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UI Design for Total Beginner

UI design, also known as User Interface design, is the process of designing the user interface for a website, app, or other software application. It involves creating a visual design that is both aesthetically pleasing and functional, making it easy for users to navigate and interact with the software.

There are several key principles that every beginner in UI design should keep in mind. First and foremost, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the user’s needs and goals. This will inform the design process and help ensure that the end product is both user-friendly and intuitive.

Another key principle of UI design is to keep the interface simple and uncluttered. Too many elements on a page can be overwhelming and make it difficult for users to find what they are looking for. Instead, the interface should be organized in a logical and easy-to-follow manner.

As a beginner in UI design, it is important to have basic knowledge about the layout. The layout of a user interface refers to the overall organization and positioning of the elements on a page. This includes the placement of buttons, menus, forms, and other elements. The layout should be logical and easy to follow, and it should guide the user’s attention to the most important elements.

In addition, the visual design of the interface is crucial. This includes the use of color, typography, and other design elements to create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing UI. The visual design should be consistent throughout the interface, and it should reflect the overall tone and brand of the software.

It is also important to consider the user experience of the interface. This includes usability testing, which involves having real users interact with the interface and providing feedback on their experience. This can help identify any potential issues or areas for improvement, and ensure that the final product is as user-friendly as possible.

In conclusion, UI design is a crucial aspect of any software application, and it is essential for beginners to understand the key principles and best practices of the field. By keeping the user’s needs and goals in mind, and focusing on simplicity, aesthetic, and testing, it is possible to create an effective and user-friendly user interface.

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10 Useful Figma Plugins to Save Your Time

Figma is originally web-based vector graphics editor and prototyping tool with emphasis on real-time collaboration. The objective was to enable anyone to be creative by creating free, simple, creative tools in a browser. As for now, the desktop version is also available both for macOS and Windows.

Figma becomes popular among designers and the community grows along with the tools/plugins. Figma plugins are programs or applications created by the community that extends the functionality of Figma. Plugins allow users to customize their experience or create more efficient design workflows.

We have curated 10 useful Figma plugins to save your time for your next design works.

Batch Styler

Batch Styler allows you to change multiple text and color styles at once. For example, you want to change 30 text styles, changing text from Inter to Roboto while keeping all font weights and other styles.

In addition, changing colors in batch also can be done, for example you want to change 12 color styles with specific hue.

Chart

Save time creating chart on Figma using this plugin. It can uses real or random data to create the most popular charts with 16 types of charts. Chart supports copy-paste from editors like Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, live connection with Google Sheets and remote JSON (REST API), local CSV and JSON files.

Dark Mode Magic

This plugin will transform your design into dark mode instantly. How it works? The plugin automatically generates colors for Dark mode from a light palette and applys them to elements. You just need to select the frame then apply the plugin, and it just works.

Icon Resizer

Icons from different collections or packs could have different bounding box that will cause non-standard size of icon in your design. Icon Resizer is fantastic plugin that will make your life easier when dealing with icons from multiple packs. Resize icons into a standard size and bounding box on your design. Run this plugin once and it has already saved you hours of work.

Iconify

No need specific plugin for an icon sets, use Iconify that combines several icon packs at once, such as Material Design Icons, FontAwesome, Bootstrap Icons, Carbon, Simple Icons and many more. It has 100+ icon sets containing over 100.000 open source SVG icons.

Mapsicle

Ever need to include map in your design? Never take a screenshot of a map again! With Mapsicle, you can quickly and seamlessly place maps in your mockups. An interactive map lets you pan to the perfect location, or you can search for a place anywhere in the world. Once you’ve placed a map in your designs, head back into Mapsicle to adjust the location, style, zoom level and more. Mapsicle uses Mapbox maps to give you a variety of customization options.

Unsplash

You may have heard of Unsplash or even use it in daily basis. Yep, Unsplash provides over 2 millions of free high-resolution images for your design or prototype. This plugin make it easy to insert images from Unsplash straight into your design.

Brand Colors

Find the best color from the world’s best brands and cool apps. Fill beautiful colors from “Brands Colors plugin” straight into your design. With Brands Colors for Figma, you can search for your favorite brand’s colors or app’s colors and apply it on your design and make it awesome.

Lorem ipsum

Generate ‘Lorem ipsum’ to fill your text layers with dummy text. Select all the text layers you want to generate ‘Lorem ipsum’ for then click ‘Generate’ — it will generate for each layer uniquely. ‘Auto-generate’ will automatically fill the selected layers with the perfectly amount of ‘Lorem ipsum’ to fit their existing frame.

Logo Creator

Logo Creator is Figma plugin with prebuild collections of 300+ logos. Browse via the plugin and select the best logo or craft one using different component.

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10 Best Free Shopify Themes 2023

Consumers nowadays become more comfortable with buying products online, moreover after COVID-19 pandemic boost online behaviour. The ecommerce industry continue its growth, with the global market forecast to hit $5.1 trillion in 2026. It’s not too late to start an ecommerce business.

One of the biggest ecommerce platform, Shopify, let you set up your online store in minutes. Shopify features enables easier, faster and more scalable ecommerce website development. Using Shopify will simplify your day, as you don’t need to mess with third parties and spend extra money for web hosting.

If you just start your own ecommerce business, you can minimize your cost by using free Shopify themes rather than paid ones. This will allow you to validate your business idea before pouring big amount of money into your business.

Ap Envy

Ap Envy is fully responsive and highly customizable. It is designed in a special platform to work well in popular devices such as computers, tablets and desktop. This template is truly suitable with Fashion shops, Clothing shops, Hat shops, Shoes shops and much more. Ap Envy theme can turn your store into a luxurious and unique heaven for shopping online.

With product quick view, you can navigate quickly between several products in order to inspect a product without redirecting to product detail page. Although you can proceed to the page if looking for more details and information, our team wants to give you an extra option to change the user’s experience in a positive way.

Venture

Venture is a bold yet minimal theme designed for high volume stores with large inventories. Features include an edge-to-edge slideshow, multi-column drop-down menus, and a promotional bar.

This theme has professional layout and homepage features that will drive conversion rates. Although it’s lack of customization, this theme is great for beginners who want to quickly launch professional ecommerce website.

Ap Wood

Ap Wood is a fully responsive shopify theme that utilizes the latest technologies in Web Development to dynamically adjust for all screen sizes and services. This template meets and fits with furniture store, sofa salon, interior and exterior design. This free theme will help you elevate your business to another level through sublime layout and outstanding features.

Design is slick and simply that directs visitors’ attention straight to your products. The elegant layout will not only make your products stand out, but will also create an efficient use of screen space. However, the secret is behind Menu button. It can be said that FREE AP WOOD is user friendly theme as all sections such as size, price, and colors are classified eye-catching and visually.

Simple

Simple is a clean and minimal theme, perfect for showcasing products. Features include a mobile-first responsive design, sidebar navigation, image animations, and product image zoom.

This theme is the best option for clear and minimal store, highly recommended for new starter online business. The other advantages of using minimal theme is shorter loading time that will increase user experience in positive way, leading to conversion.

Boundless

Boundless is a photography-first theme with a minimal UI that features edge-to-edge photography. Boundless is mobile-first and suited for stores with medium to large inventories.

Fresh and slick theme, optimized for large images in a dedicated product gallery. Collection images are presented in a full-width grid layout, great for showcasing product imagery. This theme also support home page video from YouTube or Vimeo.

Curator

Curator Fashion Free Shopify Theme is designed with high applicability. By that, it can be easily adjusted to be fit with any online stores from man fashion shop, clothes and accessories store to handbags, shoe shop.

This theme has an extremely impressive homepage which makes any guests visiting your site be attracted in the first sight. Banners with various dimensions placed flexibly in different positions on the website help you show outstanding contents to customers as big sale off, new arrivals, discounts.

Supply

Supply is a clean, easy-to-navigate theme perfect for merchants with large inventories and several collections. Features include prominent navigation, multiple home page collections, sidebar filtering, and easy integration with the Product Reviews app.

This theme is built for large catalogs and comes with featured collections on home page. Customers can also filter collection pages by brand, price, and other customizable options.

Forest

Forest is a best, popular, modern and clean responsive furniture Shopify theme. You can easily customize or edit this theme because it has well documented code style and also follow standard coding algorithm standard. 

Forest theme is beautiful and very customizable, everyone can completely personalize. Simply powerful and provides customers with a seamless, fluid shopping experience.

Debut

Debut is a flexible theme that is suitable for all stores, regardless of inventory size. With Debut you can quickly set up a store and start selling. Debut looks polished without any theme customizations.

Debut is ideal if you want to start selling right away, without the need to make a lot of customizations. This theme also make sure that your store displays well on tablets and smartphones.

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5 Reasons Why Web Design Is a Good Career Choice in 2023

Web design career

So, are you walking your road to being a web designer? The perk of being a web designer is now everybody’s secret. There’s no doubt that it is one of the most popular career paths for those who have the formal education or not. It’s easy to learn, versatile, and it pays well.

Undeniably, a web designer is on the list of those jobs with the highest salary. Once you’ve made your brand, money will keep coming. But besides that, here are top 5 reasons of why web design is a good career choice.

Web Design is Limitless

You’ll not run out of ideas when dealing with web designing stuff. This is a profession that lets you grasp any opportunity of being a creative individual. In the past, traditional web designer only focuses on “making a website,” but it’s more than that. Web design trends have many possibilities in terms of a type of work. Well, it’s still designing a website—but it’s no longer about what we do, instead of what we create.

It’s More than Just a Pretty Face

Web design trends are more of an experimental work, in which every detail of your work is essential. The designers have transformed into something greater with the role of making a platform looks attractive to the users. The idea is not just about building a beautiful-looking website anymore but to channel the stories from the clients to the users. 

Interactive User Interface

When creating a website, one thing you should remember is the user interface. How attractive you want it to be? In what way do you want the audience to enjoy the information provided? 

The reliable user interface is among web design trends, which allows the user to chat, send a message, and inquire about the company’s service through the website platform. It is now the time for a conversational interface—a conversational commerce that will revolve the idea of future communication.

Visually Responsive

As limitless as it is, there are thousands or even millions of ways to build an engrossing and interactive website using GIFs and animations. Now see, how many GIFs do you find on the internet five years ago? Today, they are everywhere. It’s going mainstream. The use of GIFs is increasing in the web design trends because they are very versatile, a great tool to explain a chart flow, serving product knowledge, or is simply used as a form of entertainment.

Next generation of web design trends should feature a responsive model. It means that the site cannot only be accessed through computer or laptop, but the designers also need to think how it will fit and adjust to different devices.

It is the role of visualization that makes web design trends limitless because you can come up with anything, but it must be visual. Customers are now more likely to be presented with a card: more minimalistic, yet comprehensive information in your hand.

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Freelance or Working in An Agency, Both are Great

It’s quite a dispute when it comes to deciding which one is better between choosing a web designer career in an agency or be your own boss. Both have great possibilities and will open many opportunities for working with any type of clients. However, it’s better if you take these factors into your considerations before going for your path.

Freelance Web Designer

No doubt that you will end up choosing your very first experience of web designer career as a freelancer. It is always fun to be your own boss, which means you can decide what to do or not to do, whether you want to take the deal or not, etc.

Many folks also specialize in a niche that allows them to become a remarkable artist in their expertise and work according to that. They don’t have to follow the rule because they make their own rule. 

Not only that, but many clients also find that working with freelancer allows them to spend less dollar, but with quality. However, it usually depends on what service you are going for because if you are looking for a complete website, built with responsive and reliable design, some freelancers can also run up an extra bill.

A freelance web designer career gives both you and your client a great flexibility to work in terms of time, location, and cost. You can decide your timetable. You can work under irregular time scale, which allows you to accord the schedule and sorting out your priorities for deadlines and any changes.

Working in An Agency

If you are uncomfortable of choosing your web designer career as a freelancer, there’ll always be an agency for you to work in. Being part of the agency means you have to work in a team with a different background. It’s because a web design agency mostly offers a broad range of services, from designing to digital marketing demands. So, capability to work with a team is a must.

The eclectic services along with the ongoing support sometimes become your next responsibility. Freelancers will end their relationship with the clients once the handover is done, but by working in an agency, you may need to provide SEO, digital marketing, or e-commerce service.

However, a web designer career in an agency will help you to access miscellaneous licensed platform as your resources. That means greater possibilities for the finished product.

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Earning as a Web Designer

Speaking of the compensation, you may figure that a web designer salary and freelance web designer earning can reach up to $53.000 per year or even more than that. There will always be additional income that fit your expertise as long as you can extend your work to various projects.

This is one of the biggest factors contributing to the high level of job satisfaction among web designers. When you are working in an agency, the approximate salary is between $38.000 and $74.000 annually, including bonuses, commission, and profit sharing, also depending on various elements.

Assuming you are working for around $30 per hour, and spending 40 hours per week for 46 weeks in a year, it means you have 1.840 working hours in a year. Do the math. It’s quite promising to pick a career in the web designing field. Most of the time, web designer salary and freelance web designer earning can even make up to $40 per hour or end up with total income as much as $80.000 per year.

Fortunately, web designer salary and freelance web designer earning are not limited to working hours, because there’s still much more to be considered. Supposed you have a great portfolio that worth extra bill. For a designer, the longer your experience and the more extensive your portfolio, clients will appraise you better than those who don’t have as much experience as you do.

Another important factor that affects web designer salary and freelance web designer earning is the size of the company you are dealing with. Startup businesses usually have a smaller budget yet less competitive, and larger companies mostly have a huge budget, but the competition is savage.

When setting your own rate, the first important thing is determining your own skill. If you possess an exceptional set of unique skills, it will place you in a higher marketplace and probably help you to command a higher fee. More knowledge about digital marketing as well as the ability to deliver more traffic can boost up your bill.

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Another Design, Another Challenge

What’s a job without challenge? Web design challenge is right before your eyes, facing you with a fierceness that demands creative solution so you can be still in the game. In order for you to be part of the job, you may need to master the challenges as follow.

Integration

The first web design challenge is how to make your designed website have seamless synchronization with third party application. This also influences the usability of your design, thus, popping up a question whether the interaction is real enough for the users.

Building a website with high usability requires anticipation on the interface. Make sure you ask the client to test every change made, and place yourself as a customer who needs to use the website.

Accessibility

What’s the use of building a beautiful-looking design if the target customers cannot access it? Among the web design challenge is accessibility. How can you make your design usable for everyone, especially the target customers? If you don’t regard this factor, your website may be unusable for the audiences.

Responsiveness

A great web designer is the one who can create website available for any platform and multiple devices. The challenge is on because traditionally, the website is only accessible in a computer. However, a computer is now a less popular device than a smartphone or PC tablet. So, better be certain that the design is infallible.

User Experience

Another web design challenge is how to make the site looks less conventional and more futuristic. By that, I mean a more reliable user interface and sophisticated design that will awe your audiences. A great user interface can lure the users to grasp any information served on the website efficiently.

Speed

Most users will abandon a site that takes more than 10 seconds to load. In fact, according to a survey, nearly half of the users would expect the site to load in less than 3 seconds. This challenge will make you think about how to prevent hiccup and slowing processing.

Creativity Becomes Your Daily Life

If you’ve been designing for sometimes now, you are probably more creative than the average person out there. Then how web designing affects my creativity? The first rule to create an attractive website is superb creativity skills. So, creativity becomes part of your daily life. You should be able to work with various patterns, lines, diagrams, charts, pictures, animations, etc. and studying your own style so you can come up with certain expertise.

When you ask how web designing affects my creativity, the answer is it can open infinite possibilities that influence your ability to create an interactive website. However, it is essential to always remember that you’re not working alone. Your design is for your clients, the interface is for the users, so you need to limit your creativity according to their need.

Based on the Google’s research, most users favor websites that look simple and familiar, and they judge the aesthetic factor in less than 1 second. Therefore, it is important for a web designer like you to think how to attract more audience with your exceptional creativity, without violating what the clients want.

Being a web designer will push you to keep thinking and use your loaf constantly to create a magnificent first impression. The creativity will affect your job, to the extent that being less creative is not good, but being too creative is not a safe option as well.

To solve the question about how web designing affects my creativity is to create a prototype. Once you have one in mind, you can adjust the look according to the target users. If you are designing for a specific group, it’s best to choose safe route and stay close to the original design. If you have the chance to create a website for more creative audiences, a prototypical website may look dull for them.

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The Verdict

Choosing web designer as your career path can bring many advantages, especially if it’s your passion and you’re good at it. I’m not saying it will be a smooth journey because there are many competitors out there, but it can be overcome by building a brand. Find your expertise and promote yourself as you create portfolio gradually.

It’s an excellent career choice because it pays well, offers limitless probability, and enhance your creativity. There are challenges along the way, but it’ll just help you to be a better competitor. So, are you ready to become a web designer?

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10 Fresh & Free Bootstrap 5 Admin and Dashboard Templates 2023

Bootstrap was created by designer and developer at Twitter in mid-2010, originally named Twitter Blueprint. It served as the style guide for internal tools at the company. Twitter Blueprint renamed to Bootstrap and released as an open-source project on August 19, 2011. Now it continues to be the most popular front-end frameworks and open-source project in the world.

Once we add Bootstrap to a project, it provides basic style definitions for all HTML elements, creating uniform visual for common UI elements such as typography, forms, tables, buttons and so on. The developers have opportunity to further customize those appearances by overriding CSS classes defined in Bootstrap.

As for now, Bootstrap has released the latest version, Bootstrap 5 which added more components, flexibility and convenient utility classes that can be extended via utility API, Sass-generated tool to generate utility classes. With all the features provided, Bootstrap is not only suitable for informative web pages, but can handle complex web app front-end such as admin or dashboard templates.

Using admin template is the fastest way to create web application or SaaS (Software as a Service). With such complexities and UI elements needed to create a beautiful web application, many designers and front-end developers offer premium admin templates. However, there are also the free versions and we have hand-picked 10 free Bootstrap 5 admin and dashboard templates for your next project in 2022.

PlainAdmin

Looking for a free, all-in-one admin template? Get PlainAdmin & get blown-away by the modern & flexible design, excellent documentation, and endless customization possibilities. It doesn’t matter if you need to create a backend for your app or site, the team of developers is constantly adding new features and improving the codebase. All that in a package that’s built on a responsive framework with modern features.

Stop wasting time looking for the right admin dashboard template! PlainAdmin is the first Bootstrap 5 admin template to offer the full range of dashboard components, pages, charts, graphs, and UI elements.

CoreUI

CoreUI provides  ready-made, reusable, and commonly used widgets and UI components and is delivered with a ready-to-use environment, so you don’t have to waste time configuring the project. CoreUI’s responsive components delivers apps that works on all major devices, browsers, and operating systems. The other important aspect is easy to use, UI Components and widgets are written with readability in mind.

Portal

Portal is a free Bootstrap 5 admin dashboard template made for developers. The design is simple and modern and the code is written in a modular way. It’s the perfect starter template for building your web app’s admin portal. 

All the source SCSS files are included so you can change the color scheme and fine tune the design components to suit your app’s branding. Built on the latest Bootstrap 5 alpha version this template is lightweight (no jQuery, only vanilla JS) and future-ready.

ArchitectUI

ArchitectUI Dashboard Free is lightweight and comes packed with a minimal set of components to get you started. If you have a simple application, it’s the perfect solution for you. It’s built on Bootstrap 5.1 and features a scalable architecture just like its wiser, older sibling – ArchitectUI HTML Pro theme. ArchitectUI also provides Pro version which is a paid templates, however both Pro and Free versions come with the ability to change their header and sidebar background color and style.

Material Dashboard 2

Designed for those who like bold elements and beautiful websites, Material Dashboard 2 is ready to help you create stunning websites and web apps. This free template provides pages like Sign In, Notifications, Profile, and so on. Just choose between a Basic Design, an illustration, or a cover and you are good to go!

Material Dashboard 2 is built with over 60 frontend individual elements, like buttons, inputs, navbars, nav tabs, cards, or alerts, giving you the freedom of choosing and combining. All components can take variations in color, which you can easily modify using SASS files and classes.

Xtreme Bootstrap Admin Lite

This template will help you kick off your online presence in style and is flexible and responsive to work across screens and browsers. This template is perfect for tracking all kinds of data in an efficient and simplified manner. The best part is that you can get your project up and running without having to spend a dime on expensive designers or developers.

Xtreme Admin Lite is a Bootstrap 5 admin template that can greatly improve the quality and aesthetic appeal of your applications. With a number of configurations and customisations available, this template can definitely let you add your creative touch to it.

NiceAdmin

NiceAdmin is a powerful admin and dashboard template based latest version of Bootstrap framework. It provides a clean and intuitive design that is focused on user experience. The custom plugins included has been carefully customized to fit with the overall look of the theme, working seamlessly across browsers, tablets and phones.

NiceAdmin comes with lots of reusable and beautiful UI elements and components like tables, charts, login form, registration form, profile page and many more. It will just fit to any app and project you’re building.

AdminKit

A professional Admin & Dashboard template based on Bootstrap 5 that comes with hundreds of UI components, forms, tables, charts, pages and icons. AdminKit does not require jQuery and neither does one of the 3rd party libraries AdminKit is using.

Elegant

Elegant is a simple free admin dashboard template built with Bootstrap 5. It is a sophisticated, clean, and got minimalistic design for admin panels, software backends, and dashboards with material design. This template is designed by Jamshid, who is a passionate web developer and UI/UX designer. It is 100% responsive, appropriately fits all the retina screens, and also compatible with modern browsers.

Elegant dashboard built with HTML5, and JS libraries like (Dropzone, Chart.js, Quil.js). It comes with a bunch of cards displaying data, charts, lists, a collapsible navbar, search box, dropdown menu, and more. The template also includes a toggle button for switching between light and dark mode. The dashboard, sign-in, and sign-up pages are all included in this free template.

Mazer

Mazer is Bootstrap 5 admin dashboard template for faster development and workflow. No jQuery dependency. For free version, this templates offers you with tons of UI elements, components and  layouts. There are four additional layout provided by this template such as 1 column, vertical navbar, RTL layout and horizontal menu. Mazer also provides components that will save your time on building advanced and complex components such as datatables, drag and drop uploader and charts.