DEV Community: Jackson kitsao

7 websites to get UI and design inspiration as a developer

Jackson kitsao — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 14:21:05 +0000

User Interface (UI) and Web design is the the process of planning the overall feel of your website, how it’s presented, how it looks, and how people can interact with it. This is important because a successful UI design contributes to a positive user experience, which is a competitive advantage.
Below are some of the websites that might inspire your web/UI design eye as a web developer

Dribbble

Dribbble is an online community for showcasing user-made artwork. It functions as a self-promotion and networking platform for:

graphic design,
web design,
illustration,
photography

Creative professionals such as illustrators, web designers, graphic designers and icon artists use Dribbble to promote their work and meet colleagues. As a web developer or UI designer dribbble is a great place to find inspiration for your next design. Dribbbble also offers amazing filter tools you can filter designs by color, Tags, Timeframe, and many other attributes Dribbble also has a pro subscription where you get to email the designer of a particular shot you like. Overall its a neat platform to get inspiration from.

Behance

Just like Dribbble Behance is also a social network owned by Adobe for creatives of just about every field and discipline. It's a place to connect, inspire, and get hired—a portfolio site that's so much more.
As a developer, you can utilize Behance advanced tools to search for design and get inspired
Behance offers great filter tools like color, location, Layouts, and more...

Awwwards

Awwwards is a platform that recognizes the talent and effort of the best web designers, developers and agencies in the world.
It is a website competition that developers can submit to. The best year-round submissions are awarded at the Awwwards conference and prize-giving ceremony, which take place in various cities across the United States and Europe.
Awwwards also features a rating system for the websites featured and selects a new site each day to showcase.

Frontend Mentor

Unlike Dribbble and Behance Frontend Mentors Gives You real-world HTML, CSS and JavaScript challenges whilst working to professional designs. Its a community of over 81,559 developers building projects, reviewing code, and helping each other get better.

HOW IT WORKS

Choose your challenge
- Have a look through different collections of web designs. Pick one that you feel will be a nice challenge for you at this stage.
Code the design
- Start the challenge and download all the starter files. They provide all the files you'll need to complete the challenge. Building it is up to you!
Submit your solution
- Post your solution on the platform for everyone to see and get feedback on your code from other developers in the community.
Give others feedback
- Thinking critically about other people's code is a crucial skill. Help others while deepening your own knowledge by giving feedback on solutions.

Frontend Masters helps you gain real experience of building websites and providing code reviews. Build your portfolio and help others achieve their goals.

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.
Pinterest is can be a great source for all kinds of design inspiration. You can use the ‘Explore’ link to view categories like photography and illustration, or plug in ‘web design’ to filter images of various websites.

Pins

Pins are bookmarks that people use to save ideas they love on Pinterest.

With billions of Pins on Pinterest, you'll always find ideas to spark inspiration. When you discover Pins you love, save them to boards to keep your ideas organized and easy to find.
If you click through the Pin, you can visit the website to learn how to make it or where to buy it. As you discover Pins you love, click the red Save button to save them to your boards.

Land book

Land-book is a Design gallery carefully collected websites. Landbook seeks to help creatives find inspiration & motivation to make really cool stuff on the internet
Overall its a great place to find inspiration

Httpster

Httpster is an inspiration resource showcasing totally rocking websites made by people from all over the world.
Its simple design lets you easily discover and possibly get inspired by designs from around
the world

Conclusion

Finding design inspiration as a developer can be challenging, but hopefully the resources above might
come in handy whenever you face a design block. Happy hacking .

Websites that offer free stock photos of all kinds for your websites and apps

Jackson kitsao — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 14:14:08 +0000

Images create visual interest on content they help you to attract attention and to guide your visitor's line of sight and can be of great value when it comes to presenting important information

In this article, we’ll cover a good number of websites that provide high quality images that you can use for free

Unsplash

Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. The website claims over 207,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 17 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 2 million photos. Wikipedia

The Unsplash community is fueled by contributors who offer their images freely for anyone to use, inspiring hundreds of millions of creators from 13-year-old graphic designers to multi-platinum recording artists.

Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.

All photos can be downloaded and used for free
Commercial and non-commercial purposes
No permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!)

This is the best site for free high-resolution photos that I've seen!

Pixabay

Pixabay.com is a website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage and music, exclusively under the custom Pixabay license, a modified and somewhat more restrictive version of the Creative Commons CC0 license.

Pixabays vibrant community of creatives, share copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.
What do you like best?

Disadvantage?

You may not find any result for many important and widely used keywords, means less image stock than paid ones. Each image can't be downloaded in the illustrator or svg format. There are pre defined sizes of each image, you have to choose the size out of these only.

There are millions of graphics but even we might not get what we expect. There is no matching result for so many topics. Last but not the least vector format is not available for all images.

Advantage?

Pixabay is one of the best Free Graphics stock market. It offers free uses of it's downloaded graphics even for commercial use. The best thing with Pixabay is that we do not have to credit anyone while using it. Graphics are also of high quality.

The best thing of Pixabay is it's licensing, they do not stop you to use their stock images for commercial use. You can use these images or photos from personal to commercial use without paying anything. They appreciate the attribution but it is even not forced, like other online tools.

Picspree

Picspree offers a wide range of quality free stock images, all available for commercial use, absolutely free of charge.

Picspree has a community of contributors who upload and share their images, free for use. It provides helpful resources of free stock images for the creative community to use in any project. All images are free to use, with no credit or permission needed, meaning they are ready to use even in commercial projects.

Images can be used in any project, across social media platforms and even for commercial purposes. However, it is important to be aware that depicted content in images such as trademarks, logos or brands may still be protected. In this case you may need to gain permission or consent of the depicted third party.

stocksnap

StockSnap is built on a very simple premise: They promise users an ever-expanding collection of the best, most beautiful stock images for free. And offer these images under a single, simple CC0 license that lets you do what you want with all our photos, with no attribution required.No more hassle trying to figure out whether you can use photos for commercial use and whether you need to provide attribution.

Disadvantage?

For some areas such as (finance and business) there often are very few, if any, good relevant images to choose from. Sometimes, there's just nothing that will work, which is frustrating and leaves me looking elsewhere.

Advantage?

The Creative Commons CC0 license allows you to use all of the photos from StockSnap for free without providing attribution to the photographers. Although it is not required, it's always appreciated when you can provide attribution.

Aside from being able to contribute photos, creating an account on StockSnap allows you to favorite photos. This allows you to save all your favorite photos in one place without having to download them all at once.

Burst

Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Its library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by a global community of photographers.

Burst provides designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography.

Are these photos free for commercial use?

Yes! In fact, we’d highly encourage it, as many of our collections were created with entrepreneurs in mind. You can use these free photos on your online store, product packaging, or anywhere else you’d like. You can even use these pics to create t-shirts, mugs, or other products.

Do I need to credit the site or photographer?

You can give credit by linking back to the original photo page or the photographer's Burst profile (e.g. “Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst”). We realize it's not always possible to provide attribution, so it is not mandatory under their image license.

How do I download free photos?

When you hover over or click on an image, you will see "High Resolution" and "Low Resolution" download options. "Low Res" images are great for small web graphics, where file sizes need to be very compressed. "High Res" images are better for presentations, websites, online stores, and anywhere else where quality matters most.

You can use the images for just about anything — your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more. All images are free for commercial use with no attribution required; you can read more about this on our license page.

Kaboompics

kaboompics.com is a service with free stock photos that can be used for both personal and commercial projects. This website gives you an opportunity to choose from thousands of pictures without any payment, even for commercial use.
Images are available according to their own license. It does not differ from Creative Commons with the one exception – the rules of redistribution. In every other case you are free to use our photos however you like.

Note that the Kaboompics License does not include the right to use:

Works of art or authorship that appear in Photos
Trademarks, logos, or brands that appear in Photos
If you download photos with any of these depicted in them, you may need the permission of the brand owner of the brand or work of authorship or individual depending on how you use the Photo. If you still aren’t sure, you should probably talk to a lawyer who knows about these things.

All photos on Kaboompics can be used for free for commercial and noncommercial use.
Attribution is not required. Giving credit to the the Kaboompics is not necessary but always appreciated.
You can modify the photos. Be creative and edit the photos as you like.