How to Choose a Color For Your Website

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/choosing-color-for-website/

Your website’s color scheme is a vital UI element that ensures positive visual appeal leading to a good user experience. You may not realize but a lot of users make their buying decisions n the…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

20 Free Christmas Card Templates You Can Download

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/free-christmas-card-templates/

When you’re creating Christmas-specific designs, you’ll find a lot of websites that offer Christmas resources like fonts, icons and vectors. However, certain type of resources like…

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Best Wireless Inkjet Printer Reviews

Original Source: https://designrfix.com/article/best-wireless-inkjet-printer/

Today, the most common type of printer used in many homes and offices is the best wireless inkjet printer. These printers have become very popular due to their ease of use and convenience. They can be used anywhere without having to worry about cables or wires getting tangled up. With them, you can print from your…

The post Best Wireless Inkjet Printer Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.

You can now buy a Switch OLED dock, without the Switch OLED

Original Source: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/switch-oled-dock

But should you?

Exciting New Tools For Designers, Holidays 2021

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2021/12/exciting-new-tools-for-designers-holidays-2021/

The year’s winding down as everyone segues into a much-needed holiday R&R. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some awesome new tools and resources for website design projects.

Check them out, and hit the ground running in January. Here’s what’s new for designers this holiday period. Enjoy!

Fancy Border Radius Generator

Fancy Border Radius Generator is a fun tool that allows you to create exciting shapes for elements. Use the included templates or create your own border shapes and then export the CSS/HTML for a variety of uses.

Pulsetic

Pulsetic answers the question: “Is your website down?” Get website downtime alerts by phone call, SMS, email, or Slack. Create beautiful status pages and incident management reports and keep visitors (and your team) updated.

Ffflux SVG Generator

Ffflux SVG Generator makes it easy to generate fluid and organic-feeling gradients. You can use the resulting graphics as backgrounds to elements on a page to give a colorful fluid look to page elements. Choose colors and styles, then save or copy your SVG for use.

Fable

Fable is a web-based motion design platform to help you tell moving stories. It’s designed to be easy enough for beginners to use but has tools that even the most experienced motion designers can appreciate. This is a premium tool, but you can try it free.

Modern Fluid Typography Editor

Modern Fluid Typography Editor takes the guesswork out of sizing and scale for type sizes on different screens. Set a few preferences and see ranges your type styles should fall in. This typography calculator is visual and easy to use.

Emoji to Scale

Emoji to Scale is a fun look at emojis in a real-world relationship to each other. Make sure to also note the Pokemon to Scale project, which is just as much fun.

Page Flip Text Effect

Page Flip Text Effect is a fun and straightforward PSD asset that adds a nice element to design projects. Everyone can use some fun, colorful animation, right?

Nanonets

Nanonets is a practical tool for automated table extraction. You can snag tables from PDFs, scanned files, and images. Then capture relevant data stored in tabular structures on any document and convert to JSON Excel, or CSV and download.

Browsers.page

Browsers.page shows browser name and version, matched with a list of the browsers you support as a company or project. It’s a visual reminder to update if you are working with some browser lag. It’s a free tool and includes a frontend API.

UKO UI

UKO UI is a Figma dashboard and design system bundle packed with components and pages to build from. It’s free for personal use.

Floating UI

Floating UI is a low-level library for positioning “floating” elements like tooltips, popovers, dropdowns, menus, and more. Since these types of elements float on top of the UI without disrupting the flow of content, challenges arise when positioning them. It exposes primitives, which enable a floating element to be positioned next to a given reference element while appearing in view for the user.

Style-Dictionary-Play

Style-Dictionary-Play lets you experiment with a style dictionary in your browser with a live preview and mobile and desktop views. It’s an open-source tool and allows for URL project sharing, and you can use it without logging in or signing up.

Airplane Runbooks

Airplane Runbooks makes it easy to turn small amounts of code into complex internal workflows. Model onboarding flows, admin operations, cron-like schedules, and more and share with your team. It’s like Zapier but for first-party operations that touch prod data.

Shoelace

Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components that works with any framework. It’s fully customizable – and has a dark mode. It’s built with accessibility in mind, and the open-source tool is packed with components.

Tutorial: Coloring with Code

Coloring with Code is an excellent tutorial by the team at Codrops that will help you create beautiful, inspiring, and unique color palettes/combinations, all from the comfort of your favorite text editor. It’s practical and easy to follow along as you work through the steps on your own.

Stytch

Stytch is a full-stack authentication and authorization platform whose APIs make it simple to seamlessly onboard, authenticate and engage users. Improve security and user experience by going passwordless with this premium tool.

Highlight

Highlight keeps web apps stable. With pixel-perfect session replay, you’ll get complete visibility into issues and interactions that are slowing down users. You can start using this premium tool in minutes, and it works on every framework.

Source

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.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

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Case Study: A Unique Website for Basement Grotesque

Original Source: https://tympanus.net/codrops/2021/12/13/case-study-a-unique-website-for-basement-grotesque/

Basement Grotesque is one of basement studio’s first self-initiated projects. We wanted to create a typeface tailored to the studio’s visual language. It became the perfect excuse to show it off with a website that could suit its inherent bold and striking style.

The Beginnings

Our design team had just redesigned the studio’s identity. For the wordmark, instead of using an existing font, we decided to draw each of the characters in an effort to capture the distinct voice and style of the studio. Once we had drawn those final seven letters (and the period sign), it seemed only natural to expand them to a full-fledged bespoke font. That was the beginning of Basement Grotesque.

From then on, our task was fairly clear: we had to create a strong typeface, suitable for large headings and titling, and it had to be bold. Inspired by the specimens of grotesque typefaces of the early 19th century, and combining them with the renewed brutalist aesthetics of the contemporary visual landscape, Basement Grotesque would become our first venture into the daunting world of type design. We weren’t just designing and releasing a new font; we were on the journey of learning a new craft by doing.

Coincidentally, the studio had established quarterly hackathons to devote specific time and space to develop self-initiated projects where the whole team would get together, work on and ship anything we wanted to explore and test that wouldn’t normally be possible with client work. After some brainstorming, the first project chosen for our first hackathon was the site to launch and share our first typeface. Again, it just felt like a natural decision.

“This font is really the result of a creative itch we wanted to scratch a long time ago. We took on the challenge and now we have a growing typeface, open and available to anyone who wants to use it” — Andres Briganti, Head of Design

The Process

Once the goal was set, the challenge was to finish at least one weight of the typeface and then make a website to promote it and its future additions. We had to do something captivating so that it would motivate our community to use it and share it.

The font quickly got to a stage where it was advanced enough to be released. Part of the appeal of the project was the idea to create something that was an ongoing effort and a work in progress. New weights and widths, and even revisions and updates would become available and open to the public as time goes by.

Starting with the Black Weight (800), each character was carefully designed to convey the studio’s visual style, and some of the features of the current version are:

413 unique glyphs14 discretionary ligaturesBold, our voice and tone, of courseOld style and lining figuresLanguage support for Western and Central European languages

Create, Develop and Show Off

With the font in hand, we now had to build a website to present it. It had to be interactive enough to show the typeface’s features, but also feel solid and performant.

The preferred tech stack at basement is Next.js with TypeScript. Having those as basics, we then chose GSAP for animations, Stitches for CSS-in-JS, and Locomotive Scroll for better scrolling experiences — among other libraries. We started from a template repository, next-typescript, for faster development.

“We worked on a tight deadline, and the team really delivered. Each of us worked on a specific section, and then we arranged everything together to get to the final result.” Julian Benegas, Head of Development.

The repository was made open-source, so feel free to fork and play around with it: https://github.com/basementstudio/basement-grotesque.

Interesting Code Challenges

1) In the “Try this beauty” section, we have an interactive preview, where you can adjust the font size, leading, and tracking, to see how it looks. We had to create a ResizableTextarea component to solve some spacing issues. The syncHeights function synced the height of a placeholder div with the actual textarea node. A bit hacky!

function syncHeights(textarea: HTMLTextAreaElement, div: HTMLDivElement) {
const value = textarea.value.replace(/n/g, '<br>')
div.innerHTML = value + '<br style="line-height: 3px;">'
div.style.display = 'block'
textarea.style.height = div.offsetHeight + 'px'
div.style.display = 'none'
}

Full source here.

2) On the footer, we used the 2d physics library p2.js to get that cool “falling letters” animation. The code is a bit long, but please, feel free to follow the source from here.

3) We integrated with Twitter’s API to get and render tweets hashtagged #basementgrotesque on the website. On the download flow, we suggested that users tweet something to show some love ?

const handleDownload = useCallback(() => {
const encoded = {
text: encodeURIComponent(
'I’m downloading the #basementgrotesque typeface, the boldest font I’ll ever use on my side-projects. Thank you guys @basementstudio 🏴 Get it now: https://grotesque.basement.studio/'
)
}
window.open(
`https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=${encoded.text}`,
'_blank'
)
download(
encodeURI(location.origin + '/BasementGrotesque-Black_v1.202.zip')
)
}, [])

Full source here.

The Results

See it for yourself: https://grotesque.basement.studio/.

The code is open-source: https://github.com/basementstudio/basement-grotesque.

More About Us

basement.studio is a small team of like-minded individuals whose purpose is to create visually compelling brands and websites, focusing not only on their looks but also on their performance. As we like to say: we make cool shit that performs.

Our award-winning team of designers and developers are hungry for even more interesting projects to build.

Do you have any projects in mind? Don’t be shy: https://basement.studio/contact.

The post Case Study: A Unique Website for Basement Grotesque appeared first on Codrops.

Popular Design News of the Week: December 6, 2021 – December 12, 2021

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2021/12/popular-design-news-of-the-week-december-6-2021-december-12-2021/

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!

Svija – A Website Builder Based on Adobe Illustrator

13 Graphic Design Trends for 2022: Retro Uprise & Bold Ideas

Designers’ Pick: Best Google Fonts for 2022

7 Apps We Couldn’t Live Without in 2021

Mistakes I Made While Learning Web Development as a Beginner

Interactive Vim Exercises

34 HTML Tabs Examples for Web Development

How to Reset a Single Git File and Why

Google Fonts Knowledge

Dark UI Design: Principles and Best Practices

Source

p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

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Top 10 Best Printer Stand Reviews

Original Source: https://designrfix.com/reviews/best-printer-stand

Printers are of great importance to offices and even homes. You can use them to print photos, labels, tickets, and many more. Most importantly, you must have a sturdy printer stand. After all, printers are a bit bulky and come with other accessories. Well, you need the best printer stand to keep your printer and the other…

The post Top 10 Best Printer Stand Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.

Top 10 Best Printer Under $100 Reviews

Original Source: https://designrfix.com/reviews/best-printer-under-100

If you are looking for the best printer under $100, this post might give you some insight by giving a reasonable solution. Due to an abrupt increase in demand and competition, companies are offering pretty deals on a budget. Also, to get the best printer under $100 does not mean you sacrifice a lot of…

The post Top 10 Best Printer Under $100 Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.

Free Holiday-Inspired Icon Sets And Vector Elements

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/12/free-holiday-icons-vector-elements/

With the holidays just around the corner, what better way to celebrate than with some free goodies? We sifted through the web (and our archives) to find winter- and Christmas-themed icon sets and vector elements that’ll give your creative projects some holiday flair. And, psst, they are perfect if you’re in need for some last-minute Christmas cards, gift tags, or wrapping paper, too.

All icons and design elements in this collection can be downloaded for free, but please remember to consult their licenses or contact the creators before using them. A huge thank-you goes out to all designers who share their work with the community, not only at this time of the year! You rock! Have a happy holiday season, everyone!

A Modern Christmas

A hipster Santa on an electric scooter, a Christmas llama, and a car that masters a risky balancing act to transport a pile of Christmas gifts on its roof — the Christmas Illustration Pack by Iconscout has some surprises built in that’ll make you smile. 14 illustrations are included in the pack, in SVG, PNG, and EPS formats. You can use them for free with attribution.

Hand-Drawn Christmas

If you like it cute, this hand-drawn freebie by Freepik and Flaticon might be for you. In it, you’ll find 70 adorable Christmas elements like snowmen, tree ornaments, bells, garlands, stars, pinecones, gift boxes, animals, and much more. They come with a nice color palette (which is editable, by the way) as well as in a lined version. Available in PNG and SVG formats, the elements are completely resizable, too. Perfect for some print-at-home coloring pages to keep the kids busy.

Merry And Bright

A set of 20 vector icons that are bound to bring some holiday joy and happiness to any project comes from the folks at Zippypixels. The icons shine with a fun color palette in combination with a flat style and circle shape and come in AI, EPS, SVG, and PNG formats. You can use them for free in personal projects with attribution.

Pixel-Perfect Line Icons

If you want to give your e-commerce or product site a little Christmas makeover, the Pixel-Perfect Line Icons that Andrey Rubin designed for Kit8 could be for you. They give UI icons a fun Christmas twist — imagine the shopping cart turning into Santa’s sleigh, the notification bell being adorned with a ribbon, and the message bubbles that usually indicate customer support turning into Christmas tree decorations. The icons come in EPS, AI, and JPG formats.

Christmas Stamps

For his Corona edition Christmas icons, Žarko Cvijović chose a motif that brings people closer together even if they are far away from each other: postage stamps. The 12 stamps show traditional Christmas motifs with a modern twist and come in three different styles (lined, bold lined, colored lined). Available as an AI file.

Pictogram

Angels, elves, Santa, the Three Wise Men, and, well, normal people caroling or preparing Christmas dinner — the Pictogram Christmas Collection by Freepik includes 50 holiday-themed characters. They come in three different styles (colored, lined, and colored lined) and are fully editable in both AI and EPS formats.

Christmas Joy

Roast turkey, gingerbread men, reindeer, and that comfy Christmas sweater that waits in the back of the closet to be dug out. With 110 icons in total, Anastasia Kolisnichenko’s Christmas icon set has everything a Christmas lover’s heart could ask for. The icons are available in AI, PSD, PNG, and EPS formats and you can customize stroke width, size, color, and shape to your liking. The license allows you to use the illustrations for anything you want, also commercially.

Geeky Christmas

To give the season of reindeer and elves a bit of a geeky glam, Tatiana Lapina designed 54 geeky Christmas vector graphics. Among them, you’ll discover characters from Star Wars and famous computer games, geeky tech stuff, even a delivery drone to deliver the presents. The illustrations come in SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, and PNG formats and are free to use in personal and commercial projects.

Christmas Tales

With their storybook-like look, Manuela Langella’s icon set stirs those familiar warm feelings. In this set, you’ll find 24 icons in total, among them some unique motifs such as Santa stuck in a chimney as well as the obligatory cookies and milk and stockings hung by the fireplace. The icons come in six formats (AI, PSD, EPS, PDF, SVG, and PNG) and can be customized not only in size, color, and shape but, thanks to full layered Illustrator and Photoshop assets, also assembled in any way you like. Free to use for private and commercial projects.

Advent

Another one from the creative mind of Manuela Langella, is the Advent icon set. It features 25 icons to celebrate the Advent season: decoration, food, and even Santa’s little helper is there to join the party. The download includes AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, and PDF formats that you can modify to your liking. A Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license allows you to use the set in private as well as commercial projects.

Sketchbook Christmas

You’re looking for something that is a bit more, well, subtle? Then these hand-drawn icons by createvil could be right down your alley. Their detailed pencil-sketch style is bound to spread some nostalgic winter vibes. Available in EPS format.

Ho Ho Ho!

James Oconnell’s Ho Ho Ho icon set features ten Christmasy line art icons with a nifty twist: some lines are dotted while others are highlighted with an accent color. The centerpiece of the set is a squiggly “Ho Ho Ho” framed by snowflakes. The icons are available in AI format and you’re free to use them as you please.

3D Christmas Decorations

Christmas is the season of giving, and what better way to illustrate that than with, well, hands? Icons8 offers a stunningly realistic set of 3D Christmas graphics of hands giving and receiving gifts and holding Christmas decorations. All graphics come in five different skin tones and two styles and are available in PNG and 3D formats. You can download the icons for free but please remember to link to Icons8 when using them.

Festive Christmas

Do you prefer a more minimalistic approach? Then George Neocleous’ festive Christmas icon set is for you. It includes 20 vector icons in EPS format, with both color and grayscale versions available. These are free to use without any restrictions in personal and commercial projects.

Lovely Christmas

Ever dream of spending the holidays in a cabin in the woods? You go out to cut the Christmas tree, spend time sitting by the fireplace, and drink tea as you watch the snow fall. That’s the feeling that Freepik captures with their Lovely Christmas Icon Set. Classic, calm Christmas colors and the choice of motifs bring some wintery flair to your designs. The 20 icons are available in EPS and AI and can be used for free in personal and commercial projects as long as you credit the designer.

Glyph Color Christmas Icons

It’s rather unusual to see Santa by the chimney side by side with Nativity Scenes in the same icon set. But the Glyph Color Christmas set designed by Maverick Studio at Christmas HQ has it all. It contains 36 holiday icons in SVG, Figma, Sketch, and PNG formats.

Tidee Christmas Icons

A minimalist but clever take on traditional Christmas motifs comes from the Icojam design duo Stan and Andy. Their set of 25 Tidee XMAS icons complements the more than 1,300 icons strong Tidee icon set and is available in AI, EPS, SVG, and PNG formats.

Holiday Spirit

RocketTheme’s Christmas icon set shines with its love for detail: the little cracks in the gingerbread man, the bubbles on the milk, the chiffon bow wrapped around the present. There are ten icons in the set in total, all of which come as 256×256 PNGs. A Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License allows you to use them in both commercial and private projects, but please be sure to credit the designer.

Vintage Christmas Elements

If you have a sweet spot for the mid-century style, this Vintage Christmas Element Collection might be for you. The vector is available in AI and EPS formats and features beautifully wrapped gifts, Christmas decorations, and, of course, a tree. You can use it for free in personal and commercial projects, but please attribute the designer.

Bold And Colorful

This fun and cartoonish icon set comes from Andrey Stelya. The fresh colors and the unusual way of applying them by shifting the underlying color layer outside the line art, gives the icons a modern feel. The set includes twelve icons and comes in SVG and PNG (90×90) formats.

Sweater Weather

A set of elements that celebrate the perks of cold winter days comes from the folks at Freepik. Think a woolen sweater and hat, a nice cup of tea, a gingerbread man, and some holiday decorations. The set is available as .EPS and free for personal and commercial projects as long as you give attribution. And if you’re looking for more motifs in the same style, also be sure to check out this collection with a teapot, iceskates, and more.

Sophisticated Line Art

Now this is a versatile set! Olha Filipenko created 78 icons in AI format with everything winter and holiday-themed: sweets, snowflakes, candles, ornaments, even a cute little postage stamp. There are so many ways to use the minimalistic line art with a unique and sophisticated twist.

Holly Jolly Badges

“Merry Little Christmas”, “Let It Snow”, “Ho Ho Ho”, and “Holly Jolly” — these badges combine bold typography with a lovely hand-painted look. The badges come in EPS format and can even be used commercially as long as you give attribution. How about printing them out to decorate your Christmas mail?

Pixel Art

Pixel time! Anna Sereda’s icon set looks as if it came straight out of a Christmas arcade game. There are 16 little pixel artworks in the bundle for you to use in personal and commercial projects. Available in AI, EPS, PSD, SVG, PNG, and JPEG formats.

Christmas Magic

This fine small set comes from Dasha Ermolova. It includes four motifs – a snow globe, a stocking, a Christmas wreath, and a ball ornament. The EPS is free to download. Minimalistic line art with nice little details.

Watercolor Leaves And Branches

Even though nature is sparse in winter in many parts of the world, there are little treasures you can find on your walk through the forest: pine cones, fir needles, acorns, for example. To celebrate their beauty, Freepik released an icon set with watercolor leaves and branches. They are available in AI and EPS formats and can be used for personal and commercial projects. Attribution is required.

Gingerbread Times

What would Christmas be without cookies? Anna Zhemchuzhina created a lovely little set of six gingerbread-inspired icons that look as if they came freshly baked out of the oven. Available as PSD.

Nostalgic Holidays

Designed by the folks at Freepik, this cheerful set consists of 16 AI and EPS icons with a unique nostalgic ’50s charm. You can use them for free in both personal and commercial projects, but please remember to credit the designer.

Snow Flurries

Christmas and snow go together like bread and butter. To add a bit of those snow flurries to your projects, Teela Cunningham has hand-drawn a set of snowflakes and turned them into vector graphics. The download includes AI and EPS files. For private use only.

Classics Revisited

Another set that pairs minimalistic line art with some lovely details comes from Žarko Cvijović. These twelve icons cover classical Christmas motifs (a present, a snowman, reindeer, a candle, a sleigh, and more) and are available in EPS format.

Santa

A hint of gold and a face hidden behind a fluffy white beard, the Santa illustrations by rawpixel.com will add a magical touch to any project. The vector is available in EPS format and can be used for personal and commercial purposes with attribution.

Winter Beauties

Holly, pine cones, and fir branches, the folks at rawpixel.com dedicated a set of design elements to these natural winter beauties. They are available in EPS format.

Decorations

Playful and bold are probably the words that best describe this bundle of Christmas illustrations. Available in EPS format, you can use them for private and commercial purposes. Attribution is required.

Watercolor Winter

If you’re looking for design elements with a handmade touch, this set of watercolor vector elements has got you covered. It comes as an .EPS file and makes a perfect fit for some last-minute gift tags.

A Storybook Christmas

With its simple but friendly style, the chubby Santa in Pikisuperstar’s set of vector elements wakes memories of storybook illustrations. You can download and use them for free in both personal and commercial projects. Attribution is required.

Flower Wreaths

Another perfect fit for some last-minute print-at-home gift tags are these flower wreaths with their light color palette and hand-drawn style. You can also use them commercially if you want, but please remember to give credit.

Silent Night

A muted color palette of red, green, and gold makes this lovely set of vector elements shine with a calm and friendly look. The elements can be downloaded in EPS format and used in both personal and commercial projects as long as you give attribution.

Black And Gold

This black and gold vector background by the folks at Freepik shines with shimmering accents that give the hand-drawn designs a magical touch. The vector is available in AI and EPS formats and can be used in private and commercial projects with attribution.

Neon Christmas

Who said neon colors and Christmas don’t go together? Actually, they do quite well. Shining bright, these neon design elements are available in AI and EPS formats. You can use them for free in personal and commercial projects as long as you give credit to the designer.

Did We Miss Anything?

Have you designed a free winter- or holiday-inspired icon set yourself? Or maybe you came across one that is just too good not to be shared? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!