Month: September 2024

Diwali, the vibrant Festival of Lights, is one of the most celebrated and cherished Hindu festivals, symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness and good over evil.

As families and communities come together to celebrate this joyous occasion, designers and marketers often seek visually captivating ways to honor the festival through their projects.

In this blog post, we’ve curated a beautiful collection of Diwali-themed templates, icons, graphics, and resources to help you craft stunning visuals for your flyers, posters, social media, and more. From traditional oil lamps (diyas) and rangoli patterns to fireworks and festive symbols, these design assets capture the essence of Diwali in a visually engaging way.

Diwali Celebration Flyer Templates

Modern Diwali Flyer Template

This flyer template is a fantastic resource for anyone organizing Diwali events, parties, or festivals. This easy-to-customize, well-organized template comes in both PSD and Ai files that are ready-to-print, featuring a modern design that truly stands out. The artboard is A4 size and layered for easy editing.

Diwali Festival Flyer Template

This is a must-have for any Diwali event or celebration. This easy-to-customize and thoroughly organized asset contains both PSD and Ai files – all set to an A4 artboard size and are print-ready at 300 DPI in CMYK. A readme file accompanying the pack provides details about the fonts used.

Happy Diwali Flyer Template

This is an artistically designed flyer template for your special Diwali event. It’s amazingly flexible, available in both Ai and PSD files, with well-organized layers that are fully editable. Sized at 21×29.7 cm + bleed and equipped with a CMYK 300 DPI color mode, the flyer ensures high-quality prints promising to leave a lasting impression.

Creative Happy Diwali Flyer Template

This is a vibrant and dynamic asset perfect for any Diwali event, be it parties, festive functions, or special events. It is an A4 size template that is simple to edit, allowing customization of color, font, and text. You can easily personalize it by inserting your event’s title, date, and time as well as your website name. It includes various files, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and a help file.

Flat Design Diwali Flyer Set

A vibrant flyer template perfect for any Diwali event or project. This comprehensive set includes templates for flyers, Instagram posts and stories, and Facebook posts, all with a colorful flat design that can be customized via Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Although fonts and images are not included, the files are well-organized, making customization a breeze.

Diwali Event Flyer Template

This flyer template is ideal for organizing any Diwali related events. These easily customizable templates, compatible with Adobe Illustrator CC and Adobe Photoshop CS4 or later, come with finely separated layers for texts, images, and graphics for your convenience.

Bold Diwali Celebration Flyer Set

This is a bold and vibrant flyer template set perfect for any Diwali festivities. The set includes a flyer, social media feeds, and a social media story, all with ready-to-print or post dimensions. Downloadables include AI, PSD, and EPS files along with a font link.

Diwali Celebration Flyer Template

An excellent choice for any Diwali events, parties or festivals. The template is customizable, editable and can be quickly adapted to your unique needs. It features a creative design, comes in PSD and Ai files and is print-ready at 300 DPI. The template uses the commercial-free fonts MONTSERRAT and Kingthings Foundation for a touch of elegance.

Editable Diwali Flyer Template

Bring Diwali, the iconic Indian Festival of Lights, to life with this bright and customizable flyer template. The design, featuring festive Diya Lamps, is perfect to promote Diwali celebrations or other Indian-themed events, including Indian weddings, Republic Day, or Rama Navami. It is available in Illustrator Ai, Photoshop PSD, and Vector EPS formats, with an A4 final printed size in a CMYK color space.

Simple Happy Diwali Flyer Template

This is a creatively designed flyer template for your special Diwali celebration event. This flyer, available in both Ai and PSD files, features neat and well-organized layers that are fully editable. With dimensions of 21×29.7 cm + bleed, and a clean, CMYK 300 DPI, CS5 specification, it allows for stunning visuals and easy customization.

Diwali Festival Icons

50 Diwali Icons Set

Add an Indian touch to your marketing campaigns with the 50 Diwali icons set. From Diwali lamps and ornate décor to lively firecrackers, this inclusive pack captures the essence of India’s vibrant festival. Whether you want to adjust the color, size or text, these 100% vector icons are fully customizable across various editing programs.

Creative Diwali Icon Set

Explore the creative Diwali icon set, an ensemble of 12 aesthetically pleasing designs themed around Diwali. Each icon is easily customizable, with the ability to alter colors to match individual preferences. Icons are perfect for any design area and are conveniently available in both AI and SVG formats, making them a versatile addition to your creative toolkit.

Diwali Festival Elements Set

This is a delightful assortment of Diwali-themed icons in a sleek flat design. It offers a range of quaint illustrations, from festive lanterns, candles, garlands, fireworks, to intricate mandalas and traditional Indian ornaments. Available in multiple formats such as EPS10, AI, JPG, PDF, PNG, and SVG, it’s a wonderfully vibrant way to celebrate the festival of lights in your projects.

Diwali 3D Icons Pack

This Diwali 3D icons pack is a striking collection of 3D icons that can enhance your design work significantly. Crafted with attention to detail, these icons bring depth and sophistication to your projects. Included formats are PNG for web use, SVG for lossless resizing, and PSD for customization in Adobe Photoshop.

30 Diwali Element Icons

This icon pack offers a range of beautifully designed flat vector icons, all based on a 48px grid. Available in multiple file formats, including AI, EPS, SVG and PNG, these icons are compatible with Adobe Illustrator CS6 and CC. The package includes individual PNG files in 5 sizes and an Iconjar, making it versatile for a variety of creative projects.

15 Diwali Icons Set

This is a vibrant assemblage of Diwali-themed symbols, featuring a lotus flower, candle, gift, firework, flag, footprints, the Hindu Om symbol, a Diwali emblem, among others. These are served in a range of formats such as PNG (64px to 512px), SVG, PSD, and vector, facilitating easy incorporation into your project or customization in their original formats.

Diwali Graphics & Illustrations

Happy Diwali Illustration

Explore the vibrancy of Diwali with this beautiful illustration. This unique design showcases children holding traditional lanterns in front of a colorful rangoli, all set against a striking purple backdrop. The file includes an EPS 10 and a high-resolution 300DPI JPG, making for a versatile, ready-to-use asset.

Celebrating Diwali Illustration

This is a vibrant, beautifully constructed vector image in both SVG and PNG format. Perfect for highlighting the sparkling Indian festival of lights, this asset can effortlessly add a dash of cultural richness to your Diwali or holiday-themed projects.

16 Diwali Illustrations Set

This is a vibrant and authentic collection of images and motifs associated with the Hindu festival, Diwali. Ideal for individuals and professionals alike, it adds an ethnic touch to wedding invitations, banners, and promotions. This versatile set, including images of diyas and lamps, is available in Illustrator Ai, Vector EPS, Clipart PNG, and Vector SVG formats with a final print size of 3000 x 2000px.

Happy Diwali Vector Clipart Pack

This is a delight for those who want to bring the festive spirit of Diwali to life. This is an exciting collection of 20 vector objects that includes favourites like an Indian boy and girl, vibrant mandalas, decorative lamps, and more. All elements are available in various formats like AI, EPS, PDF, PNG, and SVG, and are illustrated in a playful, cartoon style, making this clipart pack as fun as it is functional.

Flat Design Diwali Illustration Set

This is an ideal graphics pack for your next Diwali celebration design. Comprising fully customizable and editable Adobe Illustrator files, it allows you to create your own scene composition perfectly suited to any presentation or landing page.

Diwali Festival of Light Illustration Set

Immerse yourself in the vibrant Diwali festival illustration set. This captivating collection includes images of children joyously brandishing oil lamps and sparklers amidst a backdrop of hanging Indian lanterns and enchanting sky lanterns. Available in EPS 10, high-resolution 300DPI JPG, and PNG formats with transparent background, these illustrations are ready to enhance your creative projects!

Free Diwali Mockups & Graphics

Free Happy Diwali Background

This is a free Diwali template that features a beautiful background for showcasing your Diwali-themed designs. It features a Diwali-themed starry background surrounding the scene as well.

Free Diwali Mockup Template

If you’re working on a Diwali celebration card, invitation, or greeting card, this free mockup template is perfect for showcasing your design. The template has a realistic design with lots of beautiful Diwali elements.

Free Diwali Banner Template

You can use this free Diwali banner template to create an attractive design to spread the word about your Diwali festivals and special events. It comes in PSD format and you can fully customize it to your preference.

Free Diwali Poster Template

You can download this poster template for free to promote your Dwaili festival events like a pro. The template features a stylish scene that includes details about the event as well. It’s available in PSD format.

Free Diwali Sale Flyer Template

This flyer template is also free to download. It includes a beautiful Diwali-themed scene featuring a natural-looking setting for promoting your special festival season sales and discounts. The template is easily customizable to your preference.

An approach for creating masonry layouts in vanilla CSS is one of those “holy grail” aspirations. I actually tend to plop masonry and the classic “Holy Grail” layout in the same general era of web design. They’re different types of layouts, of course, but the Holy Grail was a done deal when we got CSS Grid.

That leaves masonry as perhaps the last standing layout from the CSS 3 era that is left without a baked-in solution. I might argue that masonry is no longer en vogue so to speak, but there clearly are use cases for packing items with varying sizes into columns based on available space. And masonry is still very much in the wild.

Steam is picking up on a formal solution. We even have a CSSWG draft specification for it. But notice how the draft breaks things out.

Grid-integrated syntax? Grid-independent syntax? We’ve done gone and multiplied CSS!

That’s the context for this batch of notes. There are two competing proposals for CSS masonry at the time of writing and many opinions are flying around advocating one or the other. I have personal thoughts on it, but that’s not important. I’ll be happy with whatever the consensus happens to be. Both proposals have merits and come with potential challenges — it’s a matter of what you prioritize which, in this case, I believe is a choice between leveraging existing CSS layout features and the ergonomics of a fresh new approach.

But let’s get to some notes from discussions that are already happening to help get a clearer picture of things!

What is masonry layout?

Think of it like erecting a wall of stones or bricks.

The sizes of the bricks and stones don’t matter — the column (or less commonly a row) is the boss of sizing things. Pack as many stones or bricks in the nearest column and then those adapt to the column’s width. Or more concisely, we’re laying out unevenly sized items in a column such that there aren’t uneven gaps between them.

Examples, please?

Here’s perhaps the most widely seen example in a CodePen, courtesy of Dave DeSandro, using his Masonry.js tool:

I use this example because, if I remember correctly, Masonry.js was what stoked the masonry trend in, like 2010 or something. Dave implemented it on Beyoncé’s website which certainly gave masonry a highly visible profile. Sometimes you might hear masonry called a “Pinterest-style” layout because, well, that’s been the site’s signature design — perhaps even its brand — since day one.

Here’s a faux example Jhey put together using flexbox:

Chris also rounded up a bunch of other workarounds in 2019 that get us somewhat there, under ideal conditions. But none of these are based on standardized approaches or features. I mean, columns and flexbox are specced but weren’t designed with masonry in mind. But with masonry having a long track record of being used, it most certainly deserves a place in the CSS specs.

There are two competing proposals

This isn’t exactly news. In fact, we can get earlier whiffs of this looking back to 2020. Rachel Andrew introduced the concept of making masonry a sub-feature of grid in a Smashing Magazine article.

Let’s fast-forward to 2022. We had an editor’s draft for CSS Masonry baked into the CSS Grid Layout Module 3 specification. Jenn Simmons motioned for the CSSWG to move it forward to be a first public working draft. Five days later, Chromium engineer Ian Kilpatrick raised two concerns about moving things forward as part of the CSS Grid Layout module, the first being related to sizing column tracks and grid’s layout algorithm:

Grid works by placing everything in the grid ahead of time, then sizing the rows/columns to fit the items. Masonry fundamentally doesn’t work this way as you need to size the rows/columns ahead of time – then place items within those rows/columns.

As a result the way the current specification re-uses the grid sizing logic leads to poor results when intrinsically sizing tracks, and if the grid is intrinsically-sized itself (e.g. if its within a grid/flex/table, etc).

Good point! Grid places grid items in advance ahead of sizing them to fit into the available space. Again, it’s the column’s size that bosses things around in masonry. It logically follows that we would need to declare masonry and configure the column track sizes in advance to place things according to space. The other concern concerns accessibility as far as visual and reading order.

That stopped Jenn’s motion for first public working draft status dead in its tracks in early 2023. If we fast-forward to July of this year, we get Ian’s points for an alternative path forward for masonry. That garnered support from all sorts of CSS heavyweights, including Rachel Andrew who authored the CSS Grid specification.

And, just a mere three weeks ago from today, fantasai shared a draft for an alternate proposal put together with Tab Atkins. This proposal, you’ll see, is specific to masonry as its own module.

And thus we have two competing proposals to solve masonry in CSS.

The case for merging masonry and grid

Rounding up comments from GitHub tickets and blog posts…

Flexbox is really designed for putting things into a line and distributing spare space. So that initial behaviour of putting all your things in a row is a great starting point for whatever you might want to do. It may be all you need to do. It’s not difficult as a teacher to then unpack how to add space inside or outside items, align them, or make it a column rather than a row. Step by step, from the defaults.

I want to be able to take the same approach with display: masonry.

[…]

We can’t do that as easily with grid, because of the pre-existing initial values. The good defaults for grid don’t work as well for masonry. Currently you’d need to:

1. Add display: grid, to get a single column grid layout.
2. Add grid-template-columns: <track-listing>, and at the moment there’s no way to auto-fill auto sized tracks so you’ll need to decide on how many. Using grid-template-columns: repeat(3, auto), for example.
3. Add grid-template-rows: masonry.
4. Want to define rows instead? Switch the masonry value to apply to  grid-template-columns and now define your rows. Once again, you have to explicitly define rows.

Rachel Andrew, “Masonry and good defaults”

For what it’s worth, Rachel has been waving this flag since at least 2020. The ergonomics of display: masonry with default configurations that solve baseline functionality are clear and compelling. The default behavior oughta match the feature’s purpose and grid just ain’t a great set of default configurations to jump into a masonry layout. Rachel’s point is that teaching and learning grid to get to understand masonry behavior unnecessarily lumps two different formatting contexts into one, which is a certain path to confusion. I find it tough to refute this, as I also come at this from a teaching perspective. Seen this way, we might say that merging features is another lost entry point into front-end development.

In recent years, the two primary methods we’ve used to pull off masonry layouts are:

• Flexbox for consistent row sizes. We adjust the flex-basis based on the item’s expected percentage of the total row width.
• Grid for consistent column sizes. We set the row span based on the expected aspect ratio of the content, either server-side for imagery or client-side for dynamic content.

What I’ve personally observed is:

• Neither feels more intuitive than the other as a starting point for masonry. So it feels a little itchy to single out Grid as a foundation.
• While there is friction when teaching folks when to use a Flexbox versus a Grid, it’s a much bigger leap for contributors to wrap their heads around properties that significantly change behavior (such as flex-wrap or grid-auto-flow: dense).

Tyler Sticka, commenting on GitHub Issue #9041

It’s true! If I had to single out either flexbox or grid as the starting poit for masonry (and I doubt I would either way), I might lean flexbox purely for the default behavior of aligning flexible items in a column.

The syntax and semantics of the CSS that will drive masonry layout is a concern that is separate from the actual layout mechanics itself, which internally in implementation by user agents can still re-use parts of the existing mechanics for grids, including subgrids. For cases where masonry is nested inside grid, or grid inside masonry, the relationship between the two can be made explicit.

@jgotten, commenting on GitHub Issue #9041

Rachel again, this time speaking on behalf of the Chrome team:

There are two related reasons why we feel that masonry is better defined outside of grid layout—the potential of layout performance issues, and the fact that both masonry and grid have features that make sense in one layout method but not the other.

The case for keeping masonry separate from grid

One of the key benefits of integrating masonry into the grid layout (as in CASE 2) is the ability to leverage existing grid features, such as subgrids. Subgrids allow for cohesive designs among child elements within a grid, something highly desirable in many masonry layouts as well. Additionally, I believe that future enhancements to the grid layout will also be beneficial for masonry, making their integration even more valuable. By treating masonry as an extension of the grid layout, developers would be able to start using it immediately, without needing to learn a completely new system.

Kokomi, commenting on GitHub Issue #9041

It really would be a shame if keeping masonry separate from grid prevents masonry from being as powerful as it could be with access to grid’s feature set:

I think the arguments for a separate display: masonry focus too much on the potential simplicity at the expense of functionality. Excluding Grid’s powerful features would hinder developers who want or need more than basic layouts. Plus, introducing another display type could lead to confusion and fragmentation in the layout ecosystem.

Angel Ponce, commenting on GitHub Issue #9041

Rachel counters that, though.

I want express my strong support for adding masonry to display:grid. The fact that it gracefully degrades to a traditional grid is a huge benefit IMO. But also, masonry layout is already possible (with some constraints) in Grid layout today!

Naman Goel, Angel Ponce, commenting on GitHub Issue #9041

Chris mildly voiced interest in merging the two in 2020 before the debate got larger and more heated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but rather an acknowledgment that it could make sense:

I like the grid-template-rows: masonry; syntax because I think it clearly communicates: “You aren’t setting these rows. In fact, there aren’t even really rows at all anymore, we’ll take care of that.” Which I guess means there are no rows to inherit in subgrid, which also makes sense.

Where we at?

Collecting feedback. Rachel, Ian, and Tab published a joint call for folks like you and me to add our thoughts to the bag. That was eight days ago as of this writing. Not only is it a call to action, but it’s also an excellent overview of the two competing ideas and considerations for each one. You’ll want to add your feedback to GitHub Issue #9041.

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CSS Masonry & CSS Grid originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The leaves are shining in the most beautiful colors and pumpkins are taking over the front porches. It’s time to welcome the spookiest of all months: October! To get your desktop ready for fall and the upcoming Halloween season, artists and designers from across the globe once again got their ideas flowing and designed inspiring wallpapers for you to indulge in.

The wallpapers in this post come in versions with and without a calendar for October 2024 and can be downloaded for free. And since so many beautiful and unique designs evolve around our little wallpapers challenge every month (we’ve been running it for more than 13 years already, can you believe it?!), we also added some timeless October treasures from our wallpapers archives to the collection. 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 October!

• 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 a wallpaper!
  Did you know that you could get featured in our next wallpapers post, too? We are always looking for creative talent.

Happy Halloween

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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• without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

Reptile Awareness Day

“Let’s celebrate reptiles and raise awareness of their vital role in ecosystems. Many species face threats, so let’s learn, appreciate, and protect these incredible creatures and their habitats!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

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• without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

Make Today A Good Day

“‘Make today a good day’ is a simple yet powerful reminder to take control of the present moment. It emphasizes that our attitude and actions shape our experience, encouraging positivity and purpose. Each day brings new opportunities, and by choosing to make it good, we invite growth, joy, and fulfilment into our lives.” — Designed by Hitesh Puri from Delhi, India.

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• without calendar: 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

The Dungeon Master

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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• without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

Happy Dussehra

“I was inspired by Dussehra’s rich symbolism and cultural significance while creating this design. The festival celebrates the triumph of good over evil. The bow and arrow become the central focus, while the bold red background, golden accents, and the temple’s silhouette add a sense of grandeur and spirituality.” — Designed by Cronix from the United States.

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• without calendar: 800x480, 800x600, 1024x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1440x960, 1600x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800, 3072x1920, 3840x2160, 5120x2880

The Crow And The Ghosts

“If my heart were a season, it would be autumn.” — Designed by Lívia Lénárt from Hungary.

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The Night Drive

Designed by Vlad Gerasimov from Georgia.

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Autumn’s Splendor

“The transition to autumn brings forth a rich visual tapestry of warm colors and falling leaves, making it a natural choice for a wallpaper theme.” — Designed by Farhan Srambiyan from India.

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National Fossil Day

“Join us in commemorating National Fossil Day, a day dedicated to honoring the wonders of Earth’s prehistoric past. On this special day, we invite you to step back in time and explore the remarkable world of fossils. These ancient remnants of life on our planet offer a glimpse into the evolution of life, from the tiniest microorganisms to the towering giants that once roamed the Earth.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

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Magical October

“‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’ (L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables)” — Designed by Lívi Lénárt from Hungary.

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Bird Migration Portal

“October is a significant month for me because it is when my favorite type of bird travels south. For that reason I have chosen to write about the swallow. When I was young, I had a bird’s nest not so far from my room window. I watched the birds almost every day; because those swallows always left their nests in October. As a child, I dreamt that they all flew together to a nicer place, where they were not so cold.” — Designed by Eline Claeys from Belgium.

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Ghostbusters

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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Spooky Town

Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany.

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Hello Autumn

“Did you know that squirrels don’t just eat nuts? They really like to eat fruit, too. Since apples are the seasonal fruit of October, I decided to combine both things into a beautiful image.” — Designed by Erin Troch from Belgium.

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Hanlu

“The term ‘Hanlu’ literally translates as ‘Cold Dew.’ The cold dew brings brisk mornings and evenings. Eventually the briskness will turn cold, as winter is coming soon. And chrysanthemum is the iconic flower of Cold Dew.” — Designed by Hong, ZI-Qing from Taiwan.

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Discovering The Universe

“Autumn is the best moment for discovering the universe. I am looking for a new galaxy or maybe… a UFO!” — Designed by Verónica Valenzuela from Spain.

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King Of The Pirates

Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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Goddess Makosh

“At the end of the kolodar, as everything begins to ripen, the village sets out to harvesting. Together with the farmers goes Makosh, the Goddess of fields and crops, ensuring a prosperous harvest. What she gave her life and health all year round is now mature and rich, thus, as a sign of gratitude, the girls bring her bread and wine. The beautiful game of the goddess makes the hard harvest easier, while the song of the farmer permeates the field.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

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Game Night And Hot Chocolate

“To me, October is all about cozy evenings with hot chocolate, freshly baked cookies, and a game night with friends or family.” — Designed by Lieselot Geirnaert from Belgium.

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Strange October Journey

“October makes the leaves fall to cover the land with lovely auburn colors and brings out all types of weird with them.” — Designed by Mi Ni Studio from Serbia.

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Autumn Deer

Designed by Amy Hamilton from Canada.

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Dope Code

“October is the month when the weather in Poland starts to get colder, and it gets very rainy, too. You can’t always spend your free time outside, so it’s the perfect opportunity to get some hot coffee and work on your next cool web project!” — Designed by Robert Brodziak from Poland.

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Transitions

“To me, October is a transitional month. We gradually slide from summer to autumn. That’s why I chose to use a lot of gradients. I also wanted to work with simple shapes, because I think of October as the ‘back to nature/back to basics month’.” — Designed by Jelle Denturck from Belgium.

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Autumn In The Forest

“Autumn is a wonderful time to go for walks in the forest!” — Designed by Hilda Rytteke from Sweden.

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Shades Of Gold

“We are about to experience the magical imagery of nature, with all the yellows, ochers, oranges, and reds coming our way this fall. With all the subtle sunrises and the burning sunsets before us, we feel so joyful that we are going to shout it out to the world from the top of the mountains.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

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Happy Fall!

“Fall is my favorite season!” — Designed by Thuy Truong from the United States.

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Ghostober

Designed by Ricardo Delgado from Mexico City.

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First Scarf And The Beach

“When I was little, my parents always took me and my sister for a walk at the beach in Nieuwpoort. We didn't really do those beach walks in the summer but always when the sky started to turn gray and the days became colder. My sister and I always took out our warmest scarfs and played in the sand while my parents walked behind us. I really loved those Saturday or Sunday mornings where we were all together. I think October (when it’s not raining) is the perfect month to go to the beach for ‘uitwaaien’ (to blow out), to walk in the wind and take a break and clear your head, relieve the stress or forget one’s problems.” — Designed by Gwen Bogaert from Belgium.

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Turtles In Space

“Finished September, with October comes the month of routines. This year we share it with turtles that explore space.” — Designed by Veronica Valenzuela from Spain.

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Roger That Rogue Rover

“The story is a mash-up of retro science fiction and zombie infection. What would happen if a Mars rover came into contact with an unknown Martian material and got infected with a virus? What if it reversed its intended purpose of research and exploration? Instead choosing a life of chaos and evil. What if they all ran rogue on Mars? Would humans ever dare to voyage to the red planet?” Designed by Frank Candamil from the United States.

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Summer, Don’t Go!

“It would be nice if we could bring summer back, wouldn’t it?” — Designed by Terezija Katona from Serbia.

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Embracing Autumn’s Beauty

“We were inspired by the breathtaking beauty of autumn, with its colorful foliage and the symbolic pumpkin, which epitomizes the season. Incorporating typography allows us to blend aesthetics and functionality, making the calendar not only visually appealing but also useful.” — Designed by WPclerks from India.

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A Positive Fall

“October is the month when fall truly begins, and many people feel tired and depressed in this season. The jumping fox wants you to be happy! Also, foxes always have reminded me of fall because of their beautiful fur colors.” — Designed by Elena Sanchez from Spain.

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How one of Norway's largest importers migrated to WooCommerce and scaled an 800k SKU operation for a better user experience, performance, and results.

With bold, organic shapes and natural textures, jungle and safari fonts are perfect for creating designs that stand out and convey the spirit of the great outdoors.

In this post, we’ve curated a selection of fonts that will help you create visually striking, forest-themed designs. Whether you’re working on branding for eco-friendly products, adventure-themed projects, or wildlife conservation campaigns, these fonts evoke the lush greenery and rugged beauty of the jungle.

These fonts bring a sense of adventure and wilderness to your designs, making them ideal for posters, flyers, packaging, or website headers with a nature-inspired theme.

Tropical Jungle – Fun Jungle Style Font

Tropical Jungle is an enchanting font with a creative design. This bold yet playful typeface takes inspiration from the thrilling wildlife of tropical rainforests around the globe. With over 500 glyphs, featuring jungle animals and a joyous spirit, you’ll find it effortlessly readable and perfect for your creative ventures. It offers support for 76 languages along with swashes, ligatures, and stylistic alternatives.

Jungle Land – Jungle Font

Jungle Land is a display font featuring both uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation, and ligature. With its stylish script marrying attractive curves and a fresh urban edge, this font can enhance any design. Its simple installation is compatible with both PC and MAC and supports 17 languages from English to Zulu, making it a versatile fit for logos, brand imagery, product packaging, or social media posts.

Jungle – Handbrush Jungle Font

This is a playful yet robust jungle font inspired by children’s books and handmade street typography. Its versatile design makes it an ideal choice for various projects, including movie titles, logos, branding, social media, blog posts, and even wedding invites. The package includes a range of font formats, punctuation, numerals, ligatures, swashes, and web fonts making it a comprehensive font.

Pine Jungle – Jungle Style Font

Pine Jungle is a jungle-themed font designed with a unique pine forest vibe. It incorporates stars into the design to cultivate a spiritual impression. This font is the perfect fit for all design types, especially those oriented towards nature. Pine Jungle comes in both ‘clean’ TTF and OTF formats, giving you flexibility in your creative ventures.

Woodpecker – Unique Jungle Font

Dive into the wild with the Woodpecker, a unique jungle-themed font. Shaped like chopped wood planks, it perfectly captures the spirit of outdoor adventures and wilderness. Ideal for survival games, jungle posters or park adventures, this font is available in TTF, OTF, and WOFF formats, adding that rustic touch your projects need.

Jungle Cruise – Display Font

Jungle Cruise is a versatile display font that adapts well to any creative project. Its captivating simplicity and legibility make it an ideal choice for a wide range of design applications, from quotes, shirt designs, websites, branding, children’s designs, blogs, logos, to invitations. Provided in OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats.

Safari – Silhouette Font

Safar is a captivating jungle-themed font that brings the spirit of the wild to your design work. It’s conveniently available in both OTF & TTF formats with extended licensing. This creative asset, which can be instantly downloaded, also offers free updates. And, if you face any problems, prompt customer support is always ready to lend a helping hand.

Graffitopia – Urban Jungle Graffiti Font

Discover the electric vibrancy of Graffitopia – an urban jungle graffiti font that channels the unique spirit of street art. With its distinctive letterforms, every word becomes an impactful artistic statement, bringing raw, underground vibes to your digital designs. Ideal for contemporary projects, edgy logos, and attention-grabbing posters, this font authentically encapsulates the daring creativity of city landscapes.

Urban Stars – Graffiti Urban Jungle Font

Urban Stars is a graffiti-style font, embodying the spirit of urban jungle street art. These dynamic and expressive letterforms are craftily inspired by real graffiti tags, adding bold authenticity to your design work. Ideal for various creative projects, its eye-catching appeal sets your designs apart with a rebellious attitude. Offering versatility and visual impact, Urban Stars ensures a powerful, trendy statement on any platform, from posters to social media graphics.

Pine Forest – Jungle Font

Pine Forest is a playful, hand-drawn typeface, inspired by outdoor adventures. It includes two style options – rough and press – each evoking a uniquely rustic feel. This versatile font is perfect for a variety of designs from logos and branding, to invitations and posters, effortlessly conveying a sense of fun and natural charm.

Forests – Layered Forest Font

This is an engaging jungle font particularly designed with a forest theme. It boasts a simple usability, offering you the flexibility of utilising one, two or all three layers and even adjust their colors to create distinctive effects. Only remember to keep CAPS on as it exclusively supports uppercase letters and numbers.

Jungle Ranger – Playful Jungle Font

Venture into the captivating world of gaming with Jungle Ranger, a playful and lively font designed to excite children and those young at heart. Its bold letters infused with jungle-inspired elements, like leaves and vines, evoke a sense of fun and adventure, making it an ideal choice for not just games, but also movies, posters, and more.

Dense Forest – Unique Jungle Font

Dense Forest is an intriguing typography forest font perfect for bringing an exotic twist to your projects. Ideal for movie titles, album covers, logos, labels, and posters, this font brings the mystery and wildness of the jungle directly into your design. Provided in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, it enhances creativity and transforms simple ideas into enchanting visuals.

Roaring Jungle – Fun Jungle Font

Unleash the wildness of your designs with Roaring Jungle font. This jungle-inspired font jumbles together attractive curves, stone-style writing and unique shapes. With regular and rough forms, it is perfect for vintage creations, logo designs, packaging, and even merchandise. A versatile asset with a unique flair and multilingual support to make your work not only look terrific, but also universally appealing.

Mystic Forest – Distressed Forest Font

Mystic Forest is a distinctively stylized type face, ideal for enhancing logos, titles, and brief texts. Its distressed effect can also work effectively as a stencil font for street art. The font package includes uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, punctuation, numerals, alternates, ligatures, and even supports multiple languages, packaged in OTF, TTF, WOFF and WOFF2 formats.

Jungle Adventurer – Jungle Font

Jungle Adventurer is a bold, all caps gaming font that boasts a powerful shape with stern sans-serif and sharp corners. Ideal for online games, posters, media pages, and more, this font comes in OTF, TTF, and WOFF for easy compatibility. Offering simple installation on both PC and Mac, the Jungle Adventurer font supports basic latin A-Z, numerical, and punctuation characters.

Northern Passage – Urban Jungle Font

Northern Passage is a handmade display font reflecting love for outdoor adventures with an aged, cabin-in-the-woods feel. An all-caps font ideal for design projects requiring a rustic, woodland aesthetic, it’s readily available for download in otf format.

Forest Trophy – Textured Jungle Font

Forest Trophy is a classic display font featuring a vintage feel with its unique rugged texture. It includes profiles in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats. Offering an array of uppercase and lowercase letters and numerals, this font also supports punctuation and multiple languages. It’s made even more versatile by its availability in three styles – clean, rounded, and textured.

Pinebrick – Modern Urban Jungle Font

Pinebrick is a modern, urban jungle-themed font that authentically captures the mood of nature and forest. Handcrafted, it features a bold, sketchy and rough style, perfect for creating a standout design on posters, shirts or other design requirements. Its array of glyphs, inclusive of uppercase, lowercase, numerals and punctuations, offers a wide variety for creative mixing and matching.

Mirkwood – Elvish Forest Style Font

Mirkwood is an Elvish forest-themed font, ideal for all things mythological and magical. Courtesy of Gienlee Cartoon, Mirkwood incorporates uppercase glyphs, operating smoothly on both PC and Mac without any special software required. When you download, you receive a user-friendly Mirkwood-Regular OTF file.

Forest Line – Condensed Forest Font

Forest Line is a jungle-themed True Type Web font, available in three styles: Light, Regular and Bold. As a creative rendition of the Forest Line Extended Font, it presents a trendier and compact alternative, retaining an air of creativity and usefulness.

Tropica Jungles – Playful Jungle Font

Tropica Jungles is a unique textured display font with a playful, cartoony twist. Perfect for a wide range of applications from logos to novel covers and wedding cards, this creative asset offers upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation and multilingual support.

Free Jungle & Forest Fonts

Theforest – Free Serif Font

Theforest is a free serif font that features a unique Jungle-themed letter design. This font is ideal for all sorts of elegant, nature-inspired typography designs. It’s especially perfect for luxury and high-end branding designs. It’s free for personal use.

Forester – Free Urban Jungle Font

Forester is another stylish urban jungle-themed font. This font has a creative handbrush-style letter design that will instantly attract attention. The font is free to use with your personal projects.

Jungle Camp – Free Display Font

This free font comes with a fun and playful letter design that makes it a great choice for crafting titles and headings related to children’s designs. The font is free for personal use only.

The Jungle – Free Handwritten Font

Another unique handwritten font featuring a jungle-themed design. This font comes with a creative look that will fit in well with t-shirts, posters, banners, greeting cards, and various other designs. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Jungle Tribe – Free Cartoon Font

This font is also free to download. Jungle Tribe is a playful cartoon-style font that also features a jungle-themed vibe. The font is ideal for children’s book covers, educational graphics, video games, and much more. It’s free for personal use.

The creator of CSS has said he originally envisaged CSS as the main web technology to control behavior on web pages, with scripting as a fallback when things weren’t possible declaratively in CSS. The rationale for a CSS-first approach was that “scripting is programming and programming is hard.” Since introducing the :hover pseudo-class, CSS has been standardizing patterns developers create in JavaScript and “harvesting” them into CSS standards. When you think about it like that, it’s almost as if JavaScript is the hack and CSS is the official way.

We can, therefore, feel less dirty implementing script-like behavior with CSS, and we shouldn’t be surprised that something like the new scroll-timeline feature has appeared with pretty good browser support. Too many developers implemented clever parallax scrolling websites, which has summoned the CSS feature genie we cannot put back in its bottle. If you don’t want janky main-thread animations for your next parallax-scrolling website, you must now come to the dark side of hacking CSS. Just kidding, there is also a new JavaScript API for scroll-linked animations if imperative programming better fits your use case.

Migrating a JavaScript sample to CSS

It was satisfyingly simple to fork Chris Coyier’s pre-scroll-timeline example of a scroll-linked animation by replacing the CSS Chris was using to control the animations with just one line of CSS and completely deleting the JavaScript!

body, .progress, .cube {
  animation-timeline: scroll();
}

Using the scroll() function without parameters sets up an “anonymous scroll progress timeline” meaning the browser will base the animation on the nearest ancestor that can scroll vertically if our writing mode is English. Unfortunately, it seems we can only choose to animate based on scrolling along the x or y-axis of a particular element but not both, which would be useful. Being a function, we can pass parameters to scroll(), which provides more control over how we want scrolling to run our animation.

Experimenting with multiple dimensions

Even better is the scroll-scope property. Applying that to a container element means we can animate properties on any chosen ancestor element based on any scrollable element that has the same assigned scope. That got me thinking… Since CSS Houdini lets us register animation-friendly, inheritable properties in CSS, we can combine animations on the same element based on multiple scrollable areas on the page. That opens the door for interesting instructional design possibilities such as my experiment below.

Scrolling the horizontal narrative on the light green card rotates the 3D NES console horizontally and scrolling the vertical narrative on the dark green card rotates the NES console vertically. In my previous article, I noted that my past CSS hacks have always boiled down to hiding and showing finite possibilities using CSS. What interests me about this scroll-based experiment is the combinatorial explosion of combined vertical and horizontal rotations. Animation timelines provide an interactivity in pure CSS that hasn’t been possible in the past.

The implementation details are less important than the timeline-scope usage and the custom properties. We register two custom angle properties:

@property --my-y-angle {
  syntax: "<angle>";
  inherits: true;
  initial-value: 0deg;
}

@property --my-x-angle {
  syntax: "<angle>";
  inherits: true;
  initial-value: -35deg;
}

Then, we “borrow” the NES 3D model from the samples in Julian Garner’s amazing CSS 3D modeling app. We update the .scene class for the 3D to base the rotation on our new variables like this:

.scene {
  transform: rotateY(var(--my-y-angle)) rotateX(var(--my-x-angle));
}

Next, we give the <body> element a timeline-scope with two custom-named scopes.

body {
  timeline-scope: --myScroller,--myScroller2; 
}

I haven’t seen anything officially documented about passing in multiple scopes, but it does work in Google Chrome and Edge. If it’s not a formally supported feature, I hope it will become part of the standard because it is ridiculously handy.

Next, we define the named timelines for the two scrollable cards and the axes we want to trigger our animations.

.card:first-child {
  scroll-timeline-axis: x;
  scroll-timeline-name: --myScroller;
}

.card:nth-child(2) {
  scroll-timeline-axis: y;
  scroll-timeline-name: --myScroller2;
}

And add the animations to the scene:

.scene {
  animation: rotateHorizontal,rotateVertical;
  animation-timeline: --myScroller,--myScroller2;
}

@keyframes rotateHorizontal {
  to {
    --my-y-angle: 360deg;
  }
}

@keyframes rotateVertical {
  to {
    --my-x-angle: 360deg;
  }
}

Since the 3D model inherits the x and y angles from the document body, scrolling the cards now rotates the model in combinations of vertical and horizontal angle changes.

User-controlled animations beyond scrollbars

When you think about it, this behavior isn’t just useful for scroll-driven animations. In the above experiment, we are using the scrollable areas more like sliders that control the properties of our 3D model. After getting it working, I went for a walk and was daydreaming about how cool it would be if actual range inputs could control animation timelines. Then I found out they can! At least in Chrome. Pure CSS CMS anyone?

While we’re commandeering 3D models from Julian Garner, let’s see if we can use range inputs to control his X-wing model.

It’s mind-boggling that we can achieve this with just CSS, and we could do it with an arbitrary number of properties. It doesn’t go far enough for me. I would love to see other input controls that can manipulate animation timelines. Imagine text fields progressing animations as you fill them out, or buttons able to play or reverse animations. The latter can be somewhat achieved by combining the :active pseudo-class with the animation-play-state property. But in my experience when you try to use that to animate multiple custom properties, the browser can get confused. By contrast, animation timelines have been implemented with this use case in mind and therefore work smoothly and exactly as I expected.

I’m not the only one who has noticed the potential for hacking this emergent CSS feature. Someone has already implemented this clever Doom clone by combining scroll-timeline with checkbox hacks. The problem I have is it still doesn’t go far enough. We have enough in Chrome to implement avatar builders using scrollbars and range inputs as game controls. I am excited to experiment with unpredictable, sophisticated experiences that are unprecedented in the era before the scroll-timeline feature. After all, if you had to explain the definition of a video game to an alien, wouldn’t you say it is just a hyper-interactive animation?

---

Slide Through Unlimited Dimensions With CSS Scroll Timelines originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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By definition, an interface is a layer between the user and a system, serving the purpose of communication between them. Interacting with the interface usually requires users to perform certain actions.

Different actions can lead to various outcomes, some of which might be critical.

While we often need to provide additional protection in case users attempt to perform dangerous or irreversible actions, It’s good to remember that one of the ten usability heuristics called “Error Prevention” says:

“Good error messages are important, but the best designs carefully prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.”

What Is A Dangerous Action?

Surprisingly, when we talk about dangerous actions, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is being deleted.

Here’s an example of a dangerous action from the banking application I use:

The bank approved a loan for me, and as soon as I clicked “Get Money,” it meant that I had signed the necessary documents and accepted the loan. All I have to do is tap the yellow button, and I’ll get the money.

As a result of an accidental tap, you might end up taking a loan when you didn’t intend to, which is why this action can be considered significant and dangerous.

Therefore, a dangerous action does not necessarily mean deleting something.

Some examples may include the following:

• Sending an email,
• Placing an order,
• Publishing a post,
• Making a bank transaction,
• Signing a legal document,
• Permanently blocking a user,
• Granting or revoking permissions.

Ways To Confirm Dangerous Actions

There are many methods to prevent users from losing their data or taking irreversible actions unintentionally. One approach is to ask users to explicitly confirm their actions.

There are several ways to implement this, each with its own pros and cons.

Modal Dialogs

First of all, we should understand the difference between modal and non-modal dialogs. It’s better to think about modality state since dialogs, popups, alerts — all of these might be presented either in the modal state or not. I will use the term dialogs as a general reference, but the keyword here is modality.

“Modality is a design technique that presents content in a separate, dedicated mode that prevents interaction with the parent view and requires an explicit action to dismiss.”

— Apple design guides

Modal dialogs require immediate user action. In other words, you cannot continue working with an application until you respond in some way.

Non-modal dialogs, on the other hand, allow you to keep using the application without interruption. A common example of a non-modal element is a toast message that appears in the corner of the screen and does not require you to do anything to continue using the app.

When used properly, modal dialogs are an effective way to prevent accidental clicks on dangerous actions.

The main problem with them is that if they are used to confirm routine actions (such as marking a task as done), they can cause irritation and create a habit of mindlessly confirming them on autopilot.

However, this is one of the most popular methods. Besides, it can be combined with other methods, so let’s dive into it deeper.

When To Use Them

Use modal dialogs when a user action will have serious consequences, especially if the result of the action is irreversible. Typical cases include deleting a post or project, confirming a transaction, and so on.

It depends on what kind of action users want to take, but the main thing to keep in mind is how serious the consequences are and whether the action is reversible or not.

Things To Keep In Mind

1. Avoid vague language.
   If you ask users, “Are you sure?” chances are, they will not have any doubts.
2. In the title, specify what exactly will happen or which entity will be affected (e.g., project name, user name, amount of money).
3. Provide an icon that indicates that the action is dangerous.
   It both increases the chances that users will not automatically confirm it and is good for accessibility reasons (people with color blindness will notice the icon even if it appears grey to them, signaling its importance).
4. In the description, be specific and highlight the necessary information.
5. The CTA button should also contain a word that reflects the action.
   Instead of “Yes” or “Confirm,” use more descriptive options like “Delete,” “Pay $97,” “Make Transaction,” “Send Message,” and so on — including the entity name or amount of money in the button is also helpful. Compare: “Confirm” versus “Pay $97.” The latter is much more specific.

However, this might not be enough.

In some cases, you may require an extra action. A typical solution is to ask users to type something (e.g., a project name) to unblock the CTA button.

Here are a few examples:

ConvertKit asks users to type “DO IT” when removing subscribers.

Pro tip: Note that they placed the buttons on the left side! This is a nice example of applying proximity law. It seems reasonable since the submit button is closer to the form (even if it consists of only one input).

Resend asks users to type “DELETE” if they want to delete an API key, which could have very serious consequences. The API key might be used in many of your apps, and you don’t want to break anything.

This modal is one of the best examples of following the best practices:

• The title says what the action is (“Delete API Key”).
• In the text, they mentioned the name of the API Key in bold and in a different color (“Onboarding”).
• The red label that the action can not be undone makes it clearer that this is a serious action.
• Extra action is required (typing “DELETE”).
• The CTA button has both a color indicator (red usually is used for destructive actions) and a proper label — “Delete API Key”. Not a general word, e.g., “Confirm” or “Delete.”

Notice that Resend also places buttons on the left side, just as ConvertKit does.

Note: While generally disabling submit buttons is considered bad practice, this is one of the cases where it is acceptable. The dialog’s request is clear and straightforward both in ConvertKit and Resend examples.

Moreover, we can even skip the submit button altogether. This applies to cases where users are asked to input an OTP, PIN, or 2FA code. For example, the bank app I use does not even have a log in button.

On the one hand, we still ask users to perform an extra action (input the code). On the other hand, it eliminates the need for an additional click.

Accessibility Concerns

There is ongoing debate about whether or not to include a submit button when entering a simple OTP. By “simple,” I mean one that consists of 4-6 digits.

While I am not an accessibility expert, I don’t see any major downsides to omitting the submit button in straightforward cases like this.

First, the OTP step is typically an intermediate part of the user flow, meaning a form with four inputs appears during some process. The first input is automatically focused, and users can navigate through them using the Tab key.

The key point is that, due to the small amount of information required (four digits), it is generally acceptable to auto-submit the form as soon as the digits are entered, even if a mistake is made.

On the one hand, if we care about accessibility, nothing stops us from providing users control over the inputs. On the other hand, auto-submission streamlines the process in most cases, and in the rare event of an error, the user can easily re-enter the digits.

Danger Zones

For the most critical actions, you may use the so-called “Danger zone” pattern.

A common way to implement this is to either have a dedicated page or place the set of actions at the bottom of the settings/account page.

It might contain one or more actions and is usually combined with other methods, e.g., a modal dialog. The more actions you have, the more likely you’ll need a dedicated page.

When To Use Them

Use a Danger Zone to group actions that are irreversible or have a high potential for data loss or significant outcomes for users.

These actions typically include things like account deletion, data wiping, or permission changes that could affect the user’s access or data.

Things To Keep In Mind

1. Use colors like red, warning icons, or borders to visually differentiate the Danger Zone from the rest of the page.
2. Each action in the Danger Zone should have a clear description of what will happen if the user proceeds so that users understand the potential consequences.
3. Ask users for extra effort. Usually, the actions are irreversible and critical. In this case, you may ask users to repeat their password or use 2FA because if someone else gets access to the page, it will not be that easy to do the harmful action.
4. Keep only truly critical actions there. Avoid making a danger zone for the sake of having one.

Inline Guards

Recently, I discovered that some apps have started using inline confirmation. This means that when you click on a dangerous action, it changes its label and asks you to click again.

This pattern is used by apps like Zapier and Typefully. While at first it seems convenient, it has sparked a lot of discussion and questions on X and Linkedin.

I’ve seen attempts to try to fix accidental double-clicking by changing the position of the inline confirmation label that appears after the first click.

But this creates layout shifts. When users work with the app daily, it may cause more irritation than help.

As an option, we can solve this issue by adding a tiny delay, e.g., 100-200ms, to prevent double-clicking.

It also matters who your users are. Remember the good old days when we used to click a dozen times to launch Internet Explorer and ended up with dozens of open instances?

If your target audience is likely to do this, apparently, the pattern will not work.

However, for apps like Zapier or Typefully, my assumption is that the target audience might benefit from the pattern.

Two-factor Authorization Confirmation

This method involves sending a confirmation request, with or without some kind of verification code, to another place, such as:

• SMS,
• Email,
• Authenticator app on mobile,
• Push notifications (e.g., instead of sending SMS, you may choose to send push notifications),
• Messengers.

Notice: I’m not talking about authentication (namely, login process), but rather a confirmation action.

An example that I personally face a lot is an app for sending cryptocurrency. Since this is a sensitive request, apart from submitting the requisition from a website, I should also approve it via email.

When To Use It

It can be used for such operations as money transfers, ownership transfers, and account deletion (even if you have a danger zone). Most of us use this method quite often when we pay online, and our banks send us OTP (one-time password or one-time code).

It may go after the first initial protection method, e.g., a confirmation dialog.

As you can see, the methods are often combined and used together. We should not consider each of them in isolation but rather in the context of the whole business process.

Passkeys

Passkeys are a modern, password-less authentication method designed to enhance both security and user experience.

“Passkeys are a replacement for passwords. A password is something that can be remembered and typed, and a passkey is a secret stored on one’s devices, unlocked with biometrics.”

— passkeys.dev

There are a few pros of using passkeys over 2FA, both in terms of security and UX:

1. Unlike 2FA, which typically requires entering a code from another device or app (e.g., SMS or authenticator apps), passkeys streamline the confirmation process. They don’t require switching between devices or waiting for a code to arrive, providing immediate authentication.
2. While 2FA provides extra protection, it is vulnerable to phishing, SIM-swapping, or interception. Passkeys are much more resistant to such attacks because they use public-private key cryptography. This means no secret code is ever sent over the network, making it phishing-resistant and not reliant on SMS or email, which can be compromised.
3. Passkeys require less mental effort from users. There’s no need to remember a password or type a code — just authenticate with a fingerprint, facial recognition, or device-specific PIN. This way, we reduce cognitive load.
4. With passkeys, the authentication process is almost instant. Unlike 2FA, where users might have to wait for a code or switch to another device, passkeys give us the opportunity to confirm actions without switching context, e.g., opening your email inbox or copying OTP from a mobile device.

The passkeys are widely supported and more and more companies adopt it.

Second-person Confirmation

This is a mechanism when two users are involved in the process. We may call them initiator and approver.

In this case, the initiator makes a request to take some action while the approver decides whether to confirm it or not.

In both roles, a confirmation dialog or other UI patterns may be used. However, the main idea is to separate responsibilities and decrease the probability of a bad decision.

Actually, you have likely encountered this method many times before. For example, a developer submits a pull request, while a code reviewer decides whether to confirm it or decline.

When To Use It

It is best suited for situations when the seriousness of decisions requires few people involved.

There is a direct analogy from real life. Take a look at the picture below:

The Council of Physicians reminds us that in medicine, seeking a second opinion is crucial, as collaboration and diverse perspectives often result in more informed decisions and better patient care. This is a perfect example of when a second opinion or an approver is essential.

Here, you will find some apps that use this method:

• GitHub, as previously mentioned, for merging pull requests.
• Jira and other similar apps. For example, when you move issues through a certain workflow stage, it may require manager approval.
• Banking applications. When you make a high-value transaction, it could be necessary to verify it for legal issues.
• Deel, which is a global hiring and payroll. One part (e.g., employer) draws up a contract and sends it to another part (e.g., freelancer), and the freelancer accepts it.

But here is the thing: We can consider it a separate method or rather an approach for implementing business logic because even if another person confirms an action, it is still a dangerous action, with the only difference being that now it’s another person who should approve it.

So, all of the examples mentioned above are not exactly a standalone specific way to protect users from making wrong decisions from the UI point of view. It’s rather an approach that helps us to reduce the number of critical mistakes.

Do We Actually Need To Ask Users?

When you ask users to take action, you should be aware of its original purpose.

The fact that users make actions does not mean that they make them consciously.

There are many behavioral phenomena that come from psychology, to name a few:

• Cognitive inertia: The tendency of a person to stick to familiar decisions, even if they are not suitable for the current situation. For instance, the vast majority of people don’t read user agreements. They simply agree with the lengthy text because it’s necessary from the legal point of view.
• Availability Heuristic: People often make decisions based on information that is easily accessible or familiar to them rather than making a mental effort. When users see the same confirmation popups, they might automatically accept them based on their previous successful experience. Of course, sooner or later, it might not work, and the acceptance of required action can lead to bad consequences.
• Cognitive Miser: The human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. This explains why many users just click “yes” or “agree” without carefully reading the text.
• Quite a representative example is banner blindness, even though not related to confirmation but, in fact, revolves around the same human behavior idiosyncrasies.

A reasonable question that may arise: What are the alternatives?

Even though we cannot entirely affect users’ behavior, there are a few tactics we can use.

Delaying

In some scenarios, we can artificially delay the task execution in a graceful way.

One of my favorite examples is an app called Glovo, which is a food delivery app. Let’s have a look at the three screens you will see when you order something.

The first screen is a cart with items you chose to buy (and an annoying promotion of subscription that takes ⅓ of the screen).

After you tap the “confirm order” button, you’ll see the second screen, which asks you whether everything is correct. However, the information appears gradually with fade-in animation. Also, you can see there is a progress bar, which is a fake one.

After a few seconds, you’ll see another screen that shows that the app is trying to charge your card; this time, it’s a real process. After the transaction proceeds, you’ll see the status of the order and approximate delivery time.

Pro tip: When you show the status of the order and visually highlight or animate the first step, it makes users more confident that the order will be completed. Because of the trick that is called Goal-Gradient Effect.

You’ve just paid, and “something starts happening” (at least visually), which is a sign that “Oh, they should have already started preparing my order. That’s nice!”

The purpose of the screen with a fake progress bar is to let users verify the order details and confirm them.

But this is done in a very exquisite way:

1. On the first screen, you click “confirm order”. It doesn’t invoke any modals or popups, such as “Are you sure?”.
2. On the second screen, users can see how information about their order appears right away, and the scroll bar at the bottom goes further. It seems like that app is doing something, but it’s an illusion. An illusion that makes you take another quick look at what you’ve just ordered.

In the previous version of the app, you couldn’t even skip the process; you could only cancel it. Now they added the “Continue” button, which is essentially “Yes, I’m sure” confirmation.

This means that we return back again to the drawbacks of classic confirmation modals since users can skip the process. But the approach is different: it’s a combination of a feedback loop from the app and skipping the process.

This combination makes users pay attention to the address, order, and price at least sometimes, and it gives them time to cancel the order, while in the classic approach, the confirmation is “yes or no?” which is more likely to be confirmed right away.

The Undo Option

The undo pattern allows users to reverse an action they have just performed, providing a safety net that reduces anxiety around making mistakes.

Unlike confirmation modals that interrupt the workflow to ask for user confirmation, the undo pattern provides a smoother experience by allowing actions to be completed with the option to reverse them if needed.

When To Use It

It works perfectly fine for non-destructive, reversible actions &mdashl actions that don’t have significant and immediate consequences:

• Reversing actions when editing a document (The beloved ctrl + z shortcut);
• Removing a file (if it goes to the trash bin first);
• Changing the status of a task (e.g., if you accidentally marked a task completed);
• Deleting a message in a chat;
• Applying filters to a photo.

Combined with a timer, you can extend the number of options since such tasks as sending an email or making a money transfer could be undone.

When You Cannot Use It

It’s not suitable for actions that have serious consequences, such as the following:

• Deleting an account;
• Submitting legal documents;
• Purchasing goods (refund is not the same as the undo option);
• Making requests for third-party APIs (in most cases).

How To Implement Them?

1. The most common way that most people use every day is to provide a shortcut (ctrl + z). However, it’s constrained to some cases, such as text editors, moving files between folders, and so on.
2. Toasts are probably the most common way to implement these web and mobile apps. The only thing that you should keep in mind is that it should stand out enough to be noticed. Hiding them in a corner with a tiny message and color that is not noticeable might not work — especially on wide screens.
3. A straightforward solution is simply to have a button that does the undo option. Preferably close to the button that evokes the action that you want to undo.

The undo option is tightly related to the concept called soft deleting, which is widely used in backend frameworks such as Laravel.

The concept means that when users delete something via the UI, it looks like it has been deleted, but in the database, we keep the data but mark it as deleted. The data is not lost, which is why the undo option is possible since we don’t actually delete anything but rather mark it as deleted.

This is a good technique to ensure that data is never lost. However, not every table needs this.

For example, if you delete an account and don't want users to restore it (perhaps due to legal regulations), then you should erase the data completely. But in many cases, it might be a good idea to consider soft deleting. In the worst case, you’ll be able to manually restore user data if it cannot be done via the UI for some reason.

Conclusion

There’s something I want everyone to keep in mind, regardless of who you are or what you do.

Every situation is unique. A certain approach might work or fail for a variety of reasons. You might sometimes wonder why a specific decision was made, but you may not realize how many times the interface was revised based on real user feedback.

User behavior is affected by many factors, including country, age, culture, education, familiarity with certain patterns, disabilities, and more.

What’s crucial is to stay in control of your data and users and be prepared to respond when something goes wrong. Following best practices is important, but you must still verify if they work in your specific case.

Just like in chess, there are many rules — and even more exceptions.

Further Reading

• Modality, Apple
• “An effective ‘Cancel’ dialog confirmation on Web,” João Bexiga
• “Confirm or undo? Which is the better option?,” Josh Wayne
• “Understanding Soft Delete and Hard Delete,” Suraj Singh Bisht
• “Confirmation Dialogs Can Prevent User Errors — If Not Overused,” Jakob Nielsen
• “Microcopy for confirmation dialogues,” Kinneret Yifrah
• What is a passkey?, passkeys.io

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Miriam Suzanne’s in the middle of a redesign of her personal website. It began in August 2022. She’s made an entire series out of the work that’s worth your time, but I wanted to call out the fifth and latest installment because she presents a problem that I think we can all relate to:

But the walls got in my way. Instead of minimal renovation, I got just far enough to live with it and then started a brand new Eleventy repo.

The plan was to prototype […] and bring back well-formed solutions. To echo Dave Rupert, prototyping is useful. It’s easier to play with new ideas when you’re not carrying a decade of content and old code along with you.

But prototyping evolved into what I would call tinkering (complimentary). Maybe I mean procrastinating (also complimentary), but it’s a wandering process that also helps me better understand what I want from a website. I might not make visible progress over two years, but I start to form a point of view […]. Keeping things easy is always where things get complicated. And it brings me back to where my redesign started – a desire to clarify the information architecture. Not only for visitors, but for myself.

Don’t even tell me you’ve never been there! Jim Neilsen blogged along similar lines. You get a stroke of inspiration that’s the kernel of some idea that motivates you to start, you know, working on it. There’s no real plan, perhaps. The idea and inspiration are more than enough to get you going… that is until you hit a snag. And what I appreciate about Miriam’s post is that she’s calling out content as the snag. Well, not so much a snag as a return to the founding principle for the redesign: a refined content architecture.

• Sometimes I do events where I speak, or teach a workshop, or perform. Events happen at a time and place.
• Sometimes I create artifacts like a book or an album, a website, or specification. Artifacts often have a home URL. They might have a launch date, but they are not date-specific.
• Some of my projects are other channels with their own feeds, their own events and artifacts.
• Those channels are often maintained by an organization that I work with long-term. A band, a web agency, a performance company, etc.

These boundaries aren’t always clean. A post that remains relevant could be considered an artifact. Events can generate artifacts, and vice versa. An entire organization might exist to curate a single channel.

So, Miriam’s done poking at visual prototypes and ready to pour the filling into the pie crust. I relate with this having recently futzed with the content architecure of this site. I find it tough to start with a solidified design before I know what content is going into it. But I also find it tough to work with no shape at all. In my case, CSS-Tricks has a well-established design that’s evolved, mostly outside of me. I love the design but it’s an inherited one and I’m integrating content around it. Design is the constraint. If I had the luxury of stripping the building to the studs, I might take a different approach because then I could “paint” around it. Content would be the constraint.

It’s yet another version of the Chicken-Egg dilemma. I still think of the (capital-W) Web as a content medium at least in a UA style sense in that it’s the default. It’s more than that, of course. I’m a content designer at heart (and trade) but I’m hesitant to cry “content is king” which reminded me of something I wrote for an end-of-year series we did here answering the question: What is one thing people can do to make their website better? My answer: Read your website.

We start to see the power of content when we open up our understanding of what it is, what it does, and where it’s used. That might make content one of the most extensible problem-solving tools in your metaphorical shed—it makes sites more accessible, extracts Google-juicing superpowers, converts sales, and creates pathways for users to accomplish what they need to do.

And as far as prioritizing content or design, or…?

The two work hand-in-hand. I’d even go so far as to say that a lot of design is about enhancing what is communicated on a page. There is no upstaging one or the other. Think of content and design as supporting one another, where the sum of both creates a compelling call-to-action, long-form post, hero banner, and so on. We often think of patterns in a design system as a collection of components that are stitched together to create something new. Pairing content and design works much the same way.

I’d forgotten those words, so I appreciate Miriam giving me a reason to revisit them. We all need to be recalibrated every so often — swap out air filters, top off the fluids, and rotate the ol’ tires. And an old dog like me needs it a little more often. I spent a few more minutes in that end-of-year series and found a few other choice quotes about the content-design continuum that may serve as inspiration for you, me, or maybe even Miriam as she continues the process of aggragating her distributed self.

This sounds serious, but don’t worry — the site’s purpose is key. If you’re building a personal portfolio, go wild! However, if someone’s trying to file a tax return, whimsical loading animations aren’t likely to be well-received. On the other hand, an animated progress bar could be a nice touch while providing visual feedback on the user’s action.

Cassie Evans, “Empathetic Animation”

Remember, the web is an interactive platform — take advantage of that, where appropriate (less is more, accessibility is integral, and you need to know your audience). Whether that’s scrollytelling, captioned video, and heck, maybe for your audience, now’s the time to start looking into AR/VR! Who knows. Sometimes you just need to try stuff out and see what sticks. Just be careful. Experimentation is great, but we need to make sure we’re bringing everyone along for the ride.

Mel Choyce, “Show, Don’t Tell”

Your personal site is a statement of who you are and what you want to do. If you showcase your favorite type of work, you’ll get more requests for similar projects or jobs — feeding back into a virtuous cycle of doing more of what you love.

Amelia Wattenberger, “Exactly What You Want”

And one of my favorites:

But the prime reason to have a personal website is in the name: it is your personalhome on the web. Since its early days, the web has been about sharing information and freedom of expression. Personal websites still deliver on that promise. Nowhere else do you have that much freedom to create and share your work and to tell your personal story. It is your chance to show what you stand for, to be different, and to be specific. Your site lets you be uniquely you and it can be whatever you imagine it to be.

So if you have a personal site, make sure to put in the work and attention to make it truly yours. Make it personal. Fine-tune the typography, add a theme switcher, or incorporate other quirky little details that add personality. As Sarah Drasner writes, you can feel it if a site is done with care and excitement. Those are the sites that are a joy to visit and will be remembered.

Matthias Ott, “Make it Personal”

That last one has the added perk of reminding me how incredibly great Sarah Drasner is.

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Aggregating my distributed self originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Every year we see new trends emerge in the world of design. While most of these new trends fade away with time, some remain to change and influence the industry for the better.

In this post, we explore the ever-evolving world of illustration trends and designs. From the rise of AI-assisted drawings to the resurgence of retro and psychedelic art, these are the trends you can expect to see more of this year.

Let’s take a look at some of the top upcoming illustration trends and how you can apply them in your own designs and projects. Some of these trends will not only be popular but also groundbreaking by bringing in new advancements and innovations.

1. AI-Assisted Illustrations

Designers have different opinions about the advancements of AI and how it’s impacting the industry. However, AI has clearly made work much easier for us. And that’s the main goal of using AI. It should not be used to replace designers but to enhance your workflow and make you more efficient.

Adobe understood this concept better than most other AI startups. During the Adobe MAX 2023 event, Adobe showed how they have improved Adobe Illustrator to help artists and designers create art more easily.

You can now generate vectors with text prompts, find exact matches for fonts, create icons, get variations of your illustrations, copy art styles, and more. These new tools will save you a ton of time and supercharge your process of finding inspiration, coming up with different concepts, and experimenting with different ideas.

2. Representation of Diversity

One of the trends that we hope to see more of this year is illustrations that represent diversity, culture, and traditions. We saw many brands and companies use these beautiful illustrations on their marketing campaigns, websites, and social media platforms to promote inclusiveness and diverse representation.

This trend is not just about representation, it’s also about celebrating different cultures, expanding the boundaries of perspectives, and bringing people together. It’s a mission that we will always promote with an open heart.

3. Colorful Abstract

Abstract illustrations have been a powerful visual form that amplifies storytelling for many years. This year, we expect to see this art trend continue to grow.

These beautiful illustrations excel at captivating audiences with colorful visuals and communicating ideas, moods, and messages much more effectively. Whether it’s for branding design or packaging design, colorful abstract illustrations fit perfectly for many types of projects as well.

4. Retro and Psychedelic

We all have a soft spot for those classic and groovy illustrations full of vibrant colors and weird shapes. Last year, we saw many artists combine this retro style from the 70s and 80s with psychedelic-style art to create very uncommon and trippy illustrations.

We’ve been seeing these retro and psychedelic illustrations on everything from product packaging designs to website designs and even branding designs. It seems to be getting more popular with casual and lifestyle brands that target younger audiences as well.

5. Art Deco

The Art Deco design trend is commonly used in various types of packaging designs, brand identities, and graphic designs as a way of showing off elegance and sophistication. It’s a trend that’s been around for decades but over the past few years we saw this trend being used more commonly by modern brands.

This trend will likely continue to be popular in the world of design and illustrations thanks to its ability to combine vintage aesthetics with futuristic vibes. Especially when it comes to luxury and high-end illustrations, Art Deco is unmatched for creating unique nostalgic feels.

6. Comic Book Art

The illustrations done in comic book art style are another new trend that’s slowly gaining momentum in the design world. This trend helps add a playful, humorous, and exaggerated look to your illustrations to create a bold retro aesthetic for various types of designs.

Whether it’s website design, poster design, or packaging design, comic book-style art blends perfectly with many different types of mediums as well. It’s also quite effective for brand storytelling and creating designs that communicate with the audience more effectively.

7. Doodle Art

No matter how old we get, we all have childhood memories that we always long for. Doodle art is a trend that’s designed to take you back to that wonderful childhood while evoking a sense of playfulness and free spirit. It’s one of the reasons why this trend has been around for such a long time and it will continue to be as effective as ever before.

Many popular brands have been using doodle art and illustrations as a way to create a more relaxed vibe and also bring out a sense of joy in the audience at the same time. The quirkiness and the imperfections of this art style allow any business or brand to strip away the formalities and create a close connection with its target audience.

8. Surrealism

The unreal, bizarre, and nightmare-ish surrealism illustration trend continues to surprise us every year by maintaining its popularity across many different industries. When it comes to creating designs that spark curiosity and imagination, nothing comes close to surrealist illustrations.

The distorted human figures, weird manipulations, and the weird elements used in surrealist illustrations often have hidden meanings and tell a story that explores controversial topics. And it opens up new doors for artists, media, and brands to share their narratives in mesmerizing ways.

9. Textured Illustrations

We went through several different illustration trends over the years from flat design to minimal artwork and the latest to join this lineup is the textured illustrations trend. This new trend sees illustrations getting a much-needed texture upgrade that adds more depth to the overall look and feel.

Textured illustrations will be one of the most popular illustration trends this year for two main reasons. First, they add an authentic and hand-crafted look to digital illustrations. Second, they create a more rugged and tactile vibe for the illustrations, replacing the overly smooth, artificial look of ordinary digital art.

10. Line Art

The great thing about line art illustrations is their versatility. Line art drawings can be as simple as a few lines or complex artwork but they will always maintain an overall simple and minimal look. This gives line art illustrations a classic yet timeless look.

Especially when designing illustrations for digital platforms, minimalist line art is an obvious choice as it reduces file sizes and helps improve performance. They are also quite effective in conveying ideas and creating adaptable art across different platforms and mediums.

11. Realistic 3D Art

3D art generation tools like Blender and Unreal Engine received significant updates last year that expanded their capabilities beyond our imagination. Designers have been using these tools to generate ultra-realistic 3D art and illustrations and the results were mind-blowing.

We will surely see more of these realistic 3D art and illustrations this year as well. Especially since the demand for this art is increasing as more industries seem to be embracing this new trend.

12. Nostalgia

When it comes to creating art and illustrations that connect with the audience on a personal level, nostalgic art is the perfect way to go. These illustrations excel at evoking emotions and good memories from the past and go a long way to establishing a strong connection with the audience.

Many brands have been using this trend to create emotional connections with their customers while also celebrating the history and good times from the past.

13. Geometric Art

There were many interesting art and design trends over the years that were inspired by the geometric style of art, including the popular Bauhaus style. And now, they are slowly influencing illustrations as well.

Illustrations inspired by geometric art styles have their own unique styles and we love how artists keep reinventing this trend while putting their own unique spins to create cool artworks.

14. Cartoon and Comic

Caroon and comic-themed illustrations do two things perfectly: They are great at adding a sense of whimsy to your creations and also conveying emotions more effectively.

When it comes to educational projects, casual and fun designs, and even creating mascots, and characters that represent brands, cartoon-style illustrations have been the ideal choice for decades.

Even though it’s not a new trend, we will surely see more cartoon and comic-style illustrations this year. Because it simply works wonders!

15. Outline Drawings

This is an illustration trend that will never go out of style. Because it’s the perfect style for creating art and illustrations that exude elegance and simplicity.

Outline drawings and illustrations have a particular way of creating a minimalist vibe for any other project. It helps create that subtle, fine art-style look that you can’t achieve with any other illustration style. And that’s why it will always be a trend you can rely on.

16. Brave and Bold

Recently, designers have been creating some radical and bold creations, much more than they used to. Mainly because modern brands and businesses now seek to create more open and authentic identities. And these brave and bold illustrations help achieve that goal.

This is a trend we would love to see more of this year. We are particularly curious how designers and artists will handle this experimental illustration style.

Conclusion

There will also be many other new trends this year, possibly ones we couldn’t even imagine. So be sure to keep an eye out for those. You can always check out our Trends category to stay on top of your game.

Many of you — perhaps most of you — have been sitting on the sidelines while WordPress and WP Engine trade legal attacks on one another. It’s been widely covered as we watch it unfold in the open; ironically, in a sense.

These things can take twists and turns and it doesn’t help that this just so happens to be an emotionally charged topic in certain circles. WordPress is still the leading CMS after all these years and by a long shot. Many developers make their living in the WordPress ecosystem. All of those developers need hosting. WP Engine is still the leading WordPress-flavored host after many years. Many developers host their agencies there and use it to administrate their clients’ sites.

And I haven’t even gotten to the drama. That’s not really the point. The point is that there’s a bunch of heated words flying around and it can be difficult to know where they’re coming from, who they are aimed at, and most importantly, why they’re being said in the first place. So, I’m going to round up a few key voices contributing to the discussion for the sake of context and to help catch up.

Editor’s Note: Even though CSS-Tricks has no involvement with either company, I think it’s mentioning that Automattic was a looooooong time sponsor. This site was also once hosted by Flywheel, a company acquired by WP Engine before we moved to Cloudways following the DigitalOcean acquisition. Me? My personal site runs on WP Engine, but I’m not precious about it having only been there one year.

Prelude to a tweet

We had fair warning that something was coming up when WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg sent this out over X:

I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and…

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) September 19, 2024

There’s the ammo: Don’t let private equity bully you into speaking up against the company you work for when its contributions to WordPress are on the slim side of things.

Private equity. Lack of participation in the WordPress community. Making a big public deal of it. Remember these things because this is one day before…

WordCamp US 2024

Matt spoke at WordCamp US (WCUS) 2024 in Portland, OR, last week. September 20 to be exact. Making big, bold statements at WCUS isn’t a new thing for Matt, as many of us still have “Learn JavaScript deeply” tattooed on the brain from 2016.

Matt’s statements this year were less inspirational (instructional?) as they took direct aim at WP Engine as part of a presentation on the merits of open-source collaboration. You can watch and listen to where the first jab was thrown roughly around the 10:05 marker of the recording.

Let’s break down the deal. Matt begins by comparing the open-source contributions to WordPress from his company, Automattic, to those of WP Engine. These things are tracked on WordPress.org as part of a campaign called “Five for the Future” that’s designed to give organizations an influential seat at the table to form the future of WordPress in exchange for open-source contributions back to the WordPress project. Automattic has a page totaling its contributions. So does WP Engine.

Before Matt reveals the numbers, he goes out of his way to call out the fact that both Automattic and WP Engine are large players in the neighborhood of $500 million dollars. That’s the setup for Matt to demonstrate how relatively little WP Engine contributes to WordPress against Matt’s own company. Granted, I neither have absolutely no clue what factors into contributions, nor how the pages are administrated or updated. But here’s what they show…

Quite the discrepancy! I’d imagine Automattic dwarfs every other company that’s pledged to the campaign. Maybe it would be better to compare the contributions of another non-Automattic pledge that has a fairly strong reputation for participating in WordPress community. 10up is one of the companies that comes straight to my mind and they are showing up for 191 hours per week, or roughly five times WP Engine’s reported time. I get conflicting info on 10up’s revenue, valuation, and size, so maybe the comparison isn’t fair. Or maybe it is fair because 10up is certainly smaller than WP Engine, and no estimate I saw was even close to the $500 million mark.

Whatever the case, bottom line: Matt calls out WP Engine for its lack of effort on a very public stage — maybe the largest — in WordPress Land. He doesn’t stop there, going on to namecheck Silver Lake, a ginormous private equity firm bankrolling the company. The insinuation is clear: there’s plenty of money and resources, so pony up.

That’s bad enough for attendees to raise eyebrows, but it doesn’t end there. Matt encourages users and developers alike to vote with money by not purchasing hosting from WP Engine (11:31) and seems to suggest (23:05) that he’ll provide financial support to any WP Engine employees who lose their jobs from speaking up against their employer.

I think I can get behind the general idea that some companies need a little prodding to pull their weight to something like the Five for the Future campaign. Encouraging developers to pull their projects from a company and employees to jeopardize their careers? Eek.

“WP Engine is not WordPress”

This is when I believe things got noisy. It’s one thing to strongarm a company (or its investors) into doing more for the community. But in a post on his personal blog the day after WCUS, Matt ups the ante alleging that “WP Engine isn’t WordPress.” You’d think this is part of the tough-guy stance he had from the stage, but his argument is much different in this post. Notice it’s about how WP Engine uses WordPress in its business rather than how much the company invests in it:

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database. This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.

WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content.

OK, gloves off. This is more personal. It’s no longer about community contributions but community trust and how WP Engine erodes trust by preventing WordPress users from accessing core WordPress features for their own profit.

Required reading

That’s where I’d like to end this, at least for now. Several days have elapsed since Matt’s blog post and there are many, many more words flying around from him, community members, other companies, and maybe even your Great Aunt. But if you’re looking for more signal than noise, I’ve rounded up a few choice selections that I feel contribute to the (heated) discussion.

Reddit: Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP

Matt responds to the requisite calls for him to step down, starting with:

To be very clear, I was 100% cordial and polite to everyone at the booth, my message was:

* I know this isn’t about them, it’s happening several levels above, it’s even above their CEO, it’s coming from their owner, Silver Lake and particularly their board member Lee Wittlinger.

* Several people inside WP Engine have been anonymously leaking information to me about their bad behavior, and I wanted to let them know if they were caught or faced retaliation that I would support them in every way possible, including covering their salaries until they found a new job.

* That *if* we had to take down the WP Engine booth and ban WP Engine that evening, my colleague Chloé could print them all new personal badges if they still wanted to attend the conference personally, as they are community members, not just their company.

This was delivered calmly, and they said thank you, and their head of comms, Lauren Cox, who was there asked that they have time to regroup and discuss.

Automattic’s Actionable Misconduct Directed to WP Engine

WP Engine issues a cease and desist letter designed to stop Matt from disparaging them publicly. But hold up, because there’s another juicy claim in there:

In the days leading up to Mr. Mullenweg’s September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, Automattic suddenly began demanding that WP Engine pay Automattic large sums of money, and if it didn’t, Automattic would wage a war against WP Engine.

And yes, they did issue it from their own site’s /wp-content directory. That’s easy to lose, so I’ve downloaded it to link it for posterity.

Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine

Just today, Matt published a cease and desist letter to the Auttomatic blog where he alleges that WP Engine’s commercial modifications to WordPress Core violate the WordPress trademark. Again, this has become about licensing, not contributions:

WP Engine’s business model is based on extensive and unauthorized use of these trademarks in ways that mislead consumers into believing that WP Engine is synonymous with WordPress. It’s not.

This is trademark abuse, not fair competition.

This is no longer WordPress vs. WP Engine. It’s more like Automattic vs. WP Engine. But with Matt’s name quite literally in the name Automattic, let’s be real and call this Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine.

WP Tavern coverage

WP Tavern is still the closest thing we have to an official WordPress news outlet. Nevermind that it’s funded and hired by Automattic (among others). I respect it, though I honestly have been less attentive to it since the team turned earlier this year. It’s still a great spot to catch up on the post-event coverage:

• Highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s Spiciest Word Camp Presentation at WordCamp US 2024 (Sep. 24)
• Automattic Responds to WP Engine’s Cease and Desist with Legal Action (Sep. 24)

There’s another more recent WP Tavern article I want to call out because it’s a huge development in this saga…

WP Engine Banned from Using WordPress.org Resources

Dang. This is the point of no return. It not only affects WP Engine proper, but the Flywheel hosting it also owns.

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin. 

I was able to update plugins on my site as recently as yesterday, but let’s see as of this morning.

Maybe I can still see details about my installed plugins…

This is a bad, bad situatiuon. I have thoughts about it and neither side looks good. Using real people with no dog in the fight to make a point is never gonna be a good look. Then again, both sides have valid points and I can see where they’re coming from. I just hate to see it come to a head like this.

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Catching Up on the WordPress 🚫 WP Engine Sitch originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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A new tool from Eric Meyer, Brian Kardell, and Stephanie Stimac backed with Igalia’s support. Brian announced it on his blog, as did Eric, describing it like this:

What BCD Watch does is, it grabs releases of the Browser Compatibility Data (BCD) repository that underpins the support tables on MDN and services like caniuse.com.  It then analyzes what’s changed since the previous release.

Every Monday, BCD Watch produces two reports. The Weekly Changes Report lists all the changes to BCD that happened in the previous week — what’s been added, removed, or renamed in the whole of BCD.  It also tells you which of the Big Three browsers newly support (or dropped support for) each listed feature, along with a progress bar showing how close the feature is to attaining Baseline status.

Browser support data is at MDN. There’s also plenty at Caniuse.com. The two share data, in fact, though not all of it. We now have Baseline, which is also cited in MDN and Caniuse alike. It’s nice to see an effort at cracking a central spot for all this — organized by date, no less.

Oh, and hey, there’s a feed. Even better.

You can also poke at its repo. Thanks a bunch, Eric, Brian, Stephanie, and Igalia! This is super helpful and already part of my toolkit.

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Vouchers and coupons are a key part of any marketing strategy, offering customers special discounts and incentives to drive engagement and sales. But to truly catch the eye, these vouchers need to look polished and professional.

In this blog post, we’ve gathered the best voucher and coupon mockup templates to help you present your designs in a realistic and appealing way. Whether you’re designing for a restaurant, retail store, or online brand, these mockup templates allow you to showcase your voucher or coupon designs with style.

From clean and modern layouts to more elaborate, creative designs, these templates are perfect for visualizing how your final product will look in the real world. Have a look.

Modern Voucher Mockup Template

This is a modern and customizable mockup template for showcasing your voucher and coupon designs. This kit offers four high-resolution PSD files that you can easily edit to place your designs. You can also alter the contrast, design, or even the background color and textures according to your needs.

Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template is fully customizable and integrates seamlessly with Smart-Objects for easy replacement of designs. The high-quality resolution of 3000 x 2000 px at 300 DPI ensures stunning visuals. A comprehensive help file is included for your convenience.

Natural Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile voucher mockup template for showcasing food and nature-themed product vouchers. It provides 4 different templates, all customizable via smart objects for easy editing. It features high-resolution (4500x3000px, 300 DPI) well-layered PSD files with adjustable light, capable of accommodating both bright and dark designs.

Voucher Coupon Mockup Template

This is a crisp, easy-to-use voucher mockup template ideal for showcasing your voucher designs. This template features smart objects for hassle-free editing, well-organized layers for speedy adjustments, and the capacity to modify the background color to match your designs. It offers a realistic photo quality along with a fully layered PSD, well-structured layers, and 300 DPI optimisation.

Stylish Gift Voucher Mockup Template

A customizable voucher mockup template for creating engaging gift vouchers or tickets. It’s ideal for social media posts and presentations to clients. This template features four high-resolution PSD mockup scenes, easy-edit smart objects, variable light settings, and a changeable background. Plus, all objects and shadows are fully separated and editable.

Discount Voucher Mockup Templates

A set of voucher mockup templates that are ideal for professionally displaying your unique coupon designs. Comprised of five different gift voucher Photoshop mockups, the templates offer smart-object features for effortless design replacement, adjustable background colors, and impressive high-resolution imagery (3000×2000 px, 300 dpi). Suitable for anyone with Photoshop CS4 and up.

Creative Voucher Mockup Templates

This collection of voucher mockup templates can make your voucher designing process effortless and quick. These templates, provided in a neatly organized and high-resolution PSD file, incorporate smart-object features for easy and fast editing. They can handle all designs, bright or dark, and allow customization like background color tweaking, separate shadows, and light adjustment.

Elegant Coupon Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile, professionally designed voucher mockup template kit. Perfect for displaying business logos, discount vouchers, and promotional designs, it captures attention and elevates your brand’s visibility. Easy to edit with Photoshop, these high-resolution mockup files come in an RGB color mode. Brilliantly crafted for showcasing branding design, the set includes three files, a user guide, and enables customizable background colors and designs.

Simple Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This is an efficient tool for crafting gift coupons. It features 4 items within a well-layered PSD file. Utilizing the smart-object feature, you can swiftly personalize the existing design effortlessly. The template comes with organized layers and folders, customizable background colors, and both bright and dark design options.

Dark Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile voucher mockup template for showcasing your gift voucher designs professionally. This creative asset includes 4 PSD Photoshop format files, features a high resolution of 4500x3000px, and a customizable background. The included smart-object features make editing quick and easy, catering to both bright and dark designs.

Colorful Voucher Mockup Template

This is a vibrant and user-friendly voucher mockup template ideal for showcasing your promotional designs. The template features a photorealistic mock-up with a high resolution of 5000×3000 pixels, smart object background, and is easy to maneuver. It also comes with built-in photo filters, enhancing the visual appeal of your vouchers.

Bold Voucher Mockup Template

This is a professionally designed voucher mockup template perfect for displaying your brand’s coupon design. With four easy-to-use Photoshop mockups, it offers smart-object features for quick design replacements. Moreover, it allows background color alterations, boasts a high-quality resolution of 3000x2000px at 300 dpi, and includes a helpful guide file.

Stylish Voucher Mockup Template

An excellent voucher mockup template for presenting your designs with a professional and realistic edge. It comes as a high-resolution, easy-to-use PSD file, compatible with Photoshop CS4 or higher. Among its key features, the template offers a changeable background color, convenient smart-object attributes, and a helpful PDF guide.

Unique Coupon Mockup Templates

This is an expertly designed voucher mockup template kit perfect for showcasing your business logos, coupons, and discount vouchers. The high-resolution, fully-editable PSDs can be tailored to your preference using Photoshop’s smart objects, allowing you to effortlessly change designs and colors. With three files included, these templates are ideal for presenting your branding and heightening your brand’s visibility.

Minimal Coupon Mockup Templates

A valuable voucher mockup template pack for those seeking sleek, structured coupon designs. With 05 high-resolution (4500x3000px, 300 DPI) PSD files included, the bundle allows for easy and speedy editing via smart objects and organized layers. Features such as customizable background colors and adjustable lighting cater to both bright and dark design preferences.

Modern Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template provides a sleek and efficient solution for crafting gift vouchers. It comes with two PSD styles, featuring a high-resolution design (4500×3000 pixels, 300dpi), and a certificate size of 7×3″. Its organized layers and folders and simple editing via smart objects make personalizing your vouchers a breeze.

Basic Coupon Mockup Templates

This is an effortless way to professionally present your unique voucher designs. Comprising of five easily customizable Photoshop mockups, these templates have a smart-object feature that lets you swiftly insert your designs. They also offer changeable background-colors and come in a high-resolution, 300 DPI, 3000×2000 pixel format.

Classy Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template boasts a refined and elegant design, perfect for those aiming to showcase their products professionally. Featuring four PSD files with a high-resolution of 4500×3000 and 300 dpi, this template is easily editable and well-organized. It’s a fantastic and efficient tool to preview whether your design vision will translate successfully before execution.

Free Coupon & Voucher Mockup Templates

Free Coupon Cards Mockup (PSD)

This is a free mockup you can use to showcase all types of coupon and voucher designs. It features a very realistic-looking mockup scene that will make your designs look much more alive and real in presentations.

Free Voucher Card Mockup (PSD)

This mockup template is also free to download and it features a unique nature-inspired mockup scene. It’s perfect for all sorts of vouchers, coupons, and other types of card design presentations.

Free Gift Voucher Mockup

This is a simple gift voucher mockup scene that you can fully customize to your preference. The template includes easily editable smart object layers and changeable backgrounds as well.

Free Ticket & Coupon Mockup

This is a collection of 5 creative coupon mockup templates that come in multiple variations and arrangements. You can use these to showcase your tickets, coupons, and vouchers like a pro.

Free Discount Voucher Mockup

Another free voucher mockup with a stylish design. This mockup features a beautiful scene with lots of editable elements. Placing your designs in the mockup is also easy thanks to smart object layers.

Ready to migrate from GoDaddy to WooCommerce? 6 signs you should make the move. GoDaddy vs Woo comparison chart. Pros & cons. 3 ways to switch.

The <select> element is a fairly straightforward concept: focus on it to reveal a set of <option>s that can be selected as the input’s value. That’s a great pattern and I’m not suggesting we change it. That said, I do enjoy poking at things and found an interesting way to turn a <select> into a dial of sorts — where options are selected by scrolling them into position, not totally unlike a combination lock or iOS date pickers. Anyone who’s expanded a <select> for selecting a country knows how painfully long lists can be and this could be one way to prevent that.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

It’s fairly common knowledge that styling <select> in CSS is not the easiest thing in the world. But here’s the trick: we’re not working with <select> at all. No, we’re not going to do anything like building our own <select> by jamming a bunch of JavaScript into a <div>. We’re still working with semantic form controls, only it’s radio buttons.

<section class=scroll-container>
  <label for="madrid" class="scroll-item">
      Madrid 
      <abbr>MAD</abbr>
      <input id="madrid" type="radio" name="items">
  </label>
  <label for="malta" class="scroll-item">
      Malta 
      <abbr>MLA</abbr>
      <input id="malta" type="radio" name="items">
  </label>
  <!-- etc. -->
</section>

What we need is to style the list of selectable controls where we are capable of managing their sizes and spacing in CSS. I’ve gone with a group of labels with nested radio boxes as far as the markup goes. The exact styling is totally up to you, of course, but you can use these base styles I wrote up if you want a starting point.

.scroll-container {
  /* SIZING & LAYOUT */
  --itemHeight: 60px;
  --itemGap: 10px;
  --containerHeight: calc((var(--itemHeight) * 7) + (var(--itemGap) * 6));

  width: 400px; 
  height: var(--containerHeight);
  align-items: center;
  row-gap: var(--itemGap);
  border-radius: 4px;

  /* PAINT */
  --topBit: calc((var(--containerHeight) - var(--itemHeight))/2);
  --footBit: calc((var(--containerHeight) + var(--itemHeight))/2);

  background: linear-gradient(
    rgb(254 251 240), 
    rgb(254 251 240) var(--topBit), 
    rgb(229 50 34 / .5) var(--topBit), 
    rgb(229 50 34 / .5) var(--footBit), 
    rgb(254 251 240) 
    var(--footBit));
  box-shadow: 0 0 10px #eee;
}

A couple of details on this:

• --itemHeight is the height of each item in the list.
• --itemGap is meant to be the space between two items.
• The --containerHeight variable is the .scroll-container’s height. It’s the sum of the item sizes and the gaps between them, ensuring that we display, at maximum, seven items at once. (An odd number of items gives us a nice balance where the selected item is directly in the vertical center of the list). 
• The background is a striped gradient that highlights the middle area, i.e., the location of the currently selected item. 
•  The --topBit and –-footBit variables are color stops that visually paint in the middle area (which is orange in the demo) to represent the currently selected item.

I’ll arrange the controls in a vertical column with flexbox declared on the .scroll-container:

.scroll-container {
  display: flex; 
  flex-direction: column;
  /* rest of styles */
}

With layout work done, we can focus on the scrolling part of this. If you haven’t worked with CSS Scroll Snapping before, it’s a convenient way to direct a container’s scrolling behavior. For example, we can tell the .scroll-container that we want to enable scrolling in the vertical direction. That way, it’s possible to scroll to the rest of the items that are not in view.

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  /* rest of styles */
}

Next, we reach for the scroll-snap-style property that can be used to tell the .scroll-container that we want scrolling to stop on an item — not near an item, but directly on it.

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
  /* rest of styles */
}

Now items “snap” onto an item instead of allowing a scroll to end wherever it wants. One more little detail I like to include is overscroll-behavior, specifically along the y-axis as far as this demo goes:

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
  overscroll-behavior-y: none;
  /* rest of styles */
}

overscroll-behavior-y: none isn’t required to make this work, but when someone scrolls through the .scroll-container (along the y-axis), scrolling stops once the boundary is reached, and any further continued scrolling action will not trigger scrolling in any nearby scroll containers. Just a form of defensive CSS.

Time to move to the items inside the scroll container. But before we go there, here are some base styles for the items themselves that you can use as a starting point:

.scroll-item {
  /* SIZING & LAYOUT */
  width: 90%;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  padding-inline: 20px;
  border-radius: inherit; 

  /* PAINT & FONT */
  background: linear-gradient(to right, rgb(242 194 66), rgb(235 122 51));
  box-shadow: 0 0 4px rgb(235 122 51);
  font: 16pt/var(--itemHeight) system-ui;
  color: #fff;

  input { appearance: none; } 
  abbr { float: right; } /* The airport code */
}

As I mentioned earlier, the --itemHeight variable is setting as the size of each item and we’re declaring it on the flex property — flex: 0 0 var(--itemHeight). Margin is added before and after the first and last items, respectively, so that every item can reach the middle of the container through scrolling. 

The scroll-snap-align property is there to give the .scroll-container a snap point for the items. A center alignment, for instance, snaps an item’s center (vertical center, in this case) with the .scroll-container‘s center (vertical center as well). Since the items are meant to be selected through scrolling alone pointer-events: none is added to prevent selection from clicks.

One last little styling detail is to set a new background on an item when it is in a :checked state:

.scroll-item {
  /* Same styles as before */

  /* If input="radio" is :checked */
  &:has(:checked) {
    background: rgb(229 50 34);
  }
}

But wait! You’re probably wondering how in the world an item can be :checked when we’re removing pointer-events. Good question! We’re all finished with styling, so let’s move on to figuring some way to “select” an item purely through scrolling. In other words, whatever item scrolls into view and “snaps” into the container’s vertical center needs to behave like a typical form control selection. Yes, we’ll need JavaScript for that. 

let observer = new IntersectionObserver(entries => { 
  entries.forEach(entry => {
    with(entry) if(isIntersecting) target.children[1].checked = true;
  });
}, { 
  root: document.querySelector(`.scroll-container`), rootMargin: `-51% 0px -49% 0px`
});

document.querySelectorAll(`.scroll-item`).forEach(item => observer.observe(item));

The IntersectionObserver object is used to monitor (or “observe”) if and when an element (called a target) crosses through (or “intersects”) another element. That other element could be the viewport itself, but in this case, we’re observing the .scroll-container for when a .scroll-item intersects it. We’ve established the observed boundary with rootMargin:"-51% 0px -49% 0px".  

A callback function is executed when that happens, and we can use that to apply changes to the target element, which is the currently selected .scroll-item. In our case, we want to select a .scroll-item that is at the halfway mark in the .scroll-container: target.children[1].checked = true.

That completes the code. Now, as we scroll through the items, whichever one snaps into the center position is the selected item. Here’s a look at the final demo again:

Let’s say that, instead of selecting an item that snaps into the .scroll-container‘s vertical center, the selection point we need to watch is the top of the container. No worries! All we do is update the scroll-snap-align property value from center to start in the CSS and remove the :first-of-type‘s top margin. From there, it’s only a matter of updating the scroll container’s background gradient so that the color stops highlight the top instead of the center. Like this:

And if one of the items has to be pre-selected when the page loads, we can get its position in JavaScript (getBoundingClientRect()) and use the scrollTo() method to scroll the container to where that specific item’s position is at the point of selection (which we’ll say is the center in keeping with our original demo). We’ll append a .selected class on that .scroll-item. 

<section class="scroll-container">
  <!-- more items -->
  <label class="scroll-items selected">
    2024
    <input type=radio name=items />
  </label>

  <!-- more items -->
</section>

Let’s select the .selected class, get its dimensions, and automatically scroll to it on page load:

let selected_item = (document.querySelector(".selected")).getBoundingClientRect();
let scroll_container = document.querySelector(".scroll-container");
scroll_container.scrollTo(0, selected_item.top - scroll_container.offsetHeight - selected_item.height);

It’s a little tough to demo this in a typical CodePen embed, so here’s a live demo in a GitHub Page (source code). I’ll drop a video in as well:

That’s it! You can build up this control or use it as a starting point to experiment with different layouts, styles, animations, and such. It’s important the UX clearly conveys to the users how the selection is done and which item is currently selected. And if I was doing this in a production environment, I’d want to make sure there’s a good fallback experience for when JavaScript might be unavailable and that my markup performs well on a screen reader.

References and further reading

• A Few Functional Uses for Intersection Observer to Know When an Element is in View (Preethi Sam)
• An Explanation of How the Intersection Observer Watches (Travis Almand)
• Practical CSS Scroll Snapping (Max Kohler)
• The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019 (Chris Coyier)
• CSS Flexbox Layout Guide (CSS-Tricks)
• CSS flex property (CSS-Tricks)
• CSS Scroll Snap Properties (MDN)
• scrollTo() (MDN)

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How to Make a “Scroll to Select” Form Control originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.