by some of the biggest giants in the tech industry, like Netflix, PayPal, and Apple. 

React is a true pioneer in the Jamstack ecosystem, with its sensational approach to simple and straightforward solutions for JavaScript management. You’ll be able to access batched and virtual DOM updates, which makes it easier to unlock components quickly, and write your components the way you see them. There’s also the added benefit that React is compatible with a lot of tools. 

You can build a comprehensive app or website with the help of React, and you’ll have no trouble accessing some of the top features, particularly with plenty of support available from the React community. 

Gatsby

Created from the ground up to improve user experience on a comprehensive level, Gatsby is a static site generator with heavy focus on things like SEO, performance, and accessibility. The solution offers plenty of out-of-the-box features to help developers deliver the most immersive solution for their users, without unnecessary complexity. 

Gatsby users pre-configuration to develop static websites giving developers faster loading pages, stronger code splitting, and server-side rendering. You can also access features like data prefetching, asset optimization, and quick image loading. Gatsby boasts excellent documentation and starter packs to help you get your site up and running more quickly.

The GraphQL data layer of Gatsby also means the system can collect your data from anywhere, including your CMS, JSON, Markdown, and APIs. More than just your standard site generator, this is a tool built specifically with performance in mind. 

Agility CMS

Developing an effective Jamstack website means having access to the right CMS technology. Agility CMS wasn’t the first CMS solution to support Jamstack, but it is one of the better-known options. As one of the first headless CMS solutions to hit the market, the company has quickly captured the attention of a huge range of developers worldwide.

Agility CMS is a Jamstack pioneer, capable of helping developers to build a foundation for any online ecosystem. The technology is an API-first CMS with support for REST APIs, so developers can connect all the third-party apps and front-end frameworks they like.

The technology also gives developers the freedom to code their solutions their way. You don’t have to follow a specific set of guidelines for how content is created, but templates are available to fast-track development. Agility CMS also hosts and abstracts your database, so you don’t have to worry about connection strings, backups, and maintenance. 

With a strong content architecture to help companies manage digital content and a partnership with Gatsby, Agility is ideal for Jamstack development strategies. 

Building Your Jamstack Website

The Jamstack solution is more than just a buzzword in today’s development world. This unique approach to building incredible development experiences delivers an excellent advantage to both developers and their end-users. Fast, scalable, and full of solutions for customization, Jamstack is a powerful way to bring websites to life with simplicity and speed. 

Every day, more companies take advantage of the Jamstack environment, and we’re constantly seeing a wide selection of new tools, APIs and offerings emerging to help enhance the Jamstack landscape too. This environment is definitely worth consideration for any developer looking to significantly speed up their development strategy.

 

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Exciting New Tools For Designers, December 2021

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With the holidays fast approaching, there are plenty of fun gifts for you in this roundup of new tools and resources for web designers. Make sure to share anything you find helpful with others to spread additional holiday cheer.

Here’s what is new for designers this month…

Volley

Volley, billing itself as Snapchat for work, is a new way to collaborate with remote teams. The tool addresses the two main problems of remote teams (lack of communication and loneliness) with an async video messaging app with interactive transcriptions neatly organized into workspaces. Volley emphasizes talking over typing (76% of volleys sent are video), doesn’t require you to coordinate schedules (it’s 100% asynchronous), and lives in a threaded conversation with context that’s neatly organized. Plus, the tool is free to use.

Upnext

Upnext is a new type of reading list. It’s designed to help you save, organize, and focus on fantastic content while expanding your knowledge on your favorite topics. You can create playlists with almost any type of content that you can refer to later and follow “thinkers” that you love. Search and filter content, focus on reading, integrate videos, and even highlight and note specific content in your customized library. This brand-new web app has a waitlist that you can join to get access soon.

Startup 5

Startup 5 is a new version of the popular website builder, and it’s a perfect tool to create your online presence. With Startup, it’s fast and easy to get your business online with pre-designed blocks. It includes a visual editor with 150+ blocks with pre-designed and pre-coded elements and styles you can easily customize in a drag and drop interface. It’s an easy tool for building a website quickly without a coding background. Most users can publish a website quickly and easily.

Flatmap

Flatmap generates Mapbox Vector Tiles from geographic data sources like OpenStreetMap. It is memory-efficient so that you can build a map of the world in a few hours on a single machine without any external tools or database. Vector tiles contain raw point, line, and polygon geometries that clients like MapLibre can use to render custom maps in the browser, native apps, or a server. Flatmap packages tiles into an MBTiles (SQLite) file that can be served using tools like TileServer GL or even queried directly from the browser.

Cleanup.Pictures

Cleanup.Pictures is a web-based tool to remove objects, people, text, or other defects from your images before using them in projects. It’s an AI-based alternative to other photo-editing software.

Linkz.ai

Linkz.ai helps you make smart link preview popups for your website to help encourage greater engagement and interaction for links. It works with a line of code you can install quickly and easily, and then you get smart link previews (in two style options) for every link on your site.

Llline

Llline is an SVG generator that helps you create smooth and organic lines and strokes with plenty of customization options for almost any application. This tool helps create graphic elements in just a few clicks, allowing you to add a few points to a canvas and then draw a smooth curve using these points. You can then tweak the resulting SVG graphic by rotating it, changing its color, giving it a gradient, making it a dashed line, and then you can download or copy the SVG markup.

Lorem.Space

Lorem.Space is a valuable placeholder image tool. With just a little bit of code, you can pop cool placeholder images – from movie posters to shoes – right in your website mockup so that the design is easier to visualize. It’s a great solution that’s fun and keeps you from having to put empty boxes throughout the design. And everything can be randomized, so you don’t spend time looking for placeholders.

Huetone

Huetone can help you create more accessible color palettes by making use of the Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm. The contrast ratios and color combinations show on one screen to help you quickly develop palettes and combinations. Plus, the tool has hotkeys that make it easy to change hues, toggle, and adjust quickly. Then you can export everything to Figma.

Rowy

Rowy is an open-source tool to build on the Google Cloud Platform. You can manage Firestore data in a spreadsheet-style user interface, write Cloud Functions in the browser, and connect to third-party platforms.

AdCreative.ai

AdCreative.ai uses artificial intelligence to help create better ad creative. To get started, you upload logos and color files, connect social and other accounts, pick the sizes you need, write text, pick a background, and upload product images, and let the AI do the work. Once you have the creative you like, you can connect to your online ad accounts for easy use. This is a premium tool that’s free to try.

Flowrift

Flowrift is a tool to browse and then copy and customize Tailwind CSS blocks in groups of collections. Filter by block type and then experiment with the options. It even has e-commerce blocks.

Layout Patterns

Layout Patterns is a collection of layout patterns built using modern CSS APIs to help you build common interfaces such as cards, dynamic grid areas, and full-page layouts.

You.com

You.com is a new private search engine that summarizes the web. The tool is in open beta and includes superior privacy choices, actionable results, extensible apps, and personalization through preferred sources.

3D Icons

3D Icons is a fun set of three-dimensional, full-color icons that are free for all uses. (Donations are accepted.) They integrate with pretty much any web design tool you are using and come in four color styles – clay, gradient, color, and premium – so you can get just the right look for your project. Each icon also includes three rendering views – dynamic, side, and isometric.

Arco Design

Arco Design is a comprehensive React UI components library based on the Arco Design system. It includes a customizable theme and more than 60 crafted components that you can use out of the box.

Seekvectors.com

Seekvectors.com is a search tool to find free resources in five different formats, PNG, SVG, JPG, EPS, and AI.

Outline to Single Stroke

Outline to Single Stroke is a tool in the Figma community that works just like the name implies. Select a filled vector on the canvas, and then you can outline it to a single stroke and adjust the line weight if you like.

Codeamigo

Codeamigo is a new self-paced platform to help you learn coding skills. It’s packed with various lessons for different languages and templates and has something for every level from beginner to advanced.

Sizze

Sizze is a Figma to React Native export tool to create app prototypes and instantly export to code.

CodingFont

CodingFont is an excellent game that can help you pick a font to use for coding that you like! If you spend a lot of time looking at code each day, the right font can help reduce eye strain and make the work a little easier to see.

Christmas Revue

Christmas Revue is the first in a trio of holiday typefaces that you can use this season. This SCG color font is fun and perfect for the holidays with exciting glyphs. It is free for personal use only.

Hotsnow

Hotsnow is a fun display font that has interesting fills and shapes in an all-caps character set. It is free for personal use.

Marlwich

Marlwich is a feminine handwriting-style typeface that has the feel of signing a holiday letter or card. It contains upper- and lower-case characters and is only for non-commercial use for free. (A paid option is available for commercial projects.)

Source

The post Exciting New Tools For Designers, December 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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