Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/Pcl6h4A9u5Q/

As we prepare to say goodbye to 2017, it’s only natural that we look back at the year that was in a variety of design genres. Today, we’ll focus on the top WordPress themes released during the year.

While there are many ways to judge themes (looks, features, popularity, etc.), we’re going to be bold and simply say that we really like the ones on this list. They represent the spectrum of what’s available, from free to commercial, from barebones to feature-rich.

Here they are, in no particular order. Let’s celebrate our 10 favorite WordPress themes of 2017!

Minimal 20/17

Minimal 20/17 is a free child theme of the default WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme. It takes away some of the “excessive” padding of its parent, introduces a wider layout and adds in a couple of extra templates. This will save anyone wanting to build on top of the original a few steps.

WoodMart

WoodMart is a commercial theme that focuses on WooCommerce shops. What really sets it apart are the advanced navigation features. Large, customizable mega menus make it a great fit for sites with a lot of product categories. Ajax product filtering enables customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. There’s something for just about every need here.

WP Generic

WP Generic may be free, but it’s got the look and feature set of a commercial theme (of course, there is the obligatory pro version as well). The theme works with the WordPress Customizer, allowing you to tweak colors and other settings to fit your needs. Overall it’s a very attractive and easy-to-read theme.

Course Builder

Course Builder aims to take advantage of the rise in sites using WordPress as a LMS (Learning Management System). It works in conjunction with the LearnPress plugin to help you build and sell online or offline courses. This commercial theme comes with several LearnPress premium add-ons, including plugins that work with various payment gateways, WooCommerce, Paid Memberships Pro and more.

CustomPress

CustomPress is a free theme that prides itself on being easy to customize. It’s also built for speed (based on the Milligram CSS framework) and compatibility with mobile devices. The look is clean and uncluttered.

Flexblog

Flexblog is further proof that blogging is still an important part of what WordPress does. And this commercial theme treats bloggers right, with lots of different layout options to suit their needs. You’ll also find different navigation/pagination styles, built in social sharing and compatibility with the WordPress Customizer.

Ariel

Ariel brings an attractive, photo-centric style to blogging. The style isn’t overbearing – a welcome characteristic in this category. Included with the free theme are two slider styles, lots of sidebar options and social media icons. A pro version adds more customization options, post formats and other assorted goodies.

Get Skeleton

Get Skeleton is a free starter theme based on the popular _s (Underscores) and features the GetSkeleton CSS boilerplate. It’s meant for designers who want to create their own stunning theme, but want a solid foundation to build upon. So, no, it’s not going to win any beauty prizes out-of-the-box. It is, however, meant for serious development.

Skin

Skin shows us the fun side of WordPress themes. The design is unique and quite bold – although you can customize it to match your personality. It seems to be the perfect fit for the modern blog that’s looking to go viral. There’s lots of movement and animation, but the layout is still easy enough to follow. This one is definitely a different sort of commercial theme.

Cortex

Cortex also lends itself to a more whimsically creative type of website. There are 17 home page layouts to choose from with this commercial theme – all are quite colorful. You’ll find several navigation options, including mega menus and a slide-out “hamburger” option.  Animation is also big here, with lots of floating objects to add a bit of flair to your content.

Looking Back…And Ahead

What did we learn from 2017? Well, blogging is still “in”. And developers are getting increasingly more playful with designs and features. That makes sense given the times we live in and the crowded market for themes.

But 2018 looks like it will be a whole other level of eventful when it comes to themes (and WordPress in general).  With the Gutenberg editor due to arrive, look for theme developers to race to ensure compatibility and add their own custom features based on it. It will be fascinating to see how the market adapts to this new way of creating and editing content.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/12/underlined-text-improve-ux/

(This article is supported by Adobe.) An underline is a horizontal line immediately below a portion of text. In our everyday experience, we underline to emphasize key sections of text, sometimes drawing an underline by hand below printed text. But underlines have their own place in the world of digital design. In fact, underlined text has become one of the most common, most recognizable features of our online experience. When we see an underlined word or sentence on a web page, we immediately assume it’s a link.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/9Turt5n0kdg/mind-boggling-vector-illustration-work-james-gilleard

Mind-boggling Vector Illustration Work by James Gilleard

abduzeedo
Dec 12, 2017

James Gilleard shared a set of beautiful illustrations that he created in 2017. They are all vector illustration  and it definitely sets the bar at another level. The amount of details is nothing but staggering, I was trying to understand some of them like the one of Paris, or the ones with buildings and I couldn’t.  There’s just too much going on which makes me wonder how long it took it for James to create those illustrations. Below you can see some of my favorites.

We also recommend that you check out James website at www.jamesgilleard.com/ – James is a designer, art director and illustrator based in London, UK. He has an incredible portfolio with more amazing vector illustration projects.

Vector Illustration

Fast Magazine – Japanese Cedar House
DB Mobile – Frankfurt redevelopment
Washington Post – Future Restaurants
Videogame Concept Art and Visual Development
Animation Backgrounds

illustration

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/uploadcare-image-cdn/

This article was sponsored by Uploadcare. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

A good Content Delivery Network will boost your website’s performance. Files are hosted on different domains or sub-domains on servers across the globe to ensure users get the fastest download wherever they are located. The best CDNs will help manage your data and save hosting costs.

CDNs are regularly used to host static assets such as images. You push an image file to the CDN server then reference it in your page’s <img> tags. That’s as far as most go, but Uploadcare are taking CDN services to another level and could save you considerable development time.

Uploadcare Services

Uploadcare provide accounts ranging from free (500MB of space and 5GB traffic per month) to white-labelled commercial services supporting 50GB file sizes and virtually unlimited bandwidth. All plans include:

Configurable Upload Widget

Despite HTML5 advances, uploading files to a server requires significant development effort. The upload widget provides a simple, ready-made, style-able component for your site. It allows users to drag and drop or choose files from their local file system, camera, URL, Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, Facebook, Instagram, Evernote and Flickr directly to the Uploadcare CDN:

REST API

A REST API is provided so any language or system can upload and manage files in bulk. A simple cURL example to upload image.jpg:

curl -F “UPLOADCARE_PUB_KEY=demopublickey”
-F “UPLOADCARE_STORE=1”
-F “file=@image.jpg”
“https://upload.uploadcare.com/base/”

The JSON response returns a Universally-Unique Identifier (UUID) assigned to all files so they can be referenced later:

{
“file”: “17be4678-dab7-4bc7-8753-28914a22960a”
}

CDN API

This feature will be considered essential by anyone creating responsive web and mobile apps. Once an image has been uploaded, it can be resized and manipulated via the URL alone. This is best illustrated with an example. Consider this image of a chap with headphones (thank you Alex Blăjan who provided it at Unsplash.com). I uploaded a 1600 x 900px, 140Kb file to Uploadcare:

The resulting URL contains the image’s UUID:

https://ucarecdn.com/718f79c5-2868-41c8-b56e-c87237674adb/

You can add any filename at the end to help you remember what image you’re using and aid SEO, e.g.

https://ucarecdn.com/718f79c5-2868-41c8-b56e-c87237674adb/man.jpg.

Ignoring the impact of high-density Retina screens for the moment, there’s little point using this full-sized image on a device with, say, a 500px-width screen. Normally, I would need to create a resized version of this image using Photoshop or a build system but Uploadcare removes this requirement. I can simply change the URL to:

https://ucarecdn.com/718f79c5-2868-41c8-b56e-c87237674adb/-/resize/500x/man.jpg

This instantly provides a 500px-width image, which now has a reduced file size of less than 20Kb:

Uploadcare claim super-fast resizing speeds, which are typically 15x faster than ImageMagick (and with substantially less hassle!)

Alternatively, I could have changed the image height using a URL such as:

https://ucarecdn.com/718f79c5-2868-41c8-b56e-c87237674adb/-/resize/x300/man.jpg

Or perhaps my site requires a 100×100 cropped and scaled grayscale thumbnail with maximum compression? The URL:

https://ucarecdn.com/718f79c5-2868-41c8-b56e-c87237674adb/-/scale_crop/200×200/-/grayscale/-/quality/lightest/-/progressive/yes/-/format/auto/man.jpg

The image file size has now dropped to less than 3Kb. In Blink-based browsers, including Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, the /format/auto/ directive detects WebP support and returns an even smaller 2.3Kb image.

The CDN API URL can contain any number of processing directives separated by a /-/ delimiter. The documentation provides full instructions for:

changing the image format, quality, and progressive loading
creating thumbnails, resizing, cropping, and stretching
filters such as enhance, sharpen, blur, grayscale, and invert
rotating, flipping, and mirroring
adding image overlays, extracting prevalent colors and more

Continue reading %Uploadcare: Your Super-Powered Image CDN%