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Without a doubt, we live in a highly competitive era. It provides us with lots of opportunities but also makes it harder and harder to get the audience’s attention. To stand out from the crowd of your online competitors, you should always be one step ahead. It comes for everything, including the website(s) you work […]
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When you’re designing a company’s logo, you need a way to test out how it will look once it’s off the computer screen. Applying a logo to real-world scenarios, such as engraved on a sign, stamped on paper, or etched into leather, can help you accurately visualize how it will look once printed and in use.
But many business mockups are quite expensive, especially highly-realistic ones that come with extra effects. Luckily, there are several free templates available online with all the professional look and customization of premium graphics.
If you want to see how your logo is going to look in real life, try out one of these beautiful free mockups. That way you or your clients can be sure that it will look great not just online, but printed on merchandise or even on their office wall.
Whether you’re designing a logo for your own company or for a client, a mockup can really help you refine your logo. Sometimes a design looks fine on the computer screen, but ends up being not quite right once it makes it through print. Maybe it’s just not suitable for the medium you’re printing or engraving it on.
Realistic mockups help you visualize your design in various scenarios. And clients will love seeing their company’s logo in these mockups. Try a few of these great free templates to help your design process and please your clients.
Building a full calendar interface is tough work. There are major differences between calendars on the web and calendars for mobile apps, so it’s good to study examples and see what’s out there.
After scouring through CodePen, I’ve organized the absolute best calendar UIs I could find that was created specifically for websites. All of these calendars run on CSS for the interface, although some add JavaScript functionality to create some cool interactive features.
Take a peek at these snippets and see what you think!
This first demo really grabbed my attention due to its bright color scheme and impeccable style.
Surprisingly, this colorful calendar even lets you move up & down the page with small arrow icons. The entire calendar run solely on HTML and CSS, so completely JavaScript-free.
The idea actually came from a shot on Dribbble and was coded into reality by developer David Khourshid.
Certainly a unique take on calendar design and this color scheme is one for the record books.
We often associate the months with seasons, and most print calendars reflect this. So why not bring that seasonal charm to your digital calendars too?
This seasonal calendar design uses custom SVGs and some basic animation to create dynamic seasonal headers. You can move between months using the arrow icons and you can even click on the dates to select them.
I’m quite fond of the date selection animation since it mimics the act of someone drawing over the date. Feels just like print without the paper!
The concept of this design is beyond incredible. It runs purely on CSS and lets you select a date range from a mobile calendar UI, then select whatever you want to schedule in for that date (appointments, vacations, etc).
But since this follows the idea of a mobile app UI it’s probably not the most persuasive case for CSS.
Either way, the implementation is superb, and I’m still amazed this works using just HTML and CSS.
For this calendar widget you can actually save certain events on the calendar just by picking a date. Again it runs without JavaScript so I’m really impressed with the quality.
Developer Ciprian Ionescu uses small dots to indicate whenever something is saved on a certain date.
You can just click the calendar date to open up a small text field, enter your to-do item, then click to close.
A very simple widget that could prove useful on some sites.
Here’s a design that’s much less interactive but also quite dynamic. With this fullscreen calendar you can tell that the developer Ricky Eckhardt put some effort into the project.
It does work in pure CSS but to keep the height perfectly aligned with the container, Ricky has used some necessary JavaScript. You could bypass this if you don’t need the height to fit 100% perfectly and you could instead set default paddings for the calendar elements.
Still a pretty cool effect and it even reminds me of the classic Google Calendar UI.
This custom calendar is actually based on an older shot posted to Dribbble back in 2009.
It’s a clear square interface where elements are delineated by borders and custom backgrounds. Probably not the strongest use of a custom calendar but certainly a brilliant starting point for designers.
And this one is 100% pure CSS so you can get it going on any site without scripting.
You don’t see custom 3D animations on calendars too often. But this one’s pretty unique because the design relies on pure CSS, yet the flip animation runs as a custom jQuery method.
If you click any of the days in the calendar it’ll perform a 3D flipping effect to rotate over to the back side. From there you can enter data for planning events or scheduling.
Classic skeuomorphism may have gone away but there’s plenty of room for merging minimalist designs with skeuomorphic ideas.
That’s kinda what you get in this neat planner calendar that looks like a traditional flip-top print calendar. All the months are fully dynamic and powered by JavaScript so you can move forward using the arrows on either side of the header.
Note the days aren’t clickable and that this calendar isn’t super interactive. But as a general base to start designing, I’m a fan of this concept.
You can build a lot of cool stuff with the Semantic UI framework. No doubt this calendar is one such example.
Most of the interface elements are just for show but the calendar sorting features work just as you’d expect. And since this runs solely on Semantic UI the entire design is powered by that default stylesheet.
Who knew that such a powerful design could come from such a small frontend library?
On the flip side we have Angular.js which is one of the largest frontend frameworks. This goes beyond simple interface styles to create a structure for developers to create dynamic webapps.
And this custom calendar UI named FlexCalendar is a really cool example running on Angular. It doesn’t let you add custom content or store anything in a local JSON database or anything crazy.
But it works like an interactive calendar should, and it’s powered solely by the Angular.js library.
It’s great to see web designers dive into JavaScript and this calendar demo is one prime reason to learn.
Most of these calendars follow the typical white background style we’re familiar with. But what about a dark calendar UI?
Where there’s a will there’s a way and developer Kenny Sing found a way to craft this rich calendar interface from scratch.
It runs on pure CSS code has some pretty neat hover effects too. Plus the whole thing fits into a fullscreen design so it’s probably one of the more versatile calendars you’ll find.
Now, I can’t say any of these demos would be useful for a datepicker U, but they offer some great starting points for designing your own CSS-powered calendar.
Looking for some free Halloween-themed graphics to spice up your designs? During the fall season, you’ll find a lot of freebies for autumn icons and backgrounds. If you want to decorate your website for October or create some festive Halloween banners, this is a great time to dive in and get some free graphics.
We’ve collected some great sources of free Halloween icons, vectors, and designs. These will be perfect if you need some cute and spooky graphics.
These cute digital icons are mostly made with the autumn season in mind, but there are quite a few Halloween examples in here as well. A jack-o-lantern, a witch’s hat, and spooky bats are just a few. There are both vector and PNG versions of each icon, so use whichever works for you.
Vector icons are great because they’re both scalable to any size and easily editable. These vectors use a simple, appealing style with cartoony monsters, grinning pumpkins, and expressive ghosts. There are 42 icons including both props and characters, so it should last you a while.
Minimalism fits in almost anywhere. The simpler a design, the easier it is to integrate with other styles. These 41 flat designs won’t look out of place as icons on your website or background decoration in graphics. They are a bit scarier with angry skeletons, bloody props, and spooky spiders, but with a cute and simplistic style that makes them very endearing.
This adorable design would look great as a greeting card. It’s full of cute, smiling characters and varied background decorations. Since it’s a vector image, you’ll be able to customize and scale each of the elements to create the perfect scene.
You’ll never run out of icons with this set of 40 minimalistic Halloween icons, suitable for web and graphic designs. Each icon comes in lined and filled styles, with an additional thin and thick version of each. There’s also both an SVG vector and PNG bitmap version of each in this pack.
Here’s another cartoon Halloween background you’ll love. This one depicts a mysterious castle with bats, spiders, and a huge harvest moon, and it’d make a great banner background. It comes in vector format, so you can tweak each element to your liking.
With a highly-stylized, wacky design, these unique vectors lack the generic appeal of minimalistic icons – you can’t use them in just any project. But if these fun and colorful characters appeal to you, they’d make great centerpieces in a graphic.
unDraw is a free, constantly maintained collection of vector icons and images for web designers. For Halloween 2018, they created a set of haunting background PNG images depicting scenes from various classic horror movies. Try to guess what each one is before you click, and use the arrow below each image to download.
The fall season tends to bring out a lot of cute Halloween art. These little icons would make great stickers on your banners and backgrounds, or in any other autumn-themed design project you’re working on this year.
Make sure to double-check the license before using these commercially, as some may require attribution, but most of these are totally free for use. Don’t hesitate to include these adorably spooky icons and backgrounds in your Halloween works.
Have you ever wonder how to avoid accidental, or on purpose, modification of collection data? Of course, we could reject access as one of the possible solutions, but it is not always possible. In today's blog post, we will look into how to easily protect your collection from accidental modifications by setting it to read-only.
You may also like: Java 10 Immutable/Unmodifiable Stream API Collectors
When we create the collection, either via the API or using the script, it is created in the all-access mode — you can both read data from it and write data to it. Let's create a collection using the following command:
There are thousands of WordPress products and services on the internet, but which one is the most effective in 2019. In this article, we will present you 29 great products from several WordPress domains like hosting, themes, marketplaces with tons of awesome good stuff, analytics, forms, landing page building, website building, and much more. Below […]
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One of the biggest hurdles to becoming a web or graphic designer is the cost. Professional design software takes time to learn and is expensive on top.
Photoshop may be the leader in graphics editing, but it has a price tag to match. With the Creative Cloud service on a monthly payment scheme, it can cost you a minimum of $120 per year, and you don’t even get a permanent license to use Photoshop.
If that’s just too expensive for you, or you want editing software with a perpetual licensing model, there are plenty of alternatives out there. Some are even free. Here are 6 design software alternatives with similar functions and feel to Photoshop.
Affinity Photo is one of the best and most similar Photoshop alternatives available. A one-time $50 fee gets you access to an advanced and affordable program for Mac or Windows, or you can get a cheaper version for your tablet.
The editor comes with support for RAW files, panoramas, vector drawing, and effective retouching tools. Its one downside is the limited plugin selection that leaves it not very extendable. But for a majority of designers, it can take Photoshop’s place pretty well.
You can’t beat free, and open source GIMP is a popular Photoshop competitor. A majority of Photoshop’s tools are available here, and it accepts a wide range of file formats including PSDs.
One of GIMP’s main features is its customizability. There are hundreds of third-party tools ranging from entire plugins to artistic brushes. However, its interface is less streamlined than Photoshop’s, and it’s missing some important tools like non-destructive editing and CMYK support.
But overall, it’s a solid choice for graphic designers if you don’t need certain advanced features.
Sketch is a vector graphics editor and web design tool for macOS, with multiple improvements over Photoshop in areas of UI design. It’s made for website prototyping and comes with grids built in, pixel perfect precision, and smart guide functionality.
The program is focused solely on UI and mockups, and comes with no features like bitmap brushes or photo editing. If you find yourself using Photoshop’s other artistic features frequently, you may want a more general-purpose editor. But UI/UX designers will quickly fall in love with this easy-to-use program.
For a free, entirely in-browser editor, Photopea comes with a surprising array of features. Its clean interface will feel very familiar to Photoshop fans, and you’ll be shocked at how much is packed into it.
That said, if you’re used to advanced or even mid-level Photoshop features, Photopea doesn’t yet hold up in all of these areas. It’s a great emergency editor, and perfect if you only need a basic set of tools. Some designers won’t need anything more, but don’t expect the raw power of a downloadable program from this.
If your design work often involves painting and creating artwork or graphics, Krita would be a great choice. It’s free and open source, and has the power of Photoshop with an interface specialized for artists.
There are over 100 brushes included and ways to download more, a fully customizable interface, vector support, and HDR painting. Krita isn’t suitable for general editing and manipulation, but it’s perfect for illustrators and graphic designers.
Figma is similar to Sketch in that it’s focused around prototyping and UI design, but it comes with its own host of features. The biggest is its support for live multi-user editing with your teammates. It works in the browser and has a free starter plan for up to two designers.
It also comes with vector editing, commenting, prototyping tools, and the ability to export as a PDF or image. If your focus is on collaboration, and you want to design alongside others, Figma is definitely one to consider.
Photoshop is considered a staple of a designer’s toolkit, but it hardly has a monopoly on the industry. There are plenty of other programs out there that have similar functionality to Photoshop and a price tag as low as free.
Just remember that these programs only provide similar functionality to Photoshop. If you use other programs in the Creative Cloud suite, such as Lightroom, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, or InDesign, you’ll need to find alternatives for those as well.
Are you on the hunt for some gritty, textured experimental fonts for your website? Grunge style typography might be just what you need.
The inspiration for many art styles, grunge music and fashion is associated with harsh songs, ripped jeans, and distorted instrument sounds. It was an unorthodox genre far removed from cleaner brands of music.
Grunge typography is much the same, sharply divulging from traditional elegant serifs and clean sans-serifs to create a new unique style. These fonts tend to have a dirty, smudged, paint-brushed, or eroded look. They can be simple and legible or distorted and dramatic.
These fonts look great on rock music sites and graphics, but anyone can use them. If you want to add a little texture and variation to your project, or need to draw eyes to a part of your website, try one of these stand-out grunge fonts.
If you’re tired of clean web design and want to put a spin on things, you should definitely consider grunge typography. The fonts are highly unique, and thus overuse can dull their message. But a grunge font in just the right place can attract attention and add a little interest to a bland webpage.
You don’t have to be making a rock website to use grunge fonts. You can find more subtle textured effects on all sorts of websites, especially ones that want to add a natural feel or tell the world that they’re unconventional.
Using a grunge font in just the right place can leave a big impact on visitors, so don’t be afraid to try one.
Java 8 introduced a new era of Java. Everything from lambda expressions and functional programming to Streams and collections — DZone was there to document it all.
So whether you're migrating over to Java 9 or Java 11, or maybe even Java 13, Java 8 concepts and features are still very much alive in the JDK. And understanding these core concepts can help tremendously when it's time to move beyond Java 8.
Free stock videos are an insanely valuable resource for web designers and video editors. A sweeping landscape shot can set the scene for a website’s animated background, or nicely fill a transition in a video. But of course, most people can’t afford the equipment to record such footage.
Stock videos are a quick and easy way to find short, high quality clips when you need them. But videography isn’t cheap, so buying footage will often cost you quite a bit.
Luckily, there are sites out there that collect free videos you can use in personal and commercial projects, and we’re going to go over the features of each today. Here are a few of the best free stock footage sites you can find.
On Mixkit, you’ll find professional HD videos, all sorted and tagged so they’re easy to search for. There’s business, landscape, and lifestyle videos, alongside abstract and even animation footage. The Mixkit license has a few light stipulations, but that’s all.
There’s quite the variety of unique stock footage in this modest, but quality collection. There are a few hundred videos here, and they can be used anywhere as long as you add unique value and credit the website.
Pexels is jam packed with awesome stock videos that nobody will believe you downloaded for free. As far as the license goes, pretty much anything is allowed, so get as much of this great footage as your project requires.
Pixabay is full of diversity, and that’s no exception in their video section. You can sort by effects, categories, resolution, or tags. Many videos on Pixabay are focused around pretty aesthetics, so try it out if you need eye-catching footage. The license here is very unrestrictive.
If you’re looking for gorgeous CC0-licensed stock footage, ISO Republic is the first place to check. There’s not a ton here, but what exists would make a great addition to your project. You’ll love these videos. As a bonus, there is plenty of outstanding free stock photography here as well.
Coverr was created just for web designers who need a full screen hero video for their homepage. There’s plenty of exceptional, well-sorted footage to look through, all free to use and optimized for your website.
There’s so many HD and 4K videos to choose from here. Get lost in the collections of vivid nature- and people-focused imagery. There are absolutely no restrictions except for a 10-video redistribution limit.
Looking for stunning landscape videos to beautify your video or website? Take a look through SplitShire’s collection and see if they have what you need. Though SplitShire is a stock photography website, they’ve branched out into footage and are doing awesome at it.
With nearly 8,000 videos and more being added every day, Videvo is a great place to start in your hunt for the perfect clip. Sort by popular or recent, or check out the tags and the incredibly helpful “similar clips” on each entry. There’s a lot of licenses, so make sure to check out Licensing 101 before you download.
Stock footage, animation, After Effects templates, and plenty of nature videography in 4K and HD are waiting to be found on Videezy. Some licenses allow commercial use while others require credit, so check the licensing page before you grab up these great free videos.
There are many places to find free stock videos on the internet, and we’ve just scratched the surface. If you need footage, one of these 10 choice collections should have what you need. Supplement your full videos, or include them in your website designs.
Just make sure you always check the site license before you download free videos. Most of these are totally free for use, but some may only be used commercially or with other stipulations. Check for a CC0 license or read the terms carefully.
If everything seems right, then you’re good to start downloading some beautiful stock videos.
JavaScript, as defined by Mozilla, is:
“a scripting or programming language that allows you to implement complex things on web pages — every time a web page does more than just sit there and display static information for you to look at — displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated 2D/3D graphics, scrolling video jukeboxes, etc. — you can bet that JavaScript is probably involved.”
Essentially JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is used to power the interactive content/media on a page. JS helps you do more with your content so you can provide the user with animations, content relevant to them based on certain parameters, and special graphics. This is used far and wide by websites and global companies for a variety of purposes. Some popular examples include:
In this article we are analyzing the top five JavaScript frameworks for 2019.
A framework is “an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software.” Frameworks are built on top of languages to speed up processes and develop specific tools, you can see some examples of CSS frameworks for design here.
Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable, making it easier for integrations and connecting to existing projects.
Vue is also super-fast, with 20KB min+gzip Runtime and minimal optimization needed to power your applications.
The way Vue works is through template styles similar to Angular. It is a fast and easy language to work with for apps, UI, and interactive interface development, and it has the ability to power single web page projects too.
One of the biggest reasons people like Vue over some of the other frameworks is because a lot of time is saved during rendering. Vue tracks the component’s dependencies so the system already knows which components need to be re-rendered when something changes.
See examples of cool websites, apps, and projects made with vue.js.
Angular is built for the future. The framework is maintained by a team of engineers who share a passion for making web development feel effortless. They believe that writing beautiful apps should be joyful and fun. Learn more about Angular here.
Angular is useful today because it utilizes cutting edge Typescript for larger applications. Typescript is defined as ‘JavaScript that scales’. Because of the way Typescript was designed, millions of developers are able to use existing JavaScript code, incorporate popular JavaScript libraries, and call TypeScript code from JavaScript. This makes it a much easier process for large projects with lots of collaborators. Having Angular built on top of this is efficient and allows developers to focus more on speed and performance.
Angular follows a classic MVP (Model View Presenter) pattern for complex applications. This is a concept people use to break down large projects into specific ‘separation of concerns’ and areas to focus on developmentally. You can read more about this concept here.
Check out made with angular to see cool examples of projects built on this framework.
React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React was created by Facebook, initially for use in the newsfeed and Instagram applications. The framework was open-sourced at JSConf US in May 2013.
Similar to Vue, React is efficient in rendering and only changing necessary components when interacting with the state. React also changes the way people can interact with states and works to evolve the development process. It is component based, meaning each encapsulated section can manage its own state, which is important in large scale and complex UIs.
This video does a great job breaking down exactly what React is and how it is used.
Express is a minimalist framework that runs on top of Node.js, a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and used by many large scale applications.
Express is a fast and minimal web app framework for both web and mobile applications. Think of it as the framework for building websites. Express helps you quickly get your apps live, while providing a number of methods for creating APIs easily, too.
A lot of other popular frameworks are built on top of Express because of the simplicity and ease of integration. You can view the full list here.
Recommended video from Programming with Mosh on Express:
Redux is a data management system that is mainly used with React. For large scale projects with lots of moving parts, Redux helps to organize the data and keep everything running predictably even in vastly different environments.
Redux places a focus on debugging and ease of use. They write:
“The Redux DevTools make it easy to trace when, where, why, and how your application’s state changed. Redux’s architecture lets you log changes, use “time-travel debugging”, and even send complete error reports to a server.”
One important thing to note about Redux is that you should not use it unless absolutely necessary! According to the Redux FAQ, “the need to use Redux should not be taken for granted.” Multiple early contributors to the project proclaim that it is something you’ll know when you need, and that you only need when other problems arise.
Dan Abramov says: “I would like to amend this: don’t use Redux until you have problems with vanilla React.”
So just keep that in mind before jumping in full steam to this powerful, and somewhat advanced framework. It is definitely useful, but only at large scale and when dealing with large amounts of data changing over time.
Read more about recommended uses for Redux here.
One thing all of these frameworks have in common is that they help developers accomplish more in less time. That’s a big part of their appeal.
Each framework has its strengths, weaknesses and ideal use cases. Which one you choose really depends on the specific needs of your project.
But, now that you know a bit more about them, you’ll have a head start on picking the right one.
In this blazing hot summer, it’s the best time to stock up on fonts that perfectly match the sunny weather. Designs you create using these typefaces can encapsulate that lively summer feeling and get people ready to have some fun in the sun. Use them in your marketing campaigns, on your seasonal website redesign, or in beautiful inspirational posters!
If you want to remind people of summer, the sun, and the sea, try out one of these 22 warm fonts we’ve collected just for you. Fun, elegant, or creative, there’s a typeface here for your project.
Nothing says summer like a colorful, lively font. All of these fonts embrace the brightness and energy of summer with their unique designs, flowy cursives, and light-hearted feel.
Some are casual and decorated with a cartoony look, while others are clean and professional. But all of them are eye-catchingly beautiful and perfect for any summer project. Try some for yourself; you’ll love the spark these fonts can instantly bring into your design.
Are you making a travel website that needs to capture the beauty of the world? World explorer, outdoorsy business, or travel agency, we know you need some big inspiration to get started with your design.
We’ve collected the work of some amazing web designers here for you. Let the mockups and websites they’ve created help you create your own awe-inspiring travel site.
Dark and light contrasts the elements of this beautiful design, with light used to highlight the gorgeous imagery. Fullscreen photography, galleries, and sliders of the most scenic places in Iceland are scattered throughout and keep people engaged.
Bright and clean design dominates this well-made mockup. There’s a nice full screen hero image followed by plenty of smaller images next to calls to action and other information.
Huge photography, a large and user-friendly UI, and sections of interest that take up the whole screen or more are scattered about this landing page. It’s fitting for one of the largest national parks in America.
If you want to create a blog that stuns people just as much as the homepage, look here. Create a travel blog that looks like this and people are sure to quickly subscribe for more.
Yellowstone’s gorgeous homepage is simply a masterpiece. It combines the amazing imagery of an untouched national park with a pleasing user interface and helpful info at every scroll.
The tile-based design here is used well, with 3D overlays and lots of interactive media in every block. A similar design would look great for a website that relies on visuals rather than text content.
This mockup has more of a focus on real estate. Photos of vast landscapes are replaced with pretty interior and exterior shots, and it all has a bright, fresh look to it.
It may only be inspired by National Geographic, but this project looks completely authentic. Exciting photography is what the brand is all about, and it’s woven perfectly into its landing page.
This hero image transitions from white to black, which seamlessly spills down into the rest of the page. The design is then broken up with beautiful, bright photography that stands out against the darkness. It’s a great concept for a landing page, and very inspiring.
Pretty and functional, this is a great project to study if you’re making a business website. Calls to action are everywhere, but it never gets in the way of the landscape and portrait shots.
Here’s an example of nice composition. The hero image and footer utilize photography, while the content area is the middle is light and spacious. Large images offer breathing room between text.
Short, sweet, and simple, this landing page gets its point across quickly and stylishly. The photo header smoothly fades out to give way to image links and blog posts, before fading back in to the footer.
A good homepage is crucial for success, and here’s a great example. Notice the focus on orange hues; they appear everywhere from UI to the photography. Strong usage of color can create a beautiful effect.
Many travel sites tend to go for contrast between the photos and background, but this contrasts dark UI against snowy photography. It gives a greater focus to the text content.
Travel websites are especially beautiful. They utilize jaw-dropping photography and videos to draw you in and get you excited to explore. Knowing how to incorporate these into a great user interface is key to creating an amazing travel design.
There’s something about seeing gorgeous natural imagery that draws people in. Use this to your advantage as you design a website that captures people with its beauty.
Looking for some animation inspiration for your next design project? Some of the most stunning websites on the internet are the ones that use motion to great effect. There’s nothing quite as memorable as a site with jaw-droppingly beautiful animations.
If you want to see some of the best examples of JavaScript, WebGL, and CSS3 backgrounds, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 9 absolutely mesmerizing animated websites, collected here for your inspiration.
This website starts with a calm, muted background. But as you progress through the screens and learn more about this bridal services company, you’ll see strips of white cloth begin gently moving across the screen, then a whole bolt elegantly unwinds across it.
The first thing you’re greeted with here is an entrancing kaleidoscope animation that slowly moves and shifts between colors, even responding to your mouse. Click to see more work and the ball expands to take up the screen, switching its patterns and designs to match the portfolio piece you’re hovering.
Thorne’s website experience immediately greets you with hundreds of intricately rendered particles, all responding to your mouse movements with fluidity. Watching the particles flow along and scattering them with your mouse is strangely fun. And that’s just the first screen!
Turn on your webcam and experience a shockingly accurate rendition of your respiratory, circulatory, and nervous system, all represented by these little particles.
Nothing sets the scene quite like a great aesthetic animation, and KIKK nails it with a pretty pastel background layered with whirling snow. Even the logo appears to be dissolving into the blizzard. There are quite a few nice scrolling animations as well.
When you visit this beautiful portfolio, you’ll find the best examples of photography and design fluttering in the background like flags. These flags are dynamic and swing or buffer on their own or in response to you scrolling and hovering. Explore further to find more beautiful background animations, everywhere from the about page to the portfolios themselves.
These dynamic 3D birds look like something out of a movie. It’s simply stunning. As you scroll, you’ll be presented with more gorgeous forest environments and beautifully animated creatures. Plus, you can learn a little about the environment and how to help the birds in your area.
In one page, this portfolio manages to show off a vast array of unique background animations. This is a UI/UX design company after all, so you wouldn’t expect any less. Scroll through this short piece and explore the variety of compelling animations presented to you.
Upon opening Digital Present’s portfolio, you’re immediately hit with a barrage of beautiful animation. Move your mouse around, scroll, and hover each element as you browse this beautiful site to discover everything.
Bright and cheerful, Creative Cruise’s homepage greets you with a fun backdrop. Try clicking and dragging the road to see it spin infinitely. Or click any link to make the clouds in the background change. It’s a simple, but super-fun site to play with.
Developers and designers have done amazing things with WebGL and other browser animation APIs. The days of flat, static web design are far behind us; now any website can become an inspiring experience, or a gorgeous art exhibit.
If you want to try making your own 3D animation, one of these websites are a great place to start for getting inspired. Now that you know how the best sites pull off creating enthralling animations, it’s your turn to start designing a beautiful site of your own.
By the year 2023, eCommerce sales in the United States are going to be over $735 billion. Some newcomers to the world of online shopping fail to realize just how competitive this market can be. The key to having success with a new online store is finding a niche and a brand voice. Each year, [...]
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UI design is a delicate, and often overlooked, art. A beautiful user interface is half of what makes a website great. The best UI combines amazing design and useful functionality to make an app or website simple and fun to navigate.
But if you’re a designer making your own website, finding examples to draw inspiration from can be difficult. You might stumble upon an amazing creation as you browse the web, but if you need some great dashboard UI inspiration right now, we’ve got something for you.
These 13 awesome examples showcase a variety of different dashboards. From simplistic user backends to info-packed analytics reports, striking dark design to elegant light UI, those creating menus and dashboards will find some beautiful inspiration in this collection.
Finding great sources of inspiration is a crucial step for any designer. Unless you’ve been making interfaces and outlines for many years, it’s a good idea to draw inspiration from other sources. That way you can see what works well in action and expand on it with your own unique style.
This list was compiled with variety in mind, so no matter what kind of dashboard UI you’re creating, you can find something to base your design off of. There are user backends, helpful interfaces, graphs and analytics, and everything in between.
We hope this compilation gave you the inspiration you needed to create a beautiful dashboard of your own.
When you’re trying to choose a CMS, there’s a lot to keep in mind. Features, price, and overall quality are all things to pay attention to. But there might be one factor you’re not considering for your CMS: The free templates it has available.
Design is everything in a website. With premium themes being so expensive, you might not initially be able to afford one, so you’ll have to rely on the default templates provided to you.
Let’s go over some top CMS options with great free themes, so you can have a beautiful website without having to pay exorbitant amounts of money.
If you’re looking for sheer variety, WordPress is definitely the way to go. It comes with a handful of customizable light themes right on its website. These simple, photography-focused templates more than get the job done.
If you’re willing to pay for premium themes, you’ll discover WordPress’s true diversity. There are thousands of user-made themes out there. Sites like Envato Elements offer plenty of choices so do some searching to find what you need.
Shopify is an e-commerce CMS aimed primarily at larger businesses, so many of its premium themes can come out to almost $200. Luckily, there are also 10 free themes made by Shopify itself, all offering the elegance you’ll need to show off your new online store. They even come in multiple styles.
The CMS is also fairly popular, so you can expect to find free third-party Shopify themes online.
Webflow is a code-free CMS made for designers, so you’d expect their themes to be great – and you would be right. Their free themes are very distinctive from one another. Don’t expect the same bland template over and over again.
There’s quite a few more of them than other CMS competitors tend to offer as well, available in a range of categories. And since this platform focuses on design, you’ll be able to customize them as much as you want.
If your website makes use of plenty of beautiful photography, any Squarespace template would work well for you. There are over twenty themes, all available on any Squarespace plan, and each one a great example of elegant design.
The one downside to Squarespace is that there are few third-party themes available, and a majority are premium. So, if you don’t like any of the free default themes, it may be best to pick a different CMS.
This free and open source CMS was created by a dedicated community of developers, and they haven’t neglected to fill out the theme project with nearly 3,000 free templates.
The problem is that it isn’t very friendly to navigate. Many themes lack demos or even screenshots, so your only option is to download each one to see if you like it.
Luckily, Drupal Free Themes was created to fix this issue. This site has a clean layout and is much less confusing to navigate, and every theme comes with a demo and a list of dependencies. If you love Drupal for its features but struggle to find a good theme, you can now have the best of both worlds.
There are many CMS options with awesome free templates out there, and this is just a handful of them. Which should you choose?
Shopify and Squarespace offer elegant templates with no fuss. They’re good choices if you just want a beautiful theme right out the gate. Webflow also has great themes, and has a high degree of customization available as well with its design-focused CMS.
Drupal and WordPress both share a large community that’s made thousands of themes. Drupal hosts them right on its website, though its themes tend to be simpler and made with functionality in mind. WordPress themes often have a larger focus on beauty and design.
Whatever you choose, remember that you’ll be rewarded if you’re willing to do some digging. Almost every CMS has a community creating third-party themes that are entirely free to download. You just have to be able to find them.
