Resources articles

Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day. Here’s what new for designers this month: April’s Top Picks Charts.css Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style...

Inclusive design is all about designing sites with everyone in mind instead of designing for your own preferences. It’s an essential component in a professional-grade site and the cornerstone of a successful project. Accessibility (A11y for short) is the technical branch of inclusive design. Accessibility is a science: it knows what markup is required to make the text available to the visually impaired; it knows the minimum button size...

Who is Grammarly for? Can a grammar checking tool like Grammarly replace a human editor and proofreader? Is the Grammarly checker worth it? Are the Grammarly free checks sufficient for me, or should I upgrade to Grammarly Premium? Should I install Grammarly on Chrome? How effective is Grammarly for Word? Is downloading the Grammarly desktop app worth it? You have questions…all of which we’re going to answer. I have been using Grammarly...

Illustration is a big trend in 2021. Every designer should have some ability to illustrate, whether that’s producing icons, creating lettering, mocking up layouts, or crafting full-blown illustrations. Designers’ workflows are as varied as their work, and one designer’s favorite tool is a frustrating mess to the next designer. Most design apps have a free trial, so it’s worth trying out a few before committing. Counting down...

Looking for something new to get you excited about design work? This list is packed with all kinds of goodies to help you feel inspired and ready to work. Here’s what new for designers this month. Top Picks for March Same Energy Same Energy, in beta, is a visual search engine. You can search with a minimum number of words or an image. The website is designed to help you find art, photography, decoration ideas, and practically anything. It uses...

Stock images are an essential tool for anyone working with clients who can’t afford to hire a photographer for a bespoke shoot, and with the cost of photography shoots running into thousands of dollars, that’s most clients. Last month we looked at the 10 Best Free Stock Image Sites for 2021, and this month we’re focusing on the premium end of the market. Paying for stock doesn’t guarantee that you’re getting a higher quality product...

When photographers take images to sell commercially, like every other business, they want to maximize their returns, so they adapt their ideas to meet commercial trends. As a result, stock always looks like stock, and that minor deception introduces a small amount of doubt in users. But the rise of camera phones, and the increasing affordability of DSLRs, has led to a growth in people who aren’t monetizing every shot. What that means is if...

This article is brought to you by 4Kdownload.com, a suite of video tools that help you make the most of YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, and many more popular resources. YouTube isn’t just for videos of cats snowboarding; it’s also a treasure trove of design tips, freebies, how-tos, career advice, and all-around creative inspiration. Whether you’re a seasoned design veteran or just taking the first steps along a creative career, there...

When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally. Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts...

We’re going to try something a little different this month; with this roundup of tools and resources for designers, we’re going to pick a few of our favorites and group everything else in a manner that makes it even easier to find elements that will work for you, and your projects, right now. Here’s what’s new for designers this month… February’s Top Picks Pika Pika is a new Mac app that is an open-source color picker. It helps you find...

Welcome to our roundup of the best plugins for popular CMS, this month. We’re going to cover plugins built to enhance WordPress, Shopify, Craft CMS, and Joomla. Enjoy! WordPress Tutor LMS Elementor Addons Tutor LMS Elementor Addons is a useful plugin that adds 25+ add-ons to the Elementor page builder. The plugin allows users to create custom styling and layouts for Tutor LMS courses. For this plugin to work effectively, you will have to...

It’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce store and start selling. There are a dizzying array of ecommerce solutions available in 2021, and most are feature-rich and competitively priced. Ecommerce sites are notoriously difficult to migrate from platform to platform, so more often than not, you’ll be committed to your chosen solution for years. The key when choosing an ecommerce solution to maximize your return on investment, is...

The new year is often packed with resolutions. Make the most of those goals and resolve to design better, faster, and more efficiently with some of these new tools and resources. Here’s what new for designers this month. Radix UI Radix UI is an open-source UI component library for building high-quality, accessible design systems and web apps. It includes examples and guidelines for all kinds of user interface elements that provide guidance...

When creating a website, it’s vital to remember that not only does it need to work and look great on the device you are creating it on, but on all the other devices, it might be used on too. Mobile and tablet optimization is important not only for the user journey but from an SEO point of view too, and badly created mobile sites just don’t cut it anymore. With more and more devices entering the market, you need to check any website you create is compatible...