DEV Community: Bryan Ferguson

8 Best Black Friday Deals for Developers

Bryan Ferguson — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 15:02:00 +0000

As the holiday season is quickly approaching and Black Friday and thanksgiving are around the corner, here are some amazing black Friday deals for you and your Dev friends.

Pluralsight

Pluralsight is a tool that is well suited for people who are excited and want to learn a variety of computer technologies. It is an amazing product for in or outside of the workplace, as long as the person is using it for self improvement. Pluralsight is offering 40% for their Black Friday Sale.

Visit PluralSight

Tuk

Tuk consists of a beautifully designed Web Application kit, a Marketing kit and an Ecommerce Kit. These kits are very well designed and can fast track your workflow. TUK also comes with React, Angular, Vue & Html templates. It consists of 30 templates and 1000 components that allows for a variety of functions and uses.

Take advantage of their Black Friday offer and get 30% off on their beautifully crafted UI kits.

Visit Tuk

Warppixel

Warppixel is for both designers and developers, It has an amazing collection of beautiful admin templates and mega bundles that consists of so much i.e. snippets, freebies etc. They are offering 95% discount on bundles of admin dashboard templates and multipurpose website templates for this Black Friday. You also get 25 premium products with unequal support.

Visit Wrappixel

AppSeed

Appseed is a prototyping tool created for people that design for mobile. Appseed runs entirely on your iOS phone or tablet. The idea behind this app is that you're laying out the interface and planning the interactions directly on the device you are planning to design on. With their Black Friday deal, you can get 50% off without using any code.

Visit Appseed

Level Up Tutorials

This platform is for both designers and developers. Level Up Tutorials is a free, accessible, and thorough resource to start learning softwares that you think will likely improve your skill set. It has a catalog of over 1000+ free videos for designers and devs. You can always Level Up your skills with clear and high production video tutorials. They have a limited time offer for black Friday live on their website where you can avail 50% off on their tutorials.

Visit Level Up Tuts

Creative Tim

Creative Tim provides premium and open-source templates in bootstrap, Vue, Angular etc. Products from Creative Tim are used by over one million developers all over the world. The best thing about this offer is the variety of templates in each stack. They have a stack based on technology that means if you like working on React you can buy the React stack in which you will get several UI kits, templates, admin dashboards and templates etc.

You can check out their main Black Friday page and avail 80% off on all their products.

Visit Creative Tim

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world. They’re rated #1 in web hosting for startups and small businesses. They're offering up to 75% off on their services as a special discount for Black Friday

Visit Bluehost

Themesberg

Themesberg is a tool that brings quality code and templates together. It has free and Premium themes, templates, admin dashboards and UI kits built in Bootstrap, React, Laravel, and Figma that will make your work easy for you and are used by over 22000+ developers and software companies. Take advantage of their Black Friday offer and get 90% off on their well crafted UI kits.

Visit Themesberg

Conclusion

So far I've reviewed many dev and designer friendly tools that I've always wanted to get my hands on. These are just few of my personal favorites and will become yours too if you give them a try!

WebGL: Redefining UX

Bryan Ferguson — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 17:12:14 +0000

Hello everyone,
Imagine a networked virtual reality simulation of the human body, including the circulatory, skeletal, and other vital systems: with your mouse you can peel back the layers of the body, drop pins on interesting parts for future reference, and share a hyperlink with people. This isn’t a trailer or video. The future is here in your web browser and it’s called WebGL.
WebGL
WebGL is an open source Javascript library capable of rendering 2D and 3D interactive objects in a variety of ways. In technical language, it allows you to run GPU-accelerated graphics directly inside an HTML canvas with no external plugins. What sets it apart from other tools is the quality and the complexity of visual elements that it can render. In fact, no HTML and CSS methods are capable of reaching quite the same impact. Unity WebGL, Babylon.js, Three.js are some of the other open source libraries.

Ample design heavy, forward thinking websites are using basic WebGL to create unique distinctive headers instead of a full website hero image. With the right creative team behind it, not only is it visually appealing, it can also be absolutely interactive.

The Pros

It’s free and native in most of the common desktop and mobile browsers
The technology blends easily with HTML and is relatively fast
No installations on the device to run WebGL API
One can make outstanding 3D web experiences by easy external libraries integration
Cross platform availability
Enhanced security compared to its competitors

Cons

It is slower than its predecessor, OpenGL
The learning curve is quite steep for native WebGL programming
Due to plugins incompatibility etc, it can be responsible for browser crashes due to plugins incompatibility, etc.
WebGL elements can be heavy on load time

Some Examples

With the spike in user demands and high competition, there are many companies using WebGL to stand out. Here are a few that caught my eye!

The dime trap

A visual and interactive journey for users through T.I’s world, while they discover his new album and his inspiration. There are sculptures present in 3D models which you can zoom in and zoom out and interact with the sculptures. Every sculpture is part of his life experiences, users just need to press and hold the sculpture and you can hear T.I voice telling the story.

Zygote Body 3D Anatomy

It’s showing the world the beauty and miracle of human life through their 3D anatomy products. It is basically a 3D anatomy viewer in which you can see a 3D model male or female and dissect it and helps you understand the human body in 3D viewing.

Mav Farm

Shop the latest video and product geo-drops around the world. A globe is present in the website which is interactive and all the products are present in that globe. Users can interact with it by pressing on the product and it directly takes you to the product you clicked on. Users can also rotate the globe to see what else is available around the world.

3 Dreams of Black

This is an interactive film by Chris Milk and some friends at Google that showcases the creative potential of WebGL. It gives you a tour of three fantasylands developed through 2D drawings and animations with interactive 3D sequences. All through different focuses in these fantasy lands, you can use your mouse and guide the hero's perspective through the experience.

Conclusion

WebGL has established itself as a cross-platform with royalty-free web standard that brings high-quality 3D graphics with plug-ins into the web browser. It is by far the most widely used web graphics API on the market and is supported by all major browser vendors from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. WebGL is still a new world, but it's quickly gaining in popularity and demand. It is so popular right now that you don't have to look far at all to find some amazing eye-catching examples. Nothing good comes without a cost, however the cost is worth it when keeping the bigger picture of the future in mind.

9 free resources and tools that every Designer should know about

Bryan Ferguson — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 18:07:01 +0000

Hi everyone,
This list is about some of the great design resources on the internet that can help you elevate your design game on everyday basis. The curated list of resources and tools in this blog can help you out to be even more creative and improve your design process. Hence, if looking for trendy fonts, stock images or maybe a little bit of inspiration you now know where to look.

Landingfolio

Landingfolio has landing page design inspiration for various use cases, templates, components, and much more.
Landingfolio features some of the best design inspirations from the web with a growing library of around a couple thousand landing pages and 3,829 component examples that are updated daily.
Check out Landingfolio here: https://www.landingfolio.com/

Pexels (Free Images)

As far as free stock photo sites go, Pexels is surely one of the best. Pexels aim to provide free high quality images and videos for better design. You can search for a wide category of visuals and videos on Pexels for different types of web projects for free.
Check out pexels: https://www.pexels.com/

Muzli

Muzli is a google chrome extension giving design ideas for your project and news each time you open a new tab, explore new web designs inspirations, best websites, web trends and tech related articles.
Try muzli extension at: https://muz.li/

Humaaans

A unique tools that allows you to customize illustrations of humans in various contexts
Check out their unique illustrations and give it a shot at: https://www.humaaans.com/

Open Peeps

Open peeps is an illustration library (created by Pablo Stanley) that has a wide library of open-source flat SVG, and PNG assets, available for Sketch, Figma, Studio and Adobe XD.
Check out open peeps illustration library at : https://www.openpeeps.com/

Freebie Supply

Free supply compiles resources into a singular directory. It has more than 300 pages of free design content for your next web project. Feebie Supply has hundreds of design resources for Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
Visit freebie Supply for phenomenal designs: https://freebiesupply.com/

Free illustrations

In free illustrations you can browser a wide variety of illustrations for different formats such as PNG, JPEG, PDF, and many more.
Visit: https://freeillustrations.xyz/

Simple Icons

Simple icons make free SVG icons available for free download.
Check out simple icons at : https://simpleicons.org/

Use and Modify

An eccentric collection of classy, punk , professional, incomplete, and weird typefaces. Use and modify has these all open-source fonts that are free to use and modify.
Visit : https://usemodify.com/

Do let me know if you use any of these and how your experience has been using these resources.
What are your go to design tools and resources?

UX and the Invisible Design of things

Bryan Ferguson — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 13:52:19 +0000

Hello everyone,
Throughout the years, designers have focused on the importance of the invisibility of a design for a good user experience. The debate of invisible UX and design has been going on in design circles for quite a while. And ultimately, designers agree that a good design is dependent on the experience of users, when they’re actually interacting with that design.

How can Web Design be Invisible?

Web design has always been focused on user experience. Most designers have come to believe that good UX is invisible. When we say that a good UX is invisible, what we actually mean is that the experience, by design, should be smooth enough to make it look like that.

Designers put a lot of effort into elevating the user experience to an invisible degree, yet they misinterpret the meaning of truly invisible UX. Moreover, the design can be overwhelming for some users if they have to put in conscious effort to interact with it.
Design should be focused on making things easier and simpler for end-users. The most primal yet effective approach is to try to assess the users’ behavior and make things more intuitive, so the users don’t get stuck in the complications of the design.

Design in everyday life

As I’ve said earlier, design is everywhere. We generally don't notice how good the design is while using everyday things. For example, we don’t spend our time thinking how good the chair is that we’re sitting in.
We only come to realize the flaws of a design when it cannot perform the function that it’s supposed to. I read somewhere that a good design is like a refrigerator. Cause when it works, no one really notices. But when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.
The concept of invisible design stems from everyday things in life. Where the elevation of user experience is the effortlessness of the user while they’re interacting with the design.
So we can say that if you don’t notice how good is a good indication of the good design it.

Keep things simple

The approach to have truly invisible design is making users feel familiar with the design. In some cases, designers try to make new designs but in the end make things more complicated for users as a good design must always have a good experience. Moreover, users should not think about the effort that makes the design. Following the general concept of the design, designers can achieve the major goals of making things easier in their design.

Intuitive design

An easier design is liked by users over a design that requires their consideration. Intuitive design is when a user knows how a design works by intuition. A design is intuitive when a user’s knowledge matches the target knowledge of the design. The major thing to consider here is that a design can only be intuitive for a user that already has basic knowledge about the design. Hence, through user research and conducting it to your target users. If you’re not sure about who is going to use your design, you can never make it intuitive subsequently.

Conclusion

So we have now established that good design is invisible, but what really makes design invisible is the extent of the consistency in the overall experience that it provides to users. Making things easier and knowing your users’ behavior certainly is the key to building designs that are intuitive and flawless.

An Introduction to Dark Mode

Bryan Ferguson — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 16:41:22 +0000

Dark Mode Design Guide

The dark mode we see nowadays was introduced as the core interface for smartphones with OLED screens to save power consumption. Dark mode has gained considerable fame in the developer communities and is one of the most wanted components in the present day user interface. Tech giants like Apple and Google have started to adapt the dark mode UI shows that it's not just a trend and will be in the market for a longer period.

Advantages Of Dark Mode

The dark mode doesn't only save your eyes from strain, but it also saves your device’s battery usage. These days mobile phones and laptops come with OLED screens; when put in the dark mode, they save the device’s battery up to 70% compared to light mode with white background. However, that is not it; dark mode has as much contemporary significance as it does with battery life, if not more. To be honest, dark mode looks pretty astonishing. It offers new and various methods of presenting graphic content such as graphs, photos, and dashboards. It almost feels creative and peculiar. Other than that, studies have shown a positive relationship between users retention and dark mode. The dark mode makes the color pop and provides good contrast, which puts less strain on the eyes at night and allows users to devour more content for a long time. Because of the advantages of Dark mode, it gets a great deal of positive fame, which implies that it is simple for one to be reprimanded for making something that doesn't need a dark mode. It ought not to be utilized in each application or site; for instance, when you see a site in a sufficiently bright room or without any attempt at being subtle, it is hard to use text situated on dark foundations. For example, a few items, Google maps, have an element that naturally switches among dark and light modes depending on the lighting in a room or view of dusk to dawn.
Considering that dark mode is yet another idea. Surprisingly, many organizations, including Apple and Google, have embraced dark mode as practically the entirety of their UIs. It is yet being worked on, and it is elementary to wreck things if one doesn't cater towards the foundations of UIs.

Do’s And Don'ts

Don’t Use Pure Black & White

Recall when I said dark mode lessens the strain on the eyes? Better believe it well assuming you utilize pure white text on a pure dark foundation, that high differentiation will be extremely excruciating to look at, consequently not lessening the strain on the eyes. In the present circumstance, it is protected to utilize dim instead of the genuine dark as the essential foundation since light message on dark has a more negligible difference than light message on pure dark. The plan ought not to be pure, highly contrasting yet in shades of dark too.

Don't Use Vivid Colors

Using vivid colors looks terrific on a white background. Still, they vibrate against the dark surface, making them hard to read on a dark background—using lighter shades of primary colors because they are readable on dark surfaces. It is essential to use an appropriate contrast ratio between the content and background to avoid eye strain.

Don't Use Shadows

Shadows are an excellent method of introducing a visual chain of command in your design, however, just in light mode. When used in dark mode, regardless of whether the background isn't pure dark, the shadow will look odd. Perhaps you should use high tones to present visual movement on dark backgrounds.

Allowing Users To Switch Between Modes

The most noticeably awful thing you can do while designing a product is to remove control from your users, regardless of if you're designing for dark mode. So for that, it is essential to provide a switch that allows users to switch between dark mode and light mode for having a better user experience. The user should consistently feel in charge and have the option to decide on which mode they need to pick.

Conclusion

Although, the dark mode might appear trendy; it has many disadvantages if not used effectively. By following these focuses referenced above, you can have a sense of security that your dark mode configuration will suit well with your users needs.

The 4 stages of Design Process

Bryan Ferguson — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:32:24 +0000

Hi everyone,
Today, the post is about a subsequent process of Design thinking that is the Design process itself. Starting out on a project is a scary place for anyone who’s starting out in UX or UI. The inexperienced beginners find it a daunting place to be where there are requirements to be met along with the problem at hand. However, even if you manage to get your ideas straight about what type of design you want to go for, you are now stuck in actually designing the product and you can’t seem to design a product that the customer wants because you might not have the skill-set or the resources to do so. Later on, it is easier to manage the design once you know what to do, how to do it and most importantly if you’re able to do it.

Organize First

To make your design process easier you should follow an organized structure for your design process that can serve as a guide to help you when you get stuck in the design process. Below is an image of the process explaining in steps how you should go about your design process:

1. Listen to the Client

The first most crucial step towards designing a product be it for anything it is important to actively listen to the client, this is not only important to maintain a healthy client relationship but it is also important in your design process. We believe that the reason why most designs don’t turn out the way our clients expected them to is due to designers not fully understanding what the client actually wants. It’s not that the designers don’t listen to the client, it’s just that the way each client explains something is different because we all have our own way of understanding things and this affects our design process. The only way to solve this problem is to really understand what the client wants from you and what they expect for you to provide them with. Get to know your clients, ask a lot of questions, build a strong relationship with them and understand them flawlessly.

2. Analyze the Project

The second most crucial step in the whole design process is to evaluate whether or not the project at hand is possible or not. One of the most important things to note in this step is that this should always be done and in sequential order to the listening to the client part because as the designer it is our job to identify any implausible ideas that might not be possible within the client’s budget or due to any reason and suggest an alternating solutions. It is also important to note all the problems that may arise during the later phases of the project and inform your client about them in due time. If when analyzing the project you feel like something won’t be possible or you find a problem you should immediately consult with the client and explain the problem and clear your queries.

3. Design the Product

To put it simply, there is no shortcut to designing and knowing how your website will look. It’s not like someone can tell you this is how you need to design a product and you start working. Designing is a combination of art and science, and with every art it depends on the artist on how he/she goes about their artwork and presents an end product to the client. However, the main variables required by the client are still there. What I’m talking about is the actual creativity that is involved in the design process that will define the project and give it life, your life. The essence of this part is that you know how to design the product and now's the time to use those skills to make that product for your client. If designing the product seems difficult go back to the 2nds step and analyze the project again.

4. Test the Product

Lastly, before you complete your project and submit the design to your client it is important to first test the product to see if all the elements in the design are interacting with one another successfully. The last thing you want is to deliver a product that keeps on crashing and keeps disturbing your client. If the test proves your design to be correct then well and good however if it proves that the design is flawed and the product will eventually crash then you can evaluate your project on either of the previous three steps based on the severity of the problem.

Conclusion

An important thing to note after all this is that this process is not final. Like I said earlier, this model will only serve as a guide to organize your work so that you don’t get stuck at any stage and easily compartmentalize your work and rather than letting it drive you, you drive it. One more thing to add here is that these stages mentioned may not necessarily work for you because every project has its own challenge. These challenges will work for the majority of your projects. However, the essence of this is to show you that when you organize your tasks you make your work easier for yourself and ultimately end up improving your design process which will ultimately improve our design itself.

3 Stages of Design thinking

Bryan Ferguson — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 19:12:24 +0000

Design thinking

Design thinking is a strategy-making process that avoids making mistakes by applying the use of certain tools from the world of design and shifting the focus to human behavior and analyzing how certain things will affect different individuals. It was popularized by David M. Kelly and Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin of the Rotman School. Generally, whenever web developers set strategies to design a product based on what their clients/users want they often stumble. Either they collect a lot of backward-looking data, which doesn’t tell them what future customers really want. Or they make risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.

The 3 Major Stages

The major stages of the design thinking process ensure that your design will be able to meet your future customers’ wants.

First stage: Invent the Future

In the first stage, you start with forming a few theories about what your users might want, by immersing yourself in their lives. Instead of polling them about specific design features, you observe and ask questions about their behavior. The process stops at realizing what they might want (that you currently don’t have), and you move on to the next step.

Second stage: Test Your Ideas

Use iterative prototyping on the designs you’ve created and conduct a few quick experiments to see how users respond. Iterative prototyping is basically a repeating cycle of designing, prototyping, testing, and refining multiple “versions” of a product (in this case a web design). After you’re done with the iterative prototyping process, you can make the necessary changes and move on to the final stage of the design thinking process.

Third stage: Bring it to Life

The last stage of the design thinking process involves bringing the new design to life. After you’re done with the iterative prototyping process and picking a winner, you start developing the final product based on all the points collected in the previous two stages.
Organizing your workflow makes way for improvement and innovation. Design thinking is about solving problems. The same was the case for the manufacturing industry when Total Quality Management was introduced in the 1980s by Toyota. Design thinking has the potential to do for innovation in web development exactly what TQM did for manufacturing. By strategically structuring your whole design process, you can not only improve the process as is but also make room for innovation. Because in the first stage instead of asking the user/client for what they want, what you do is you observe their behaviors and analyze them based on what they would want but not know yet. What this does is that it makes room for innovation because you usually end up making a design the client didn’t actually ask for but wanted and didn't know that they wanted that design.

Conclusion

Human-centered problem solving requires a fair bit of imagination. Design thinking can help you unlock new creative avenues that later help you come up with new strategies for designing a product. In a nutshell, Design Thinking is about improving products by analyzing user behavior and understanding how they interact with products along with the conditions where they operate the product.

Design approaches of Mobile-first, Desktop-first, and Responsive Web Design

Bryan Ferguson — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:22:19 +0000

This blog post is about the approaches of building a design for multiple screen sizes. Users today, prefer different devices for accessing the web according to their user profile and goals. As diverse user profiles prefer different devices for the same website, designers try to provide a consistent experience across those devices. The end goal of a design across multiple devices is making the experience consistent across various screens and devices.
Generally, Design experts define some key concepts that ensure interusability for any cross-platform UX, for a coherent experience. These concepts include Composition of functionality across those platforms, Consistency of interfaces across these devices, and Continuity of content and data for possible transitions between platforms.

User trends are changing

We have seen noticeable growth in mobile users visits on websites during 2020. 68.1% of all website visits consist of mobile users. According to the projections of Statistica.com, there will be more than 300 million mobile users in the US within the next five years.
Keeping numbers aside, the daily screen time of an average user on their phone and desktop while scrolling through web stores and apps sums up the story. Users now prefer using their phones for accessing websites and actually reading content rather than doing the same on their laptops or desktops. What we’re trying to get at is that you can optimize your website for mobile use but usually at the expense of functionality or interactivity that affects the experience of your mobile users.

Mobile-first approach in Design

The mobile-first approach stems from the concept of progressive enhancement. The idea with this approach is doing the hardest part first. Hence, designing for other devices becomes easier. It comes down to the most essential features that the website, store or app can’t do without. The core concept is designing for a smaller screen to take care of your user needs without any constraints and then progressing to the bigger screens with more freedom. In simple words, mobile-first focuses on giving optimized views to mobile users followed by desktop users. On the contrary, the responsive design prioritizes desktop readers. Generally, it is easier to design a site that fits the content in a mobile device first as then it’s able to render across different screens.

Desktop-first approach in Design

The desktop-first approach can lead to the trouble of aligning the content and some last minute compromises on user experience for mobile users. Responsive web design and mobile-first design are not the same. A Responsive design is mobile friendly whereas mobile-first caters to the mobile users as a priority. Similarly, Desktop-first can be an approach in Responsive web design where your priority can be a Desktop design (like most cases in RWD)

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design is the widely followed approach where the design is flexible, responsive and can be rendered across different screen sizes. A couple years ago, Google started indexing and ranking websites by their mobile content. In the past, the content on desktop versions was used primarily for indexing that majorly influenced the Search Engine Optimization and the user query results. According to Google, the change was made due to the fact that the majority of online users are surfing the internet through mobile devices. Hence, the Googlebot now crawls the pages with the smartphone agent.

Distinctions between Design approaches

The mobile first approach usually prioritizes users resulting in the process being more content-centric. The smaller screen breakpoints allows the design to naturally fit around the corners. Moreover, the approach compels you to design multiple layouts based on different screen sizes and orientations. Although the approach can make you go the extra mile and make some extra effort, it also saves you the compromises in the desktop first approach where you are prone to the risk of “cutting down” on the experience.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it boils down to the user experience and the objectives of the design for its audience. A good design is always built for the end user. Therefore, before you decide to follow an approach you must keep your end-user and their journey in mind. Your consideration should account for the screen size, device and orientation that the end-users prefer. In conclusion, following the approach that suits you the most to cater to the experience and journey of the end-user is the way to go.

UX discovery and asking questions

Bryan Ferguson — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 17:40:32 +0000

Hello everyone!
This post is about a very critical phase of the UX process known as UX discovery or research. UX discovery is instrumental in solving the “right” problems that translate into a flawless user experience. I will try to unfold the basics of UX discovery and its importance.

UX discovery and the importance of asking questions

UX discovery is a preliminary phase of the design process where you learn about the business, its product & users, and the prevalent practices followed in the industry. The process starts with coming up with a problem statement and setting the scope. Then you collect data from the mentioned sources and set up a roadmap on how to build something that achieves the project goals. From personal experience, I’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to allocate resources and time for UX discovery than starting out on the wrong foot, only to revert back to square one later.

Ask the right questions while setting up goals

The primary thing to understand is that you should know what you're constructing and why you're constructing it. You can also have a suitable draw close at the solutions to these two questions earlier than beginning the project; however, everyone must be on the same page before embarking. For example, the project lead can also additionally recognize the purpose why a project is being undertaken from an enterprise viewpoint (to advantage users, to extend function set, or to reduce sales losses, etc); however, a technical SME can also additionally recognize how the codebase desires to alternate an excellent way to accommodate a shift in-person experience. For this purpose, ask these essential questions with all stakeholders withinside the room. Moreover, try answering these questions on the basis of the data that you’ve gathered.

Understand the Users

A user-centered design process doesn’t always require creating detailed persona profiles. However, it needs a thorough understanding of how they perform their job, what annoys and facilitates them, and how they will use the product you're working on. For this purpose exactly, you start up listing out every type of individual that might use this product. The next step is to set up a profile for each user type and try to understand their behavior. If you can not gather data from the existing users, similar products can help you get an idea of the right way to go. Understanding users is an integral part of the process, it provides an actual direction for the
design as the product is built for their use.

Conclusion

The guidelines above will steer you to set a better tone for your projects by asking the right questions at this crucial step. However, it's imperative that you allocate the right amount of resources and time for the process to actually bear its fruit. There are times when the product exists and you're supposed to solve some critical issues rather than starting from scratch. Following these key steps can allow you to cut down on unnecessary delays by putting your focus on the right area

Some of the most prominent UI Kits for Tailwind CSS

Bryan Ferguson — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 16:40:29 +0000

Tailwind CSS has emerged as an excellent front-end solution in recent times. This utility-first framework has made itself famous in dev circles due to its magnificent class categories. This post is about some of the most renowned UI kits for Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind UI (premium)

A brainchild of the creators of Tailwind CSS. They have over 400 “expertly crafted” (as they like to put it) UI components that you can drop right away in your projects. The components can be integrated with JavaScript for interactivity as well as React and Vue. They have three categories of Application UI, Marketing, and Ecommerce components at different prices.
The components are pretty great, and they have all the necessary categories of UI components for websites, stores, and apps that you can use in unlimited projects.
You can preview their components and find more about them here. https://tailwindui.com/preview

Tailwind UI Kit (free and premium)

Tailwind UI kit has the most extensive library of expertly designed components and templates (1000 components and 30 templates) that you can’t find anywhere else. They also have fully responsive, drop-in-ready components that can be integrated with React, Vue, and Angular. They also have three categories of Web Application UI kit, Marketing UI kit, and Ecommerce UI kit. Besides premium licenses, they also have a community license that gives you free access to 117 of their prime components.
You can build functional web apps, stores, and websites with great ease. They also have around 30 templates with Angular, Vue, and React integrations that they sell separately. Their access for a lifetime is a significant plus.
You can preview their components and find more about them here.
https://tailwinduikit.com/

Meraki UI (free)

Meraki UI is a free Tailwind CSS components library with 58 stylish and fully responsive components. The kit supports RTL languages. It's also based on Flexbox & CSS Grid. They offer various components, including popups, cards, buttons, dropdown, forms, navbar, pagination, and much more. The kit is MIT licensed, and they have a Github repo where you can see the end results of different projects for yourself. They also have unique resources (built using Meraki UI components) that are entirely free. Check out their free components and resources here: https://merakiui.com/resources

DaisyUI (free)

DaisyUI is another impressive and free component library that has expertly designed components for your projects. Their components are customizable, and they also provide you free help with themes, colors, layouts, and typography. If you want a quick and simple solution for a project right now, DaisyUI is your go-to.

They provide free solutions for not only components but also themes, layouts, and typography. Their component classes are clean and require no dependencies, so you just copy-paste, and you’re good to go. Check it out here:
daisyUI — Tailwind CSS Components

Tail-Kit (free)

Tail-kit is another free Tailwind CSS component and templates library that gives you access to over 250 components and templates. The kit is built for Tailwind CSS 2.0, which was a significant upgrade in the framework. You install the library and get access to all its components and templates in a jiffy.

All the components & templates have React, VueJs, and Angular integrations. Some components do need to override basic Tailwind configuration before using them in your projects, but all the necessary configurations are available on their website.
Check out their free components here:
Tailkit - Premium UI Components for your Tailwind CSS projects

Kometa by Kitwind (free)

Kometa includes 130 sections of UI components, is accessible on their website. Kometa is built on Tailwind CSS 1.4.4 (a slightly older version of the framework). The kit also includes a custom color palette and font family with a couple of spacings & variants.
They have built their color palette on Material design color palette. The components are diverse and can be used in various projects for personal and commercial use.
Check Kometa out here:
https://kitwind.io/products/kometa/

Razor UI (premium)

Razor UI does need some Node.js packages for configurations that are available in the documentation on their website.
Priced at $79, Razor UI’s components kit is styled consistently with 100+ components, allowing your web designs to have a similar feel. To sum it up, if you’re looking for something simple and beautiful, Razor UI is the way to go. Check their UI kit out here:
https://razorui.com/packages

Do let me know if you’ve ever used any of these UI kits. I’m looking forward to hear about your experiences.

5 reasons why you should give Tailwind CSS a shot

Bryan Ferguson — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 17:05:04 +0000

Tailwind CSS is a recently growing utility-based front-end framework. In this blog, I have some key points today that might give you some valuable insight if you should consider giving it a shot.
Here’s why you should consider Tailwind CSS as your primary front-end framework:

Utility-first

Tailwind CSS is easier to debug than other Non-CSS solutions where you have to go through multiple steps for simple prototyping and debugging tasks. With Tailwind CSS, you know your progress in real-time. This seems like a small thing at first, but it actually lets you focus on what you should be doing rather than going through circles to fix something that can be dealt with in minutes. The class names in Tailwind CSS represent one or multiple CSS declarations. Hence, you get to build complex components from a set of primitive utilities in no time.

Reusability

You can re-use the elements by making them a component and share it between elements. You also get to reuse optimizable CSS for your elements. Generally, your fonts and colors are based on relative values but with Tailwind, you can darken your text by 10% or make the text smaller by 20%. The values allow you to really get the little things right. Moreover, the real catch of small and composable utilities is the enforcement of consistency for every developer in the team as they have a fixed amount of options that make the design consistent.

Responsiveness

Tailwind CSS lets you design right in your browser where you can add transitions and animations. The HTML is completely responsive, so you don’t have to go back and forth multiple windows to test a component through the eyes of an end-user. As a result, you don’t switch tabs between HTML & style sheets, resulting in quicker developer hand-off with the help of fast-tracked progress.

Consistency and readability

The Class names in Tailwind CSS can be shared between elements so which also results in consistent bundle size. Not only does the CSS is easier to read, it fast tracks your workflow as the whole process becomes much quicker. And with writing faster styles, you get loads of pre-built classes for size and colors which also make it easier for other devs to learn the styles and collaborate in an ongoing project.

UI kits & Templates

Tailwind CSS makes it easier for devs to drop in components and cook something up in no time. The one thing Tailwind does best is fast-tracking your workflow with the help of UI libraries of expertly crafted components so you get to put all your attention on developing rather than getting stuck in the design process or hiring a designer.
There are several UI kits and templates on the internet made for/with Tailwind CSS. These UI kits and templates have a variety of responsive components for you to have a solid base for your design. They enable you to achieve your project requirements with functionality and responsiveness without having to do additional coding yourself. Tailwind CSS is also known as the go-to if you value customizability to a higher degree in responsive user interfaces. Some UI kits have free resources and components that you can check out right now. You can give their components a go right now with Tailwind play or Doge build and see how stuff looks in real-time. I’ll talk about some of the best UI kits on the market in another blog.

Conclusion

Tailwind CSS is a great low-level framework that solves many drawbacks of other CSS solutions. It does fast track the workflow for many devs but it’s not a solution for every web dev need. Front-end devs have the luxury to mesh different solutions as long as we guarantee maintainability, scalability, and performance. Tailwind CSS gets the job done for a great number of devs and provides a quicker approach to doing things seamlessly. Although, in order to adopt any new framework it’s vital to factor in the effects of any change on your workflow, performance, and scalability.

Improve your Interaction Design

Bryan Ferguson — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 13:15:09 +0000

Hello to all the fellow devs!

My name is Bryan and I'm a devRel at Tailwinduikit.com, and over there we're eager about examining thoughts that convert into practical solutions for the dev community. This post is both for the newbie designers and the developers as well because I've noticed that developers can improve their production a lot just by going through the basics of design principles. So, In this blog, I’ll share some ideas to improve interaction design that will help you cut through the upheaval.

Interaction design

Interaction design is a part of user experience. It’s a discipline of design that revolves around the design of interactive products and services in which a designer focuses on the ways in which a user interacts with an element or product. Interaction design stays relevant due to the continuous stream of new ideas and practical implementations that demand continuous personal improvement on designers’ part. Keeping yourself up to date with contemporary design trends can become compelling but forming some proven UX habits, that’s the real deal to ensure continuous improvement in your design thinking.

This blog will discuss some practical habits that you can adopt for successful implementation of interaction design.

Designing for clarity

Each page of your design should answer the following questions for clients

Where am I?

What actions can I take?

For what reason would I make those actions?

What will happen once I do take those actions?

While forming personas and user streams, you should follow these simple techniques for adding clarity in your interaction design:

Choose appropriate UI patterns

To know popular design solutions to common problems, use different sites, for example, UI Patterns and free guides like Web UI patterns. For instance, cards are famous because they assist with getting a lot of content sorted in a streamlined manner. Hero images are extraordinary for item locales since they have an immediate hunch. Utilize these examples as a standard, then, at that point, build on further with your imagination.

Don’t break mental models

Design based on what individuals are already familiar with. Such as symbols in the upper left should connect back to the landing page. Calendars should allow you to pick dates rather than expecting users to type the date and time.

Use good copy

content is a major building block of interaction design. Ensure that the tone of the copy matches the visual design since everything is part of a similar interface. Any disparities will confuse your users and negatively affect your user experience.

Include meaningful labels & icons – Don’t complicate

things too much with labeling interface objects. It ought to be clear what is and isn't interactive.

Let users guide your design decision

Designers can have a specific measure of auteurship in their work, yet the design should eventually revolve around the client's necessities. The easiest way to unlock particular design requirements is to listen to user feedback. Client feedback is often treated as an annoyance to disregard, but there is a rich lode of intuitions present within every customer's assistance team. Don't drift apart from customer feedback as it enhances your design sense. There are tools like Get Satisfaction, where the features are designed to bring out honest conversations. The more noteworthy insights, the more prominent experiences.

Ask the Right Questions by Observing User Behavior

User participation is a significant part of Interaction design. There is no interaction without Users performing an activity. Such practices are presented in the Lean UX Lifecycle methodology, which states that you should consistently improve your design depending on the hyper-centered usability studies, insightful tools, heatmaps, and eye-tracking. Tracking down the right design arrangement starts by posing the proper inquiries. In any case, sorting out what queries to pose takes a bit of time and practice. Whenever you notice a prevalent issue faced by your users, make sure to find the right examining questions to distinguish the foundations of that specific design issue.

Conclusion

Spend a good amount of time on Interaction design because knowing about users' context and motivation to interact with a specific product makes it easy to create venture maps and design interaction patterns. The attention and focus on interaction design, during your design process, can help you elevate the experience for your user and save you the effort of coming back to repeat the process again.