Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/06/20-best-new-portfolios-june-2018/

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism.

Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy.

Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.

Bruno Ferdinand

Bruno Ferdinand is a designer with strong type skills and the nearly-obligatory hipsterish tendencies we see a lot of nowadays. The guy does simple, beautiful, and kind of rustic design rather well.

Platform: JS app

Yumpic

Yumpic is a portfolio site featuring — and you might have guessed this — photos and videos of food. They specialize in food-related digital content for anyone who wants to make the perfect Instagram account, and also (read: actually mostly) for people who make money off their food. The actual portfolio work is artfully interspersed with illustration and playful touches, which definitely sets the right mood,in my opinion.

Platform: WordPress

Duane Dalton

Duane Dalton’s portfolio pretty strongly reflects his print-focused work, being minimalist and asymmetrical. It’s one of the simpler sites on this list, but no less visually pleasing for that.

Platform: Static Site

Kenta Toshikura

Kenta Toshikura’s website is one of those minimalist-looking presentation-style sites. As is par for the course in cases like these, I’d not look too closely at the usability, but the visuals and general aesthetic style are just plain pretty, darnit. In particular, there’s this touch of 3D-feeling typography that catches my eye.

Platform: Static Site

Ellen Mandemaker

I’m not precisely sure what Ellen Mandemaker makes, precisely, but my best guess is art. And art is what you get from the get go: you’ll see a collage of it to begin with, and then a simple and orderly portfolio that promptly and efficiently throws you into the deep end. It’s one of those portfolios that made me think “I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, but I like it.”

Platform: Static Site

No Plans

No Plans is a one-page portfolio that keeps things fairly simple, preferring a clean design and a decidedly serif-friendly way of doing things. Also, they indent some of their paragraphs. I know, right? You hardly ever see that these days.

Platform: WordPress

Lab101

I’ll never be a fan of sites that change your cursor, but everything else about Lab101 is pretty solid. The overall aesthetic is minimalist and modern, with some interesting touches of 3D animation on the “Contact” page.

Platform: WordPress

Studio Bjørk

Studio Bjørk has a thing for monochromatic palettes, diagonal lines, and horizontal layouts. And you know what? It works out pretty darned well for them. There’s also a significant bit of animation, great type, and some background video here and there, all combining to make a site that a marketer would call dynamic. Oh,

[Sighs.] Fine, I’ll call it dynamic, too. It just sounds so much like marketer-speak that I didn’t want to say it.

Platform: Static Site

Juul Hondius

I often make reference to magazine-style designs ion this article series, but Juul Hondius’ portfolio is one of the more interesting examples I’ve seen lately. It looks like an old, ooold magazine, complete with small spacing issues and slightly cramped text, combined with beautiful and striking photography.

Those might technically be “issues”, but the design as a whole hits me with a very specific sense of nostalgia that just sells the imagery to me. Besides, it’s a photographer’s site. How badly do you want to read the text anyway?

Platform: Static Site

Thu-Van Tran

Thu-Van Tran’s website has one main theme that makes it visually interesting: layers. Every page is loaded on top of the home page like one piece of paper overlaying another. It’s like a paper prototype come to life. Combined with the sheer simplicity of layout, and strong typographic choices, it stands out.

Platform: Static Site

Aristide Benoist

Aristide Benoist’s portfolio combines a grid-based aesthetic with warping animations to striking effect. While most of the text could and certainly should be bigger, the visual theme of this site is enough to make you look, at least. Whether it’s interesting enough to make you grab your glasses will greatly depend on the user.

Platform: Static Site

Datagif

Datagif love their sans-serif type, and apparently spicing up standard layouts with geometric flourishes and animation. This one’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good, even kind of playful for all the corporate aesthetic it has. Give it a look.

Platform: Static Site (I think)

Handsome

Oh, Handsome takes me back maybe five years or so. The large serif type, the darkened photos as backdrops, all those barely visible straight lines. Did we just go back to the early days of flat design? Well, it’s both nostalgic, nearly perfectly executed, and a pleasure to browse.

Platform: Static Site

Sister

Sister’s agency site is living proof that any design style, even the once super-artsy minimalism-with-asymmetry trend, can be given an almost corporate flair. And that’s not a criticism. Corporate-feeling front end design tends to be modern and devastatingly effective in its simplicity, and the same is true here.

Not a fan of those occasional modal pop-ups, though. That’s a corporate trend that can go straight to hell.

Platform: WordPress

Makers and Allies

Makers and Allies is a branding studio in the finest tradition of hipster design studios, but with a lot more motion design added to the mix. It evokes just the right balance of rustic aesthetics with the modern technical competence we expect. Or at least the animation we expect. Whatever, it looks good, even if some of the text could use more contrast.

Platform: WordPress

Bipolar Studio

Bipolar Studio combines motion graphics with a pretty modernist aesthetic style, and good old fashioned big type. Their work basically is video, so it’s they use a lot of it in their design. I do like the little “stats” section at the end of each project page, detailing what it took to complete each project.

It’s just that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the logo could be bigger. With type that thin, it should be.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Akins Parker

Akins Parker’s agency site wasn’t made with Powerpoint, but it’s presentational design in its purest form. You go to see this one for the graphics, not for the usability.

Platform: Static Site

Ian Jones

Ian Jones’ portfolio is another site to embrace the visual grid theme. But unlike many other sites, the visual representation of the grid is only visible when his work is on the page. It’s a dead-simple approach, but it looks calm and professional, and I can’t fault that.

Platform: Static Site

Michael Uloth

Michael Uloth is a rare talent indeed. When he’s not literally singing opera, he builds minimalist-yet-beautiful websites for artsy people. His own site is no exception.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Lasse Fløde

Lasse Fløde is a photography studio with a striking one-page portfolio. Lovers of white space should definitely enjoy this one, as it employs that asymmetrical almost collage-style so favored by many photography portfolios these days. Simple and effective.

Platform: Static Site

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

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;}

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/do-coding-in-terminal-micro-ide/

Web development has changed a lot over the years. Just a decade ago the terminal wasn’t needed to build websites. Nowadays it’s practically a staple with Gulp/Grunt, npm, and version…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

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

The learning process to keep up with the latest web technologies can take up lots of time. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an expert to put these new technologies to work. The more you know the better of course. But plenty of people out there are busy developing the tools you need to keep abreast of technology.

This is as good a time as any take an inventory of your computing tools to see which are obsolete. You may find yourself discarding a few old favorites. But when you first have the chance to put the replacements to work you’ll have no regrets whatsoever.

Check out these 15 best tools and resources. One or more of them could not only make your day but help make 2018 the year your business takes off.

1. Elementor Page Builder

There’s a reason why Elementor is the #1 page-builder. There are several in fact. This open source frontend page builder makes it ever so easy to visually create spectacular websites without any need to code. Elementor works on any theme, it’s developer friendly, lightning fast, pre-built with beautiful templates and creative design elements. Elementor is also free.

Elementor became the most popular website-building tool in a very short time, already surpassing 900,000 active installs in under two years.

Elementor surpasses its alternatives in terms of ease of use, superior workflow, and excellent performance. These advantages explain how Elementor grew so fast.

The most popular feature that makes Elementor shine above the rest is its visual form builder that comes included with built-in 3rd party integrations to most marketing automation tools and CRMs.

Another notable feature is the theme builder that lets you easily design your header, footer, single post and other dynamic parts of your site.

2. Mobirise Website Builder

In today’s world, a website must be device friendly if it is to be successful. It makes sense then to invest in a website builder that specializes in building mobile-friendly websites – like Mobirise.

Mobirise is also great to have on hand for small projects like landing pages, portfolios, promo sites, or small to medium websites. Mobirise’s drag and drop functionality makes it simple to work with and there’s no need for coding.

Mobirise is an offline application so you’re not tied to any specific platform, you have complete control over your web-building projects, and you can host your website wherever you choose. The Mobirise package is chock-full of trendy blocks and templates (1,200 of them) plus large selections of icons, fonts, and free images.

Best of all, Mobirise is free for both personal and commercial reasons and without restrictions. Over 1.5 million Mobirise-built sites are currently active.

3. Amelia – Enterprise-Level WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin

Amelia is a WordPress plugin from Elite Envato author that automates your booking activities 24/7 and gives you complete control over your appointments, your schedule, and those of your employees. Clients or customers can make appointments any time of the day or night.

Amelia is easy to install and easy to work with as no special training is necessary. The colors and fonts of its frontend elements can be customized to match your WordPress theme or your corporate brand.

An important advantage this plugin offers both your business and your customers is it eliminates call waiting, phone tag, and back and forth emailing to set up an appointment or get things straightened out. Customers and clients can book an appointment in seconds on their smartphone or computer.

Amelia supports group bookings, and automatically sends email notifications to participating parties whenever an appointment has been booked, cancelled, rejected, or is pending.

4. monday.com

monday.com is a central platform from which teams can manage their tasks down to the finest details. This team management tool can serve a team of 2 or a widely-dispersed team of thousands equally well. monday.com encourages team collaboration and project transparency, it is a proven productivity booster, and provides team management solutions for both technically and non-technically-oriented teams.

5. Nutcache

This business-oriented project management application is equally well-suited for web designers and developers and project managers that subscribe to Agile processes and principles such as Scrum and the use of Kanban boards. Nutcache will help you collaborate and conduct your work more efficiently from project estimating and budgeting to expense management, time tracking, and final billing.

6. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme

You’re bound to be impressed (as will a client) with Uncode’s portfolio-building features and functionalities that enable you to achieve awesome results in a relatively short time.

With Uncode, you don’t have to start a portfolio-building project from scratch, and you don’t have to resort to coding to achieve pixel-perfect results thanks to Shape Dividers, Slides Scroll, the powerful Gallery Manager, and a host of other cool features.

7. Themify Ultra

Whether you have a single project, or dozens of them for dozens of different clients makes no difference. With Themify Ultra you can handle them all. This multipurpose theme’s host of pre-designed layouts, customizable mega-menus, WooCommerce support and multiple other features including the portfolio post type plugin will ensure that you can build any website for any client.

8. Houzez

Building a website for anyone in the real estate sector can be a genuine challenge unless you have exactly the right tools. Houzez is a real estate WordPress theme that has every function and feature you need to satisfy the most demanding client.

Houzez’ features include everything from advanced search capabilities and listings format options to the new custom fields builder and search composer. In addition, the team behind this theme is known for its high-quality customer support.

9. Salesmate

Salesmate is a customer relationship management plugin that you can integrate with your WordPress site to engage and capture leads to add to your sales teams and increase your sales.

This CRM plugin will help you keep your leads organized, tag leads having special views, talents, or characteristics, and moved them through the sales cycle to where you can communicate with and respond to them quickly and easily.

10. 34,000 Icons Full Bundle by Roundicons.com

This is your chance to download the world’s largest collection of icons all wrapped up in a single bundle. These 34,000 icons are royalty-free and consist of flat icons, solid icons, full icons, doodle icons, and most other icon types you’re ever likely to run across.

The icon bundle comes with a commercial use license and is yours for a one-time payment. Be sure to use coupon code R1200FFALL for a 20% discount.

11. Stockfresh

This up-and-coming stock photo agency has already amassed several million hand-selected photos and vector images at competitive prices. This makes Stockfresh a wonderful resource to have for your stock photo and graphic images needs.

Stockfresh is currently working to extend their super selection to include themes, fonts, templates, and other design aides. Check their website for special checkout discount prices.

12. PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery

Creating a pixel perfect, attention-getting gallery to showcase your work couldn’t be easier if you make Photoblocks Grid Gallery with its visual drag and drop builder your gallery-builder of choice.

Photoblocks is responsive, so your gallery will be scaled up or down as needed, no matter the screen size. Photoblocks offers a variety of hover effects and social sharing icons.

13. Beamer

Churning out emails, newsletters, and other methods of announcing promotions, new products or services and the like can be a hassle. Why not turn the problem over to Beamer?

It’s simply a matter of inserting this online newsfeed application into a website’s “What’s New?” section together with an accompanying menu item or icon. Beamer customers have reported over 10x more user engagement compared to other announcement methods.

14. The Web Designer YouTube Channel

The Web Designer YouTube Channel offers high-quality video tutorials on a variety of subjects relating to your day-to-day web design activities. You can view and learn from subjects ranging from UI and UX to WordPress and typography, and everything in between.

You’ll also find videos featuring design tips and actual design examples. Go to the landing page for more information on a service that can help your business grow.

15. Portfoliobox

This online website builder was designed with photographers, designers, artists, and other creative professionals in mind. Portfoliobox is flexible and easy to use, no coding is required, and it’s not theme based.

All templates offered by Portfoliobox are free of charge. With the free plan you’re allowed to host 50 images, 10 pages and 10 products.

Conclusion

Pick one or more of these 15 top quality tools and resources. You’re likely to notice improvements in daily web design/development work performance! You will see smoother workflows, increased sales, or some combination of the above.

These top-quality items are either free to try, completely free, or affordably priced. Each of them represents a cost-effective investment. Also, each in its own way will help you cope with the latest tech changes.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/JmoaLLy0GEk/

For some freelancers, churning out work and keeping focused comes easy. For others, it’s a living nightmare. If you find yourself struggling and wasting hours on social media, all hope isn’t lost. Before you give up on freelancing and go back to that office job, try these tips to get back on track.

Establish Structure

Many people choose freelancing for its freedom. What’s better than waking up at noon and working in pajamas? But just because you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder or a tight schedule doesn’t mean you don’t have deadlines to meet.

Don’t let your laziness get the best of you. You’re allowed to make your own structure, so design a schedule that works for you!

If you want to have a 30-minute coffee break in the morning, then feel free – just make sure that you do start working on those terms. Don’t let 30 minutes turn into an hour. A lack of discipline is the downfall of many freelancers.

Work with Your Energy Cycle

Every day has high and low points, and this cycle is different for everyone. Some find it easier to start right away, and struggle to focus as the day goes on. Night owls may need to spend the afternoon relaxing and ride on their nightly burst of energy.

Figure out when you feel most active and put those times to use. Save your recreational time for when you’re feeling lazy. If you work best in the morning, don’t get up and waste that potential energy on video games. Change up your routine if you must.

Rest and Reward

The best way to get motivated is to use positive reinforcement. If you force yourself to work without a break, you’ll only begin to dread your job. Our brains aren’t wired to sit still and stay focused for hours on end.

Break your work into smaller tasks. When you hit those milestones, take a break to do something enjoyable. Wrote 1,000 words? Play your favorite game for a while. Finished up a webpage template? Treat yourself to some ice cream. Even if it’s just to get up and stretch your legs every 30 minutes, make sure to give your brain a break.

You may find it easier to take frequent mini-breaks throughout the day, or work for hours and take longer rests. Just don’t reward yourself unless you’ve earned it.

But it’s also important to know your limits. When these small breaks stop working, take a long shower or do something that requires little mental energy. Get relaxed, then get back to work.

Take Care of Yourself

Nothing does more wonders for your productivity than a good night’s sleep, lots of exercise and a few healthy meals. If your job is getting in the way of this, it may be time to step back. Know when you’re overloaded, and when to say “no” to a client. Don’t work yourself into the ground.

Create a Comfortable Workspace

It may not seem that important, but comfort can do wonders for your productivity. Work in a quiet room with no noise or distractions. Invest in a comfy office chair or a nice, spacious desk. Make it yours with posters, plants and your own personal touch. Decorate to create a casual or professional environment, depending on where you work better.

Use Tools

There are many apps, websites, and programs out there that can help you stay focused. Desktop calendars, virtual sticky notes, and time management tools are great at keeping everything straight. If you’re desperate, Parental Controls can keep you off Facebook.

Apps like Habitica, Mindbloom or Fighter’s Block! “gamify” your life and reward you for staying motivated – helping you build better habits.

Do What Works for You

More important than any advice a stranger can give you is this: Figure out what’s best for you. Articles like this can point you in the right direction, but they’re no replacement for experimenting. Keep trying and find what keeps you motivated, what’s best for your situation and what methods keep you focused and on track.