20 Freshest Web Designs, August 2019

This month we leap back to the culture of America circa 1969, dive into the oceans with whales, discover multiple approaches to pitching a design agency, get invited to festivals, and shop online the right way. Enjoy!

Kilotype

Kilotype’s awesome new site shows off its variable fonts with a clever mouse-track — move your cursor around the screen vertically and horizontally to see the full range of each family’s weight and italic.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

The latest film from Tarantino is steeped in the culture of 1969, from the moon landing to Woodstock. This amazing promo-site does an incredible job of transporting you to a different era.

Wade and Leta

Wade and Leta are a partnership of talented art directors, whose offbeat sense of the absurd leads to some truly original and inspiring work. The homepage videos range from hilarious to bizarre.

Morenita

If there’s one place I’d like to be right now, it’s floating around the coast of Menorca on beautiful traditional fishing boat, and that’s all thanks to this inspiring site for Balearic boat hire.

The Believer Magazine

The site for The Believer Magazine is charmingly counter-culture, with deceptively sophisticated typography and New Yorker-quality illustration. Exactly what you’d expect from a modern culture publication.

Cher Ami

Cher Ami’s site features plenty of engaging work, but it’s the little details that make this site special, like the way the menu flies out not-quite-square, and the hyperspace-style transitions.

Good Day

Good Day sells CBD-infused beverages from a tastefully minimal site. At roughly $6/drink, it’s not cheap, and this sophisticated site is ideal for positioning the company in the luxury consumables market.

Dice

Dice is a German music and arts festival. Its site features some incredible, generated organic shapes, with animated gradients to match, and the seamless eternal scroll is a delight.

Flatiron Collective

The Flatiron Collective site opens with animated illustration. It’s an eye-catching pitch for business, far into left-field from the usual agency promotional site, and doesn’t even showcase previous work.

Save Whales

Whales are among …

What Is Adobe After Effects (And What Is It Used For?)

Adobe After Effects is a video and animation-based tool that’s used to add elements to moving pictures and animations. Most designers use it to create titles, intros, and transition between clips for more seamless video production.

After Effects is part of the Adobe Creative Suite of products and is included in cloud plans. Full suite users already have access to this tool, or you can get it on its own if that’s all you need.

As with other Adobe tools, the great thing about using this set of tools is that functions and interacts have a look and feel that you are probably already used to, making it easier to learn on the fly.

Here’ a look at Adobe After Effects, what it is, and how to know if you should use it for projects.

What Is After Effects?

After Effects is a tool that’s used to create animation and motion graphics effects. Unlike Adobe Premiere Pro, which is more focused on video editing, After Effects is designed to help create all the cool extras that make your motion graphics shine.

The great thing about working with After Effects is that it works seamlessly with other Adobe tools

It’s used by a variety of creative professionals for film, TV, and video for websites and social media.

Like other Adobe tools, the great thing about working with After Effects is that it works seamlessly with other Adobe tools, and allows you to import and work with native files from other pieces of Adobe software, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Character Animator, Adobe XD, and Animate.

Plus, it’s an award-winning tool. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed two Scientific and Engineering Awards to Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

The best way to get started with the tool if you aren’t already using it is with Adobe help tutorials. They walk you through the basics and can help you better understand how and when to use After Effects versus other Adobe software when working on video projects. (many designers will find …

How to Insert a GIF Into PowerPoint

GIFs are more popular than ever right now and they can be a great way to add a touch of personality, character, or humor to your PowerPoint presentation. We’re going to quickly cover how to insert a GIF into PowerPoint in a few quick, easy steps!

Of course, you have to find the right image to use in a presentation. If you’re going for humor, aim for something short, punchy, and easy to read from a distance as well! If you’re using a GIF to explain a workflow in your app or product, try zooming in on the areas you’re getting people to look at.

Once you have your GIF sorted, here are the steps you need to focus on in order to insert your GIF into PowerPoint.

Choose the Slide to Add the GIF To

First up, choose the slide you’d like to add your GIF to. Make some space for it to fit in with your design, and think about the type of background and style you’ll use to ensure that it stands out.

You should consider the option of a full-screen GIF as well, creating a slide dedicated to it. Nothing creates a big, bold impact like a full-screen GIF!

Download Your GIF + Open File Picker

It’s best to download your GIF to your computer (by right-clicking the image and selecting “Save Image As…”). This means you’re not relying on the computer you present on having an internet connection, which is never a guarantee!

Browse the menu in PowerPoint to find the “Insert” tab. Choose “Pictures”, and then PowerPoint will ask you to choose the GIF that you’ve just downloaded.

Choose Your GIF

Now you will need to navigate to the location of your animated GIF and then click Insert or Open. This will drop it into the current slide. You can make some minor enhancements to the GIF if you’d like (things like adding a frame or border to make it stand out). Or, you can resize it to cover the full slide if that’s …

Popular Design News of the Week: August 12, 2019 – August 18, 2019

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Image Optimization for the Web (2019 Guide)

Extra.css

Do Creatives Still Need Personal Websites?

Noted: New Logo for Lotus

How to Choose the Right Font for your Website

Adobe’s Next Big Bets are on AR and Mixed Reality Software

4 Rules for Intuitive UX

This YouTuber Redesigned the Logos of Starbucks, Coffee Bean, and Folgers-and They’re Brilliant

Beautiful Examples of Anime UI

Adobe Fresco: A Free App for the iPad Made to Beat Procreate

The Real Reason Snap Changed its Logo

5 Sneaky Typography Errors to Avoid

Uber Design Platform

WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company; It’s a Soap Opera

How Tinder Design Hooks You up

Here’s How Google’s New Keyword Selection Preferences Work

The Evolution of Visual Design and Tech’s Designer Renaissance

50+ Best Free Fonts for Minimal Design

Dieter Rams Designed One of Gillette’s Most Successful Razors

Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech

Designer Vs Corporation

Superposition: Use the Design System You Already Have

Finding Brand True North

The Four Critical Factors to Planning a Successful Project

UX Can’t Be Defined by One Set of “Rules”

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

Source

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Draggin’ and Droppin’ in React

The React ecosystem offers us a lot of libraries that all are focused on the interaction of drag and drop. We have react-dnd, react-beautiful-dnd, react-drag-n-drop and many more, but some of them require quite a lot of work to build even a simple drag and drop demo, and some do not provide you with more complex functionality (e.g. multiple drag and drop instances), and if they do, it becomes very complex.

This is where react-sortable-hoc comes into play.

💡 This tutorial requires basic knowledge of React library and React hooks.

This library has “HOC” in its name for a good reason. It provides higher-order components that extends a component with drag and drop functionality.

Let’s walk through an implementation of its functionalities.

Spinning up a project

For this tutorial we are going to build an app with funny GIFs that can be dragged around the viewport.

GitHub Repo

Let’s create a simple app and add drag-n-drop functionality to it. We’re going to use create-react-app to spin up a new React project:

npx create-react-app your-project-name

Now let’s change to the project directory and install react-sorting-hoc and array-move. The latter is needed to move items in an array to different positions.

cd your-project-name
yarn add react-sortable-hoc array-move

Adding styles, data and GIF component

For simplicity’s sake, we are going to write all styles in our App.css file. You can overwrite styles you have there with the following ones:

.App {
  background: #1a1919;
  color: #fff;
  min-height: 100vh;
  padding: 25px;
  text-align: center;
}

.App h1 {
  font-size: 52px;
  margin: 0;
}

.App h2 {
  color: #f6c945;
  text-transform: uppercase;
}

.App img {
  cursor: grab;
  height: 180px;
  width: 240px;
}

Let’s create our state with GIFs. For this purpose we gonna use React’s built-in useState hook:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

Now add following before the return statement:

const [gifs, setGifs] = useState([
  'https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohhwoWSCtJzznXbuo/giphy.gif',
  'https://media.giphy.com/media/l46CbZ7KWEhN1oci4/giphy.gif',
  'https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohzgD1wRxpvpkDCSI/giphy.gif',
  'https://media.giphy.com/media/xT1XGYy9NPhWRPp4pq/giphy.gif',
]);

It’s time to create our simple GIF component. Create a Gif.js file in the src directory and pass in the following …

Accessibility and web performance are not features, they’re the baseline

This week I’ve been brooding about web performance and accessibility. It all began when Ethan Marcotte made a lot of great notes about the accessibility issues that are common with AMP:

In the recordings above, I’m trying to navigate through the AMP Story. And as I do, VoiceOver describes a page that’s impossible to understand: the arrows to go back or forward are simply announced as “button”; most images are missing text equivalents, which is why the screen reader spells out each and every character of their filenames; and when a story’s content is visible on screen, it’s almost impossible to access. I’d like to say that this one AMP Story was an outlier, but each of the nine demos listed on the AMP Stories website sound just as incomprehensible in VoiceOver.

Ethan continues to argue that these issues are so common in AMP that accessibility must not be a priority at all:

Since the beginning, Google has insisted AMP is the best solution for the web’s performance problem. And Google’s used its market dominance to force publishers to adopt the framework, going so far as to suggest that AMP’s the only format you need to publish pages on the web. But we’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately — about how accessibility work is often seen as an additional feature that can be tacked onto a project later — rather than accessibility work being a core principle or standard of working on the web.

And I’ve seen this sentiment expressed time and time again, in the frameworks, on Twitter, in the design process, in the development process, and so much so that arguing about the importance of accessibility can get pretty exhausting. Because at some point we’re not arguing about the importance of accessibility but the importance of front-end development itself as a series of worthy skills to …

30+ Animated PowerPoint Templates (Free + Premium)

In this collection, we’re featuring some of the best, animated PowerPoint templates (both premium and free) to create stunning presentations filled with stylish object and transition animations.

Designing a PowerPoint presentation is not an easy job. It requires a lot of work and time. When crafting presentations, most people completely ignore one of the key elements of a creative slideshow: animation. Adding creative animations and effects not only makes your presentation slides interactive, but it’s also useful when emphasizing key points and data.

Of course, you don’t have to be a PowerPoint expert to design animated slideshows. You can simply use a pre-made animated PowerPoint template. We handpicked these templates just for you.

We’re also featuring a series of tips for creating animations and transitions in PowerPoint with some extra pointers and advice.

Top Pick

Happines – Animated PowerPoint Template

Happines is a modern PowerPoint template that features a colorful and attractive design. All of the slides in this template are fully animated with just the right effects so you won’t have to spend any extra time adding animations.

This PowerPoint template also comes with 30 unique slides. You’ll also be able to choose from 5 different color schemes to create stylish presentations.

Why This Is A Top Pick

In addition to its beautiful slide design that comes filled with animations, the template also includes lots of editable vector graphics, illustrations, and infographics. Which makes it a great choice for making professional presentations.

Blossom – Animated PowerPoint Template

Blossom is a modern PowerPoint presentation template that comes with a set of fully animated slides. It includes a total of 150 slides in 5 different premade color schemes with 30 unique slides in each template. This template is perfect for modern business and startup presentations.

Busono – Creative PowerPoint Template

Busono features a creative and minimal design that makes it the perfect choice for designing creative design and marketing related presentations. The template comes with 30 unique slides and you get to choose from 5 different color themes to match your …

How To Find Top Most Used Commands On Linux

The other day a fellow Linux user and I were discussing about Linux commands. He asked me which Linux command I use the most. I told him one of my most frequently used command is...

The post How To Find Top Most Used Commands On Linux appeared first on OSTechNix.

from OSTechNix https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-find-top-most-used-commands-on-linux/…

12 Best CMS for 2019

2019 is half over, but don’t let that stop you from trying something new… specifically, a new CMS. “But Ezequiel, good buddy, I don’t have time to check out a whole new content management system. I have websites to make!”, you say, in those exact words.

That’s fair, but you should be keeping an eye on the up-and comers anyway. These are the people who have the sheer brass walnuts (which are a real thing, unisex, and available to anyone with money) to go up against giants like WordPress, Joomla, and mostly WordPress. They do this with nothing but a pretty good idea, a GitHub repository, and sometimes some corporate funding of some kind, if they’re very lucky. You ignore them at your own peril.

Well, maybe not peril, but these projects deserve a look.

The CMS that have been selected for this list were (almost) all launched post-2017 (or at least their GitHub repos were), and they’re all free, or at least have a free plan. They’re also all under active development. Let’s get started…

Flextype

Flextype is a simple, PHP7-based, flat-file CMS that’s designed to keep things flexible, allowing you to create more or less anything you want. And I do mean “anything”; Flextype makes it dead-easy to define custom fields for any content entry, and has a built-in theme editor

The actual content editing is easy enough, with a simple WYSIWYG editor, though Markdown support is available via plugin. Doing anything fancy with the content requires the use of WordPress-style shortcodes, though.

All in all, it’s a solid foundation for a CMS, and I can’t wait to see what they do with it.

rwtxt

rwtxt is designed to be a simple, searchable notepad where you can jot down notes, keep a journal, or use it as a pastebin. It’s reminiscent of a wiki in that, in its default configuration, anyone can add a page to the public area of the site.

However, you can also add a “domain”, or a sort of personal notepad …

20+ Best After Effects Slideshow Templates

Adobe After Effects is one of the most popular and effective tools for making attractive motion graphics. With the ability to use pre-made templates, After Effects can be a powerful tool even at the hands of a beginner.

Especially when making wedding photo album videos, presentations, and promotional campaigns, After Effects is quite useful in turning ordinary photos and videos into gorgeously animated slideshows.

To help you find inspiration, we handpicked a collection of After Effects slideshow templates you can use to easily make professional motion graphics without an effort.

All you have to do is edit the template and drop the images into the placeholders.

Top Pick

Urban Melodic Slideshow Template

This After Effects slideshow template features a beautifully minimalist design that allows you to create modern and elegant slideshow videos for all kinds of creative projects, startups, businesses, and more.

The template is easily customizable and features stylish melodic animations that will make your videos more entertaining to watch.

Why This Is A Top Pick

The multipurpose and minimal design of this After Effects template allows you to create various types of slideshows with ease. The melodic transitions and the creative effects also add more value to the template.

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