Prahlad Yeri

Posted on Jun 6, 2019

Web Developers and Designers, where do you get your raw materials from?

#webdev #javascript #html #css

Web Development is perhaps the fuzziest science of our times. It keeps evolving constantly and you must keep up with tons of things.

One of the most important things are resources, be it fonts, css and bootstrap themes, stock icons and background images or javascript frameworks. My question is what is the standard practice in this regard, where do you get these things from?

Top comments (18)

Rick Booth • Jun 6 '19 • Edited

Logodust for logos if I need something quickly for prototyping.
Undraw for open source svg illustrations
Heropatterns, thepatternlibrary and Novapattern for repeatable patterns
Cupcake Ipsum, Bacon Ipsum, Cat Ipsum for better Lorem Ipsum text
templated.co for free templates/inspiration
UIGoodies also has quite a few decent things on there.
cssfx for quick copy-paste css animations

Lohit Aryan • Jun 7 '19

Man this was useful wow I just go about making up some baseline Bulma page as frontend for playing around in node ;/

Rick Booth • Jun 7 '19

I used to rely heavily on stuff like Bootstrap/Bulma, but have found myself recently getting attached to utility frameworks like https://tailwindcss.com/. You can quickly create buttons and stuff with inline classes like <button class="px-4 py-2 border border-grey-darkest rounded hover:bg-grey-light">Click me!</button>

I feel like sometimes when prototyping you can get caught up with frameworks like Bulma trying to get everything to look nice and work well together, but if you create your own minimalistic components it can speed dev up a bit! Depends whether you hate css or not though I suppose haha

Prahlad Yeri • Jun 7 '19

Tailwind seems wonderful! But you also need a grid for your layouts, do you use a different minimal framework for that?

Then there's also the need for things like responsiveness, modal dialogs, navbars, carousel, etc. which come built-in with Bootstrap. What do you use for those?

Are these minimal frameworks too difficult to handle for someone with minimal knowledge of CSS?

Rick Booth • Jun 7 '19

For a grid I usually just use tailwind's built in width stuff, having a two column layout would be something like

<div class="flex flex-col md:flex-row">
  <section class="w-1/3">Sidebar</section>
  <section class="w-2/3">Main Content</section>
</div>

where initially it wraps and on medium screens and above it sits side by side.

I've found the responsive stuff in tailwind to be great. You can even hook directly in to the config if configured properly and do stuff like

.my-component {
  @apply bg-red text-white p-4;
  @screen md {
    font-family: config('fonts.primary');
    @apply bg-blue text-grey p-8 /* font-primary here would do the same as the above line */;
  }
}

As for stuff like modals, it's not too hard to achieve these in pure css without needing javascript or pre-built component (I know Bootstrap used to rely pretty heavily on jQuery which was one of the main reasons I moved away from it when starting to use stuff like Vue/React). Check out tailwindcomponents if you get chance, there's a load of pre built tailwind things there that you can either get inspiration from or copy :)

I wasn't that confident with CSS stuff until more recently and using tailwind has been a blessing.

Angela Whisnant • Jun 11 '19

Just what I needed! Thanks!
Angie

Vicente G. Reyes • Jun 6 '19

I get stock photos from Pexels, Icons from icons8 and fonts from Google Fonts.

Rick Booth • Jun 6 '19

Pexels is great, I've found unsplash to be good too

Vicente G. Reyes • Jun 6 '19

I was just drawn to Pexels because of the background photos on Brave Browser lol Unsplash is awesome too!

Paul • Jun 7 '19 • Edited

I won't duplicate what others have said, but in addition:

Font Awesome is still great, we have a pro license at work
Nucleo Icons for personal projects, I prefer them over FA actually, and their turnaround time for newly requested icons is much better
Codyhouse Framework for layouts, better support for modern browsers than Bootstrap like CSS Grid and Custom Properties, also smaller file size and more componentized, only use the CSS you need
UpLabs has some awesome freebies/inspiration
Lukasz Adam does some amazing SVG work
Absurd Design is just great
ManyPixels Illustration Gallery is a lot like UnDraw, but with more gradients and finer detail, I think

Florian Rand • Jun 6 '19 • Edited

Fonts: Adobe Typekit (now free) also well known Google fonts. Avoid dafonts and similar to it like a plague.

Icons inspiration: the noun project.
Some designers share free resources on Behance as self-promotion. You can search there too.

Be aware of Dribbble and other platforms. While it's cool search for inspiration, a good designer follows users needs, not the hype or trends.

Lastly, for any real professional work I hire illustrators or other professional profiles to the job, and if there is no budget for that then quality stock resources.

Dan • Jun 6 '19

If need be I make images and icons. I’ve had a long history with design. I do own some pro software (Affinity Designer) which makes a lot of things easier. Free things exist too. Designing things in SVG is great.

There are a number of websites that offer free to use resources though for those who don’t have time/skill/personnel or etc.

Allison Walker • Jun 7 '19

Lorem Ipsum
blindtextgenerator.com/lorem-ipsum
generator.lorem-ipsum.info/

officeipsum.com/index.php — For fun

Web Typography
theasciicode.com.ar/ — ASCII chart
dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref — Character References
practicaltypography.com/straight-a... — quotations codes
cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/dashes.html — codes for dashes and other shapes

Colors
coolors.co/
webgradients.com/

Pictures
placekitten.com/

Random Names
uinames.com/
fakenamegenerator.com/

CSS Stuff
leaverou.github.io/css3patterns/
cssmatic.com/

I have a very long list of silly text generators. I found them by searching for text generators. When I find something I like, I bookmark it. I find things I like either through classes, or maybe something like this where people list their favorite tools.