Archive for month: May, 2019

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/I1PiNN2kvDo/

We recently had the opportunity to interview Qode, author of one of the best selling WordPress themes. Their humble beginnings and rapid success are inspiring to anyone interested in selling digital products.

Can you tell us a bit about how Qode started and the team behind it?

Qode started out as two people with a shared goal – to create quality digital products, but with a focus on beauty and aesthetics. In our early stages, we provided custom web development services. But we soon noticed the rising popularity of WordPress themes and saw an opportunity there, even though the marketplace was already fairly saturated.

Our team was still small, but we were all oriented toward UX and aesthetics. That was our main advantage. We made a decision back then that has become the cornerstone of our company: never to compromise our creative vision, even if it meant reaching fewer people. Instead of going down the commercial path and making the types of themes everyone was churning out, we primarily focused on great design. And I think that’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the market.

Your Bridge theme is one of the most popular WordPress themes on ThemeForest with over 100,000 sales — an incredible achievement. What do you believe sets Bridge apart from other WordPress themes?

When it came out, Bridge was just another theme by Qode. The thing is, we approach each new theme as a success, even in the earliest stages of design. I think that’s evident in all our themes, from the very beginning.

With Bridge, it turned out people were drawn to its clean and simple style, which was popular at the time. It got that initial boost straight out of the gate and gained enough visibility on the market. So, we adapted and started developing it in that direction. We wanted to offer Bridge to as many people as we could, while still sticking to our principles and making as few compromises as possible.

That’s how the Bridge demos came to be. Bridge currently has nearly 380 distinct demos, and we’re always adding more. It was the first bestseller on the market with so many and might have even set the standard in terms of the number and the quality of demos a WordPress theme can have.

With the huge success of Bridge and your other WordPress products, what are some challenges you’ve faced with that type of growth?

Bridge served as proof that we were doing something right and it motivated us to keep moving in that direction. So when we decided to create new brands and expand our catalog of themes, we knew we would need a lot more manpower. Our first goal was hiring the best people in the business.

We now have over 100 employees, and more than 25 professional designers and artists working on our themes. With so many people cooperating on multiple projects, we had to implement a set of procedures to make sure things run smoothly at all times.

We also quickly outgrew the downtown apartment we started from and had to move to a larger office. This alone brought its own set of challenges: planning the space, remodeling, obtaining all the necessary equipment, etc. A larger company requires a completely different approach than a startup. But with great success comes great responsibility, I guess.

What has your experience been like developing for Gutenberg and are you excited for the direction WordPress is taking?

We’re currently working on a new theme framework that’s ultimately going to let users switch between page builders. Developing for Gutenberg has been a significant part of that project.

We definitely see Gutenberg as a step in the right direction. The components and modules are well executed, but the editor in its current form isn’t as user-friendly as we’d like it to be. We think there’s still work to be done in terms of the UX.

Of course, we understand this is just the first phase of what could be an entirely new approach to website building in WordPress and we’re excited to see where it goes. But one of the goals with our new framework is to give users a choice in terms of the editor they’d like to use.

If you could give any advice to a new designer or developer trying to sell digital goods, what would it be?

Everyone that came before you already has a massive head start. So, when thinking about the audience for your product, don’t take the expected route. Don’t try to satisfy everyone at all times. That’s a surefire recipe for failure.

Find a small but reliable audience and do everything you can to speak directly to their needs. Tailor all aspects of your business – from your actual product and its functionalities to your design, branding, and messaging – to that select group of people and you’ll have a way better chance at success.

Do you have any tips on promoting your work to build an audience?

The best form of promotion is the quality of your product. And satisfied customers are always the best advocates. I think ThemeForest does a good job of promoting great themes, but these days, with so many authors and themes out there, you can’t rely only on that. You need to use all available techniques to get your themes in front of your target audience. Once you accomplish that, the design and quality will often be the deciding factors.

When it comes to places for promoting our work, we take a special interest in visually-oriented social networks. Particularly ones like Dribbble and Pinterest, where we can connect with fellow designers and other users who recognize the importance of a visual experience.

Before we wrap up this interview, are there any upcoming products or other announcements you’d like to share?

We recently launched the new Qode Interactive website. It’s now the home of all 330+ themes from our five brands. If you look at the current state of the market, you’ll see that the best quality often gets buried in the avalanche of themes coming out every day. Our new site provides a collection of themes that make no compromise when it comes to quality.

And finding the right one is now quicker and easier than ever, thanks to our powerful filtering system. We made sure people can search themes based on all imaginable parameters, from colors, styles, and effects all the way down to the shortcodes and plugins each theme comes with. So, if you’re looking for a new way to find beautiful WordPress themes, you might want to check it out.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/BINpKdu0ZJg/art-movements-inspired-modern-web-design

Modern web design has its roots in some of the most influential art moments in the history of the world. The elements that we identify as being pleasing to the eye are echoes and homages to the great art of the past. That’s not to say modern web design isn’t a new and important form […]

The post The Art Movements That Inspired Modern Web Design appeared first on designrfix.com.

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

Inspirational Website of the Week: Nike Circular Design Guide

A razor-sharp grid-based design with lots of personality. Our pick this week.

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Website Builder Software With Your Branding

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Accessible Icon Buttons

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SCAR

SCAR is a deployment stack that make it easy for you to deploy a static website with a custom domain, SSL, and a CDN

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Twisted Polygons

A Vue.js project for generating SVGs of polygons for plotting. By Maks Surguy.

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Animation Handbook

A free ebook that will teach you how to use animation to demonstrate abstract concepts, make products feel more life-like, and instill more emotion into digital experiences. By Ryan McLeod.

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Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface

Some valuable information on what’s important when designing for car-dashboard user interfaces.

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The State of Fluid Web Typography

A very insightful article by Matej Latin on the current state of fluid typography and its issues.

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The “Inside” Problem

Chris Coyier explains the “inside” layout problem and shows how to tackle it.

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Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models

Some amazing work from the Samsung AI lab with the potential to animate heads using only few or even one shot of a target person.

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Vue.js And SEO: How To Optimize Reactive Websites For Search Engines And Bots

Paolo Mioni writes about how reactive JavaScript frameworks like Vue and React perform in terms of SEO.

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Face Button

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THREE – Optimized Line Mess!

A demo by Colin van Eenige where “lines are created, stored and animated”.

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Colour Diver

A wonderful animation made by Chris Gannon.

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Contextually Marking up accessible images and SVGs

Scott O’Hara explains the various methods for providing accessible names for images or SVGs and points out related quirks in browser.

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Font-display is incompatible with icon fonts

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Burberry: The Monogram Universe

A very cool WebGL powered interactive explorer for showcasing a new collection.

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A Cloud

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Launching Today: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

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Flexible data tables with CSS Grid

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Font Kiko

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Color Designer

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On How I Approach Teaching CSS, CodePen Quizzes and Playing Cards

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Undesign

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Collective #518 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/how-many-of-these-design-tools-youve-tried/

As a web designer or design agency, you’ve learned to keep a close watch on design trends. They come and go as well as changes in digital design technology and how they affect your profession….

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/webpack-beginner-guide/?utm_source=rss

Nowadays, we’re forced to use many accessory tools to facilitate, speed up and optimize our web development workflow. Often though, such tools add an extra layer of complexity into the stack. As a result, we need to utilize additional time and effort to learn, understand and use these tools correctly. The same is true for webpack.

When using webpack for the first time, it can be difficult to understand how it works and how it should be used. Although it has good documentation, it can be daunting for novices, and it has a steep learning curve. However, webpack is worth learning and can save considerable time and effort in the long run. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce all the core concepts to help you get started.

Note: in this tutorial I’ve used webpack 4.30.

What Is Webpack?

As its core, webpack is a static module bundler. In a particular project, webpack treats all files and assets as modules. Under the hood, it relies on a dependency graph. A dependency graph describes how modules relate to each other using the references (require and import statements) between files. In this way, webpack statically traverses all modules to build the graph, and uses it to generate a single bundle (or several bundles) — a JavaScript file containing the code from all modules combined in the correct order. “Statically” means that, when webpack builds its dependency graph, it doesn’t execute the source code but stitches modules and their dependencies together into a bundle. This can then be included in your HTML files.

Now, to expand the above cursory overview, let’s explore the main concepts webpack uses.

Webpack Main Concepts

Webpack has some main concepts which we need to understand clearly before digging in its practical implementation. Let’s examine them one by one:

Entry. The entry point is the module, which webpack uses to start building its internal dependency graph. From there, it determines which other modules and libraries that entry point depends on (directly and indirectly) and includes them in the graph until no dependency is left. By default, the entry property is set to ./src/index.js, but we can specify a different module (or even multiple modules) in the webpack configuration file.

Output. The output property instructs webpack where to emit the bundle(s) and what name to use for that file(s). The default value for this property is ./dist/main.js for the main bundle and ./dist for other generated files — such as images, for example. Of course, we can specify different values in the configuration depending on our needs.

Loaders. By default, webpack only understands JavaScript and JSON files. To process other types of files and convert them into valid modules, webpack uses loaders. Loaders transform the source code of non-JavaScript modules, allowing us to preprocess those files before they’re added to the dependency graph. For example, a loader can transform files from a CoffeeScript language to JavaScript or inline images to data URLs. With loaders we can even import CSS files directly from our JavaScript modules.

Plugins. Plugins are used for any other task that loaders can’t do. They provide us with a wide range of solutions about asset management, bundle minimization and optimization, and so on.

Mode. Typically, when we develop our application we work with two types of source code — one for the development build and one for the production build. Webpack allows us to set which one we want to be produced by changing the mode parameter to development, production or none. This allows webpack to use built-in optimizations corresponding to each environment. The default value is production. The none mode means that there won’t be used any default optimization options. To learn more about the options webpack uses in development and production mode, visit the mode configuration page.

How Webpack Works

In this section we’ll examine how webpack works. Even a simple project contains HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Also, it can contains assets such as fonts, images, and so on. So, a typical webpack workflow would include setting up an index.html file with the appropriate CSS and JS links, and the necessary assets. Also, if you have many CSS and JS modules which depend on each other, they need to be optimized and properly combined in one unit ready for production.

To do all this, webpack relies on configuration. Although webpack 4 comes with reasonable defaults, for any non-trivial project you’ll need to provide a special configuration file webpack.config.js, which describes how the files and assets should be transformed and what kind of output should be generated. This file can quickly become quite monolithic, which makes it hard to understand how webpack does its job unless you know the main concepts behind its working.

Based on the provided configuration, webpack starts from the entry points and resolves each module it encounters while constructing the dependency graph. If a module contains dependencies, the process is performed recursively against each dependency until the traversal has completed. Then webpack bundles all project’s modules into a small number of bundles — usually, just one — to be loaded by the browser.

Getting Started

Note: you can find the files for our project in the GitHub repo.

Now that we have solid theoretical foundation, let’s implement it in practice.

To start, we’ll create a new directory and switch to it. Then we’ll initialize a new project:

mkdir learn-webpack
cd learn-webpack
npm init -y

Next, we need to install webpack and webpack CLI locally:

npm install webpack webpack-cli –save-dev

Now, the content of the generated package.json should be similar to the following:

{
“name”: “learn_webpack”,
“version”: “1.0.0”,
“description”: “”,
“main”: “index.js”,
“scripts”: {
“test”: “echo “Error: no test specified” && exit 1″
},
“keywords”: [],
“author”: “”,
“license”: “ISC”,
“devDependencies”: {
“webpack”: “^4.30.0”,
“webpack-cli”: “^3.3.0”
}
}

Besides bundling modules, webpack can be used as a simple task runner. We can create webpack tasks by including the name of our task followed by its instructions in the scripts section of the package,json file. Let’s try this now. Open package.json and change the scripts object to the following:

“scripts”: {
“test”: “echo “Error: no test specified” && exit 1″,
“dev”: “webpack –mode development”,
“build”: “webpack –mode production”
},

Within the scripts property, webpack allows us to reference locally installed npm packages by their names. We use that and the –mode flag to define dev and build tasks, which will run webpack in development (npm run dev) and production (npm run build) mode respectively.

Before we test the tasks we’ve just created, let’s create a src directory and put an index.js file in it so that it contains console.log(“Hello webpack”);. Now we can already to run the dev task to start webpack in development mode:

$ npm run dev

> learn_webpack@1.0.0 dev C:UsersUserWebpacklearn_webpack
> webpack –mode development

Hash: 5bb3bdc1efd7b7f4b627
Version: webpack 4.30.0
Time: 226ms
Built at: 2019-04-16 17:48:32
Asset Size Chunks Chunk Names
main.js 3.8 KiB main [emitted] main
Entrypoint main = main.js
[./src/index.js] 27 bytes {main} [built]

Great! It works as expected. But to verify that we get the correct output, we need to display the result in the browser. To do that, let’s create an index.html file in the dist directory:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Getting Started</title>
</head>
<body>
<script src=”main.js”></script>
</body>
</html>

Now, if we open the file in the browser, we should see the Hello webpack message in the console.

So far, so good. But writing our index.html file manually can be problematic in some cases. For example, if we change the name of our entry point, the generated bundle will be renamed, but our index.html file will still reference the old name. So, we’ll need to update our HTML file manually every time we rename an entry point or add new one. Fortunately, we can easily fix that with the html-webpack-plugin. Let’s install it now:

npm install html-webpack-plugin –save-dev

At this point, to activate the plugin, we need to create a webpack.config.js file in the root directory with the following content:

const HtmlWebpackPlugin = require(“html-webpack-plugin”);

module.exports = {
plugins: [
new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
title: “Webpack Output”,
}),
],
};

As you can see, to activate a webpack plugin, we need to include it and then add it to the plugins array. If needed, we also pass options to the plugin.

Let’s run our build now to see what will happen:

$ npm run build

> learn_webpack@1.0.0 build C:UsersUserWebpacklearn_webpack
> webpack –mode production

Hash: e56a796f5ccfebcc8270
Version: webpack 4.30.0
Time: 1088ms
Built at: 2019-04-16 20:44:47
Asset Size Chunks Chunk Names
index.html 183 bytes [emitted]
main.js 956 bytes 0 [emitted] main
Entrypoint main = main.js
[0] ./src/index.js 27 bytes {0} [built]
Child html-webpack-plugin for “index.html”:
1 asset
Entrypoint undefined = index.html
[2] (webpack)/buildin/global.js 472 bytes {0} [built]
[3] (webpack)/buildin/module.js 497 bytes {0} [built]
+ 2 hidden modules

Let’s open the index.html. As we can see, the plugin automatically creates an updated index.html file for us which uses the title option from the configuration:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=”UTF-8″>
<title>Webpack Output</title>
</head>
<body>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”main.js”></script></body>
</html>

Let’s now expand our project and specify custom names for the entry and output properties. In webpack.config.js we add the following before the plugins property:

entry: ‘./src/app.js’,
output: {
filename: ‘[name].bundle.js’,
path: path.resolve(__dirname, ‘dist’)
},

Now, we’ll create an src/component.js file:

export default (text = “Hello webpack”) => {
const element = document.createElement(“p”);

element.innerHTML = text;

return element;
};

Next, we rename index.js to app.js to reflect our changes, and swap its content with the following:

import component from “./component”;

document.body.appendChild(component());

Now, let’s run webpack in production mode:

$ npm run build

> learn_webpack@1.0.0 build C:UsersUserWebpacklearn_webpack
> webpack –mode production

Hash: 9f78936f8a2a21061f0b
Version: webpack 4.30.0
Time: 1689ms
Built at: 2019-04-17 23:43:40
Asset Size Chunks Chunk Names
index.html 190 bytes [emitted]
main.bundle.js 1.04 KiB 0 [emitted] main
Entrypoint main = main.bundle.js
[0] ./src/app.js + 1 modules 227 bytes {0} [built]
| ./src/app.js 79 bytes [built]
| ./src/component.js 148 bytes [built]
Child html-webpack-plugin for “index.html”:
1 asset
Entrypoint undefined = index.html
[2] (webpack)/buildin/global.js 472 bytes {0} [built]
[3] (webpack)/buildin/module.js 497 bytes {0} [built]
+ 2 hidden modules

Let’s examine and clarify the information from the webpack output. Beginning from the top, we see the hash of the build, webpack version, and the time it took to execute the build. Next, we see the files generated in the dist directory (index.html and main.bundle.js). Below them, we see the entry module (app.js) and its dependency (component.js). The output after Child html-webpack-plugin for “index.html”: is related to the internal work of the html-webpack-plugin and we can safely ignore it.

So now, in the dist folder, we have the newly generated bundle file main.bundle.js. If we open index.html in the browser, we should see Hello webpack displayed on the page. Also, if we check the source of index.html, we’ll see that the value of the src property in the script tag is updated to main.bundle.js.

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Webpack appeared first on SitePoint.