Spring and fresh designs are in the air. This month, it’s obvious that designers are feeling creative with new and interesting concepts that range from a new style for cards, homepage experimentation with multiple entry points or calls to action, and risky typography options.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month.
1. “Flat” Cards
Card-style design elements that allow users to click through to other content aren’t new, but the design of these cards is fresh and interesting.
Rather than more heavily designed cards with shadows and layers of content, flat styles are trending. Expect this trend to explode thanks to usage by Google for a shopping experience page.
The Google example below is interesting because Google’s Material Design guidelines are what helped card-style elements grow in popularity previously. However, those cards did include more layers, color options, buttons inside the cards, and shadows.
Today’s trending cards are completely flat. And beautiful.
Each of these websites does it in a slightly different way.
Heartcore, a consumer technology VC company, uses a series of flat cards as a navigation element to help users find their way through the website. Each features a bright color background with an illustration and a simple text block.
Each card has a nice hover state where only the illustration zooms inside the card frame. This is an interesting effect because it is exactly the opposite of the previous iteration of cards, which zoomed the entire card as a hover state.
Google Shopping uses that whole card bounce hover state (plus a not-so-flat shadow) for each card. The initial design is sleek with the pairing of white and image cards with simple text in each. You are enticed to click around to see what happens.
Click on Greece is a travel website design that uses simple cards with a minimal color and text overlay. The consistency of these cards makes the design pop and the beauty of the images draw you in. Each card also has a hover state with a darker color mask to guide navigation and make text elements easier to read.
2. Multiple Homepage Entry Points
For a long time, designers have been working off the philosophy that the homepage should have one direct entry point, creating a direct funnel for the user experience.
These designs throw that idea out the window, with multiple entry points and click elements.
You can think of it as the “create your own adventure” option for these designs.
It can be a risky concept if you are diving into analytics to pay attention to user paths. You want to make sure you know what choices users are making so that you can help them on the journey to the content and information that you want them to get from the visit.
But this type of design scheme does feel somewhat personalized, putting the user in more control.
Parcouse Epicuriens uses three flat card-style elements to help users pick what they want to see from the home page. There’s no other button or direct call to action, which is somewhat uncommon in today’s website design landscape. Users have to pick from one of the cards, scroll, or enter using the hamburger menu icon.
Tasty Find uses search options to help users start their journey. What’s interesting here are the choices – search for the food you want, pick something random, or (in the small print) find even more options. Users get three choices to begin their journey with the website.
What’s interesting is how simple this complex user journey looks. The design is easy to digest, but so many options could overwhelm users. This is one of those situations where you have to watch return search data and information and weigh the risk versus the reward of so much choice. It’ll be interesting to watch this design over time and see if the options decrease in number.
Accord also has several levels of user engagement opportunity. Option 1: Every block contains a click element. Option 2: Use the search at the top to narrow choices. This is an interesting configuration as the homepage for an e-commerce website because they get right to product selection and shopping without a softer sell or introduction.
3. Risky Typography
Typographic risk has been an ongoing theme for a little while. Designers are embracing experimental and novelty typefaces to stand out in the cluttered website space. Sometimes it works beautifully, and other times, it can fall short.
Here, each of these trending website designs uses a risky typography treatment. The risks are a little different for each design, from readability to comprehension to font delivery.
How Many Plants has duel typography risks: A funky typeface paired with odd word breaks. Interestingly enough, readability isn’t as big of a concern as you might think. This is likely because there aren’t many words, and they are short. Plus, the imagery ties in nicely.
Do you notice a similarity between How Many Plants and The Great Lake? The typography has the same style with a blocky, slab, sans serif with alternating thick and thin strokes. (It’s the same font.)
The risk in the typography design for The Great Lake isn’t in the homepage display, although you might wonder what the design is about. It is carrying this font throughout the design. While it looks great large and with only a few words, it gets a little more difficult the more you see it. This type of mental reading weight can be difficult for visitors over time, creating an element of risk.
Zmaslo uses an interesting typeface with a liquid effect on top of an unusual word. That combination of text elements makes you think hard to read the homepage, despite its neat looks. The risk here is weighing visual interest against comprehension. Depending on the audience, this risk can be worth the chance.
Conclusion
Spring always seems to be that time of year where designers start thinking about new, fresh design elements. That might explain some of the “riskier” design choices and experimentation here.
Regardless of the motivation, it is always fun to see the creative stretch happen. It can be even more interesting to see what elements from these trends continue to grow in the coming months.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
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Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
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Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted a Low-code/No-code application as part of their platform development.
The proliferation of Low-code/No-code tooling can be partially attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put pressure on businesses around the world to rapidly implement digital solutions. However, adoption of these tools — while indeed accelerated by the pandemic — would have occurred either way.
Even before the pandemic, the largest, richest companies had already formed an oligopsony around the best tech talent and most advanced development tools. Low-Code/No-code, therefore, is an attractive solution for small and mid-sized organizations to level the playing field, and it does so by giving these smaller players the power to do more with their existing resources.
While these benefits are often realized in the short term, the long-term effect of these tools is often shockingly different. The promise of faster and cheaper delivery is the catch — or lure — inside this organizational mousetrap, whereas backlogs, vendor contracts, technical debts, and constant updates are the hammer.
So, what exactly is the No-Code trap, and how can we avoid it?
What is a No-Code Tool?
First, let’s make sure we clear up any confusion regarding naming. So far I have referred Low-Code and No-Code as if they were one term. It’s certainly easy to confuse them — even large analyst firms seem to have a hard time differentiating between the two — and in the broader context of this article, both can lead to the same set of development pitfalls.
Under the magnifying glass, however, there are lots of small details and capabilities that differentiate Low-code and No-code solutions. Most of them aren’t apparent at the UI level, leading to much of the confusion between where the two come from.
In this section, I will spend a little bit of time exploring the important differences between those two, but only to show that when it comes to the central premise of this article they are virtually equivalent.
Low-Code vs. No-Code Tools
The goal behind Low-Code is to minimize the amount of coding necessary for complex tasks through a visual interface (such as Drag ‘N’ Drop) that integrates existing blocks of code into a workflow.
Skilled professionals have the potential to work smarter and faster with Low-Code tools because repetitive coding or duplicating work is streamlined. Through this, they can spend less time on the 80% of work that builds the foundation and focuses more on optimizing the 20% that makes it different. It, therefore, takes on the role of an entry-level employee doing the grunt work for more senior developers/engineers.
No-Code has a very similar look and feel to Low-Code, but is different in one very important dimension. Where Low-Code is meant to optimize the productivity of developers or engineers that already know how to code (even if just a little), No-Code is built for business and product managers that may not know any actual programming languages. It is meant to equip non-technical workers with the tools they need to create applications without formal development training.
No-Code applications need to be self-contained and everything the No-Code vendor thinks the user may need is already built into the tool.
As a result, No-Code applications create a lot of restrictions for the long-term in exchange for quick results in the short-term. This is a great example of a ‘deliberate-prudent’ scenario in the context of the Technical Debt Quadrant, but more on this later.
Advantages of No-Code Solutions
The appeal of both Low-Code and No-Code is pretty obvious. By removing code organizations can remove those that write it — developers — because they are expensive, in short supply, and fundamentally don’t produce things quickly.
The benefits of these two forms of applications in their best forms can be pretty substantial:
Resources: Human Capital is becoming increasingly scarce — and therefore expensive. This can stop a lot of ambitious projects dead in their tracks. Low-Code and No-Code tools minimize the amount of specialized technical skills needed to get an application of the ground, which means things can get done more quickly and at a lower cost.
Low Risk/High ROI: Security processes, data integrations, and cross-platform support are all built into Low-Code and No-Code tools, meaning less risk and more time to focus on your business goals.
Moving to Production: Similarly, for both types of tools a single click is all it takes to send or deploy a model or application you built to production.
Looking at these advantages, it is no wonder that both Low-Code and No-Code have been taking industries by storm recently. While being distinctly different in terms of users, they serve the same goal — that is to say, faster, safer and cheaper deployment. Given these similarities, both terms will be grouped together under the ‘No-Code’ term for the rest of this article unless otherwise specified.
List of No-Code Data Tools
So far, we have covered the applications of No-Code in a very general way, but for the rest of this article, I would like to focus on data modeling. No-Code tools are prevalent in software development, but have also, in particular, started to take hold in this space, and some applications even claim to be an alternative to SQL and other querying languages (crazy, right?!). My reasons for focusing on this are two-fold:
Firstly, there is a lot of existing analysis around this problem for software development and very little for data modeling. Secondly, this is also the area in which I have the most expertise.
Now let’s take a look at some of the vendors that provide No-Code solutions in this space. These in no way constitute a complete list and are, for the most part, not exclusively built for data modeling.
1. No-Code Data Modeling in Power BI
Power BI was created by Microsoft and aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities to all types of business users. Their simple interface is meant to allow end-users to create their own reports and dashboards through a number of features, including data mapping, transformation, and visualization through dashboards. Power BI does support some R coding capabilities for visualization, but when it comes to data modeling, it is a true No-Code tool.
2. Alteryx as a Low-Code Alternative
Alteryx is meant to make advanced analytics accessible to any data worker. To achieve this, it offers several data analytics solutions. Alteryx specializes in self-service analytics with an intuitive UI. Their offerings can be used as Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Tools within their own framework. Alteryx allows data workers to organize their data pipelines through their custom features and SQL code blocks. As such, they are easily identified as a Low-Code solution.
3. Is Tableau a No-Code Data Modeling Solution?
Tableau is a visual analytics platform and a direct competitor to Power BI. They were recently acquired by Salesforce which is now hoping to ‘transform the way we use data to solve problems—empowering people and organizations to make the most of their data.’ It is also a pretty obvious No-Code platform that is supposed to appeal to all types of end-users. As of now, it offers fewer tools for data modeling than Power BI, but that is likely to change in the future.
4. Looker is a No-Code Alternative to SQL
Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that promises to help you explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics easily. Very much in line with Tableau and Power BI, it aims to make non-technical end-users proficient in a variety of data tasks such as transformation, modeling, and visualization.
You might be wondering why I am including so many BI/Visualization platforms when talking about potential alternatives to SQL. After all, these tools are only set up to address an organization’s reporting needs, which constitute only one of the use cases for data queries and SQL. This is certainly a valid point, so allow me to clarify my reasoning a bit more.
While it is true that reporting is only one of many potential uses for SQL, it is nevertheless an extremely important one. There is a good reason why there are so many No-Code BI tools in the market—to address heightening demand from enterprises around the world — and therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at their almost inevitable shortcomings.
At the dawn of the web-era, there was much focus on how environmentally friendly websites were: we’d chop down fewer trees, ship fewer products, and travel less for business.
And because the web was small, any negative impact it had was relatively small. But the Internet’s no longer small, and neither is the impact it has on the environment. The average website uses 211,000g of CO2 per year, watching a video online outputs an estimated 0.2g of CO2 per second, and a single email can cost 50g of CO2.
In the next four years, the tech industry as a whole may use up to 20% of the world’s electricity and be responsible for 5.5% of global CO2 emissions.
The good news is that because websites are viewed many times, even small improvements can multiply into real change.
1. Reduce Energy Consumption
Through electricity use, the Internet generates around the same CO2 as most major countries. That carbon comes from two sources: the devices we use to access the Internet and the servers that host our data.
Computers heat up, and when they heat up, they slow down. Servers are especially vulnerable and use extraordinary amounts of energy to keep cool and functional, which is why Microsoft keeps throwing servers into the sea.
Make It Faster
The faster your site, the less data is used to serve it, and the less carbon it’s outputting; it’s that simple.
Reduce the Number of Resources Used
Everything you load on your site has an impact. You might think that a tiny PNG is too small to really impact your carbon footprint, but over thousands of page loads, its impact is multiplied. Anything you can do to reduce the number of actual files requested will reduce your carbon output. You can use sites like Ecograder to estimate your own site’s CO2 output.
Optimize Images
If there’s one thing you can do to reduce the size of your site, the amount of data that needs to be sent over the Internet to serve your site, and the resulting speed, it’s optimizing your images.
Nothing reduces a site’s footprint like optimizing images. It’s easy and free to reduce the size of JPGs and PNGs with a service like TinyPNG. Offer WebP to any browser that will accept them; it will boost your Lighthouse score and improve your CO2 usage.
Lazy Load Images
Lazy loading images means images are loaded as they are required; images at the top of a page always load, images further down only load when the user scrolls to them; if the user doesn’t scroll to the bottom of the page, they don’t load, saving you CO2.
Reduce The Amount Of JavaScript You Use
Yes, JavaScript is awesome. Yes, it can be hugely beneficial to UX. And yes, it munches on energy like it’s candy.
When a web page loads, it’s done, the total cost is in. If JavaScript keeps running in the background, redrawing the screen based on user interaction — as is the case with a parallax site — the web page keeps using up energy on the device.
Choose a Sustainable Hosting Company
You can reduce the power needs of a site, but you can’t eliminate them. One simple step is to opt for a hosting company that gets its electricity from sustainable sources such as wind power or solar.
Low←Tech Magazine is powered by a server that runs on solar energy and carries a warning that it may go offline. But it’s possible to host both reliably and sustainably. Many web hosts outsource their actual server management, so they have no control over how those servers are powered, but there are plenty of exceptions that guarantee green web hosting. Google Cloud aims to be the cleanest in the cloud industry. For green web hosting, I always recommend the all-round superb Kualo.
2. Be Inclusive
One of the biggest issues with the EV (Electric Vehicle) movement is that we’re replacing cars earlier than we normally would in a rush to move to “clean” driving.
A new EV certainly outputs less than a gas-powered vehicle when driven the same distance. Combine increased use — because owners think they are driving cleanly — with the fact that a new EV has to be manufactured, the minerals for batteries have to be mined (in horrific conditions), and it then needs to be shipped to you, and EVs are not as friendly as they appear — so go ahead, buy that vintage Porsche it’s probably better for the environment than a Tesla.
Support Legacy Devices
The same issue that applies to cars applies to devices. Every time we rush ahead to support the latest iPhone, we leave older generations behind. A device can and should last longer than two years.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t embrace modern web standards. Technologies like CSS Grid are excellent at reducing markup size and speeding up sites. CSS Grid has been well supported for over four years, and even “legacy” devices can handle it. If you can keep a phone for an extra six months, the environmental cost of that phone is reduced by 20%.
3. Help Users Make Good Choices
More and more people are trying to make good choices. We’re eating a healthier, balanced diet. We’re recycling clothes. We’re traveling by bike, and on foot, instead of by car. People want to do the right thing, and they seek out companies that aid them.
Improve Navigation
Anything that you can do to make your content more findable will mean fewer page loads and therefore consume fewer resources.
By improving your information architecture, improving your search accuracy, and improving on-page signposts like bread crumbs and link text, you help users find content faster.
Feelgood Feedback
When the environmental impact of a user’s actions are quantifiable, let them know. Users who care will appreciate it, and users who don’t will ignore it.
Raileurope.com adds a note to any quotation letting you know how much carbon you’ve saved by traveling by train instead of flying.
Don’t Remove the Shipping Rate
Many ecommerce sites offer free shipping, especially above a certain order value; it’s a good way to encourage higher sales. But absorbing the shipping cost implies that there is no shipping. By highlighting the shipping costs, even if they’re not passed on to the customer, you remind them that there is an environmental cost and a financial cost.
You can absorb the shipping rate without implying there is no cost by adding the shipping and then explicitly deducting it as a discount.
Make it fast and usable, and you’ll also be making it energy efficient. Make it inclusive, and you’ll help the industry slow the ever-growing tendency to consume. Make it transparent, and you’ll help your users make good choices of their own. All of these things are not only good for the environment, but they also result in improved UX and SEO.
Ten years ago, people began talking about the “Independent Web.” Although we don’t commonly use the term anymore, that doesn’t mean that it’s not still as vital a topic of discussion today as it was a decade ago.
Today, I want to look at where the term came from, what it refers to today, and why it’s something that all of us in business, marketing, and web design should be thinking about.
What Is The Independent Web?
The Independent Web is a term that was coined back in 2010 by John Battelle.
In “Identity and The Independent Web,” Battelle broaches the subject of internet users losing control of their data, privacy, and decision-making to the likes of social media and search engines.
“When we’re ‘on’ Facebook, Google, or Twitter, we’re plugged into an infrastructure that locks onto us, serving us content and commerce in an automated but increasingly sophisticated fashion. Sure, we navigate around, in control of our experience, but the fact is, the choices provided to us as we navigate are increasingly driven by algorithms modeled on the service’s understanding of our identity.”
That’s the Dependent Web.
This is how Battelle explains the Independent Web:
“There is another part of the web, one where I can stroll a bit more at my own pace, and discover new territory, rather than have territory matched to a presumed identity. And that is the land of the Independent Web.”
In 2010, this referred to websites, search engines, and apps where users and their activity were not tracked. But a lot has changed since then, and many websites that were once safe to peruse without interference or manipulation are no longer.
What Happens When the Dependent Web Takes Over?
Nothing good.
I take that back. It’s not fair to make a blanket statement about Dependent Web platforms and sites. Users can certainly benefit from sharing some of their data with them.
Take Facebook, for instance. Since its creation, it’s enabled people to connect with long-lost friends, stay in touch with distant relatives, enable freelance professionals like ourselves to find like-minded communities, etc.
The same goes for websites and apps that track and use visitor data. Consumers are more than willing to share relevant data with companies so long as they benefit from the resulting personalized experiences.
But the Dependent Web also has a darker side. There are many ways that the Dependent Web costs consumers and businesses control over important things like:
Behavior
If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma, then you know that platforms like Facebook and Google profit from selling their users to advertisers.
That’s right. They’re not just selling user data. They’re selling users themselves. If the algorithms can change the way users behave, these platforms and their advertisers get to cash in big time.
Many websites and apps are also guilty of using manipulation to force users to behave how they want them to.
Personal Data
This one is well-known thanks to the GDPR in the EU and the CCPA in California. Despite these initiatives to protect user data and privacy, the exploitation of personal data on the web remains a huge public concern in recent years.
Content and Branding
This isn’t relevant to websites so much as it is to social media platforms and Google.
Dependent Web platforms ultimately dictate who sees your content and when. And while they’re more than happy to benefit from the traffic and engagement this content brings to their platforms, they’re just as happy to censor or pull down content as they please, just as Skillshare did in 2019 when it deleted half of its courses without telling its course creators.
What’s more, while social media and search engines have become the place to market our businesses, some of our branding gets lost when entering such oversaturated environments.
Income
When algorithms get updated, many businesses often feel the negative effects almost immediately.
For example, Facebook updated its algorithm in 2018 to prioritize “meaningful content.” This pushed out organic business content and pulled regular user content to the top of the heap.
This, in turn, forced businesses to have to pay-to-play if they wanted to use Facebook as a viable marketing platform.
Access
The Dependent Web doesn’t just impact individuals’ experiences. It can have far-reaching effects when one company provides a critical service to a large portion of the population.
When Amazon Web Services burps and half the Internet goes down maybe just maybe it’s not a great idea to have a single company with so much control over what has essentially become our society’s critical infrastructure?
It wasn’t just Amazon’s servers that went down, though. It took out apps and sites like:
1Password
Adobe Spark
Capital Gazette
Coinbase
Glassdoor
Roku
The Washington Post
And there’s absolutely nothing that these businesses or their users could do but sit around and wait… because Amazon hosts a substantial portion of the web.
Innovation
When consumers and businesses become dependent on platforms that predominantly control the way we live and work, it’s difficult for us to stand up for the little guys trying to carve out innovative pathways.
As a result, we really lose the option to choose what we use to improve our lives and our businesses. And innovative thinkers lose the ability to bring much-needed changes to the world because Big Tech wants to own the vast majority of data and users.
How Can We Take Back Control From The Dependent Web?
Many things are happening right now that are trying to push consumers and businesses towards a more Independent Web:
Consumer Privacy Protection: GDPR and CCPA empower consumers to control where their data goes and what it’s used for.
Private Search Engine Usage: Although Google dominates search engine market share, people are starting to use private search engines like Duck Duck Go.
Private Browsing Growth:Over 60% of the global population is aware of what private browsing is (i.e., incognito mode), and roughly 35% use it when surfing the web.
Self-hosted and Open Source CMS Popularity: The IndieWeb community encourages people to move away from Dependent platforms and build their own websites and communities. This is something that Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, talked about back in 2012.
“The Internet needs a strong, independent platform for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. I like to think that if we didn’t create WordPress something else that looks a lot like it would exist. I think Open Source is kind of like our Bill of Rights. It’s our Constitution. If we’re not true to that, nothing else matters.”
As web designers, this is something that should really speak to you, especially if you’ve ever met a lead or client who didn’t understand why they needed a website when they could just advertise on Facebook or Instagram.
A Decentralized Web: Perhaps the most promising of all these initiatives are Solid and Inrupt, which were launched in 2018 by the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.
”The Web was always meant to be a platform for creativity, collaboration, and free invention — but that’s not what we are seeing today. Today, business transformation is hampered by different parts of one’s life being managed by different silos, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life, but where the users and teams can’t get the insight from connecting that data. Meanwhile, that data is exploited by the silo in question, leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused. That in turn has led to increasingly complex data regulations.”
This is something we should all keep a close eye on. Consumers and businesses alike are becoming wary of the Dependent Web.
Who better than the creator of the web to lead us towards the Independent Web where we can protect our data and better control our experience?
https://ankaa-pmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/what-is-the-independent-web-and-does-it-matter-in-2021.jpg14082560Service comm.https://ankaa-pmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Logo-Ankaa-engineering.pngService comm.2021-04-21 16:45:552021-04-21 16:45:55What Is The Independent Web And Does It Matter In 2021?
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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Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
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Have you ever wondered why we’re so amazed by motion? A moving image is more likely to grab your attention than a static one. Motion is exciting and attention-grabbing – plus, it allows us to access more information in a short space of time.
For a while now, companies have been experimenting with all kinds of motion and animation in their design choices. We’ve seen the rise of animated website backgrounds or live-playing videos instead of images on a home page. There are videos and 360-degree pictures on product pages to help people get a better view of certain items and immersive AR experiences on apps.
So why has the power of motion not made its way into the logo design landscape yet?
Sure, there are a few examples of animated logos out there, but they haven’t had the same long-lasting impact as animated websites. Perhaps that’s because people don’t have the right tools to bring their animated logos to life?
Today, we’re going to cover some top tips for live logo design.
1. Understand What “Live Logo” Means
An animated logo or live logo can be a powerful tool in a company’s branding strategy. Although there’s more to a company’s identity than its logo, it’s fair to say that logos make a huge difference to how we feel about brands and their identity.
A powerful logo can make an emotional connection with your target audience and help your brand to thrive in virtually any environment. Live logos, or animated logos, bring more attention to the brand image, by helping a customer to focus on the logo’s action. A live logo might tell a story about what the business does through motion, or just be eye-catching.
The level of animation varies depending on the designer, but it can go all the way from a short video presentation to a few simple moves. The Skype logo is an excellent example of something simple, that multiple designers have played with to great effect.
Today, there are plenty of open-access tools helping to create more immersive animated graphics in the logo design world. Additionally, the types of animation available are becoming more impressive all the time.
2. Explore the Types of Logo Animation
The next stage of properly leveraged live logos, is knowing what kinds of logo animation are available. There are plenty of different styles of animation to explore today, depending on the kind of impact you want to have.
For instance, sometimes the animation you choose will be connected to your business. A vehicle company might have a logo that seems to “drive” into the central space on the screen. An electricity company might choose a logo that pulses like an electric charge. This animated FedEx logo is an excellent example of how animation can show what a business does.
Options for animation might include:
Rotation: Make an emblem stand out by moving it to the sides or allowing it to move on its axis. Rotation gives a logo a sense of 3D space.
Appearance/Disappearance: You can make a logo grow on the screen by bringing to life one pixel at a time, or have it dissolve and disappear in a similar way.
Transformation: Your logo doesn’t have to start out in the shape it’s going to achieve. You might start with a seed that gradually grows into a tree-shaped logo for a gardening company, for example.
Replacement: Another great way to tell a story is to replace a graphic related to the company in question with the logo through an immersive animated experience.
3. Set Goals for the Live Logo
If you’re not sure what kind of animations to experiment with, then it’s a good idea to start with some solid goals. Your goals will give you a direction to move in with your logo choices. An animated logo can be a dynamic and modern way to present a brand to an audience, but it’s only going to be effective when implemented carefully.
Let’s look at some of the goals you can choose for your live logo:
Differentiation: While it’s true that animation and live content is gaining more attention lately, it’s still relatively new as an overall concept. With an animated logo, you could help a brand to create a more unique image for themselves, which sets them apart from the other organisations in the same space.
Storytelling: As mentioned above, animated logos can tell a story about what the company or product actually does. In this example for Firefox, for instance, the logo mimics a loading wheel to demonstrate a speedy internet browser.
Brand awareness: Dynamic logos and animations are more likely to capture your audience’s attention than static images. They’re also more of a novel experience, which means that customers might want to share them with other people too.
Memorability: Today’s customers are bombarded by hundreds, if not thousands of logos all the time. They need something special to convince them that one image deserves a spot at the front of their mind. Animation can help to make a business more memorable.
4. Do Your Research
Doing your own research is an excellent way to get some inspiration for a live logo or animation. Ideally, you’ll want to focus on the industry you’re already working in, as this will give you some guidance as to the kind of movement that can attract the most attention from the correct audience.
Watch as intros to brand videos and check out as many live logos as you can. Check out the kind of animations that people use in their videos when they’re showcasing products online. You can learn a lot about what works just by evaluating what other people have done before. Just be careful not to simply copy what you’ve found elsewhere.
The aim of your live animation should be to tell a unique story about the company
The aim of your live animation should be to tell a unique story about the company in question. If you’re not sure how to start with differentiating the image, check out the brand guidelines for the company in question. The guidelines that the company used to choose the right brand colors, fonts, and other visual assets can work just as well for your animation strategy.
Remember, the aim here is to tell a specific story, send a message, or evoke a certain emotion. Don’t make the mistake of designing something that looks cool but doesn’t have much of a purchase. Most human beings will naturally look for the meaning behind the content that they see. If there isn’t anything there, it’ll just lead to confusion.
5. Use Live Logos on Brand Websites
The most obvious way to begin experimenting with animated logos in web design, is to implement live logos into a client’s website. Some companies have a “welcome screen” for their site which uses an animation to introduce visitors to the home page and other navigation options. There are also brands out there who love the impact that animation can have but want to use it more subtly.
In these cases, live logos can be an excellent way to draw the eye to a specific spot on a website, perhaps the area just above the “contact” button that encourages a client to reach out. Crucially, to avoid weighing down the website and distracting visitors, companies and designers will need to make some important choices.
Although it might be tempting to keep the animation looping at all times, just in case someone misses the first round, this requires a lot of extra processing power. Too much animation also makes it harder for businesses to push the focus of their visitors to other points on the website, like landing pages for products, or testimonial pages.
Often, as with most innovative decisions in web-design, the best bet is usually to start small and work your way up. Don’t over-do it with animation on day one. See how the visitors to the website respond first.
6. Find the Right Balance
Animations in a live logo are there to grab attention quickly, and effectively. They shouldn’t go on for too long, or you risk overwhelming your audience before they have a chance to browse the rest of the website or check out other content. A live logo should only be active for a few seconds at most, and in that time, it needs to say something valuable.
Often, the best strategy is to start by building up curiosity, and getting your viewer engaged so that they’re keen to see more. Every frame will count to pull the customer in and make them feel connected to the brand in question.
Make sure that the logo animation is dynamic so that it doesn’t just capture the attention of the viewer but maintain their interest for the full time required. During the motion, the viewer’s brain should be working to figure out what’s going to happen next.
Just like most logo design and graphic animation strategies, the key to success is finding the right balance between clever experiences, and simplicity. You want to do something meaningful that earns your viewer’s attention, but you need to compete with the fact that attention spans are plummeting all the time.
7. Explore Logo Animation in Video
One of the best ways to use logo animation, is to draw interest for a company at the beginning of a video. Video is gaining incredible levels of popularity lately, particularly in a world where you can view video content almost anywhere. Companies are adding videos to their product pages, social media accounts, applications, websites, and so much more .
For the majority of companies, a live logo at the start of a video can help their brand to seem more professional. It’s a reminder to viewers of the brand that they’re learning about with that video content. Plus, a logo at the beginning of a piece of video content can also build on the consistency that companies attempt to create by using the same brand assets in various mediums online.
(Starting a video with an animated logo is great for presentation, but it can also be frustrating to customers in certain pieces of content where they’re looking for quick answers to questions. If an animated logo is more than a couple of seconds long, it may be better placed at the back of a video instead.)
With videos for news reports or announcements where you want to get straight to the point and generate excitement about a new product or service, it can be better to jump straight into action. Ending a video with a live logo keeps the brand image front of mind for the customer for longer, even after the message has ended. On the other hand, ending a video with a logo could increase the chances that customers miss the animation, because they click away from the content too quickly.
If you’re new to adding live logos into videos, consider experimenting with different strategies to see which works best. Different companies might get unique results.
8. Bring Logo Animation to the Real World
Another interesting option for live logo design, could be to step outside of the computer screen for a while. In today’s digitally transforming landscape, it’s becoming more common to see the real and digital worlds converging. Most events and trade-shows come with presentations that rely on digital content, like animated presentations and slide shows.
Depending on the signage solutions available at industry events, companies could even use an animated logo above their booth to draw attention in a cluttered environment. Around 48% of exhibitors agree that a more eye-catching stand or booth is often the most effective way to attract visitors and customers at an event.
Animation and live logos may have started life on the computer screen, but they can appear in much more diverse environments today. Offices could use a live logo in the reception room or lobby to make their on-premises environment more appealing. Retail locations could display ads on digital signage, followed by live logos that work to both separate messages, and keep shoppers entertained when they’re enjoying the bricks-and-mortar experience.
9. Include Live Logos in Brand Signatures
Remember, a live logo doesn’t just have to sit on a company’s app or website until someone discovers it. Sometimes, the right logo can also be a powerful way to “sign off” on a message from a brand or its management team. For instance, email remains to be one of the most valuable tools for business marketing and customer relationship building today.
It’s the third most influential source of content and news for a lot of B2B audiences, and yet, most companies aren’t taking full advantage of what their email marketing software solutions are capable of. If you can display gifs and animated videos in an email (which most software solutions can), then you can also add a live logo to the brand signature.
The important thing to remember is that if you’re going to be adding a signature to a lightweight thing, like an email, it needs to be lightweight too. Don’t make the live logo too long and complicated, or it might prevent the email from loading properly.
Outside of email, don’t forget to consider options for live logos in things like social media profile pictures too. According to experts, around 80% of companies use visual assets in their social media marketing. A live logo is a great way to go beyond the basics with a company’s imagery. Motion grabs attention, and video content is quickly gaining steam on a lot of social media platforms.
Embracing a New World of Live Animation
Designers are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with animated logos. For many companies, live logos are an excellent way to capture audience attention and encourage engagement with a brand.
A live logo at the beginning of a video, at the start of an app loading screen, or even at the top of a website can differentiate a company and make them stand out. As technology continues to evolve, and customer expectations continue to expand, the options for live animation could continue to grow. You might even be able to infuse live logos with elements of VR and AR, to impart brand essence in a brand-new digital world.
If you haven’t begun experimenting with live logo design yet, now could be the time to start.
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Google has been talking about the Core Web Vitals tool and the Page Experience Update for about a year now.
With the update scheduled to roll out in May 2021, now is the time to make sure your websites are prepared for it. It’s taking a lot of the best practices Google has recommended over the years and making them an official part of the search algorithm, so not taking this seriously could negatively impact your sites’ rankings.
Today, we’re going to look at everything Google has told us about the update and how to use the Core Web Vitals tool to ensure your site rankings don’t drop once it rolls out.
What We Know About the Google Page Experience Update
Google first told us about the page experience update back in May 2020. Here’s what we know about the upcoming update:
Google’s Search Algorithm Will Change in May 2021
Although there’s no specific day given, we do know that the page experience update will go live sometime in May 2021.
The Goal is to Reduce Friction on the Web
It’s not as though user experience is something that designers and developers overlook when building websites. Heck, there’s an entire disciple of UX design dedicated to it.
That said, Google hasn’t taken too hard line of an approach in enforcing its page experience suggestions, like mobile-first design, removing intrusive pop-ups, or improving page speed. With this update, though, Google is now telling every site owner that performance, accessibility, technical best practices, and SEO must be built into their websites.
Of course, the goal isn’t to create more work on your side of things. Google believes that by encouraging developers to build better web experiences that consumers will experience less friction and businesses will be more profitable as a result.
The Update Will Include Older Signals
According to Google, the page experience update is going to combine a bunch of older signals with the new Core Web Vitals:
The Core Web Vitals tool will now merge all of that data we once had to gather from various Google apps. That’ll make it more convenient for designers and developers to improve the on-page experience across a variety of areas.
The Page Experience Algorithm Will Change Over Time
Per Google:
Because we continue to work on identifying and measuring aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis to both further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure.
So, don’t expect this to be a one-and-done thing. You’ll have to rely on the Core Web Vitals tool, and pay close attention to updates out of Google, to ensure your sites are keeping up with Google’s page experience standards.
Your Other Google Apps Have Already Been Updated with Core Web Vitals
If you hadn’t noticed, Google has already updated its other apps in anticipation of the page experience update.
Here’s an example of how Lighthouse’s report on the Amazon website now looks:
By including these metrics within the tools you’re already using, you don’t necessarily have to add the Core Web Vitals tool to your growing toolbox. That said, there are some really valuable reports in there, so I’ll show you why you may want to add it anyway.
Google’s Top Stories Will Be Affected
In the past when someone did a news-related search on Google, they’d see “Top Stories” results like this one:
Until now, the only pages shown here were AMP-enabled ones.
Once the page experience update goes live, though, the AMP requirement is going away. So long as a page meets the page experience criteria along with Google News content policies, it can now rank in this section.
Google Search Results May Show a Page Experience Indicator
In the Top Stories example above, notice the AMP indicator I highlighted in yellow. Google is thinking about adding something similar to any search result that fulfills its page experience criteria.
While I think a small, eye-catching icon might draw a little more attention from Google users, I’m not sure if it’ll be that big of a deal to them. People working in this industry certainly know what that lightning bolt means, and we’ll also be the ones who recognize the page experience indicator, but I’m not convinced it’ll matter to users.
That said, this is something Google is thinking about rolling about, so it’s something to be aware of. At the very least, you can consider it a badge of honor when showing your websites to clients and prospects who want to see what you can do for them.
Content Is Still More Important Than Page Experience
Even if a website checks off all the page experience boxes, there’s no guarantee that it’ll start to rank better than websites that haven’t. The quality and value of the content on the page still matters greatly.
Using Core Web Vitals to Measure Page Experience
Alright, so let’s take a look at this Core Web Vitals tool. Here’s what the tool looks like when you enter the “Measure” tab:
It’s like most other Google analyzer tools. You enter the URL you want to audit and let the tool run. The results then spit out something that looks like this:
Core Web Vitals are graded on four categories:
Performance measures the loading speed, interactivity, and stability of the page.
Best Practices focus on the technical aspects of the page, including things like having an SSL certificate and making sure images fit within the parameters of the mobile screen.
SEO checks on the typical SEO signals like metadata, structured data, and so on.
Accessibility reports any issues with visitors not being able to see or access parts of the page.
If you scroll down just a little bit on the page, there’s more data available. It mainly has to deal with the technical stuff, like page speeds and unoptimized code:
Now, this isn’t really anything new. We can get this data about load time, interactivity, and content stability from Google’s other apps.
The real value is in the report, which you can access up top next to the date of your audit.
Open the report and you’ll find specific suggestions and pro tips to optimize each part of the page experience, like this SEO report:
Just like other Google tools, this one can teach you a lot about what makes one site more rankable than another. So, make sure you update your web design strategy going forward to integrate all of these ranking signals.
While you’ll have to do annual audits on your sites to see how much Google has changed the page experience signals, you’ll create less work for yourself if this baseline set of criteria are met with every site you build.
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