Archive for month: January, 2018

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/av9H–SKguQ/become-your-own-boss-with-freelance-mastery-bundle

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About Creative Bloq deals

This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life.

We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more.

Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/xTPO3A43o3k/10-stress-relief-gadgets-for-designers

January can be a tough time; all that festive partying, darkened afternoons and chilly weather means that inspiration and motivation can often be more difficult to keep hold of than usual. This tends to lead to stress – and a lot of it – which, in turn, renders you unable to focus.

The best new tech for designers in 2018

But fear not creative folk – here we’ve pulled together some of the finest gadgets that aim to help you get back to your best self. From nature-inspired structures to electronic wizardry, explore the technology that could bring the calm back into your creative process.

01. Fidget Cube

Playing around with puzzles can often lead to a more efficient work ethic

$9.99/£7.61 from antsy labs

Funded through Kickstarter in 2016, this clever desk toy from designers Matthew and Mark McLachlan will remind you that playing around with puzzles can often lead to a more efficient work ethic. 

Featuring six sides, each features something to fidget with, whether you like to click, flip, glide or roll. There’s even a side inspired by those age-old worry stones that aim to get you breathing and reduce anxiety. 

02. BiOrbAIR terrarium

A little greenery can go a long way in establishing a calm and relaxing work environment

We all know that a little greenery can go a long way in establishing a calm and relaxing work environment. If you’re unable to stroll around the park on your lunch break or escape to the countryside at the weekend, a terrarium is pretty much the next best thing. 

This one from biOrb is tech-heavy (and has a fairly hefty price tag) but that means it can take care of your plants so you don’t have to. Creating the perfect micro-climate for growing tropical plants, you can sit back and enjoy your personal slice of paradise.

03. Sona

Sona keeps tabs on your heart rate and physical activity to measure your overall stress levels

Wearable technology offers new possibilities when it comes to wellbeing, both mental and physical. The Sona bracelet wants to “train your resilience to stress” and comes with five Resonance breathing meditation sessions for focus and calm. 

It's perfect if you need a quick fix during small, intense bouts of stress-related anxiety. It also keeps tabs on your heart rate and physical activity to measure your overall stress levels.

04. The Pip

Who knew that your fingertips could lead to a happier and healthier mind?

Who knew that a stress-free life was at your fingertips? It turns out that the pores on your fingertips are extremely sensitive to stress. The Pip is an innovative gadget that reads these signals and turns them into a visualisation that enables you to keep track of your stress levels. 

With a scientific board at the heart of the design, The Pip allows you to be self-aware and, in turn, establish some self-care.

05. Thync

Thync uses electronic pulses to stimulate the brain

Claiming to be the first wearable technology that “actively elevates your mood and lowers stress,” Thync uses electronic pulses to stimulate the brain. 

If that sounds worrying, it does come with some solid credentials: this stress relief gadget was developed by a team of neuroscientists from MIT, Harvard and Stanford and has been clinically tested over 5000 times. Plus, with such a sleek design, you’ll be combating stress in serious style.

06. Wellbe

Discover exactly what triggers your stress with Wellbe

Initially funded through IndieGoGo, the WellBe wearable provides insights into what exactly triggers your stress levels to rise. The bracelet monitors your heart rate and uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine your stress and calmness levels based on time, location and people you meet throughout your day. 

Cut back on the negativity in your life.

07. Face Of The Moon stress ball

The ‘Faces of the Moon’ stress ball expressions change as you squeeze

Stress balls are a go-to toy for desk spaces, and while most of them do the job, this stress relief product from The Museum of Modern Art is truly one-of-a-kind. 

Created by Japanese designer Makiko Yoshida, the ‘Faces of the Moon’ expressions change as you squeeze. Produced using a unique texture, its addictive tendencies will help relieve your anxiety. Who couldn’t love a face like that?

08. Spire

Spire measures your breathing, notifying you when your it reflects tension

When it comes to managing your stress levels, focusing on your breath is one of the most important exercises around. Spire helps to manage this by measuring your breathing, notifying you when it reflects your tension.

Through its use, you can discover what makes you calm and focused or stressed and agitated, allowing you to be more productive than ever. Designed to clip onto your belt, you can also program your Spire to let you know when you’ve been inactive and it’s time to get walking.

09. Prana

Prana tells you when you need to improve your posture

Bad posture is one of the most common problems for creatives who work at a desk. Thankfully, the team at Prana has created a stress relief wearable that not only tracks your breath but also tells you when you need to improve your posture. 

Designed to rapidly activate your body’s relaxation response through proper diaphragmatic breathing and good posture, Prana could enable you to have a calm working day in no time.

10. Muse

Designed like a headband, Muse uses brain-sensing technology to measure whether your mind is calm or active

You may already be well on your way to stress management through meditation and while this is proven to keep your mind healthy, you may have trouble sticking to a meditative routine or find yourself distracted during the process. 

Designed like a headband, Muse uses brain-sensing technology to measure whether your mind is calm or active, and translates those signals into guiding sounds, so you can stay focused. 

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/cGX-aT9I_ro/

The incredible material design library is awesome for designers. It might be the most famous design language ever and it fits well with all devices.

And with the large following behind material design, we’ve also seen dozens of frameworks hit the web. Many of these are half-baked or partially finished, but there are some good ones in the mix.

For this post I’ve curated my top picks for the 14 best material design kits you can start using today. These work for all types of websites and, even though they follow a similar design language, they all have unique features that make them valuable.

1. MUI

I recently stumbled onto the MUI framework and really like it so far. I had never heard of this before – but I have a feeling it’ll be around for the long haul.

It’s a material design framework built around Google’s guidelines for great websites, clean code and native device support from smartphones to desktops. This includes all the standard material UI elements like appbars, tappable buttons, and custom panels.

The introduction is pretty clean and easy to follow regardless of your coding background. Even if you’ve never used a framework before, this one should be a piece of cake.

2. Material Design Kit

The infamous Material Design Kit is perhaps the best digital design freebie out there. It comes as a full package for Photoshop, Sketch and Adobe XD. This makes up about 90% of the design community’s preferred software. So regardless of how you craft mockups – you’ll be good.

It comes with 60+ different interface components and it’s pretty darn easy to work with.

Be warned that the full kit comes at a price. So while the free version is fantastic, it shouldn’t be the only kit you use for mockup design work.

3. Materialize.css

Materialize.css is another personal favorite that’s been around for a few years. This one’s definitely stable and should be good to run on any site.

Have a look at their startup guide to get a feel for how everything works. You can include optional JS files to add components to your page or just use the Materialize stylesheet.

Most developers want a lightweight CSS framework, so it makes sense to focus primarily on Materialize as a frontend HTML/CSS structure.

4. Material Design Lite

The Material Design Lite framework avoids any reliance on external JS libraries or CSS files. It’s a completely self-supporting framework that runs on modern coding standards and even supports graceful degradation for older browsers.

However, this MDL library has officially merged with the Web Components project – so it’s no longer in active development.

But I still included it here because it’s a great starting point for new projects. You won’t find many (or any) bugs in the code and it should work as expected.

5. Surface

Surface is a general CSS framework that doesn’t exactly clone Google’s material guidelines. However, it is inspired by them.

The entire library is 100% CSS-based and uses zero JavaScript. This means no scripts weighing you down and all the components run in pure CSS.

In total, the stylesheet measures just over 5KB – which is pretty reasonable considering what you get.

Have a look at the getting started page for more details.

6. MD Bootstrap

MD Bootstrap is one of the few freemium libraries out there. It does cost money for the pro version, but you can use the free version indefinitely. This makes it perfectly suitable for most projects.

Not to mention this library runs on Bootstrap 4, which makes it fully compliant with the newest updates. Pretty cool!

There are quite a few Bootstrap frameworks that use material design, but the MD Bootstrap kit is my favorite.

Browse their tutorial to learn more.

7. Bootstrap Material Design

This is one other Bootstrap add-on that really takes material design to the next level. With the Bootstrap Material Design framework you have the option of using the older version (3.x) or the newer Bootstrap 4. Both choices are fully supported and this library is completely free regardless.

While I think both material BS libraries offer value, I think this one’s a bit more customizable from the get-go. But that also means it takes a little more work to learn the internals.

Have a look at their GitHub page if you would like to learn more.

8. Material UI

If you’re building modern webapps then you’ll probably know all about React. It’s one of the largest JS frameworks on the web and it’s growing larger every year.

The Material UI framework brings material design into the React.js ecosystem. This lets you build custom material-styled webapps while coding on top of a React.js base.

It’s currently in development for a v1.0 release and you can expect that update very soon. Have a look at the GitHub repo for more information.

9. Vuetify

Another fast-growing JS framework is Vue.js. This works like React, except it feels more like a traditional templating library for all types of sites – not just webapps.

The Vuetify library offers a material design UI kit on top of the Vue.js framework. This project started a little while back and it features a pretty dedicated support base.

There’s a fantastic user guide online you can check out if you’d like to see how this works in action.

But I can’t say this is the perfect solution for all Vue.js projects, so keep that in mind before launching this on a live site.

10. Bulma

Love using CSS flexbox? Then the Bulma framework is for you.

This runs on top of common material design features with aesthetics that can blend into any page. The design is clean, super-easy to use and the grid system is phenomenal.

This is my top choice for anything flexbox related. Even if you don’t know much about flexbox, this framework makes for a great learning tool.

11. Ionic Material

If you want to build native apps without programming, then Ionic is a perfect choice. It works like a web framework and lets you publish native Android applications that can actually be accepted into the store.

Ionic Material takes things to the next level. With this framework you can build native-looking apps that run on Google’s material design guidelines.

All you need is some knowledge of Ionic and a willingness to dive into this gorgeous UI kit.

12. Google Material Color

Google Material Color isn’t a complete UI kit, but rather a color library for web developers.

This comes with a bunch of pre-built color codes that fit perfectly into Google’s color requirements. And this library runs on top of Sass, Less, and Stylus.

13. Material UI

Short, simple, and easy to setup best describes this Material UI kit developed by Balaj Marius.

It’s a super-simple concept and certainly not the largest library here. But it gets the job done – offering a solid number of material components for any project.

Most of these follow the card interface which has become popularized by Google. It’s the perfect addition to any material website.

14. Hubuntu UI

Few designers mention admin themes because they’re just not as popular as frontend frameworks. But the Hubuntu UI admin kit is phenomenal for building your own dashboard, whether it’s for a CMS, a SaaS product or anything else.

This entire framework runs on the Stylus preprocessor but can be used with plain CSS. It is fairly complex so you’ll need to do some reading to get into the nitty-gritty details.

Thankfully everything you need to learn can be found on the main GitHub page, along with setup instructions for the whole framework.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/cjhDPBxzLy0/

Today we’d like to share some fun letter animations with you. The idea is based on Animography’s Dribbble shot “Us By Night” where various little shapes animate with some letters. We wanted to explore some similar animations using different typographies and shape effects. We are using anime.js for the animations and Charming for working with the words.

The demo is kindly sponsored by JazzCon.Tech: Music. Food. Code. New Orleans March 2018. If you would like to become a demo sponsor, you can find out more here.

Attention: For this demo we are using some new CSS properties, please view in an up-to-date browser.

The main idea of the implementation is the following: we create an SVG for each word where we then place the shapes relative to the position of each letter. With a couple of options we can then create fun effects using the simple shapes. To showcase the effects, we’ve created a little slideshow.

This is an initialization example. In our case, the element is an h2 with the class word:

const word = new Word(element, options);

options: {
shapesOnTop: false, // shapes on top or beneath the letters
totalShapes: 10, // number shapes per letter
shapeTypes: [‘circle’, ‘rect’, ‘polygon’], // type of shapes
shapeColors: [‘#e07272’, ‘#0805b5’, ‘#49c6ff’, ‘#8bc34a’, ‘#1e1e21’], // pick randomly from these colors
shapeFill: true, // if set to false, there’s no fill and the stroke gets applied instead
shapeStrokeWidth: 1 // the stroke width
}

We have the following two methods for showing and hiding the word:

word.show(options)
word.hide(options)

Here is an example for the options we can define for the effect on the letters and the shapes when showing the word:

word.show({
lettersAnimationOpts: {
duration: 400,
delay: (t,i) => i*60,
easing: ‘easeInExpo’,
opacity: [0,1],
scale: [0,1]
},
shapesAnimationOpts: {
duration: 700,
delay: (t,i) => i*40,
easing: ‘easeOutExpo’,
translateX: () => [0,anime.random(-20,20)],
translateY: () => [0,anime.random(-400,400)],
scale: () => [randomBetween(0.2,0.6),randomBetween(0.2,0.6)],
rotate: () => [0,anime.random(-16,16)],
opacity: [
{value: 1, duration: 1, easing: ‘linear’},
{value: 0, duration: 700, easing: ‘easeOutQuad’}
]
}
})

This follows the syntax of anime.js. Learn more about it on their documentation page.

Have a look at some screenshots:

We hope you like this little project and find it useful.

References and Credits

Based on the Dribbble shot “Us By Night” by Animography
Anime.js by Julian Garnier
Charming by Yuan Qing

Decorative Letter Animations was written by Mary Lou and published on Codrops.