Month: October 2024

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I’d like to create a js for a dynamic location

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So i'd like to have a text saying [Location] which will be shown and changed based on the viewer's location/ip. I tried to follow this video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KiGKd2XXL4 but i didn't manage to make it to work. I registered on 2 websites to get an API key which i placed it in the script and yet it didn't work out. What I tried in a nutshell is

<script>
    $('document').ready(function() {
        $.ajax({
          url: "https://api.snoopi.io/check?apikey=MY API KEY",
          dataType: "jsonp",
          jsonpCallback: "unBounce"
        });
    }); // Ready
function unBounce(json){
   $('#location').html(json.City + ", " + json.State);
}
</script>

Followed by 

<span id="location"></span>
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JS SCRIPT NOT RUNNING

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I am creating a basic page in w3spaces and while I've finished editing the html and css part, I'd like to add a few scripts in it. I tried to add this script (https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_countdown.asp), which is a countdown timer to my own page but it seems like it doesn't run. Initially I used the code provided <p id="demo"></p> and nothing happened. I also tried other things such as <span id="demo" class="demo"></span> and <script src="./countdown.js"></script> but neither worked. Do you have any suggestion please as I am not very experienced.

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Ingredients For A Cozy November (2024 Wallpapers Edition)

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When the days are gray and misty as they are in many parts of the world in November, there’s no better remedy than a bit of colorful inspiration. To bring some good vibes to your desktops this month, artists and designers from across the globe once again tickled their creative ideas and designed unique and inspiring wallpapers that are bound to sweeten up your November.

The wallpapers in this post come in versions with and without a calendar for November 2024 and can be downloaded for free — as it has been a monthly tradition here at Smashing Magazine for more than 13 years already. As a little bonus goodie, we also added a selection of November favorites from our wallpapers archives to the post. Maybe you’ll spot one of your almost-forgotten favorites in here, too?

A huge thank-you to everyone who shared their wallpapers with us this month — this post wouldn’t exist without you. Happy November!

  • You can click on every image to see a larger preview.
  • We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.
  • Submit your wallpaper design! 👩‍🎨
    Feeling inspired? We are always looking for creative talent and would love to feature your desktop wallpaper in one of our upcoming posts. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!

Honoring the Sound of Jazz And Soul

“Today, we celebrate the saxophone, an instrument that has added its signature sound to jazz, rock, classical, and so much more. From smooth solos to bold brass harmonies, the sax has shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Whether you’re a seasoned player or just love its iconic sound, let’s show some love to this musical marvel!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Snow Falls In The Alps

“The end of the year is approaching, and winter is just around the corner, so we’ll spend this month in the Alps. The snow has arrived in the mountains, and we can take advantage of it to ski or have a hot coffee while we watch the flakes fall.” — Designed by Veronica Valenzuela from Spain.

The Secret Cave

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

Happy Thanksgiving Day

Designed by Cronix from the United States.

Space Explorer

“A peaceful, minimalist wallpaper of a lone cartoon astronaut floating in space surrounded by planets and stars.” — Designed by Reethu from London.

The Sailor

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

Happy Diwali

Designed by Cronix from the United States.

Elimination Of Violence Against Women

“November 25th is the “International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.” We wanted to create a wallpaper that can hopefully contribute to building awareness and support.” — Designed by Friendlystock from Greece.

Square Isn’t It

“When playing with lines, which were at the beginning displaying a square, I finally arrived to this drawing, and I was surprised. I thought it would make a nice wallpaper for one’s desktop, doesn’t it?” — Designed by Philippe Brouard from France.

Transition

“Inspired by the transition from autumn to winter.” — Designed by Tecxology from India.

Sunset Or Sunrise

“November is autumn in all its splendor. Earthy colors, falling leaves, and afternoons in the warmth of the home. But it is also adventurous and exciting and why not, different. We sit in Bali contemplating Pura Ulun Danu Bratan. We don’t know if it’s sunset or dusk, but… does that really matter?” — Designed by Veronica Valenzuela Jimenez from Spain.

Cozy Autumn Cups And Cute Pumpkins

“Autumn coziness, which is created by fallen leaves, pumpkins, and cups of cocoa, inspired our designers for this wallpaper. — Designed by MasterBundles from Ukraine.

A Jelly November

“Been looking for a mysterious, gloomy, yet beautiful desktop wallpaper for this winter season? We’ve got you, as this month’s calendar marks Jellyfish Day. On November 3rd, we celebrate these unique, bewildering, and stunning marine animals. Besides adorning your screen, we’ve got you covered with some jellyfish fun facts: they aren’t really fish, they need very little oxygen, eat a broad diet, and shrink in size when food is scarce. Now that’s some tenacity to look up to.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Colorful Autumn

“Autumn can be dreary, especially in November, when rain starts pouring every day. We wanted to summon better days, so that’s how this colourful November calendar was created. Open your umbrella and let’s roll!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Winter Is Here

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

Moonlight Bats

“I designed some Halloween characters and then this idea came to my mind — a bat family hanging around in the moonlight. A cute and scary mood is just perfect for autumn.” — Designed by Carmen Eisendle from Germany.

Time To Give Thanks

Designed by Glynnis Owen from Australia.

The Kind Soul

“Kindness drives humanity. Be kind. Be humble. Be humane. Be the best of yourself!” — Designed by Color Mean Creative Studio from Dubai.

Anbani

“Anbani means alphabet in Georgian. The letters that grow on that tree are the Georgian alphabet. It’s very unique!” — Designed by Vlad Gerasimov from Georgia.

Tempestuous November

“By the end of autumn, ferocious Poseidon will part from tinted clouds and timid breeze. After this uneven clash, the sky once more becomes pellucid just in time for imminent luminous snow.” — Designed by Ana Masnikosa from Belgrade, Serbia.

Me And The Key Three

Designed by Bart Bonte from Belgium.

Mushroom Season

“It is autumn! It is raining and thus… it is mushroom season! It is the perfect moment to go to the forest and get the best mushrooms to do the best recipe.” — Designed by Verónica Valenzuela from Spain.

Welcome Home Dear Winter

“The smell of winter is lingering in the air. The time to be home! Winter reminds us of good food, of the warmth, the touch of a friendly hand, and a talk beside the fire. Keep calm and let us welcome winter.” — Designed by Acodez IT Solutions from India.

Outer Space

“We were inspired by the nature around us and the universe above us, so we created an out-of-this-world calendar. Now, let us all stop for a second and contemplate on preserving our forests, let us send birds of passage off to warmer places, and let us think to ourselves — if not on Earth, could we find a home somewhere else in outer space?” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Captain’s Home

Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium.

Holiday Season Is Approaching

Designed by ActiveCollab from the United States.

Deer Fall, I Love You

Designed by Maria Porter from the United States.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

“November is the Peanut Butter Month so I decided to make a wallpaper around that. As everyone knows peanut butter goes really well with some jelly so I made two sandwiches, one with peanut butter and one with jelly. Together they make the best combination.” — Designed by Senne Mommens from Belgium.

International Civil Aviation Day

“On December 7, we mark International Civil Aviation Day, celebrating those who prove day by day that the sky really is the limit. As the engine of global connectivity, civil aviation is now, more than ever, a symbol of social and economic progress and a vehicle of international understanding. This monthly calendar is our sign of gratitude to those who dedicate their lives to enabling everyone to reach their dreams.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

November Nights On Mountains

“Those chill November nights when you see mountain tops covered with the first snow sparkling in the moonlight.” — Designed by Jovana Djokic from Serbia.

November Fun

Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany.

November Ingredients

“Whether or not you celebrate Thanksgiving, there’s certain things that always make the harvest season special. As a Floridian, I’m a big fan of any signs that the weather might be cooling down soon, too!” — Designed by Dorothy Timmer from the United States.

Universal Children’s Day

“Universal Children’s Day, November 20. It feels like a dream world, it invites you to let your imagination flow, see the details, and find the child inside you.” — Designed by Luis Costa from Portugal.

A Gentleman’s November

Designed by Cedric Bloem from Belgium.

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Screenwriting Techniques for Marketers: Defining Your Customer’s Problem

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Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

For the past ten years, I’ve been using Hollywood screenwriting techniques to help companies create powerful marketing stories. I've seen firsthand how powerful storytelling can be in transforming a company's messaging.

Start solving for the customer today with the help of these 61 helpful templates. 

Before we keep going though, spoiler alert, I need you to know that may just ruin movies for you. On the other hand, if you keep reading, I also may just show you how to make your marketing story even more irresistible.

The Power of the Problem in Screenwriting

For a moment, let’s take off our marketing hats and put on our screenwriting hats.

In the world of screenwriting, master storytellers know that to create a gripping narrative, you need to write a powerful problem for a hero to overcome. If there is no problem in the story, there is no story.

Can you imagine Liam Neeson getting the phone call that his daughter is kidnapped (again), but this time, just as he’s about to go off on the terrorist on the other end, his daughter hops on the call and tells him it's all just a prank. Her friends took her to New York to check out colleges and she’d like him to join her.

Then the rest of the movie is about them just walking around New York enjoying a fall day. That is not an interesting movie. You would walk out.

There has to be a problem for the hero to overcome. A bomb has to be about to go off. A meteor has to be hurling towards earth. A Death Star has to be about to destroy another planet.

The bigger the problem the hero has to overcome, the more the audience pays attention and waits to see if the hero can eventually overcome the problem.

However, there is more to writing an interesting story than just establishing a big problem.

The Three Levels of Problem

So obviously, for a movie to truly grip the audience, the hero has to encounter a big problem. There is something that has to get in the way of what the hero wants. This is called an External Problem.

External Problem

The External Problem is the visible, tangible obstacle or challenge that the main character faces. It's the surface-level issue that is easily identifiable. In the Hunger Games, Katniss has to win the Hunger Games. In Star Wars, Luke has to destroy a Death Star. Pretty simple to understand.

Here is where I’m going to start ruining movies for you. In order to relate to the audience, screenwriters have to dig deeper than the External Problem. After all, how many of us have had to compete in the Hunger Games or destroy a Death Star? Very few. So how can we relate to the main characters if we’ve never experienced their experience?

Storytellers have learned to hook audiences by introducing two more layers to the problem: Internal Problem and Philosophical Problem.

Internal Problem

Beneath the surface of every External Problem lies an internal struggle. In a movie, the hero has to disarm a bomb (External Problem), but maybe the last time he tried to disarm a bomb, he cut the wrong wire and people died. Now, he is not sure he has what it takes. That is his Internal Problem. How many of us have ever wondered if we have what it takes? Pretty much everyone.

The story is no longer just about destroying a bomb, but it is about the hero’s desire to prove he has what it takes. The Internal Problem becomes the heart of the story and makes the story more relatable to the audience.

Philosophical Problem

The next layer of problem screenwriters use is called the Philosophical Problem.

This is the deepest level, addressing why the problem matters in a larger context or on a moral level. It often relates to what's right or wrong, fair or unfair. The movie will make an argument that good should triumph over evil or true love should win out over arranged marriages.

By incorporating all three levels, storytellers can create more compelling narratives that deeply resonate with their audience. When the hero overcomes all three levels of problems, the hero wins.

So what does this mean for you as a marketer?

In your marketing, your customer is the hero of your story. One of the most crucial elements in crafting a compelling story for your brand is understanding your customer‘s problem. But here’s the thing — most businesses only scratch the surface when it comes to defining their customer's issues.

External Problem: The Visible Obstacle

The external problem is what most businesses focus on. It‘s the tangible, visible issue that your customer is facing. For example, if you’re selling lawn care, the external problem might be a weed-filled lawn. It's easy to identify and straightforward to address. Most marketers get this right.

However, if you stop here, you're missing out on the real power of storytelling. This is where many companies fall short, failing to connect with their audience on a deeper level.

Internal Problem: The Emotional Struggle

Customers are often more motivated to buy solutions to their internal problems than their external ones. For instance, a homeowner with a weed-filled lawn (External Problem) is not going to hire someone to care for their lawn unless they feel frustrated and embarrassed (Internal Problem).

The Internal Problem is where the real story begins to take shape. It's what drives the character (or in our case, the customer) to seek a solution. By addressing this level, you show your audience that you truly understand their struggles and make your marketing more interesting.

Philosophical Problem: The Big “Why”

The third and deepest level of problem is philosophical. This is the big picture, the reason why the problem matters in the grand scheme of things. It's often framed as a question of right and wrong or fairness.

In our lawn care example, the philosophical problem might be, “People should spend more time enjoying their lawn than working on it.” This level adds weight and significance to the customer's problem, making your product or service feel more important and impactful.

Implementing the Three-Level Problem In Your Marketing

Now, let's look at how to implement all three levels of problem in your marketing.

1. Identify the External Problem.

Start by clearly defining the tangible issue your product or service solves. Be specific and use language your customers would use themselves. For example: "Our software helps small businesses manage their finances more efficiently.”

2. Uncover the Internal Problem.

Dig deeper to understand the emotional impact of the external problem. What feelings or internal struggles does it create? For our financial software example: "Small business owners feel overwhelmed and stressed about managing their finances, worried they might be making costly mistakes.”

3. Articulate the Philosophical Problem.

Consider the bigger picture. Why is this problem unfair or wrong on a broader scale? For our example: "Hardworking entrepreneurs shouldn't have to become accounting experts just to run their businesses successfully.”

4. Put all three levels into your messaging.

Once you‘ve identified all three levels, make sure they are in your marketing materials. Here’s how it might look for our financial software: “Managing your small business finances can feel like a full-time job.

Our easy-to-use software streamlines your bookkeeping, giving you peace of mind and more time to focus on what you do best. Because you started a business to pursue your passion, not to become an accountant.”

This message addresses the External Problem (inefficient financial management), the Internal Problem (stress and overwhelm), and the Philosophical Problem (entrepreneurs should be free to focus on what they love).

Making Your Marketing Irresistible With These Screenwriting Techniques

By clearly defining your customer‘s problem at all three levels — external, internal, and philosophical — you create a message that’s not just clear, but deeply resonant and motivating.

Remember, most companies are missing two of these crucial levels in their marketing. By implementing this screenwriting technique, you‘re not just selling a product or service; you’re inviting your customer into a compelling story where they‘re the hero, and you’re the guide they've been looking for.

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Personality Content: Strategies for Creating AI-Proof Content

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If you rely on SEO and information-based content to grow your audience, it’s time to rethink your approach with personality content.

Informational content used to be the go-to method for building brand awareness and driving growth. And it was a pretty simple process: rank for key search terms, attract web traffic, and convert leads.

Download Now: Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

But with AI’s growing capabilities, this category of content has become commoditized — easily generated, widely distributed, and harder to distinguish from the competition. As a result, it’s increasingly difficult for brands to maintain a unique voice and stand out in an oversaturated market.

This is where personality-led content comes in. By tapping into storytelling and the human experience, it connects with audiences in ways that AI simply can’t. But what exactly is personality content, and how can you add it to your marketing playbook?

In a recent episode of Marketing Against the Grain, Kieran and I explore the shift from informational content to a personality-led approach. We also cover five practical tips to help brands regain control of their narratives and create content that stands out from AI-generated material. Let’s dive in.

Informational vs. Personality Content: What’s the Difference?

Information-led content — also referred to as ‘educational’ content — is all about delivering facts, data, and answers to specific questions. Think of assets like how-to guides, tutorials, or product comparisons. But with AI tools now able to generate those answers in seconds (and with even more precision than Google), this type of content has become less valuable and much harder to rank for in search results.

Personality-led content, on the other hand, connects with audiences through storytelling and real-life experiences. This could look like behind-the-scenes videos that give a peek into your brand’s culture, opinion pieces from industry thought leaders, or influencer-driven stories that build trust by featuring familiar faces.

Especially as attention spans shrink and the competition for audience engagement grows, personality-driven content gives businesses a strategic advantage by fostering authentic, emotionally-driven connections and making them more memorable.

Practical Tips to Build a Personality Content Strategy

Interested in implementing a personality-led content strategy? Kieran and I have identified five key tactics to help your brand thrive — even as AI-generated content continues to grow.

1. Revamp your hiring strategy.

One of the best ways to jumpstart your personality-driven content strategy is by rethinking how you structure and hire for your marketing team.

Take Mohak Nahta, for example, a founder in the travel industry. He realized that SEO-driven content that addressed common travel questions — like visa applications and logistics — was losing its impact, as AI could easily churn out that kind of information.

Instead of continuing with the same approach, he pivoted to a personality-led strategy and hired in-house influencers to share their personal travel experiences on the company’s marketing channels.

This not only made the content harder for AI to replicate but also helped the brand grow its audience on community-driven platforms like TikTok.

2. Incentivize your creators and influencers.

Creators and influencers are among the most trusted voices today, but working with them can be challenging.

Many prefer to build their own platforms rather than fully commit to a brand, especially if they have the skills to grow their own channels. As a result, influencers who are willing to collaborate with brands are often either early in their careers or less established. To bridge this gap, offering the right incentives is crucial.

One approach is to hire aspiring influencers as in-house content creators and invest in their development. The better they perform, the more training and opportunities they receive.

Alternatively, you can attract established influencers by offering incentives like revenue-sharing models, exclusive brand deals, or access to premium experiences that align with their personal brand.

Whichever route you choose, the key is to align their success with your brand’s goals, ensuring a win-win for both parties.

3. Differentiate in key areas.

Instead of trying to compete for web traffic everywhere, zoom in on one or two places where you can truly win. This means obsessing over a few key areas — whether that’s one platform or a specific content style — and becoming the best in those spaces.

As Kieran points out during the episode, the market is even more saturated because you're not just competing with brands anymore — you’re up against individual influencers, too. So you have to really know: where am I unique? Where's the differentiation?

By narrowing your focus, you can develop content that stands out from the competition and resonates with your audience in a way that AI-generated content can't.

4. Own your content infrastructure.

Modern B2B creator marketing should be structured like the Marvel Universe. For example, just like Marvel owns the IP, the characters, and the storyline, companies need to own their most valuable assets — social accounts and platforms, strategic playbooks, content libraries.

The creators themselves, much like actors, can come and go. You might have different people playing the role, depending on the project or the message, but the core infrastructure and brand identity remain consistent.

5. Go deep on expertise.

Deep expertise is what separates truly valuable content from the rest. At HubSpot, for example, we’ve taken all of our informational content, sorted it into categories, and identified the pieces that are the most defensible.

From there, we go deeper, adding unique value to those posts in ways AI can’t easily replicate — video, customer statistics, interactive features — which ensures that our content remains highly specialized and unique to our brand.

Personality content is the future of content marketing.

Personality-led content is the key to surviving and thriving in the face of AI. By focusing on authenticity, differentiation, and strategic use of creators, marketing executives can protect their brands and keep control over their narrative.

To learn more about personality content, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into ideas shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they unpack growth strategies and learn from standout founders and peers.

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Maximizing Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) — Here’s What Experts Have to Say

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In the paid acquisition world, clicks on your ads can seem like the holy grail. But you need a better way to measure your content's converting capabilities than just clicks — enter, cost per acquisition.

If you really think about it, clicks only tell you if people arrive at your content. And as much as I wish my clicks could spell out the whole picture for me, they can’t.

Download Now: Free Marketing Reporting Templates

Instead, I’ve found the cost per acquisition (or CPA) is a better metric to determine whether my content is engaging enough to persuade my audience to stay and, ultimately, buy into my product or service.

Read on to learn more about what exactly CPA is, the formula for calculating it, how its bidding process works, and some principles for crafting creative and convincing ad copy.

Table of Contents

Many marketers prefer the cost-per-acquisition pricing model because they can define an acquisition before they start advertising and only pay when their desired acquisition or action occurs.

I like this model because it allows you to stretch your advertising budget just a bit farther. (Check out these free templates to help you manage your budget!)

This pricing model is used in a handful of paid marketing mediums, including:

  • PPC
  • Display
  • Social media
  • Affiliate
  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing

Now let's take a closer look at cost acquisition biddings.

AdRank is calculated by multiplying your maximum cost per acquisition bid with the quality score of your ad. Your quality score ad is impacted by your page’s relevance to the keyword, user experience, and click-through-rate.

This means organizations can’t acquire the top ranking for any keyword they want just because they have the biggest ad budgets, which is a relief for smaller marketers like me. Their content has to be engaging, and because of that, you and I can fairly compete with them.

how to calculate ad rank

In other words, Google wants to discourage bad advertisers from advertising bad content, so those with low quality scores will usually only acquire a high ad position if they pay a huge cost per acquisition bid.

If they want to pay a lower cost per acquisition bid, they’ll have to settle with stooping at the bottom of the ad rankings.

Target CPA Bidding

To generate as many conversions as possible within the limits of your advertising budget, consider using Google’s target CPA bidding.

Target CPA bidding leverages machine learning to analyze your campaign’s historical conversion data, recommend an optimal average target CPA, and automatically optimize all your eligible bids to meet the average target CPA you set for all your campaigns.

If you use target CPA bidding, some of your conversions may cost more than others because your quality score or the competition in your ad auction might fluctuate, but Google will try its hardest to keep your cost per acquisition as close to your average target CPA as possible.

Cost Per Acquisition Formula

You’ll want to keep up with your cost per acquisition costs to track in your monthly marketing reports.

To calculate your advertising campaign’s CPA, take your total advertising spend and divide it by the number of acquisitions generated.

how to calculate CPA

Let’s take a moment to play with some numbers to get an idea of how to calculate a CPA. Let’s say you have an advertising budget of $5,000. However, you only spend $2,500 and generate 1,200 conversions.

Your math will look something like this:

CPA= 2,500/1,200

This gives you a CPA of $2.08. In other words, each conversion costs around two dollars of your advertising budget.

(Alternatively, you can use the Return on Ad Spend calculator to quickly crunch these numbers and a few other important metrics!)

Why is cost per acquisition important?

If you’re considering pay-per-click advertising, you need to understand CPA. It’s an important metric to help you plan your advertising strategy.

To help you better understand why, I thought it would be useful to share insights from marketing and advertising specialists.

Here’s what they said when I asked, “Why is cost per acquisition important?”

1. Plan your marketing budget.

Ross Kernez, CEO of SEO Meetup, told me that your CPA can help you better plan your multi-channel marketing strategy, including PPC, social media, and content marketing.

Kernez said, “Knowing your CPA enables better allocation of marketing budgets. It helps marketers identify which channels are more cost-effective in delivering results, allowing them to focus resources on high-performing campaigns while cutting back on underperforming ones.”

2. Improve your advertising’s conversions.

Just like using CPA to plan your budget, you can also use it to improve your advertising efforts.

Cristina Muchi, CEO of Upway Marketing, put it like this, “CPA is the yardstick for measuring how efficiently the marketing dollars are working for the brand. Whether the company is using Facebook ads, Google search, or email marketing, every platform and campaign incurs a cost. CPA shows us which strategies are truly delivering conversions without burning through the budget.”

3. Easily scale your efforts.

Alfred Goldberg, Chief Brand Strategist of Absolute Marketing Solutions, told me that calculating your CPA helps eliminate guesswork in marketing and makes it easier to scale your efforts.

Goldberg said, “You can confidently scale your campaigns when you know your CPA is profitable. If you‘re spending $10 to get a customer who spends $50, why wouldn’t you increase your ad budget? CPA lets you grow without the guesswork.”

What is a good cost per acquisition?

Now that we know why CPA is important for your advertising efforts, let’s discuss the question everyone is asking: what is a good cost per acquisition?

I’m going to let you in on a secret: a “good” cost per acquisition varies by industry. So, while a $5 CPA might be perfect for one industry, it might be entirely too high for another.

I like what Randall Yates, Co-Founder of VA Loan Network, said about it. Yates said, “If you can keep your CPA low, you’re in a position to thrive because every dollar spent brings in more value. It's like a well-oiled machine — you’re reaching your ideal customers efficiently, and that’s how you scale a business.”

On the flip side, a high CPA is a huge red flag, Yates says.

“It means your marketing efforts aren’t hitting the mark, and you’re throwing money at a problem without getting the returns. I’ve seen businesses struggle and fail because they couldn’t get their CPA under control. So, for me, lowering CPA isn’t just important — it’s make or break,” says Yates.

If you’re worried you’re spending too much on advertising, a good rule of thumb is to maintain a 3 to 1 ratio. In other words, for every three dollars you spend, you can expect one conversion.

It’s helpful to reach out to other marketers in your industry to compare notes. This way, you can get a better understanding of your CPA and if it’s too high or too low for your industry.

How to Lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Costs

how to lower cpa

Adjusting your cost per acquisition is a starting point for lowering it. However, there are more factors at work that determine the effectiveness of your advertising.

Let’s take a moment to go over how you can lower your CPA costs and maximize your ad spending just by making a few tweaks to your marketing strategies.

1. Optimize your ad copy.

Since your quality score, which measures how positive and relevant of an experience your content provides, is the most influential determinant in securing a top ad ranking, the best way to optimize your cost per acquisition costs is crafting compelling ad copy.

When you sit down to write an ad or landing page copy, your goal should be to write something so captivating that it can grab the attention of a distracted millennial slouched in front of the TV, with their smartphone in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.

One way to do this is by selling a feeling, not a product. Psychology tells us that emotions drive our behavior, while logic justifies our actions after the fact. Marketing confirms this theory — humans associate the same personality traits with brands as they do with people.

This is also the reason why pitching a product’s features is a lousy attempt at persuasion. Features only appeal to the logical part of your brain, which science suggests doesn’t drive action nearly as well as appealing to the emotional part of your brain does. So don’t just get creative with your copy — get emotional too.

Pro tip: Avoid selling the features and focus on the benefits. For example, don’t just say, “This computer has twelve hours of battery life.” Consider making a more compelling statement like, “With 12 hours of uninterrupted power, you can create, work, or explore the web all day, at your desk or on the go.”

2. Focus on customer retention as a strategy.

To state the obvious, acquiring new customers is often more costly than retaining existing customers. So, by focusing on customer retention, you can leverage the investment you've already made in acquiring your existing customers, reducing the need for additional acquisition spending. This ultimately leads to a lower CPA.

On top of that, repeat customers tend to generate more revenue over their lifetime compared to one-time purchasers. By focusing on customer retention, you can increase the customer lifetime value (CLV) of your customer base.

Pro tip: Checking in with your customers, providing targeted support, and focusing on building a solid relationship with them are some of the best ways to increase customer retention.

3. Enhance your landing pages.

Just because you’ve grabbed someone’s attention with your ad doesn’t mean your work is done. You still need to design a compelling landing page that clearly conveys the value of our offer.

In order to do this, consider piquing your audience’s curiosity with an intriguing headline and subheading, and scrapping any external links from your landing page so visitors can only leave your paid acquisition funnel if they exit or convert.

You could also test out video, which can explain the value of your offer in a more engaging way than text can.

If you want to learn how HubSpot creates landing pages that convert at 35% rate, check out this blog post.

Pro tip: Check out HubSpot’s Marketing Software to help drive revenue and optimize your landing pages.

4. Leverage your CRM to prioritize leads.

According to HubSpot research, 44% of marketers say using a customer relationship management software (CRM) to streamline their sales cycle is an effective strategy for lowering CPA costs.

The power of a CRM lies in its ability to centralize and manage your leads. Then, by organizing leads based on their stage in the sales cycle, you can prioritize your efforts on those with the highest potential to convert.

As a result, you can avoid wasteful spending on leads that are less likely to result in conversions, leading to a lower CPA.

Pro tip: Spend some time analyzing how your leads interact with your sales funnel and CRM. This can help you identify sticky points that might lead to customer loss.

5. Conduct market research regularly.

How can you speak to your audience if you don't know who they are?

Of marketers surveyed by HubSpot, 43.5% say conducting market research to better understand their target audience is an effective strategy for lowering CPA costs. Market research helps you gain insights into the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience.

Ultimately, targeted messaging increases the relevance of your ads and content, resulting in higher engagement, click-through rates, and conversions.

Plus, market research provides valuable demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data about your target audience. This information enables you to advertise on the right platforms and refine your targeting parameters.

Pro tip: Social media platforms, like Reddit forums, are great places to learn about your target audience. Spend some time reading Reddit posts to learn more about their wants, needs, and pain points.

Back to You

Marketers will chase vanity metrics until the end of time, and, if you’re like me, you might feel pressured to do the same, especially when your peers clamor on about their astronomical growth in views or clicks.

As I’ve learned, ad clicks are great, but it only counts if you convert a lead to a sale. So if you ever feel tempted to jump on that train of vanity metrics, remember, the goal in marketing is to persuade someone to take your desired action.

So incentivize your brand to resonate with your audience — that’s the thing that actually keeps people on your content and prompts them to act. And make conversions, not clicks, your carrot.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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22 Email Best Practices That I Live By as an Email Marketer

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Despite my tendency to let my email inbox bloat with unanswered emails (I just got a warning from Gmail that my inbox is 90% full), I'm actually pretty well-versed in email marketing.

I used to manage the email newsletter at a TV station as a journalist, and I most recently managed the HubSpot Daily Newsletter before it morphed into the Masters in Marketing newsletter, which you should subscribe to if you haven't already.

→ Download Now: The Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing [Free Ebook]

Though the marketing landscape is constantly changing, email marketing remains an effective way for businesses to generate leads and convert more leads. That's why local TV stations use them, your favorite brand likely has one, and HubSpot has a few!

According to our 2024 State of Marketing and Trends Report, about a third of marketers (33%) use email as a channel to connect to their audience. This makes email the second most used channel behind social media.

Email marketing isn't going away soon, so you should incorporate it into your marketing strategy. Here are some best practices I live by that will help you get the most out of your email marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

3 Email Automation Best Practices

1. Implement AI wherever helpful.

You can't spell “automation” without AI. I know the use of AI has garnered as much criticism as praise, but believe me when I tell you that all email marketers should be leveraging AI in their campaigns.

AI can streamline your workflows and processes, freeing time to focus on other tasks while ensuring your audience receives timely and engaging content.

In fact, our most recent newsletter survey found that 42% of email marketers saved between 30 minutes and two hours of work each week by using AI.

If that notion alone isn't enough to convince you to implement AI, remember that while you may not be using AI, your competitors certainly are.

Our survey also found that almost a third of respondents (31%) use AI to edit newsletter content.

28% use AI to generate newsletter headlines or format content and 22% use it to get suggestions for short-form newsletter content such as headlines and preview descriptions.

So, if you want to stay competitive and efficiently generate newsletter content your audience will read, you should look into ways to leverage AI to automate certain processes, such as ideation or segmentation.

2. Look over, fact-check, and edit AI-generated content.

If you‘re using AI to draft any sort of copy for your emails, always double-check for accuracy and legibility. AI can streamline processes and boost efficiency but also make mistakes.

You also want to ensure the copy doesn’t read as being too robotic or impersonal.

3. Create automated emails for opt-ins.

Be prepared for your readers to forget they opted in.

Set up an automated email flow that reminds people they opted into your email database. The auto-responder should be sent out one day, five days, and 10 days after the person subscribes.

Each automated email should also include additional content or bonus material to reward the reader for opting into the newsletter. Otherwise, your readers might not feel they have enough incentive to actually stay on your list.

9 Email Campaign Best Practices

1. Don't purchase contact lists.

This first tip should be no surprise, but given the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it bears repeating.

Email campaigns depend on a healthy open rate. If you're contacting people whose information you bought rather than earned from a previous interaction, your emails’ performance will quickly drop.

It also could turn off potential customers if they know you bought their information from another party.

For example, a couple of years ago, I made a big cross-country move and contacted a moving company for a quote on their services.

About a day after contacting them, I was bombarded with emails from other moving companies and services and added to newsletters I had never signed up for.

So, I unsubscribed and blocked many of those businesses that seemed to have received my information from the initial company I contacted. I also blocked that company.

Moral of the story? Don't buy your contacts, add people to lists without their permission, or share their information without their consent. It's one way to leave a bad impression on potential consumers.

Remember that the GDPR also requires each European recipient's consent before contacting them. Purchased email lists usually do not come with that consent.

To help reach your target audience, consider Versium Reach — a platform for B2B marketers that allows you to own data on your target audience across multiple marketing channels.

2. Avoid using ‘No-Reply’ in the sender's email address.

Have you heard of CAN-SPAM? This long-standing legislation is a popular and important guideline for all email marketers in the U.S.

One major rule in CAN-SPAM is to never use the words “no reply “ or a similar phrase as the email sender's name (for example, ”noreply@yourcompany.com”).

“No reply” in an email message prevents recipients from responding and even opting out of further emails, which CAN-SPAM protects their right to do so at any time.

Instead, have your automated emails come from a first name (jamie@mycompany.com). Your customers are much more likely to open emails if they know a human being wrote them, and this keeps you compliant with email regulations.

Screenshot of email sent by Voluum.com

3. Clean your mailing list regularly.

Listen, I get it. When I managed the HubSpot Daily Email, I absolutely loved seeing thousands of people on our lists who would receive our emails. However, I eventually learned that the quantity of my email list wasn't nearly as important as the quality.

Some of our email contacts may not have opted out of our email campaign but would still never open our emails. And those types of contacts simply were not helpful to our campaign goals.

People who never open emails make your campaign look worse since you‘re not analyzing the campaign’s quality against your most loyal recipients.

That's why I strongly suggest you review your list of subscribers who have not engaged with your emails over a certain period and remove them regularly.

This will give you a more accurate email open rate and keep your email campaign clean of people who are no longer interested in hearing from you.

You can also implement a workflow in which they’re gradually moved to a less frequent email list based on activity.

For instance, say you have a daily newsletter. You could implement a workflow in which subscribers who do not open your email in two consecutive weeks are moved to the weekly email.

Then, if subscribers don't open four consecutive emails, they could be moved to the monthly newsletter, and so on.

It prevents you from bombarding your subscribers with emails they’re not interested in while keeping your list clean.

4. Allow recipients to subscribe to your newsletter.

I know what you're thinking: "Wait, if they received the email, to begin with, shouldn’t they have already subscribed?"

Usually, yes. Therefore, adding a “Subscribe” button to your email doesn’t help those who’ve already agreed to receive your emails.

But great content is shareable content, and if your current subscribers are forwarding your emails to their friends and colleagues, you’ll want to help them subscribe, too.

I‘m pretty much the queen of newsletters, which is partially why my inbox is so full. I’m always forwarding newsletters to my friends when I think they might interest them. And oftentimes, they end up subscribing, too.

So, add a small but visible CTA that allows the recipient to subscribe to the newsletter if they received this email from someone else.

This email newsletter called Contentment is a great example of how to include a sign-up CTA in your email without distracting from the rest of the content:

Screenshot of email sent by Contentment

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But remember, because your newsletter should already be driving another action, such as downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar, make sure this “Subscribe” button doesn't distract or confuse users, weakening your main campaign goal in the process.

5. Include a clear CTA.

Speaking of CTAs, let‘s get into their value. I’ve never sent out a newsletter without ensuring I've included a clear CTA. Your CTA directs the receiver to make another move.

When adding a CTA, consider what you want the receiver to do next. Should they set up a call or book a demo?

I‘m subscribed to a newsletter by one of my favorite local music venues to keep current on all the artists and musicians coming through my city. The venue’s newsletter always has a CTA button directing me to Buy Tickets or use a code to get a discount or early bird special.

Do you see how the CTA is clear and simple? Sometimes, a little can go a long way for a quality CTA.

Screenshot of email with CTA button to buy tickets

6. Make it personal.

Sending an outbound email isn’t too different from sending a marketing email. You should still be personal, but even more so when you know your email is only being read by the receiver.

Start by letting them know how you know them. Have you already connected on Twitter or in a Slack group? Is this a completely cold email? As my friends like to tell me (though not about emails), “Define the relationship!”

Figure out where you stand so you can personalize the greeting and message.

7. Closely tie emails to landing pages.

If you’re promoting a specific landing page in your email, the landing page should match the email in terms of headline, copy, and content. I'll even suggest that the color schemes be the same or similar.

The look and feel of your landing page should match the email to help create consistency, which goes a long way toward earning a customer's trust. Also, make sure you‘re using tracking tools to see which emails and landing pages performed the best so you can keep sending what’s working.

8. Conduct a five-second test.

Send a copy of the email to a friend or colleague. Can they quickly tell what your CTA is? If so, you’re ready to hit send. If not, figure out how you can tweak your subject line. Or, if there’s a different landing page, you should link to it.

9. Follow up.

Follow up when necessary, but don’t bombard the receiver with a million follow-up emails.

Be aware of the typical response time from people in your industry or people you contact. Two days to one week is a reasonable amount of time between sending your first email and sending a follow-up.

10 Email Content Best Practices

1. Stick to fewer than three typefaces.

The less clutter you have in your email, the more conversions you'll get.

Don't clutter your message with more than two fonts or typefaces; this can distract readers and ruin your email’s visual appeal.

In the email example below from recruiting SaaS company Greenhouse, the company sticks to just two fonts.

This makes the email easy to read, and readers can focus on the context rather than get distracted by the styling.

Screenshot of email sent by Modern Recruiter

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In addition, use web-safe fonts with sizes between 10 and 12 points. This ensures your email will be legible on all readers and devices.

2. Optimize the email's preview text.

You've probably seen emails like the one below with preview texts that say something like, “Email not displaying properly? Click here.”

Screenshot of email sent by Bandweek

And, yeah, that‘s helpful, but I have a couple of gripes about it. For one, you should optimize your emails to display properly across various devices, but that’s a conversation for later in this post.

My other issue is that the message in the preview header doesn't tell your recipients what the email is even about. This lack of information and optimization can negatively affect your open rate.

Your preview text should supplement your subject line by adding details to capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to open. By default, preview text pulls in the first several words of the email body and displays it next to the subject line before the person opens it.

The problem is that custom email templates often include conditional statements like “Can't see images?” or “Not displaying correctly?” at the top banner, allowing the message to slip right into the preview when it goes out.

As a rule of thumb, always write a custom preheader that teases what your email will offer.

(If you're having trouble writing your preview text or emails as a whole, this video can help you harness the power of AI for the purpose of email creation.)

Pro tip: HubSpot users can fix this problem by customizing the preview text themselves in the backend of their email marketing newsletter.

3. Include an email signature.

Even if your newsletter is technically being sent to your contacts on behalf of the company rather than an individual, the email should include the signature of a specific person.

Considering that every email sent on behalf of your company is another branding opportunity, it makes sense to include a signature.

Your email signature should include a CTA, whether a link to your website, social media, or a specific landing page.

Screenshot of email signature

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Another reason you should include your email signature is because it’s a touch of personalization.

People are naturally more inclined to read an email if they know it came from a human being, not just a collective marketing team. Your email signature is your ticket to their attention.

Want a quick way to make a beautiful email signature? Use HubSpot's Email Signature Generator. We also have an Out-of-Office Email Generator to make your response to incoming messages just as delightful.

4. Keep the main message and call-to-action above the fold.

Above the fold refers to the information visible to the reader before they scroll down.

Even though recent research suggests that consumers scroll more than they used to because of social media and vertical timelines, above-the-fold content still gets the most attention, considering that people don’t have long attention spans.

According to a recent report from Litmus, people spend an average of nine seconds looking at an email.

With this in mind, place your main message and CTA above the fold. It’s the first thing your recipients will see once they open your email, increasing your conversion rate.

You can also run an A/B test first to validate the hypothesis and see if it works for your emails.

5. Personalize the email greeting.

How often do you read emails that begin with “Dear Member?”

You might segment your email audiences by their customer type (member, subscriber, user, etc.), but it shouldn't be the first thing recipients see in your company messages.

Personalizing the greeting of your emails with your contacts‘ first names grabs each reader’s attention. For HubSpot users, this is called a personalization token, and creating one looks like this:

screenshot of personalization token

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Then, the address line of your email would automatically produce the contact‘s first name by fetching this personalization token in the email’s HTML, like this: Hi, !

Don‘t worry; personalizing an email’s greeting line with 50 recipients‘ names doesn’t mean you'll have to manually write and send 50 different emails from now on.

Many email marketing tools today allow you to configure the greeting of your email campaign so that it automatically sends with the name of the people on your contact list — so everyone is getting a personal version of the same message.

6. Keep your email around 500 to 650 pixels wide.

If your email template is wider than 650 pixels, it will not show up correctly and will require users to scroll horizontally to read the full message.

This is a pain, to say the least, and will likely affect your conversion, especially when many users read emails on mobile.

One of our most recent email newsletter surveys found that the majority of newsletter subscribers (61%) read them via mobile devices.

Having your template fit within the standard format will make for easier readability, better conversions, and an overall better user experience.

7. A/B your subject lines and calls to action.

If you can‘t seem to increase your email’s open and click-through rates, a couple of things might be wrong: You‘re not emailing the right people (if you’re buying your contact list, see the first tip at the top of this blog post), or the content needs to be improved.

A/B tests can be used to improve almost any of your digital marketing content.

This test splits your recipients into two groups in an email. Group A receives the regular newsletter, while Group B receives the newsletter with a specific variation. The variation can be anything from a different subject to another CTA.

This variation tests whether your audience would be more or less likely to take action based on that element.

HubSpot Marketing Hub users can conduct email A/B tests on everything from the subject line to the call-to-action (CTA) inside the email.

For example, you might change the color of your CTA from red to green to see if your email‘s clickthrough rate increases. If it does, the test indicates that you should change all of your emails’ CTA color to green from now on.

8. Include your logo.

Logos are essential in emails. The average person receives about 121 emails daily, so it‘s easy for recipients to skip over an email, even if it’s from a newsletter they're happily subscribed to.

One of the best ways to help your email stand out and keep your brand top of mind is to include your logo. One of my favorite newsletters is Bad Brain from music and pop-culture journalist Ashley Reese.

As I said, I tend to let my emails pile up and go unread, but I always stop to read one when I see the bright orange Bad Brain font at the top of the message.

Screenshot of Bad Brain newsletter with logo

9. Name the offer in your subject line.

If you’re running a promotion, use incentive-focused subject lines like “Free shipping when you spend $25 or more” or "Receive a free iPad with a demo.”

Here's an example of an email with an enticing subject line and a warm, welcoming body copy. The subject line for this email from Elementor says, “Up to 50% off when upgrading!”

screenshot of email from elementor

However, do not overwhelm your readers with savings- or product-related emails.

Customer loyalty starts with casual industry insights — only after nurturing should you start introducing offers.

10. Write compelling (but concise) subject lines.

As I said, most email newsletter subscribers read them on mobile devices, so I suggest keeping your subject lines to fewer than 50 characters.

Your email subject line should also create a sense of urgency while giving readers some indication of what to expect once they open the email.

Notice some of the subject lines pulled from my own inbox below. Each subject line is condensed enough to display fully on my iPhone, telling me exactly why I should read more.

IMG_4458

And there you have it! 22 email best practices I live by, and that will help your email marketing campaign generate more leads. As I said earlier, email marketing is a tried and true method that isn't going anywhere any time soon. 

So, it's important to follow these best practices to set your next campaign up for success.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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30+ Portfolio Design Trends for 2025

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When was the last time you updated your design portfolio? (If you’re like me, it’s probably been a while.) Maintaining a fresh portfolio is a good way to show off your skills to potential clients and can be helpful when looking back on work for annual contest entries.

If you’ve fallen behind with your portfolio design, or just need a new portfolio in general, this is a great opportunity to create something using trendy techniques and visuals.

A modern portfolio using design trends can make a great impression. A portfolio is also a representation of your skills — so design wisely! Here’s a look at some of our favorite portfolio design trends.

Personal Touch

portfolio design

A portfolio is a place to show off who you are, your style, and serve as an introduction to potential clients or employers. Make it personal.

By using language and a tone that feels like you and a photo or video that shows your personality, you can start to establish a connection online with those who visit your portfolio. People who know you personally might even say they can “really see you” in the design – literally or figuratively.

In the example above, Colin Reitz uses a fun video to help show he’s a personable, friendly, enthusiastic designer. It’s an inviting option that makes him feel approachable, a good thing for a freelancer.

Brutalist Style

portfolio design

The brutalist trend that’s popped up all over website design also applies to portfolio sites as well.

The good thing about brutalism for a portfolio is that it can give images and work more room to shine without so many effects in the design. The challenge is that it could turn off some potential connections that might not appreciate the bluntness of the design.

An “almost brutal” aesthetic is the balance that most designers go with for their portfolios.

A Curated Homepage

Michael-Collins

Michael Collins is an experienced director and design strategist who likes to work at the intersection of curiosity, reasoning, and imagination to create one of a kind user experiences and future-oriented solutions.

What stands out in his portfolio website is the way the homepage has been curated. Having a clean and simple layout that does not require too much scrolling helps in providing an easy user experience.

Unexpected Visuals

portfolio design

If there is a single image on the homepage of a portfolio, it tends to be of the designer or of a specific piece of work. But what if it is something completely unexpected?

That’s what designers are doing more of. They are creating interesting elements to help set their portfolios apart so that they don’t look like the sea of other portfolio sites that potentially come across hiring managers’ desks.

In the example above, Ryo Irago uses a bit of beautifully created imagery to draw you in. The design of the homepage is stunning, the image is captivating, and if nothing else you’ll likely scroll to learn more (which is exactly the intention of a portfolio design such as this).

Subtle Animation

portfolio design

A website portfolio is a perfect place to show off some of your design skills. Use a cool technique or trendy element to create just the mood to show your design style and ability. For many designers right now, this includes using subtle animated effects – often with other bold elements – to bring attention to portfolio designs.

Eumray’s portfolio does just that with big, bold typography that explains what they do with a nifty animation with the photo. (A headshot on a portfolio website is another design trend that’s hung on for a long time.)

The use of space here and a black-and-white color scheme are also trendy elements, making this portfolio seem very in the moment. There are other subtle animations below the scroll that tie everything together beautifully as well.

Show, Don’t Tell

portfolio design

The “show, don’t tell” concept has been a big part of website design for a long time. It can work equally well for portfolio sites, by telling visitors what the design does or where to find information about their work.

Here, Rekhchand Sahu uses bouncing icons to help take you to design elements and information. The overall aesthetic is simple and easy to understand with a clear headline/hero text area.

Click on the icons for more work or scroll for a selection of pieces. The design feels modern and shows the type of style that you’ll get from this designer/developer.

Cute Illustrations

portfolio trend - Cute Illustrations

Cute illustrations are becoming increasingly popular in portfolio design as they add a touch of personality and whimsy to the presentation. These illustrations often feature playful characters, soft color palettes, and hand-drawn elements that make the design feel approachable and fun.

By incorporating charming and lighthearted illustrations, portfolio sites can establish an immediate connection with visitors, making the content more memorable. This trend works particularly well for creatives in fields like illustration, animation, or children’s media, where a friendly and engaging aesthetic can help showcase the artist’s unique style.

Incorporating cute illustrations doesn’t mean compromising on professionalism. When used thoughtfully, these elements can enhance the storytelling aspect of a portfolio, guiding users through the site with visual cues that add context and personality.

High Contrast Colors

portfolio trend - high contrast

High-contrast colors make a bold statement in portfolio site design by using vivid and opposing hues to draw attention to key elements. This approach involves pairing light and dark colors, or complementary colors, to create a striking visual effect that captures the viewer’s eye. High-contrast designs are particularly effective for portfolios that want to make a memorable first impression.

Using high-contrast colors can also enhance the site’s usability by clearly differentiating sections, buttons, and calls to action. When implementing this trend, it’s important to maintain a balance to avoid overwhelming the user; choose colors that complement each other while ensuring readability is not compromised.

Text-Only Design

portfolio trend - Text-Only Design

Text-only design strips away images and illustrations to focus entirely on typography as the main visual element. This minimalistic approach relies on the power of words and fonts to make a statement, using large headings, creative layouts, and varied fonts to keep the design engaging.

Text-only portfolios can create a clean and modern look that emphasizes the content and message, making them well-suited for writers, copywriters, and content creators who want their words to take center stage. By playing with font sizes, weights, and styles, text-only designs can still achieve a dynamic and visually compelling effect without relying on imagery.

The text-only trend also offers greater flexibility for designers to experiment with spacing, alignment, and motion. For instance, animated text or interactive elements can add interest and guide the user through the site in an engaging way.

Neon Accents

portfolio trend - Neon Accents

Neon accents are making a comeback in portfolio site design, adding a futuristic and energetic feel to layouts. These bright, luminous colors can be used to highlight important elements such as buttons, headings, or featured projects, drawing the eye to key areas of the site.

To make the most of neon accents without overwhelming the design, use them sparingly to add pops of color that enhance the visual hierarchy. Incorporating subtle neon effects, such as glows, gradients, or outlines, can create a sense of depth and movement, making the site feel more dynamic.

Pairing neon accents with clean layouts and neutral colors can balance the boldness, ensuring the design remains professional while still making a visual impact. Neon accents can give portfolios a cutting-edge appeal that captures attention and keeps users engaged.

Creative Layouts

portfolio trend - Creative Layouts

Creative layouts break away from traditional grid-based designs, offering more freedom and flexibility in the arrangement of content. By using asymmetrical layouts, overlapping elements, or unconventional scrolling effects, designers can create a unique and engaging user experience.

The key to successful creative layouts is maintaining a sense of balance while experimenting with the arrangement of elements. While the design may be unconventional, it should still guide the viewer’s eye naturally through the content, ensuring that important information is easily accessible.

Thoughtful use of whitespace, layering, and animation can add depth and visual interest without sacrificing usability. When executed well, creative layouts can transform a portfolio into a memorable and interactive experience that resonates with viewers.

3D Interactive

portfolio trend - 3D Interactive

The 3D Interactive trend in portfolio site design brings depth and realism to web experiences by incorporating three-dimensional elements that users can engage with. This approach involves using 3D models, animations, and effects that respond to user interactions, such as hover states, clicks, or scrolling.

It creates a sense of immersion that makes the portfolio feel more dynamic and engaging, as visitors can explore the content in a more interactive way. This trend is especially impactful for portfolios in industries like digital art, game design, or 3D modeling, where showcasing technical skills and creativity through interactive elements can leave a lasting impression.

To successfully implement 3D interactive elements, you should balance realism with usability, ensuring that animations and effects enhance the user experience rather than detract from it. Strategic placement of 3D components can guide users through the portfolio in an intuitive manner, while subtle animations can be used to draw attention to key content without overwhelming the visitor.

Over-the-Top Design

portfolio design

While minimal portfolio styles are popular, over-the-top portfolio designs are beginning to trend. (Likely because they are so disruptive in a sea of black and white, minimal designs.)

This portfolio uses a lot of trending elements together and it works. There’s the big hero headline with a gradient color treatment, liquid animated effects, and funky type elements.

As you scroll, the entire portfolio website has an almost brutalist feel to it with slab font choices and a dark outline. Although the design has a bit of harshness to it, there’s reason to scroll and get into the design and learn more about the designer.

Layered Graphic Elements

portfolio design

Cool layered effects, especially those that include nifty CSS effects such as parallax scrolling or hints of animation can make for fun layers.

This portfolio technique is gaining popularity and provides a good opportunity for designers to play with certain effects before deploying them on a client project.

This one-page portfolio by Sophie Doukhopelnikoff uses transparencies and text elements in layers that create depth and visual interest. Having letters both behind and in front of images is rather stunning and draws you into the design. Sans serif typography lends an even more classic feel to the overall design.

Subtle Color Effects

portfolio design

You’re going to have to click through and hang out on this portfolio website for a few minutes to get the full effect of the design.

The simple “Hello There” first expands to fill the screen with other text elements that better explain the portfolio, then the background color softly changes every few seconds for a rainbow effect. It’s simple, subtle, and very beautiful.

This is a color effect that could have a lot of applications elsewhere and speaks to the creative nature of a portfolio website itself.

Super-Simple Aesthetic

portfolio design

It seems like there’s a trend in portfolio design where designers don’t lead with their work. Their websites are simple and visually interesting and then lead you into their project only after a first glance.

The simple design here is sleek and intriguing. It works equally well with dark or white backgrounds and simple typography and graphic elements.

Valentin Semes makes the most of the super-simple aesthetic with neat interactive divots – pay attention to the mouse hover – to keep you moving through the design so that you see elements of the portfolio.

Magazine-Style Layouts

portfolio design

Magazine-style layouts have long been popular for blogs but can also help show off a portfolio as this trend shows.

Each block can be used to highlight a different type of work or individual project in a way that gives each design room of its own.

Antoine Barres uses this format to show a variety of creative pieces in a way that makes it easy to see each design. The gray background blocks with the white grid have an incredibly classic style that gives each design even more room to shine.

Homepage Bios

portfolio design

There’s no rule that your bio has to be on the About page of your portfolio website. One of the strongest trends in portfolio design is to move that bio – or at least a short version of it – to the homepage.

It’s a great way to tell people exactly what you do from the start. There will be no guessing what your portfolio is about and what type of creative you are.

It’s a place where you can create a personal statement or even highlight various projects. Bill Chien’s portfolio does this beautifully with a movie-credits-style bio that scrolls on the homepage. His bio is simple, and to the point, showing his creative mindset.

Lots of Interactivity

portfolio design

Interactive portfolios are in.

Many of these portfolio designs are visually loud, packed with movement, color, and things to click or cool changing hover states. There’s an almost limitless opportunity to use effects and design techniques.

What’s neat about a highly interactive portfolio is that it provides a place to show off some supreme UX skills.

The challenge is that sometimes the designs can get just a wee bit overwhelming. Make sure to track user behavior and engagement and if you are losing visitors, it might be worth a chance. (It can also be a good test for deploying similar techniques in other projects.)

Unusual Design Patterns

portfolio design

Portfolios that test new design patterns are also trending. Moving traditional navigation elements, obscuring text, and even experimenting with animation states are all common.

This trend might be popular because it provides an opportunity for designers to have a little playground to test techniques and effects. What’s nice about it, is that this trend pushes our idea of what is and isn’t the right way to do something.

The example above uses a few visual trends and unusual patterns at the same time. There’s outline typography that’s partially obscured, an animated hover state for the color orb, and navigation that is on the vertical edges of the screen.

The portfolio trend makes you think about design norms and how you feel about them as you dive into the work.

Black and White

portfolio design

Black and white designs, often with a color accent, are huge right now.

The biggest contributing factor might be that black-and-white design patterns make it easy to see portfolio works, which are often in color. It gives the thing you want people to see greater attention when it does appear on the screen.

Paired with this black-and-white trend is another common factor. Portfolio pieces don’t appear on the homepage; users have to click through to find them.

Trendy Typography

portfolio design

You can never go wrong with amazing typography. Whether you are using a trending type element, such as the outlines above, or simply a beautiful typeface, this trend never gets old.

Strong typography skills will help your portfolio shine and help others understand the quality of your work. This trend shows why creating a portfolio that represents the strength of your skills is important.

Potential employers and clients will often get an impression of the kind of creative you are simply by looking at your portfolio website. Almost every designer would love to be thought of as someone with strong typography skills. Using trendy typography well definitely fits the bill.

High-Performance Effects

portfolio design

Victor Costa’s portfolio is a prime example of how to create a high-performance portfolio.

Because web designers, photographers, and other creatives are using their portfolios to show off what they can do, there’s a distinct shift to more high-performance designs. (Some of which are too much for mobile displays. Make sure you have an alternative gateway if you go this route.)

These high-performance designs are packed with nifty JavaScript, animation, and effects that are designed to wow users.

Victor Costa’s portfolio is a prime example of how to create a high-performance portfolio. It opens with an option for users – standard or high-performance. The portfolio is filled with interactive elements, fades and scroll actions, and animation. These techniques match the elements he references in his bio and is not only a showcase of past work but an indicator of what else he can do for clients.

Plenty of Space

portfolio design

Something that’s been popping up in more designs across the board is making its way into portfolio design as well – plenty of space between elements and objects.

This trend seems to have roots in ensuring that items are appropriately separated on mobile devices and have plenty of tap space, but the additional space can look great on desktop screens as well. (Granted, I’ve always been a fan of white space.)

Lotta Nieminen’s portfolio is a perfect example of this design in action. The super-deep header takes up more than a third of the screen while the vertical and horizontal space between portfolio images is super wide. Each element stands on its own and the exaggerated spacing gives each project room to stand on its own, which can be particularly nice for a portfolio design with the potential for so many different types of images.

Groovy UI

portfolio design

Pairing a minimally-styled design with stylish user interface effects can create quite a stunning portfolio. This combination of visual simplicity and complex interaction can delight users and keep them looking through different screens and portfolio projects.

Click through the example above to see how each portfolio project glides onto the screen with a cool ripple effect before it stops. The cursor shifts and shapes as well, denoting click elements to take users through each project in a way that’s more than just reading about how the design came together.

This is a portfolio you could spend hours with thanks to the groovy UI.

Large Typography

portfolio

Typography and text are some of the most frequently overlooked design elements when planning a project or portfolio.

Strong typography and language can be the perfect introduction to your work (and portfolio). Most people probably know of Tobias van Schneider from his ventures as a designer or podcaster, but would you expect his portfolio home page to be mostly text?

Typography and text are some of the most frequently overlooked design elements when planning a project or portfolio. Most of us are so concerned with visuals or animation.

This example shows why so many designers are opting for portfolios that feature strong typography. It sets the right tone – you know what he does and what the site is about – before getting into the deeper visuals. (This option also highlights his strength for designs that feature a lot of text.)

Portfolios That Don’t Look Like Portfolios

…as a designer you don’t have to come up with something completely new to show off your work

One of the biggest trends in portfolio design is crafting a portfolio that looks like another type of website altogether.

Robin Mastromarino’s portfolio looks like a website for a bar or fashion designer or professional athlete, depending on which part of the slider you view first. It’s beautiful and simple and what’s most impressive is the room each project has to shine.

Subtle cues help users understand elements of the portfolio, such as small numerals above the headline, and the date below. Plus, the slide element encourages left-to-right scrolling with partial headlines from other projects.

The other things that are so nice about this portfolio style are that as a designer you don’t have to come up with something completely new to show off your work. With big “art” for projects, completed jobs are the focus, rather than creating something completely new. (How’s that for creating something you can update quickly?)

Split-Screen Patterns

portfolio

Split-screen patterns have been trending for a while and more portfolios are using this design, even if they don’t use the functionality. It works because the pairing of elements helps drive users across the screen to take in everything in front of them.

Xavier Cusso uses a split-screen design with great parallax scrolling effects to move from project to project. The color-block screen design helps emphasize that the website is his creation, while the element in the middle is the portfolio project to examine. It puts some separation between the portfolio and project designs.

This is a nice way to handle big-name projects – note the graphic for Adidas Climaheat here – while maintaining your identity in the portfolio design. (Make sure to click through and visit individual projects here; the overall portfolio design is impressive.)

Minimalism-Inspired Design

portfolio trends

The best thing about a minimalism-inspired portfolio is that it gives the design plenty of room to shine. The design of the actual portfolio becomes relatively invisible so that all the focus is on the elements that you want people to see.

Designer Shawn Park recently wrote about how he redesigns his portfolio every year for UX Collective – I highly recommend that you go read that article here – and the current design (above) shows an evolution of design trends in itself.

Park includes iterations of his portfolio design in the post, beginning in 2013, and you can see how design trends impacted his portfolio. You can also see how this fresh minimal style makes it easier to see his work today than in previous incarnations.

Oversized Homepage Headshots

portfolio trends

Big headshots are a big deal, particularly with developers and interaction designers.

This portfolio trend might be popular because it’s harder to visually show this work: Do you highlight code?

The trick to making this portfolio design work is a strong image. It needs to be more than a headshot; it needs to have a moodiness to it. Then pair it with strong typography to make it obvious that this is a portfolio website and what you do. Keep all of that information above the scroll for the best chance of keeping visitors moving through the design.

And a few nifty effects can’t hurt either.

Modular Grids

portfolio

One portfolio design trend that never seems to fade is the use of modular grids to show off projects. This is a great – and functional – option because you can “float” images of different projects on a single canvas.

Kimi Lewis does something a little bit different with her portfolio, above. Rather than lots of small blocks to show portfolio projects, this design goes big. It mixes and matches squarer and long horizontal images in an oversized grid.

Users get a good feel for each project right from the start. Add the oversized grid images to some exaggerated spacing between elements and this portfolio might be one of the easiest to digest that I’ve seen in a while. There’s also a nifty hover animation on each image with the client name and project type to provide extra information before you click through.

Color Overlays

portfolio trends

Heather Shaw’s portfolio works because each project is so different, but the color overlays give the homepage a connected feel.

One of the most challenging things about creating a portfolio is the homepage. How do you preview work or project sections in a way that will entice users to actually click through?

The answer might be to partially obscure the work. Using interesting color overlays on preview image links can be a visually engaging way to encourage clicks to individual projects. It’ll keep your homepage cleaner with a consistent look and style for different sections of the website, ensure that one page isn’t too heavy and slow to load, and provides an opportunity to highlight something about a project before the click.

Heather Shaw’s portfolio, above, works because each project is so different, but the color overlays give the homepage a connected feel. The user also knows what kind of project they are about to view thanks to labels with client names and project types right there. This is a highly navigable and easy-to-understand format that appeals visually.

Streamlined Project Showcase

mobile cards


And then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum – portfolios that have a more streamlined look and feel. There can be a benefit to only showing a handful of projects.
It ensures that users only see what you want them to focus on and not get distracted.

Stefanie Bruckler also uses a module grid format but with fewer items in a more contained space. Plus, it’s all below the main scroll which features a minimal business card-style design.

It has a look that’s polished and classy, setting a distinct tone for the work of this designer.

Conclusion

Still not quite ready to redesign your portfolio? While it is a creative project, this is also an investment in your business, whether you work for a company or as a freelancer.

Potential clients are looking for you before you even know they exist. A modern, trendy portfolio with your best projects can make a strong first impression.

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6 marketing takeaways from Longlegs’ campaign of terror

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Mid-June, 2024. A full page of indecipherable glyphs runs in The Seattle Times, with the only clue a typewritten-style note at the bottom: “Printed at the request of LONGLEGS.”

A week later, a user named Mr_Downstairs leaves strings of glyphs in the comments on Letterboxd.

Screencap of a Letterboxd comment with glyphs and symbols.

Image Source

Billboards pop up; a partially obscured face peers down at drivers. In large red type, there’s nothing more than a phone number and a date. 458.666.4355. 7.12.

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It was all part of an eerily good marketing campaign from indie film distributor Neon, and it racked up a respectable $22 million for Longlegs’ opening weekend in July. Arguably — don’t come for me — the campaign itself was more provocative than Nicolas Cage’s madman serial killer.

I asked our spookiest HubSpot marketers: What made Neon’s campaign so effective, and what tactics can we bring to our (hopefully) less macabre marketing efforts?

1. Build a continuous journey for your audience.

“The Longlegs campaign brilliantly invited people to step into the narrative, transforming them into active participants rather than a passive audience. By threading suspense and curiosity throughout its progression, the campaign ensures a dedicated and engaged audience eager for what's to come.


“For marketers, this approach offers a clear lesson: Aim for more than just a single peak of interest — build a continuous journey that keeps your audience engaged and eagerly anticipating what's next. By nurturing ongoing interest and curiosity, you create a dynamic relationship that leads to deeper connections and greater loyalty over time.”

—Carly CHILL-iams, director, media monetization

 

 

2. Build community and shared experiences.

“What's so sharp about the Longlegs campaign is that it applies pressure from two angles. People don't like unanswered questions but, on the flip side, they LOVE being a part of something.

“When the Longlegs audience tries to answer those unanswered questions, SURPRISE, they're now part of a mystery game.


“That may be harder to apply if you're marketing, say, drain plugs, but there are some lessons here that everyone can benefit from.

  • Give your audience something to answer for themselves. Maybe that‘s plugging their details into a quote creator. Maybe it’s finding a coupon code somewhere on your site. Even mundane industries can enjoy a little mystery.
  • Welcome them into being a part of something bigger. Maybe that's a social community, a Slack channel, or a product forum. Even just giving a name to your audience can be a powerful way to create that sense of ‘something bigger.’ (Think of Swifties, the Bills Mafia, or Browncoats.)”

—Curt del PRINCE of DARKNESS, senior marketing manager

Longlegs movie poster.

Image Source

“I love that I immediately want to share the experience. I want to send this phone number to my sister and wait for her totally weirded-out reply. It feels so special when a marketing campaign evokes a desire to pull more people in.

“As marketers, we think a lot about how to cut through today's noisy marketplace. But sometimes we forget that creating an experience our audience wants to share with others is a great way to expand reach (and get our audience to do a bit of the heavy lifting).”

—Meg PraterGEIST, managing editor, blogs

 

 

3. Cultivate suspense.

“At Los Angeles’ BeyondFest this fall, programmers spliced the trailer for the American remake of Speak No Evil into pre-show entertainment, a cinephile joke poking fun at how often the various cuts of the trailer — which gave away much of the film — appeared in movie theaters leading up to its debut.

“Longlegs took an opposite tactic, reveling in minimalism. It never gave too much away in its trailers, leaving viewers to wonder when and how Nicolas Cage, its biggest star, would show up.

“Neon instead invited audiences into its mystery through a series of cryptic codes and phone numbers, building the same sense of dread and intrigue that Maika Monroe’s character — a young FBI agent — experiences in the film.

“Additionally, the marketing built an accessible, interactive alternative reality game (ARG) that could be freely enjoyed by fans everywhere, maintaining interest in the movie without spoiling it or exhausting potential customers.”

—GHOUL-iet Bennett Rylah, senior writer, The Hustle

“I think the marketing was effective because it cultivated a sense of suspense by planting breadcrumbs. Neon lets its target audience fill in the rest with their imagination, which can be the most powerful tool in both horror and marketing.

“Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the actual film — as were a ton of other folks I talked to online and IRL — so the marketing built up too much anticipation for me. The more the campaign let my imagination go wild, the higher my expectations were — and the bigger the discrepancy between my expectations and my experience.

“My takeaways:

  • Know when to leave a meaningful blank. What’s left unsaid and unshown gives your audience space to imagine.
  • Plant breadcrumbs. Marketers can encourage people to actively engage in your marketing campaign without them even realizing it. Give new information with each iteration of your campaign, and you’ll have your audience yearning for more.
  • Use multisensory marketing. The phone number, audio clip, music, etc. contribute to the atmospheric success of this campaign, which the film did deliver on.
  • Repurpose your content. A two-hour movie can spin out hundreds of mini content types, whether it‘s a still image, a number, a clip, or a series of puzzle pieces. You don’t even need to create new stuff — just make a meaty product and use the product itself to create marketing assets.”

—DYIN’ Zhong, senior marketing manager

 

 

4. Unite analog and digital marketing strategies.

“Neon did movie marketing, especially horror movie marketing, right.

“Movie promos are notorious for showing all the good parts, but Longlegs beautifully captured the suspense audiences would get in the movie and piqued curiosity without giving anything away.

“I love how the film’s marketing united the analog and digital worlds. People could see the billboard with its eerie imagery and move along, but if they called the phone number, they could actually experience it.

“This strategy brought them into the movie in a way, and made its value more of a reality. It’s not difficult for marketers from all backgrounds to mimic this with the use of URLs and QR codes.

“Plus, Neon’s trailers used behind-the-scenes footage and actual recordings of lead actress Maika Monroe’s heart rate the first time she saw Nic Cage as Longlegs.


“It makes the terror that much more tangible. They didn’t just tell viewers the movie was scary in their marketing, they proved it.”

—Ra-MOAN-a Sukhraj, principal marketing writer

 

 

5. Lean into imagination and interactivity.

“I'm a huge horror fan, and I was really impressed at how Neon took an entirely fictitious threat (Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs) and brought it into our dimension. (The nonfiction threat of Nic Cage himself predates the movie industry.) It’s a creative and immersive way to gain fan attention and build curiosity for moviegoers.

“Smile 2 did something similar, breaking the fourth wall in its marketing campaign by placing odd smiling people in random sports events or news broadcasts to draw attention to the movie.

“In that movie, the sinister smile portends a murderous threat. Bringing elements of it into our world adds legitimacy and makes the movie feel all the more plausible. That strategy also played into word-of-mouth marketing, as regular social media users would post the different smiling people they’d see on TV, igniting even more interest.

“What I take away from these frightful marketing campaigns is that the more imaginative and immersive your marketing team gets, the more you stand to gain from letting your viewers unravel the mystery or story.”

“Tap into their curiosity, use enigmatic symbols or details, and provide interactive elements that encourage investigation and sharing among friends — and you can transform a paid marketing campaign into a real hot topic.”

—Tristen Tay-LORD of the UNDERWORLD, Service Blog editor and marketing manager

Still of Longlegs’ star Maika Monroe with her gloved hands leaning against a window.

Image Source

“What made this campaign so effective is that people were given a lot to work with — ciphers to decode, numbers to call, backstories to explore — but none of it gave people what they really wanted: a face reveal of the titular villian. You could only get that by watching the movie, which made people eager to show up.

“My favorite element was the audio of Maika Monroe’s heart rate when she first laid eyes on Longlegs. I expected him to be so agonizingly grotesque and off-putting that I was almost relieved when he was mostly just ugly. Since he wasn’t as hideous as I expected him to be, it made the true horror of the movie (which was also hidden from the trailers) hit even harder.


“Longlegs’ marketing is a lesson in the importance of interactivity. Giving your audience something to do that relates to your product or service makes them want to engage. And pre-engagement makes a product reveal, launch, etc., all the more exciting.”

—GORY Needle, senior marketing manager

6. Trust your audience.

“Longlegs’ minimalist drip marketing is an exercise in restraint. A few lines of glyphs here, a phone number there. It’s straight out of the scream queen playbook: The more that’s left to your imagination, the more horrifying it is.

“But for that to work, you have to trust your audience. That’s not always the easiest thing to accomplish, especially if you’ve been elbow-deep in marketing copy for days or weeks on end. But remember that your audience is made up of real human people, not numbers — the payoff can be tremendous.

—Laura M. DROWNING

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PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Unsupported operand types error

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I am trying to make a system for office staff and delivery drivers so the office staff book the orders in and the delivery drivers are able to see what can see what orders there are for that day and for their lorry as will be multiple lorries/drivers. I am currently working on the sell product order page but I am getting the following error

It was working before I added extra code in so the customer name and lorry name is populated from the customers and lorries db table and when a customer name is selected, there is a next textarea box next to it that is populated with the customers address

[30-Oct-2024 15:30:07 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Unsupported operand types in /home/wwwbeechwoodsolu/public_html/sites/coal-lorry-system-two/sell_product.php:23
Stack trace:
#0 {main}
thrown in /home/wwwbeechwoodsolu/public_html/sites/coal-lorry-system-two/sell_product.php on line 23

On line 23 is 

$_SESSION["cart_item"][$k]["quantity"] += $_POST["quantity"];

But don't think that line is the issue as was not showing any issue with that line or the code before I added extra code in

It's bit of long file to post the whole code here so I attached it as a txt file to this post

Below is the sections of code that contains the code I put in

//Code for Checkout
if(isset($_POST['checkout'])){
    $invoiceno= mt_rand(100000000, 999999999);
    $pid=$_SESSION['productid'];
    $quantity=$_POST['quantity'];
    $lorryname=$_POST['lorryname']; // I ADDED THIS LINE IN
    $customername=$_POST['customername']; // I ADDED THIS LINE IN
    $customeraddress=$_POST['customeraddress']; // I ADDED THIS LINE IN
    $pmode=$_POST['paymentmode'];
    $value=array_combine($pid,$quantity);
    foreach($value as $pdid=> $qty){
        $query=mysqli_query($con,"insert into tblorders(ProductId,Quantity,InvoiceNumber,LorryName,CustomerName,CustomerAddress,PaymentMode) values('$pdid','$qty','$invoiceno','$lorryname','$customername','$customeraddress','$pmode')") ; // I AMENDED THIS LINE TO ADD IN LORRYNAME, CUSTOMERNAME, CUSTOMERADDRESS
    }
    echo '<script>alert("Invoice generated successfully. Invoice number is "+"'.$invoiceno.'")</script>';  
    unset($_SESSION["cart_item"]);
    $_SESSION['invoice']=$invoiceno;
    echo "<script>window.location.href='invoice.php'</script>";

}



// I ADDED THIS CODE BLOCK IN
<div class="col-md-4 mb-10">
                                                    <label for="validationLorry03">Lorry</label>
                                                    <select  name="lorryname"  class="form-control" required>
                                                        <option value="">Select Lorry</option>
                                                        <?php
                                                $sql="SELECT * from  tbllorries";
                                                $query = $dbh -> prepare($sql);
                                                $query->execute();
                                                $results=$query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_OBJ);
                                                if($query->rowCount() > 0)
                                                {
                                                    foreach($results as $row)
                                                    {
                                                        ?> 
                                                        <option value="<?php  echo $row->lorryname;?>"><?php echo "Lorry Name: " . $row->lorryname . " | Area: " . $row->lorryarea . " | Day: " . $row->lorryday;?></option>
                                                        <?php 
                                                    }
                                                }
                                                        ?>
                                                    </select>
                                                </div>



// I ADDED THIS CODE BLOCK IN

<div class="col-md-4 mb-10">
                                                    <label for="validationLorry03">Lorry</label>
                                                    <select  name="lorryname"  class="form-control" required>
                                                        <option value="">Select Lorry</option>
                                                        <?php
                                                $sql="SELECT * from  tbllorries";
                                                $query = $dbh -> prepare($sql);
                                                $query->execute();
                                                $results=$query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_OBJ);
                                                if($query->rowCount() > 0)
                                                {
                                                    foreach($results as $row)
                                                    {
                                                        ?> 
                                                        <option value="<?php  echo $row->lorryname;?>"><?php echo "Lorry Name: " . $row->lorryname . " | Area: " . $row->lorryarea . " | Day: " . $row->lorryday;?></option>
                                                        <?php 
                                                    }
                                                }
                                                        ?>
                                                    </select>
                                                </div>

                                                <div class="col-md-4 mb-10">
                                                    <label for="validationCustom03">Customer Name</label>

                                                    <script>
                                                        function myFunction(){
                                                            var index = document.getElementById("customername").selectedIndex;
                                                            //alert(index);
                                                            var add = document.getElementById("customername").options[index].getAttribute("data-add");

                                                            document.getElementsByName("customeraddress")[0].value = add;
                                                        }
                                                    </script>

                                                    <select  name="customername" id="customername" class="form-control" required onchange="myFunction();">
                                                        <option value="">Select Customer</option>
                                                        <?php
                                                $sql="SELECT * from  tblcustomers";
                                                $query = $dbh -> prepare($sql);
                                                $query->execute();
                                                $results=$query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_OBJ);
                                                if($query->rowCount() > 0)
                                                {
                                                    foreach($results as $row)
                                                    {
                                                        ?> 
                                                        <option value="<?php echo $row->customername;?>" data-add="<?php echo $row->customeraddress;?>"><?php echo $row->customername;?></option>
                                                        <?php 
                                                    }
                                                }
                                                        ?>
                                                    </select>
                                                </div>
                                                <div class="col-md-4 mb-10">
                                                    <label for="validationCustom03">Customer Address</label>
                                                    <textarea rows=5 cols=5 name="customeraddress" class="form-control" placeholder="Enter Customer Address" required></textarea>
                                                </div>
Posted on

What’s Coming in WordPress 6.7: New Default Theme, Better Font Management, and More!

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WordPress 6.7, slated for release on November 12, is packed with new tools designed to enhance design flexibility and streamline site management. The sleek Twenty Twenty-Five default theme leads the update, offering adaptable styling that’s perfect for any site, whether running a personal blog or a complex content hub. This release also brings an upgraded…

The post What’s Coming in WordPress 6.7: New Default Theme, Better Font Management, and More! appeared first on WP Engine.

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State of CSS 2024 Results

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They’re out! Like many of you, I look forward to these coming out each year. I don’t put much stock in surveys but they can be insightful and give a snapshot of the CSS zeitgeist. There are a few little nuggets in this year’s results that I find interesting. But before I get there, you’ll want to also check out what others have already written about it.

Oh, I guess that’s it — at least it’s the most formal write-up I’ve seen. There’s a little summary by Ahmad Shadeed at the end of the survey that generally rounds things up. I’ll drop in more links as I find ’em.

In no particular order…

Demographics

Josh has way more poignant thoughts on this than I do. He rightfully calls out discrepancies in gender pay and regional pay, where men are way more compensated than women (a nonsensical and frustratingly never-ending trend) and the United States boasts more $100,000 salaries than anywhere else. The countries with the highest salaries were also the most represented in survey responses, so perhaps the results are no surprise. We’re essentially looking at a snapshot of what it’s like to be a rich, white male developer in the West.

Besides pay, my eye caught the Age Group demographics. As an aging front-ender, I often wonder what we all do when we finally get to retirement age. I officially dropped from the most represented age group (30-39, 42%) a few years ago into the third most represented tier (40-49, 21%). Long gone are my days being with the cool kids (20-29, 27%).

Bar chart with age results from the state of CSS 2024 survey.

And if the distribution is true to life, I’m riding fast into my sunset years and will be only slightly more represented than those getting into the profession. I don’t know if anyone else feels similarly anxious about aging in this industry — but if you’re one of the 484 folks who identify with the 50+ age group, I’d love to talk with you.

Before we plow ahead, I think it’s worth calling out how relatively “new” most people are to front-end development.

Bar chart with years of experience from the state of CSS 2024 survey.

Wow! Forty-freaking-four percent of respondents have less than 10 years of experience. Yes, 10 years is a high threshold, but we’re still talking about a profession that popped up in recent memory.

For perspective, someone developing for 10 years came to the field around 2014. That’s just when we were getting Flexbox, and several years after the big bang of CSS 3 and HTML 5. That’s just under half of developers who never had to deal with the headaches of table layouts, clearfix hacks, image sprites, spacer images, and rasterized rounded corners. Ethan Marcotte’s seminal article on “Responsive Web Design” predates these folks by a whopping four years!

That’s just wild. And exciting. I’m a firm believer in the next generation of front-enders but always hope that they learn from our past mistakes and become masters at the basics.

Features

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this section. When there are so many CSS features, how do you determine which are most widely used? How do you pare it down to just 50 features? Like, are filter effects really the most widely used CSS feature? So many questions, but the results are always interesting nonetheless.

What I find most interesting are the underused features. For example, hanging-punctuation comes in dead last in usage (1.57%) but is the feature that most developers (52%) have on their reading list. (If you need some reading material on it, Chris initially published the Almanac entry for hanging-punctuation back in 2013.)

I also see Anchor Positioning at the end of the long tail with reported usage at 4.8%. That’ll go up for sure now that we have at least one supporting browser engine (Chromium) but also given all of the tutorials that have sprung up in the past few months. Yes, we’ve contributed to that noise… but it’s good noise! I think Juan published what might be the most thorough and thoughtful guide on the topic yet.

I’m excited to see Cascade Layers falling smack dab in the middle of the pack at a fairly robust 18.7%. Cascade Layers are super approachable and elegantly designed that I have trouble believing anybody these days when they say that the CSS Cascade is difficult to manage. And even though @scope is currently low on the list (4.8%, same as Anchor Positioning), I’d bet the crumpled gum wrapper in my pocket that the overall sentiment of working with the Cascade will improve dramatically. We’ll still see “CSS is Awesome” memes galore, but they’ll be more like old familiar dad jokes in good time.

(Aside: Did you see the proposed designs for a new CSS logo? You can vote on them as of yesterday, but earlier versions played off the “CSS is Awesome” mean quite beautifully.)

Interestingly enough, viewport units come in at Number 11 with 44.2% usage… which lands them at Number 2 for most experience that developers have with CSS layout. Does that suggest that layout features are less widely used than CSS filters? Again, so many questions.

Frameworks

How many of you were surprised that Tailwind blew past Bootstrap as Top Dog framework in CSS Land? Nobody, right?

More interesting to me is that “No CSS framework” clocks in at Number 13 out of 21 list frameworks. Sure, its 46 votes are dwarfed by the 138 for Material UI at Number 10… but the fact that we’re seeing “no framework” as a ranking option at all would have been unimaginable just three years ago.

The same goes for CSS pre/post-processing. Sass (67%) and PostCSS (38%) are the power players, but “None” comes in third at 19%, ahead of Less, Stylus, and Lightning CSS.

It’s a real testament to the great work the CSSWG is doing to make CSS better every day. We don’t thank the CSSWG enough — thank you, team! Y’all are heroes around these parts.

CSS Usage

Josh already has a good take on the fact that only 67% of folks say they test their work on mobile phones. It should be at least tied with the 99% who test on desktops, right? Right?! Who knows, maybe some responses consider things like “Responsive Design Mode” desktop features to be the equivalent of testing on real mobile devices. I find it hard to believe that only 67% of us test mobile.

Oh, and The Great Divide is still alive and well if the results are true and 53% write more JavsScript than CSS in their day-to-day.

Missing CSS Features

This is always a fun topic to ponder. Some of the most-wanted CSS features have been lurking around 10+ years. But let’s look at the top three form this year’s survey:

  • Mixins
  • Conditional Logic
  • Masonry

We’re in luck team! There’s movement on all three of those fronts:

Resources

This is where I get to toot our own horn a bit because CSS-Tricks continues to place first among y’all when it comes to the blogs you follow for CSS happenings.

I’m also stoked to see Smashing Magazine right there as well. It was fifth in 2023 and I’d like to think that rise is due to me joining the team last year. Correlation implies causation, amirite?

But look at Kevin Powell and Josh in the Top 10. That’s just awesome. It speaks volumes about their teaching talents and the hard work they put into “helping people fall in love with CSS” as Kevin might say it. I was able to help Kevin with a couple of his videos last year (here’s one) and can tell you the guy cares a heckuva lot about making CSS approachable and fun.

Honestly, the rankings are not what we live for. Now that I’ve been given a second wind to work on CSS-Tricks, all I want is to publish things that are valuable to your everyday work as front-enders. That’s traditionally happened as a stream of daily articles but is shifting to more tutorials and resources, whether it’s guides (we’ve published four new ones this year), taking notes on interesting developments, spotlighting good work with links, or expanding the ol’ Almanac to account for things like functions, at-rules, and pseudos (we have lots of work to do).

My 2024 Pick

No one asked my opinion but I’ll say it anyway: Personal blogging. I’m seeing more of us in the front-end community getting back behind the keyboards of their personal websites and I’ve never been subscribed to more RSS feeds than I am today. Some started blogging as a “worry stone” during the 2020 lockdown. Some abandoned socials when Twitter X imploded. Some got way into the IndieWeb. Webrings and guestbooks are even gaining new life. Sure, it can be tough keeping up, but what a good problem to have! Let’s make RSS king once and for all.

That’s a wrap!

Seriously, a huge thanks to Sacha Greif and the entire Devographics team for the commitment to putting this survey together every year. It’s always fun. And the visualizations are always to die for.

State of CSS 2024 Results originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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developing with AR Google Spatial API with non supported region

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Hi All,

I am Asif. I want to develop a mobile application in Android and iOS using Google AR spatial api. After running the sample applications in Google Code Labs, we are getting an error, VPS is not available in your region. Yes we know it is available mostly in USA. However my question is, how can we develop such an app in an non supported region?

Thank you.
Asif.

Posted on

100+ Beautiful Script, Brush & Calligraphy Fonts 2025

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Brush, script, and calligraphy fonts can add a touch of elegance to your design. They’re stylish, flowing, and full of character! We’ve picked some of the best examples of these typefaces to add to your collection.

Whether you’re looking for a precise and decorative script font or a bold brush typeface that needs to grab the reader’s attention, we’ll have something for you here.

Each of these fonts is beautifully crafted to add character to your next design project, perfect for logos, lettering, clothing design, posters, flyers, quotes, and so much more.

What Are Script, Brush & Calligraphy Fonts?

All these typefaces have similarities, but each of these styles is unique in a different way. Before we dive into the fonts themselves, let’s quickly outline the difference between them.

Calligraphy Fonts

Calligraphic script fonts aim to mimic the style of traditional calligraphy writing. Some have connecting letter designs, and some don’t, but they all have the type of character you’d expect from a hand-written piece of calligraphy.

Script Fonts

Script fonts are a traditional typeface choice, referencing back to formally written styling in the 17th century. They have a flowing, connected style, and most characters adjoin another with a connecting stroke. They can roughly be separated into formal script fonts and casual script fonts. The former is more traditional, and the latter mimic a more quickly written, informal style.

Brush Fonts

These often have a much heavier weight, to look similar to letterforms that have been painted with a brush. They have the same connected, flowing style as calligraphy or script fonts, but their block-style makes them more suited for uses where you need a bigger impact!

Sandsea – Graceful Script Font

Sandsea - Graceful Script Font

Sandsea is a chic-style script font offering unique letterforms in TTF, OTF, and WOFF formats. Ideal for wedding invitations, sophisticated handwritten logos and branding, social media quotes, and more.

Bungalow – Modern Script Font

Bungalow - Modern Script Font

Bungalow script font brings a touch of elegance and modern sophistication to your designs. Designed with smooth strokes and artistic characters, this font is ideal for chic logos, stylish branding or elegant invitations. The beautiful calligraphy-inspired curves give a personal and refined touch to your work, making it stand out.

Smackles – Street Brush Font

Smackles - Street Brush Font

The Smackles brush font packs a punch with its spirited, streetwise appeal. Influenced by the raw energy of street culture, it boasts rough brush strokes for an authentically handmade feel, ideal for bold, eye-catching headlines and titles.

Strong Young – Modern Brush Font

Strong Young - Modern Brush Font

Strong Young is a contemporary brush font offering a sophisticated and modern feel. Its versatile character set also boasts multi-lingual support, making it well-suited for various global projects. Equipped with both TTF and OTF files, it’s a breeze to use.

Radelna – Vintage Script Font

Radelna - Vintage Script Font

Radelna is a vintage script font inspired by classic visual design. It’s a versatile and elegant choice for a wide range of creative projects, including branding, invitations, social media posts, and product packaging. The font offers standard glyphs, numerical and functional, as well as alternates and ligatures.

Romeo Bohemian – Brush Script Font

Romeo Bohemian - Brush Script Font

Romeo Bohemian is a textured brush script font that brims with rustic charm. Offering OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, this versatile typography asset caters to a diverse range of projects, including branding, packaging, magazine layouts, or even social media and wedding embellishments.

Roadpunks – Natural Handbrush Font

Roadpunks - Natural Handbrush Font

Imbue your projects with an urban, artistic flair using Roadpunks, a handbrush typeface renowned for its authentic construction and stylish appeal. Meticulously crafted to replicate natural brush strokes, this font is perfect for designs that require a personal yet rebellious touch.

Honeymoon – Script Wedding Font

Honeymoon - Script Wedding Font

Honeymoon is a sophisticated script wedding font that adds an air of romance to your creative projects. With beautiful curves and elegant wash tails, it is perfect for crafting wedding invitations or ornate holiday decorations. Featuring alternate characters and multilingual support, Honeymoon offers flexibility and endless design possibilities.

Stayalova – Monoline Script Font

Stayalova - Monoline Script Font

Stayalova is a chic and gentle monoline script font perfect for adding a touch of elegance to your designs. Handcrafted for a fresh and beautiful appeal, it comes in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, and includes multiple options such as ligatures, swash, and alternates.

Ralliant – Script Handwritten Font

Ralliant - Script Handwritten Font

Ralliant is a script handwritten font that offers versatility with uppercase, lowercase, punctuation, ligatures, and alternates. Ideal for a range of uses, from branding and logos to social media posts, packaging design, posters, flyers, and handwritten quotes.

Saekana – Modern Script Font

Saekana - Modern Script Font

Saekana is a modern script font featuring a stylish calligraphy-style design. The bold and wavy letters of this font make it a great choice for designing logos for modern brands. It includes lots of swashes and borders for decorating your designs.

Jarvish Blurry – Stylish Brush Font

Jarvish Blurry - Stylish Brush Font

A clean and creative brush font with a sharp letter design. This font will fit in perfectly with almost all types of title and heading designs, including posters, flyers, book covers, and more. You can use it for product packaging and label designs too.

Scoutdale – Handwritten Brush Font

Scoutdale - Handwritten Brush Font

Scoutdale is a beautiful brush font featuring a set of handwritten-style characters. This font has the perfect look for crafting branding designs for feminine brands, custom T-shirts, greeting cards, and social media posts.

Pink Lemonade – Handlettering Calligraphy Font

Pink Lemonade - Handlettering Calligraphy Font

Pink Lemonade is another cute calligraphy-style font with a feminine design. It comes with uppercase and lowercase letters with a beautiful curvy character design. The font is ideal for product packaging and logo design.

The Queen – Free Calligraphy Font

The Queen - Free Calligraphy Font

This is a free calligraphy font with a modern letter design. This font has a certain elegant look that makes it much more suitable for fashion and lifestyle-themed designs. You can use it for free with personal and commercial projects.

Comica Brush – Comic-Style Brush Font

Comica Brush - Comic-Style Brush Font

Looking for a brush font with a comic book-style letter design? Then we’ve found the perfect font for you. This font has all the characteristics of a classic comic book font and it comes in solid and textured font styles as well.

Ahmedy – Rustic Brush Handwriting Script Font

Ahmedy - Rustic Brush Handwriting Script Font

Ahmedy is a beautiful brush script font featuring a rustic texture and handwriting letter design. This font is perfect for designing modern titles for posters and flyers. It’s great for social media posts as well.

Roughsweep – Handwritten Brush Font

Roughsweep - Handwritten Brush Font

Roughsweep is another creative brush font with handwritten characters. This font is most suitable for labels and product packaging designs. Just as its name suggests, it has rough textured designs for each letter of the font.

Alegarde – Vintage Early Modern Script Font

Alegarde - Vintage Early Modern Script Font

Alegarde is a modern script font with a subtle vintage look and feel. It also has decorative elements in each letter to add more style to its characters. You can use it for all kinds of branding and print designs.

Fathia – Free Monoline Script Font

Fathia - Free Monoline Script Font

This font has a classic monoline script letter design. It will make your business cards and branding designs look much more attractive. The font is free for personal and commercial use.

Historea – Modern Handlettered Brush Font

Historea - Modern Handlettered Brush Font

This unique brush font comes with a hand-lettered design that is guaranteed to add a personal touch to various types of designs, including greeting cards, website designs, social media posts, and much more.

Mahelisa – Contemporary Calligraphy Font

Suitable for all your design needs, Mahelisa is a modern and stunning calligraphy font ideal for wedding invitations, greeting cards, product packaging, and branding projects. It comes with TTF and OTF and offers multilingual support.

Hachitos – Signature Script Font

Create gorgeous artworks with Hachitos, a casual and stylish script font that stands out from the daily flood of fonts we see on our screens. It supports more than 100 languages and comes with a wide range of amazing features for you to take advantage of.

Raiden King – Horror Brush Font

Next up we have Raiden King, a distorted brush font that screams horror and fear. It’s a great choice for mystery, Halloween apparel, and other terror-themed branding projects. It works on both Mac and PC, and compatible with Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Microsoft Word.

Blink Stones – Creative Brush Font

Blink Stones - Creative Brush Font

Blink Stones is one of a kind creative and quirky brush font that is perfect for creating book covers, greeting cards, and many other creative designs. The font can also be used to create T-shirt designs and mug prints as well.

Calleraets – Signature Script Font

Cellarets Signature Script Font

Cellarets is a slanted signature script font with clean regular stroke, fun character with a bit of ligatures. To give you an extra creative work, Cellarets font support multilingual more than 100+ language.

Whisper – Dry Brush Font

Whisper -Dry Brush Font

Whisper is a stunning hand-lettered dry brush font. This typeface is very unique! It has an unique natural dry-brush feel which will outstand your project with ease! Combine it with its remarkable swashes which you can choose dozens of them!

Husein – Script Font

Husein Script Handwritten Ramadan Font

Husein is natural handwritten Ramadan themed script font, which support OpenType features and includes, numeral, punctuation ligatures, and it also supports multi-languages.

Black Sail – Artistic Brush Font

Black Sail - Artistic Brush Font

Black Sail is a modern brush script font that comes in both OpenType and TrueType formats. The font is perfect for creating luxury brand logotypes, business cards, invitations, letterheads, and much more.

Galantis Script – Brush Script Font

Galantis Script - Brush Script Font

Galantis is another brush script font that features a unique design of its own. This font also includes OpenType and TrueType formats as well as alternatives and swashes.

Shakila Script – Modern Font

Shakila Script - Modern Font

Shakila is the perfect font you can use to design modern greeting cards and wedding invitation designs. The font features a creative script design and includes the standards alphabet, numbers, and symbols.

Handoubt – Creative Script Font

Handoubt Typeface - Creative Script Font

Handoubt is a creative brush script font that features a modern and stylish design. You can use it to design unique website headers, posters, greeting cards, and various other designs.

Gladiol Haze – Elegant Script Font

Gladiol Haze - Elegant Script Font

This bundle includes 2 families of script fonts featuring script and sans serif typefaces. These fonts are ideal for all types of greeting cards, invitations, and other print designs.

Rainy Day – Unique Brush Font

Rainy Day - Unique Brush Font

Rainy Day is a creative brush font that comes with a unique design. The font is most suitable for book covers, greeting cards, logos, titles, especially related to kids and children.

Hey Insomnia – Script SVG Font

Hey Insomnia - Script SVG Font

This creative font comes with a brush design featuring transparent textures and unique ligatures. The font is available in SVG format and requires Photoshop CC or Illustrator CC to function.

Outistyle – Handwritten Script Font

Outistyle - Handwritten Script Fotn

Outistyle is a unique script font that features a handwritten design. The font is available in 2 styles, Script and Brush. You can use the fonts to craft greeting cards, posters, banners, product packaging, and more.

Gineva Script Font

Gineva is a hand lettering script font created in the style of a brush font. Which makes it the perfect font for fans of both script and brush fonts. It’s also great for designing website headers, signage, and logos as well.

Cosmodrome Monoline Script Font

Cosmodrome is a script calligraphy style font that’s most suitable for designing book covers, posters, music album covers, and much more. It also comes with a web font version for online use.

Shania Script Font

Shania is yet another calligraphy script font that features a modern design. It also includes 432 glyphs and 194 alternate characters for crafting unique logotypes, greeting cards, logotypes, and more.

Aaron Script Font

This script font features a modern retro design that makes it truly unique and ideal for designing T-shirt designs, signage, posters, and more. It also features 400 glyphs and 190 alternate characters.

Wasatsh Brush Font

A handwritten brush font that comes with a dancing baseline. The font features a design that’s ideal for luxury and fashion related branding and designs as well as wedding and other stationary works.

Story Brush Font

This brush font comes with a slightly scary design that makes it more suitable for movie posters and Halloween themed designs. It comes in regular and slanted versions of the font, which also includes 240 glyphs.

Harry’s Brush Font

Yet another brush font for crafting posters, T-shirt designs, and greeting cards. This font also includes 216 Glyphs and comes in two formats, OpenType and TrueType.

Palm Brush Font

This brush font features a bold and a natural look that makes it the best choice for designing website headers, posters, and social media posts. It comes in both sans and sans-serif versions as well.

Axwell Brush Font

Axwell is a handmade brush font that comes with a rough natural look. It’s most suitable for modern website header designs, posters, flyer designs, and other print and digital designs.

Sugar Plums Script

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Sugar Plums is a new hand made font. Available for both personal and commercial use. Download and use Sugar Plums Script for anything and everything. Including over 400 different hand drawn characters for a range of languages and dialects. As well as an Italic version and over 60 hand drawn ornaments, including leaves & flowers, catchwords, frames, doodles and swirls.

Ageitha – Free Calligraphy Font

Check out this beautiful calligraphy font that you’ll fall in love with in no time. The design is all about class and elegance, and is suitable for a wide variety of projects from quotes and thank you notes to logos and business cards.

Brighnesy – Free Handbrush Font

Here we have a bold handbrush font that is sure to make an impression. It has a nice, modern design and contains everything you’d expect in a natural textured brush typeface. Best of all, its available for free download.

Font Bundle Calligraphy

A massive bundle of over 20 beautiful calligraphy fonts that comes in both OpenType and TrueType formats. Perfect for your logo, card, and wedding invitation designs.

Hydrangea Script – Wedding Font

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Hydrangea Script is a Regular script font with a clean calligraphy feel for wedding invitation design, logo, cards, etc.

Brayden Family Typefaces

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Brayden Family is Family font that include 3 weight on script fonts + 1 Sans serif fonts to create the beautiful combination. This Fonts is Great for Logos, Lettering, Clothing Design, Poster, Label, Quotes, etc.

Helena Font

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Give your designs an authentic handcrafted feel. Helena is perfectly suited to stationery, logos and much more. It’s available at $10 for 1 User License.

Fabfelt Script

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A gorgeous hand-written script font which you can use perfectly on vintage designs. Fabfelt is available for free without any license restrictions.

Dankita Script

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Dankita is a beautiful hand painted script that comes with a set of extras. All letters have been carefully painted giving your words a wonderful flow. Dankita can be used for fashion, apparel, stationery, magazines, film, books and marketing.

Salamat Typeface

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Salamat is an elegant and sophisticated brush script typeface created by Joluvian & Ale Paul. The strokes are mesmerizing and the font will look perfect on your next design project.

Thunder Script

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Thunder is a beautiful hand typeface that comes with a set of Beautiful extras. Highly Suitable for a variety of media design , logo, fashion, poster and all design product

Adelina Script

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Adelina is modern calligraphy script that was painted in watercolor by soft brush. The basic principle of creation is striping of thick and thin lines. It can be used in different goals: romantic cards lettering, t-shirt design, package design and others.

Sortdecai Brush Script

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Sortdecai Brush Script is a hand lettered modern brush script typefaces, which is combining the style of classic calligraphy with an modern style. Sortdecai Brush Script is a part of Sortdecai Family.

Streetwear Script Font

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Streetwear is bold and stylish retro inspired script typeface suitable for logo, poster, branding, packaging and t-shirt design. It looks like 1960s and 70s fashion and sport related typeface, unique and fun at the same time.

Bohemienne Brush Script Font

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Bohemienne us a fun and flirty hand-drawn brush script. It’s tousled and chic, and will add a beautiful touch of handmade love to your projects- use it for wedding invitations, posters, logos and more.

UT Nickel Script

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UT Nickel is a geometric script font inspired by the Milwaukee Tool company logo. This complete typeface includes accents, punctuation, mathematics symbols etc. It also contains a few alternates, contextual alternates for some disturbing letters such as r,s,x,z and few ligatures too for all the problematic pairs.

Starstruck Hand-Lettered Script

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Starstruck is a hand-lettered script with tons of characters. It’s sparkling, charming, feminine, sophistacted, and super swirly and perfect for your next design project.

Intro Rust Script

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Intro Rust is one of the biggest packages on the market, including 214 fonts. The font family is a rough version of the famous Intro and includes 4 sub-families – Intro Rust, Intro Script, Intro Head and Intro Goodies. You can download the sample version of 3 fonts including the script version for free.

Imperfect Calligraphy Script

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Imperfect is a bright mischievous lovely modern calligraphy typefaces. Imperfect is good for both short texts and headlines.

Levo Typeface

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Levo is a collaboration with illustrator and graphic designer Rutger Paulusse a.k.a. Gwer. It’s packed with flavour, bold characters and full of his signature straight handles on curves. There are several of lively swashes, alternates and ligatures for you to discover. Perfectly suitable for logo design, packaging and web headings.

Bodega Script Font

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Bodega Scrip is a classic decorative copperplate script with a modern twist. It is a display font meant for vintage logos, fashion labels, badges, food packaging designs, especially wine labels.

Brenda Script

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Brenda Script is a beautiful formal script, contemporary typeface with classic root and elegant touch. Can be used for various purposes.such as logos, wedding invitation, heading, t-shirt, letterhead, signage, lable, news, posters, badges etc.

Dope Script

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Dope Script is a rough around the edges, hand-made paint brush font with bags of personality. It comes with a large range of characters including capitals, lower-case, numerals, punctuation, currency and accents.

Mulberry Script

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Mulberry Script is a lovely handwritten calligraphy script. Mulberry is whimsical and modern with a lot of character. This typeface comes with pretty flourished alternate letters, ligatures, extras and watercolor art. Mulberry works great for stationery, letterpress, weddings, magazines and marketing.

Braxton – Free Font

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Braxton is a brush flavored script free font. One style (Normal) available for direct free download.

Patronia Script

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Patronia Script is a brush-lettering inspired script typeface that combined thick and thin lines, loose and tight kerning and unique baseline combinations for genuine hand-writing feels. Suits best for almost all of your designing project; wedding invitation, t-shirt design, fancy logotype, etc.

Austtin Type

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Austtin type is a hand painted typeface designed to help you create the look of stunning custom hand-lettering.
It comes with upper and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals, and swashes.

Tasty Two, Modern Script Typeface

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Charming Modern typeface can beautify your design. The pack includes 335 glyphs, with swashes letters and alternative characters, suitable for any design needs, modern design, branding, stationery design, blog design, modern advertising design, invitation, wedding, special events, any lettering needs and more.

Goodlife Type Family

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The Goodlife type family is a lovely handlettering collection designed by Hannes von Döhren. It contains six different hand drawn fonts with loads of features and a set of extras such as catchwords, arrows, ornaments & more. With this set and a little bit of love and care it is possible to create beautiful “handmade” graphics.

Ink Blossoms Script

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Introducing Ink Blossoms! Sweet Types latest hand drawn typeface. Felt-tipped characters resemble hand-lettered, hand-inked strokes. Use your imagination with this fonts fill to create watercolor, marker, or painted characters.

Wallows Typeface

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Wallows Typeface is a beautiful handwriting script. Suitable for wedding invitations, greeting cards, design of water-based paints, correspondence, and a variety of other purposes.

Country Chic Script

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Country Chic Script is a new hand crafted modern vintage style typeface. She’s chic, she’s sweet, and she’s a little shabby. This script doesn’t miss a single detail in her sweet and shabby lines. Even her ornaments are a bit worn.

Sanelma Typeface

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Sanelma is a brush script inspired by Hot Rod lettering and sign painting. Sanelma is a very versatile script: It includes two different styles of end swashes, swash caps, small caps, lots of alternate characters and underline option.

Portabello Script Font Trio Pack

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Portabello is a sophisticated hand drawn typeface in 3 styles. Hand made characters replicate hand lettered artwork. Just the right amount of messy mixed up with a stylish script, making it completely legible.

Awesome Script

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A simple and cleanly designed brush font family. It is designed to easily create logos, headlines and text phrases within a blink of an eye.

Natura Script Font

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Inspired by old nature field notebooks, Natura was born out of the passion for new modern hand-calligraphy, designed first with a flexible fountain pen and then digitalized glyph by glyph to get the natural feeling of the dry ink on smooth paper.

Wanderlove Script Font

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Wanderlove is a solo dance of the brush script typeface with the interprentation from the freedomness and humble thing about the natural and beautiful sight from the traveler’s journey. It’s super fit for the design project such as wedding invitation, scrapbook, novel, notebook, gift card, or anything that you need to touch with love.

Ferrine Script Font

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Ferrine Script is a beautiful handwritten stylish. It’s a multi-purpose font with two alternates (different style in lowercase) lowercase and one uppercase.

Bethlehem Handmade Script Font

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Bethlehem is an illustrative typeface designed to be real and natural to look like hand-lettered script. The scattered ink you seen in the preview are also included as alternative characters. So you can play with it to create a beautiful illustrative lettering.

Smitten Script Font

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Smitten Typeface is a hand-inked, ‘semi-script’ font with tight kerning, and a fun, imperfect baseline. It’s nice and bold, plus a little gritty – Perfect for creating organic, fluid typography on products, branding, invitations, fliers, posters and more.

Signalist Typeface

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Signalist is a contemporary brush script. It is condensed and tight but still legible.

Dankita Script

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Dankita is a beautiful hand painted script that comes with a set of extras. All letters have been carefully painted giving your words a wonderful flow. It can be used for fashion, apparel, stationery, magazines, film, books and marketing.

Deadhead Script Typeface

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Deadhead Script is playful typeface that inspired from brush lettering. Made with high attention to the details that will bring your design to the next level. Suits best for almost all design themes; vintage, modern, gothic, dangdut pantura etc.

Hello Sunshine Script

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Hello Sunshine is a new bright and sunny Script. Hand Drawn letters are both elegant and funky. Contains 2 terminal ornaments to add on to any lower case letter to finish off your word or phrase with a end character swirl.

Abbie Script

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Abbie Script is a beautiful handwritten script font that has been hand drawn, scanned, and digitized for you to enjoy for free. Abbie Script is available in three different weights (Light, Regular & Bold)

Isabella Script

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Sabella Script is handwritten stylish copperplate calligraphy fonts, combines from copperplate to contemporary typeface with a dancing baseline, classic and elegant touch. Can be used for various purposes.such as headings, signature, logos, wedding invitation, t-shirt, letterhead, signage, lable, news, posters, badges etc.

Hollie Script Font

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A typeface that pays tribute to all letterers that created amazing signs in magazines, walls and windows through the brush lettering during many years, especially in the 50s and 60s. This font is 100% based on the brush traces, it has 2100 glyphs, contextual ligatures from two to four characters and alternates for each ligature.

Noteworthy Script

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The Noteworthy Script is a new hand scripted authentic signature style typeface. Use this decorative typeface for stationary, logos, invitations, and more! Available for both personal and commercial use.

Rissa Typeface

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Give your designs an authentic brush handcrafted feel. “Rissa Typeface” is perfectly suited to stationery, logos and much more.

Clementine Script

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Clementine Script is a tangy new hand crafted typeface. Available for both personal and commercial use. This script was inspired and designed with a large chisel felt marker. Bold characters make your logo stand out. Perfect for signage, posters, logos, headlines, and more.

Sarrah And Claire Brush Land

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“Sarah and Claire” is a typeface inspired by the letters brush. It’s made in a little untidy way that brings your designs to the level of the wild yet natural look.

Selphia Script

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Selphia is a new script typeface designed with deliciously taste, so fruity, and milky. But you can be used for various purposes like tagline, t-shirt design, logos, quotes design etc.

Hillda Script Font

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Hillda Script is bold, modern, and multi-purpose typeface that combines brush lettering with natural handwriting. It was designed as a display typeface that alternative characters to improve your design. It is suitable for logo, packaging, headline, poster, t-shirt, etc.

Dandelion Soup Script Font

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The Dandelion Soup Script is a new hand drawn script typeface. Available for both personal and commercial use. Download and use The Dandelion Soup Script for anything and everything.

Handsome Script Font

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This font is perfect for luxury products and special occasions such a weddings or parties. For added affect have it letter pressed into a beautiful cotton paper stock. It is best used as a headline, however, it more than pulls its weight as body copy.

Happy Day Script

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Happy Day is a bright cheerful lovely modern calligraphy typefaces. It can be used for a variety of purposes including posters, book covers, and even logo designs.

Stubborn Faith Script

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Stubborn Faith is a perfect, bright and wayward font. It’s highly useful for calligraphic and vinyl artwork and can be used for a variety of purposes. The urban nature of this font will be ideal for t-shirts design.

Fadli Script

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Fadli Script is a script font with a touch of tattoo lettering style. Highly usable to create Custom Logotype, Band Logos, Brand, clothing company, Indie Flyer/Poster or it can be anything.

Smoothy – Cursive Script & Sans

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This is an amazing set of 2 font family with a mono weight cursive script and a complementary subtly rounded sans-serif. Based on popular hand lettered style, give your work that stylish hand rendered look with no effort. It works great with logos, prints, quotes, magazine headers, clothing and all design mediums.

Anemone Script Font

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Anemone is a stunning font with 100% hand painting. It’s highly suitable for the design of logos, creation of invitations, greeting card and more.

Layla Script Mini Bundle

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Layla is a great font hand lettering brush, there are two different fonts, font layla brush and font layla painted, very good for your product advertising, invitation, brocure, poster, etc

Margherite Script

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Margherite is sweet feminine typeface, hand drawn characters dance decoratively along the baseline. Available for both personal and commercial use.

Bukhari Script Font

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Bukhari Script is a  bold monoline cursive font. It’s very useful for various design project, for web or printing, such as a Logotype, Posters, Badges, Signage, Business Card, T-shirt Design, or it can be anything.

Alisandra Script

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Alisandra is a smooth but with sharp edges brush typeface. With almost 500 glyphs and with the magic of OpenType, this font is well playful for an artistic typography.

Blenda Script

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Blenda Script is a free experimental font inspired by lobster font, a bold vintage script. can be used for various purposes. Such as news, posters, logos, badges etc.

Variane Script Font

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A simple and cleanly designed font that you can use for a variety of purposes. Variane is a perfect font for your next logo or poster design and is available to use for free.

Seren Script

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Seren is a retro font that contains 430 glyph, the OpenType feature can be used to create your own custom typo and design. Very useful for t-shirts, banners, posters, etc.

Sant’Elia Script Font Family

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Sant’Elia Script from Yellow Design Studio is a robust modern type family with regular and rough versions in six weights. Its forms are crisp and welcoming with a splash of verve. Alternate versions feature angled strokes that inject drama and energy.

Ashley Brush Script

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“Ashley Brush Script” was completely handwritten using watercolors and a calligraphy brush. Rough edges and imperfect lines give this brush lettered font a unique and trendy look. Perfect for wedding invitations, adding design accents, and giving your projects a coveted hand-crafted look.

Thirsty Script Fonts

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Thirsty Script from Yellow Design Studio is a contemporary script conceived as a marriage of elements from vintage signage scripts, Wisdom Script, Deftone Stylus, and Lobster. The result is a typeface with a ‘new meets vintage’ vibe. It’s friendly with an edge, a mixture of retro script, modern sans serif, and a shot of caffeine.

Octavia Script Font

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Octavia Script is another lovely modern calligraphy typefaces, which is combining the style of classic calligraphy with an modern style.

Joella Brush Script Font

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Joella is a bold, clear and full of character script typeface. The thickness of this font makes it great for use with fills such as gold, watercolor, glitter, etc. This font is extremely versatile and can be used for such things as beauty, make up, typographic designs for t-shirts and fashion, etc, organic products or any kind of food and drinks products. There are many possibilities where this font will work very well.

Script Bundle – 4 Handmade Fonts

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This Handmade Script Bundle contains 4 amazing script fonts that would be very handy for your new logotype, wedding invitation or poster. You can have your hands on this amazing set for just $22.

Featherly Wedding Font

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Featherly is a hand drawn, elegant, modern calligraphic font perfect for wedding design projects, invitations, greeting cards, signatures, watermarks, logos, handwriting and more.

Faith & Glory

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Faith and Glory is a set of 2 hand-painted brush fonts, designed to perfectly combine with one another and allow you to create beautiful typography with a personal touch. It comes with upper and lowercase characters as two separate fonts, punctuation, numerals, and supports international languages. Alternates are available for key characters, you can access these by switching between upper & lower case characters within the 2 fonts.

Last Paradise Script

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Last Paradise script font comes with upper and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals, and supports international languages. It’s perfect for attention-grabbing header text, logos, clothing designs. or anything which needs a bold & loud text with a personal touch.

Fresh Script

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Fresh Script is hand-painted typeface designed to help you create the look of stunning custom hand-lettering. It comes with upper and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals, and supports international languages.

Giant Bundle – 56 Fonts

Can’t decide whether you need a brush or script font? Then grab this bundle, which comes with 12 different brush and script font collections with a total of 56 vintage-style typefaces.

Wild Spirit Font

A modern and a hand-drawn script font with a natural flaw featuring a bonus set of 14 swashes and arrows. The font pack includes 3 unique styles.

Hello Sunshine Font Duo

This beautiful hand brushed typeface comes with a set of 52 bonus ornaments for adding more style to your design. The font is ideal for your invitation and greeting card designs.

Better Times Brush Font

A beautifully free-flowing handmade brush font that includes 3 different font styles. It’s great for your quotes, product packaging, and branding work. According to its creator, the font looks more amazing in all-caps.

Crystal Sky Font Set

A beautiful handwritten style font that makes your text look like a signature. It comes with additional 32 hand-drawn doodles and a separate typeface for all-caps letters.

Heritage Font Combinations

This font pack comes with both script and sans font styles featuring a vintage design. It can be used for designing various types of graphics including logos, wedding cards, clothing brand logos, and more.

Garden Grown Font Duo

A unique pack of two fonts, an all-caps font and a script font, that will make your book covers, stationery, marketing, magazines, and film designs stand out from the crowd.

Have Heart

A handmade brush font that mimics a marker pen. This font comes in 2 styles and with 12 bonus swashes. It also supports international languages.

Ball Pen Handwritten Font

Make your text look as if it’s written with a ballpoint pen using this stylish font. This font will go along nicely with your signatures, quotes, badges, labels, and many other types of designs.

BLACKHAWK Brush Font

This beautiful brush font looks simply perfect for designing a cover for a music album. It comes in 2 font styles, and with 11 swashes, and 4 paint-splatters.

Tuesday Script

A unique script font for your greeting and wedding invitation card designs. The font also includes 4 bonus standard characters and 7 swashes.

Suargie

A unique and a modern font featuring 250 glyphs. The style of this brush script font makes it more suitable for designing clothing and fashion brand logos.

The Humber Font

This font is just what you need for your logo design, badges, and poster design work. The font comes with swashes, alternative styles, symbols, and more.

Pineapple Script

A unique hand lettered dry brush script font suitable for all kinds of design work from branding to logos and even wedding and stationery designs.

Nabila

This is a multi-purpose typeface that has a mixed design of brush lettering with natural handwriting. It also features 350 glyphs and 155 alternatives characters.

Cartel Deux

A bundle of stylish script and bold style fonts that includes 5 styles. This font will definitely make your logo designs, social media posts, and badge design look phenomenal.

Northern Soul

A unique brush typeface for designing realistic hand-crafted artworks. The font comes in both desktop and web font versions.

Amberlight

This modern script font will help add a feminine touch to your design. The font comes with over 400 stylistic sets and swash characters.

Ink Bandits Font Duo

A font for designing bold logos, invitations, greeting cards, and website headers. This font pack includes both sans serif and irregular script font styles, as well as 85 catchwords and ornaments.

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Lost in the ‘Twilight Zune’: Scary Tech Tales That Will Haunt You

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Looking for some scary tales to tell around the campfire (or perhaps a circle of blinking routers) this Halloween? We've got you covered. Here are three real horror stories from the world of tech and science that will make you wish humanity had never left the stone age.

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Dude, Where Is My Nuclear Arsenal? The Lost Atomic Bombs.

Ever had a wild night, only to realize the next day that you lost something really important? The U.S. Air Force can relate. Since the end of World War II, at least three nuclear weapons have been lost by the United States and have never been recovered. Two of them were on board a B-47 bomber that disappeared without a trace over the Mediterranean Sea in 1956. Another might be much closer to homea proud 7,600-pounder that vanished near Savannah, Georgia, in the 1958 Tybee Island accident. And yes, these bombs could still be functional.

Thats just the tip of the iceberg. At its peak, the Soviet Union stockpiled approximately 45,000 nuclear weapons. Since then, the Russians have lost track of at least 100 suitcase-sized bombs (how handy!) as well as several nuclear submarines. At least you dont have to worry about them if you dont live near the coast

But even when not lost, the worlds most annihilating weapons aren't always treated carefully and the list of accidents involving nuclear bombs that almost caused devastating harm is equally terrifying. In total, 32 broken arrow incidents (= accidents involving nuclear weapons) have been recorded by the U.S. military since the 1950s. For example, in North Carolina, two 3.8 megaton H-bombs dropped after a plane crash in 1961. One bomb's parachute deployed, the other hit the ground unchecked near Goldsboro. Only a single safety switch prevented its detonation. Oh, and then there was that time in 1983 when a malfunctioning Soviet satellite indicated an all-out nuclear attack launched by the U.S., and an automatic counterattack was only prevented by the officer on duty, who decided the warning must be a false alarm. Good call, comrade?

As for the lost bombs? We can only wonder where they are and if they will ever resurface. Whether slumbering in the depths of the oceans, frozen in eternal ice, or sitting in the back of the van of some guy whos been shopping on the dark webthey could surprise us anytime. Consider stocking up on some Potassium Iodide pills for those trick-or-treaters!

Dude, Where Is My Free Will? The Lost CIA Files.

Ever had someone spike your drink at a party? The CIA can relateexcept they were the ones doing the spiking. Between 1953 and 1973, they ran a program called MKUltra, turning thousands of unwitting Americans into guinea pigs for psychedelic experiments. Think your government would never secretly dose you with LSD? Think again!

The CIA wasnt just experimenting in hidden underground labs (though they had those too). They were running "experiments" in hospitals, universities, and even brothels across the U.S. and Canada. In one particularly wild operation, they hired prostitutes to lure men to CIA-run "safe houses" where they were dosed with LSD while agents watched through one-way mirrors, sipping martinis and taking notes. The operation was, unironically, called "Midnight Climax" (yes, really). Talk about a bad trip!

The program didnt stop at LSD either. They experimented with everything from sleep deprivation to psychological torture. At Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute, Dr. Ewen Cameron (funded by the CIA) tried to "de-pattern" his patients minds using electroshocks, drug-induced comas, and endless loops of recorded messages. Many of his victimswho had checked in for minor issues like anxiety or postpartum depressionsuffered permanent damage. Then there is the story of Frank Olson, a U.S. Army biochemist who worked for the CIA. In 1953, his colleagues secretly slipped LSD into his drink during a work retreat. Nine days later, he plunged to his death after jumping through the closed window of a New York hotelthrough drawn shade and curtains. Suicide? Accident? Murder? We might never know. The CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra files shredded in 1973. Only a fraction of the files survived and were declassified in 2001.

How many people were unknowingly dosed, shocked, or manipulated? Well never know for sure, thanks to that convenient document-shredding. But here's a spine-chilling thought: these are just the experiments we know about. Sure, the CIA wouldn't legally be allowed to conduct such operations today, but maybe grab a drink tester while you're stocking up on those Potassium Iodide pills!

Dude, Wheres My Music? Lost in the Twilight Zune.

The scariest story I saved for the end. Kids these days, with their AirPods and Spotify, will never understand the true technological terror that was... the Microsoft Zune. Gather 'round, children, as I tell you about one of the darkest chapters in consumer tech historya tale so frightening, it makes the Meta Quest look like a fairy tale.

The year was 2006. Apples iPod was dominating the music player market when Microsoft decided to enter the ring with what looked like a brown brick that had been cursed by an ancient deity. Yes, you read that righttheir flagship color choice was brown. Not sleek white, not glossy black, but brown. Like your grandfathers 1970s kitchen appliances or, worse, the uniforms of the guys he fought against 30 years earlier. But the horror doesnt end with the aesthetics. The Zune came with its own proprietary software that made iTunes look awesome (and thats saying something). Imagine trying to sync your music, but instead of it just working, your device enters a state where your precious music collection becomes trapped in a format that only works with... you guessed it, the Zune.

Then there was the incredibly creative social feature called Zune Social, which let you "squirt" songs to other Zune users nearby. Yes, you read that right, they actually used the word "squirt" in their marketing. The catch? The received songs would self-destruct after three plays or three days, whichever came first. It was like Snapchat for music, except nobody wanted it, and nobody was around to receive your "squirts" because NOBODY ELSE HAD A ZUNE!

The horror story reached its climax on December 31, 2008, when every single Zune 30GB model in existence simultaneously crashed due to a leap year bug. Imagine thousands of people waking up on New Year's Eve to find their precious brown bricks had turned into actual bricks.
The Zune lived (or rather, stumbled around like a zombie) until 2011, when Microsoft finally put it out of its misery. Total sales? About 2 million Zunes compared to the iPods 300 million. Thats not a market sharethats a rounding error.

But perhaps the scariest part of this story is that somewhere out there, in forgotten drawers and dusty attics, thousands of Zunes still exist, waiting... Their brown cases slowly fading, their batteries quietly leaking, their proprietary software forever haunting the digital graveyard of tech history. Legend has it that on quiet nights, you can still hear the faint echo of a marketing executive whispering, "squirt me some Jonas Brothers..."

So, next time you complain about having to charge your AirPods, remember the brave souls who endured the Zune era. And if you ever find one at a garage sale, run. Run far, run fast. Some tech is better left in the past!

P.S.: If you think this was bad, wait until you hear about Windows Vista...

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Essential Security Tools for Web Developers and Designers

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Whether you’re designing a simple website or building complex web applications, security needs to be a priority from day one. Cyber threats like data breaches, cross-site scripting (XSS), and SQL injections are becoming more sophisticated, targeting every weakness they can find. 

Fortunately, various security tools exist to help developers and designers safeguard their projects and ensure users enjoy a seamless and secure experience. This article will explore essential security tools that should be part of every developer’s toolkit.

1. OWASP ZAP

OWASP ZAP

OWASP ZAP is an open-source tool that identifies vulnerabilities in web applications. It scans for security weaknesses like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and authentication flaws. OWASP ZAP offers automated and manual testing options, making it useful throughout the development lifecycle. Developers can also integrate it into their CI/CD pipelines, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production.

By using OWASP ZAP early and often, development teams can adopt a proactive approach to security, preventing common attacks from slipping through the cracks. It also provides detailed reports that guide developers on mitigating issues, ensuring every code change aligns with security best practices.

2. Burp Suite

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Burp Suite is a powerful tool designed for web application security testing. It provides developers with tools to inspect HTTP requests, manipulate data, and simulate attacks. Burp Suite’s automated scanner detects vulnerabilities, while its manual tools allow security experts to perform deep-dive testing on complex issues.

The platform’s modular nature makes it easy to customize testing processes. With features like Intruder for brute-force testing and Repeater for request manipulation, Burp Suite offers flexibility for both automated and manual testing. These capabilities help developers address logic flaws, broken authentication, and access control issues that automated scanners might miss.

3. VPN

Remote work becoming the new norm, VPNs are essential for developers who need secure access to servers, platforms, and databases from various locations. A reliable VPN ensures that online activities remain encrypted and private, helping prevent data leaks and unauthorized access. By using industry-standard AES-256 encryption and specialized protocols, VPNs provide a secure option for accessing sensitive environments—even on public Wi-Fi.

VPNs can also mask IP addresses, allowing developers to test web applications from multiple regions without compromising security. With a global network of servers, VPNs offer access to geo-restricted content and tools, enabling seamless and secure workflows regardless of the developer’s location. For example, services like AstrillVPN offer features tailored for developers, enhancing both privacy and functionality across diverse use cases.

4. Nmap

Nmap is a well-known tool for network discovery and auditing. It helps developers identify open ports, running services, and network misconfigurations that attackers could exploit. Nmap’s comprehensive scans offer insights into the entire network infrastructure, making it easier for developers to secure their systems proactively.

Using Nmap during the early stages of development ensures that potential entry points are identified and secured before launch. It’s also a valuable tool for periodic security audits, keeping infrastructure resilient against evolving threats.

5. Acunetix

Acunetix is a web vulnerability scanner that fits perfectly into DevOps workflows and offers continuous security monitoring. It automates the detection of vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, and broken authentication and generates detailed reports for quick remediation. Acunetix supports CI/CD integration, making it a great fit for teams practicing agile development.

This tool stands out for its speed and accuracy, which helps developers keep up with tight release schedules while ensuring robust security. Its seamless integration into development environments allows teams to detect issues without slowing their workflow.

6. Wireshark

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Wireshark is a go-to tool for analyzing network traffic and troubleshooting security issues. It provides deep insights into how data travels between a web application and its backend systems, enabling developers to detect bottlenecks, data leaks, or malicious activities. Wireshark captures and inspects data packets in real-time, allowing teams to identify and respond to anomalies quickly.

Wireshark ensures that communication channels remain secure and efficient for developers working on complex web applications. Its robust filtering options allow users to pinpoint specific traffic flows, making it an indispensable tool for network analysis and security debugging.

7. Metasploit

Metasploit enables developers to adopt an attacker’s mindset by simulating real-world cyberattacks. It provides a library of known exploits that can be used to test applications and systems, helping teams assess how well their defenses will perform under pressure. Metasploit’s penetration testing framework is essential for anyone serious about security, as it gives developers a clear understanding of their application’s vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them.

8. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)

Web Application Firewalls

WAFs act like gatekeepers, monitoring incoming traffic and blocking anything that looks suspicious. By filtering HTTP requests, tools like AWS WAF protect against the most common web attacks, including SQL injection and XSS. For developers managing high-traffic websites or online platforms, WAFs ensure that malicious traffic never reaches the application’s backend, maintaining performance while keeping attackers at bay.

9. Secure Coding Practices and Code Reviews

Secure coding practices are the foundation of any secure web application. Developers should sanitize inputs, use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection and apply access control mechanisms to restrict unauthorized access. Embedding security principles into the codebase from the start ensures that vulnerabilities are minimized.

Regular code reviews, both automated and manual, are essential to catch security flaws early. Developers can also use Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools to identify vulnerabilities during development, keeping code secure throughout the project lifecycle.

10. GitGuardian

GitGuardian is a crucial tool for developers working with code repositories. It continuously scans repositories for exposed credentials, such as API keys, tokens, or passwords that may have been accidentally committed. With GitGuardian, developers can avoid the risk of attackers exploiting leaked secrets, ensuring that sensitive information stays protected. It also provides real-time alerts, enabling teams to act when potential exposures are detected immediately.

11. Snyk: Manage Open-Source Vulnerabilities

Snyk specializes in finding vulnerabilities within open-source libraries and dependencies. Modern web applications rely heavily on open-source components, so Snyk helps developers identify and patch vulnerabilities early. It integrates with DevOps tools, offering continuous monitoring to ensure dependencies remain secure throughout development cycles.

12. Security Audits and Continuous Testing: Stay One Step Ahead

Regular security audits and continuous testing play a crucial role in safeguarding digital environments. By incorporating automated testing tools alongside thorough manual audits conducted at regular intervals, organizations can swiftly identify and address emerging risks. This proactive strategy not only aids teams in adhering to established security standards but also serves as a preventive measure, ensuring that minor security concerns do not escalate into significant incidents that could jeopardize sensitive information or disrupt operations. Such diligence fosters a culture of security awareness and resilience within the organization.

13. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

Two-factor authentication is a simple yet powerful way to protect accounts from unauthorized access. By requiring users to provide two verification forms, like a password and a code sent to their phone, 2FA ensures that attackers can’t gain access even if passwords are compromised. Developers should implement 2FA wherever sensitive data or user information is involved, adding an extra layer of security to the application.

14. Regular Security Audits and Continuous Testing

Security isn’t something you set up once and forget, it requires continuous monitoring and improvement. Regular security audits help identify vulnerabilities introduced through updates or changes in the infrastructure. Continuous testing ensures that applications remain compliant with security standards and are ready to face new threats as they emerge. With automated scanning tools and periodic manual testing, developers can avoid potential risks and maintain a strong security posture.

In today’s digital landscape, web security is essential for developers and designers building everything from simple sites to complex applications. This article explores top security tools, including OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite, and GitGuardian, that help identify vulnerabilities, secure sensitive data, and protect against cyber threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. By integrating these tools into development workflows, teams can ensure a seamless, secure user experience and maintain robust defenses against evolving threats. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, these tools provide the foundation for building safer, more resilient web applications.

The post Essential Security Tools for Web Developers and Designers appeared first on CSS Author.

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Designing For Gen Z: Expectations And UX Guidelines

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Every generation is different in very unique ways, with different habits, views, standards, and expectations. So when designing for Gen Z, what do we need to keep in mind? Let’s take a closer look at Gen Z, how they use tech, and why it might be a good idea to ignore common design advice and do the opposite of what is usually recommended instead.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 — with live UX training coming up soon. Free preview.

Gen Z: Most Diverse And Most Inclusive

When we talk about Generation Z, we usually refer to people born between 1995 and 2010. Of course making universal statements about a cohort where some are adults in their late 20s and others are school students is at best ineffective and at worst wrong — yet there are some attributes that stand out compared to earlier generations.

Gen Z is the most diverse generation in terms of race, ethnicity, and identity. Research shows that young people today are caring and proactive, and far from being “slow, passive and mindless” as they are often described. In fact, they are willing to take a stand and break their habits if they deeply believe in a specific purpose and goal. Surely there are many distractions along that way, but the belief in fairness and sense of purpose has enormous value.

Their values reflect that: accessibility, inclusivity, sustainability, and work/life balance are top priorities for Gen Zs, and they value experiences, principles, and social stand over possessions.

What Gen Z Deeply Cares About

Gen Z grew up with technology, so unsurprisingly digital experiences are very familiar and understood by them. On the other hand, digital experiences are often suboptimal at best — slow, inaccessible, confusing, and frustrating. Plus, the web is filled with exaggerations and generic but fluffy statements. So it’s not a big revelation that Gen Zs are highly skeptical of brands and advertising by default (rightfully so!), and rely almost exclusively on social circles, influencers, and peers as main research channels.

They might sometimes struggle to spot what’s real and what’s not, but they are highly selective about their sources. They are always connected and used to following events live as they unfold, so unsurprisingly, Gen Z tends to have little patience.

And sure enough, Gen Z loves short-form content, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to a short attention span. Attention span is context-dependent, as documentaries and literature are among Gen Z’s favorites.

Designing For Gen Z

Most design advice on Gen Z focuses on producing “short form, snackable, bite-sized” content. That content is optimized for very short attention spans, TikTok-alike content consumption, and simplified to the core messaging. I would strongly encourage us to do the opposite.

We shouldn’t discount Gen Z as a generation with poor attention spans and urgent needs for instant gratification. Gen Zs have very strong beliefs and values, but they are also inherently curious and want to reshape the world. We can tell a damn good story. Captivate and engage. Make people think. Many Gen Zs are highly ambitious and motivated, and they want to be challenged and to succeed. So let’s support that. And to do that, we need to remain genuine and authentic.

Remain Genuine And Authentic

As Michelle Winchester noted, Gen Zs have very diverse perspectives and opinions, and they possess a discerning ability to detect disingenuous content. That’s also where mistrust towards AI comes into play, along with AI fatigue. As Nilay Patel mentioned on Ezra Klein Show, today when somebody says that something is “AI-generated”, usually it’s not a praise, but rather a testament how poor and untrustworthy it actually is.

Gen Z expects better. Hence brands that value sincerity, honesty, and authenticity are perceived as more trustworthy compared to brands that don’t have an opinion, don’t take a stand, don’t act for their beliefs and principles. For example, the “Keep Beauty Real” campaign by Dove (shown below) showcases the value of genuine human beauty, which is so often missed and so often exaggerated to extremes by AI.

Gareth Ford Williams has put together a visual language of closed captions and has kindly provided a PDF cheatsheet that is commonly used by professional captioners. There are some generally established rules about captioning, and here are some that I found quite useful when working on captioning for my own video course:

  • Divide your sentences into two relatively equal parts like a pyramid (40ch per line for the top line, a bit less for the bottom line);
  • Always keep an average of 20 to 30 characters per second;
  • A sequence should only last between 1 and 8 seconds;
  • Always keep a person’s name or title together;
  • Do not break a line after conjunction;
  • Consider aligning multi-lined captions to the left.

On YouTube, users can select a font used for subtitles and choose between monospaced and proportional serif and sans-serif, casual, cursive, and small-caps. But perhaps, in addition to stylistic details, we could provide a careful selection of fonts to help audiences with different needs. This could include a dyslexic font or a hyper-legible font, for example.

Additionally, we could display presets for various high contrast options for subtitles. This gives users a faster selection, requiring less effort to configure just the right combination of colors and transparency. Still, it would be useful to provide more sophisticated options just in case users need them.

Support Intrinsic Motivation

On the other hand, in times of instant gratification with likes, reposts, and leaderboards, people often learn that a feeling of achievement comes from extrinsic signals, like reach or attention from other people. The more important it is to support intrinsic motivation.

As Paula Gomes noted, intrinsic motivation is characterized by engaging in behaviors just for their own sake. People do something because they enjoy it. It is when they care deeply for an activity and enjoy it without needing any external rewards or pressure to do it.

Typically this requires 3 components:

  • Competence involves the need to feel capable of achieving a desired outcome.
  • Autonomy is about the need to feel in control of your own actions, behaviors, and goals.
  • Relatedness reflects the need to feel a sense of belonging and attachment to other people.

In practical terms, that means setting people up for success. Preparing the knowledge and documents and skills they need ahead of time. Building knowledge up without necessarily rewarding them with points. It also means allowing people to have a strong sense of ownership of the decisions and the work they are doing. And adding collaborative goals that would require cooperation with team members and colleagues.

Encourage Critical Thinking

The younger people are, the more difficult it is to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Whenever possible, show sources or at least explain where to find specific details that back up claims that you are making. Encourage people to make up their mind, and design content to support that — with scientific papers, trustworthy reviews, vetted feedback, and diverse opinions.

And: you don’t have to shy away from technical details. Don’t make them mandatory to read and understand, but make them accessible and available in case readers or viewers are interested.

In times where there is so much fake, exaggerated, dishonest, and AI-generated content, it might be just enough to be perceived as authentic, trustworthy, and attention-worthy by the highly selective and very demanding Gen Z.

Good Design Is For Everyone

I keep repeating myself like a broken record, but better accessibility is better for everyone. As you hopefully have noticed, many attributes and expectations that we see in Gen Z are beneficial for all other generations, too. It’s just good, honest, authentic design. And that’s the very heart of good UX.

What I haven’t mentioned is that Gen Z genuinely appreciates feedback and values platforms that listen to their opinions and make changes based on their feedback. So the best thing we can do, as designers, is to actively involve Gen Z in the design process. Designing with them, rather than designing for them.

And, most importantly: with Gen Z, perhaps for the first time ever, inclusion and accessibility is becoming a default expectation for all digital products. With it comes the sense of fairness, diversity, and respect. And, personally, I strongly believe that it’s a great thing — and a testament how remarkable Gen Zs actually are.

Wrapping Up
  • Large parts of Gen Z aren’t mobile-first, but mobile-only.
  • To some, the main search engine is YouTube, not Google.
  • Some don’t know and have never heard of Internet Explorer.
  • Trust only verified customer reviews, influencers, friends.
  • Used to follow events live as they unfold → little patience.
  • Sustainability, reuse, work/life balance are top priorities.
  • Prefer social login as the fastest authentication method.
  • Typically ignore or close cookie banners, without consent.
  • Rely on social proof, honest reviews/photos, authenticity.
  • Most likely generation to provide a referral to a product.
  • Typically turn on subtitles for videos by default.
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