Month: September 2024

Only Chris, right? You’ll want to view this in a Chromium browser:

This is exactly the sort of thing I love, not for its practicality (cuz it ain’t), but for how it illustrates a concept. Generally, tutorials and demos try to follow the “rules” — whatever those may be — yet breaking them helps you understand how a certain thing works. This is one of those.

The concept is pretty straightforward: one target element can be attached to multiple anchors on the page.

<div class="anchor-1"></div>
<div class="anchor-2"></div>
<div class="target"></div>

We’ve gotta register the anchors and attach the .target to them:

.anchor-1 {
  anchor-name: --anchor-1;
}

.anchor-2 {
  anchor-name: --anchor-2;
}

.target {
  
}

Wait, wait! I didn’t attach the .target to the anchors. That’s because we have two ways to do it. One is using the position-anchor property.

.target {
  position-anchor: --anchor-1;
}

That establishes a target-anchor relationship between the two elements. But it only accepts a single anchor value. Hmm. We need more than that. That’s what the anchor() function can do. Well, it doesn’t take multiple values, but we can declare it multiple times on different inset properties, each referencing a different anchor.

.target {
  top: anchor(--anchor-1, bottom);
}

The second piece of anchor()‘s function is the anchor edge we’re positioned to and it’s gotta be some sort of physical or logical inset — top, bottom, start, end, inside, outside, etc. — or percentage. We’re bascially saying, “Take that .target and slap it’s top edge against --anchor-1‘s bottom edge.

That also works for other inset properties:

.target {
  top: anchor(--anchor-1 bottom);
  left: anchor(--anchor-1 right);
  bottom: anchor(--anchor-2 top);
  right: anchor(--anchor-2 left);
}

Notice how both anchors are declared on different properties by way of anchor(). That’s rad. But we aren’t actually anchored yet because the .target is just like any other element that participates in the normal document flow. We have to yank it out with absolute positioning for the inset properties to take hold.

.target {
  position: absolute;

  top: anchor(--anchor-1 bottom);
  left: anchor(--anchor-1 right);
  bottom: anchor(--anchor-2 top);
  right: anchor(--anchor-2 left);
}

In his demo, Chris cleverly attaches the .target to two <textarea> elements. What makes it clever is that <textarea> allows you to click and drag it to change its dimensions. The two of them are absolutely positioned, one pinned to the viewport’s top-left edge and one pinned to the bottom-right.

If we attach the .target's top and left edges to --anchor-1‘s bottom and right edges, then attach the target's bottom and right edges to --anchor-2‘s top and left edges, we’re effectively anchored to the two <textarea> elements. This is what allows the .target element to stretch with the <textarea> elements when they are resized.

But there’s a small catch: a <textarea> is resized from its bottom-right corner. The second <textarea> is positioned in a way where the resizer isn’t directly attached to the .target. If we rotate(180deg), though, it’s all good.

Again, you’ll want to view that in a Chromium browser at the time I’m writing this. Here’s a clip instead if you prefer.

That’s just a background-color on the .target element. We can put a little character in there instead as a background-image like Chris did to polish this off.

Fun, right?! It still blows my mind this is all happening in CSS. It wasn’t many days ago that something like this would’ve been a job for JavaScript.

Multiple Anchors originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

If you’re looking to add a gritty, urban vibe to your designs, spray paint textures and backgrounds are the perfect solution.

Whether you’re creating digital artwork, branding, or eye-catching event graphics, spray paint textures add a layer of authenticity and creativity that’s hard to achieve with traditional tools. From street art-inspired projects to bold, edgy posters, spray paint elements can instantly bring a raw, artistic energy to your work.

In this post, we’ve rounded up the best spray paint textures and backgrounds for you to use in your next project. With a variety of options ranging from splatters and drips to fully painted surfaces, these resources give you the freedom to create designs that feel dynamic and expressive.

Spray Paint Leaks Backgrounds

Featuring colorful graffiti wall textures, this is a collection of abstract spray paint textures with a hand-crafted artistic look. They come as a pack of 10 unique and striking JPG backgrounds with a high resolution of 6000 x 4000, 300 dpi in RGB format. These vibrant designs are ideal for web and print applications – from social media covers to logo backdrops, posters, or invitations.

Horizon Spray Paint Texture Backgrounds

Experience the vibrancy of hand-crafted colorful spray paint textures. This creative bundle features 10 unique graffiti wall textures in an array of colors, providing a lively backdrop for web pages, social media profiles, apps, presentations and printed projects. Delivered in JPG format with high-resolution clarity (6000×4000, 300 dpi, RGB), these textures can bring dimension and depth to your design work.

Graffiti Spray Paint Textures

This is an impressive collection of 29 vibrant PNG images featuring spray paint graffiti style textures. Housed in a single .zip file, these high-resolution textures are ideal for different design needs – from adding a creative touch to projects, using for masks and overlays, or setting unique backgrounds. All the items use an RGB color space to enhance your creative process.

Paint Splatter Texture Backgrounds

This spray paint textures bundle offers a collection of 15 varied designs, each texture is presented in high-resolution 6000 x 4000px format. With a crisp 300 DPI and convenient JPG formatting, these spray paint textures are perfect for adding a unique and vibrant touch to any digital project.

Spray Paint Textures & Overlays

A unique spray paint textures pack offers authentic and high-resolution textures extracted from real spray paint patterns. With 10 varieties to choose from, these full transparency textures are flawlessly isolated and prepared as transparent PNG files. Adjust the dark grey opacity as needed, and enhance your design projects with these fine detailed, 48-megapixel sized overlays to bring a real-life spray paint effect.

Spray Paint Colorful Backgrounds

A vibrant collection of handcrafted spray paint textures, featuring graffiti-style elements perfect for a variety of digital and print uses. The set includes 10 distinctive, high-resolution (6000 x 4000, 300 dpi, RGB) JPG backgrounds, ideal for websites, social media, apps, presentations, logos, and print items like flyers, cards, posters, and more.

101 Blob & Spot Spray Shapes

Explore the world of spray paint textures with this collection of high-resolution designs and shapes. Crafted with inks on paper and meticulously scanned and edited in Photoshop, these unique abstract shapes can enhance any project, whether it’s web design, art, posters, flyers, banners, or covers.

32 Abstract Spray Paint Shapes

The 32 Abstract Spray Paint Shapes asset is an expansive assortment of unique, digitally enhanced PNG files of ink-sprayed shapes. With a high resolution of up to 6000 pixels, these beautifully abstract textures, originally painted on paper, can enhance a variety of projects including web design, art creation, and print materials like cards, posters and flyers.

Spray Paint Texture Bundle

A unique spray paint textures pack that showcases over 100 authentic spray paint marks in high-resolution png files that can be effortlessly integrated into your projects. This versatile bundle provides varying spray paint splatters, drips, and marks, which can be scaled, copied, pasted, or color-customized to add grunge detail to your artwork.

Spray Paint Drip Textures

Invite some vibrancy into your artwork with this collection of spray paint textures. These authentic, captivating textures are perfect for any design project and are easy to use. They offer impressive detail, having been scanned at a high resolution before being converted to vector formats. With their dark grey color, full isolation, and transparency in various formats, these textures are versatile and adaptable to your choice of software.

20 Paint Splatter Textures & Brushes

Explore new depths in your graphics designs with this spray paint textures pack. It offers high-resolution ink splatter effects, suitable for enhancing illustrations, photos, and website layouts, and even for creating realistic blood splatter. The pack includes 20 PNG files, 1 PSD file, and an ABR file with 20 brushes, guaranteed to add elegance and memorability to your designs while saving you time.

Paint Splashes Backgrounds

This is a collection of vibrant, urban-style designs filled with splattered acrylic paint reminiscing the energetic spirit of youth. These grainy textures serve as a multifunctional decorative asset featuring unique graffiti-like brush strokes and chaotic mud bursts. Ideal for youth apparel, advertising material, digital product presentations, and more.

Spray Paint Drips Textures

This is a versatile collection of 20 high-resolution PNG files with spray paint textures. With a vibrant RGB colour space, these textures are brilliant for incorporating into design projects, creative edits, background visuals, masks, and overlays. Their spray paint drip style serves as an innovative design element, adding a unique artistic flair to various creations.

Subtle Spray Paint Textures

This is a comprehensive set of gently sprayed textures, created from high-resolution scans of spray-painted paper and converted into multiple formats like AI, EPS, and PNG. Perfect for both Illustrator and Photoshop, these dark gray textures, crisply detailed and fully customizable, come with transparent backgrounds and can be paired with DRIP textures to add depth to your design projects.

12 Spray Paint Textures

An eclectic collection of abstract spray paint shapes as PNG files. These high-resolution shapes, crafted thoughtfully from ink on paper, are edited digitally for optimal use. They reach up to 9000 pixels in size and can significantly enhance visual arts projects, such as cards, banners, templates, websites, and more.

Paint Splatter Art Textures

This spray paint texture pack offers a collection of modern, abstract paintings that were originally created with real paint, then scanned at high resolution and converted to Vector EPS, AI, and PNG formats. Ideal for various design projects, these finely detailed textures come with fully isolated, transparent backgrounds.

20 Spray Paint Graffiti Texture

Explore your creative side with this unique spray paint texture pack. Featuring 20 PNG textures in stunning 8K resolution (6000 x 4000 px), it ensures compatibility with Photoshop and other graphics programs that support PNG files, promising to enhance any design project with a vivid, urban touch.

Spray Paint Splatter Brushes & Textures

This spray paint textures collection contains high-resolution, handmade ink splatter effects in a pack of 21 black and white jpg or png images. Perfect for adding texture, grunge effects, or realistic blood splatter to your designs. Incorporate these greyscale bitmaps into any application compatible with .jpg or .png files, offering easy layering and color changes in photoshop.

Free Spray Paint Textures

Free Abstract Art Spray Paint Texture

This beautiful spray paint texture features a colorful design with an abstract and artistic design. You can use it in various ways to create backgrounds as well as for adding textures to designs.

Free Spray Painted Fence Texture

This is a real photo of a spray-painted fence that features a very authentic design. It has a realistic look with a rusted metal fence background that will add a vintage feel to your design project.

Free Green Spay Paint Texture

You can use this spray paint texture to add a gritty look and feel to your posters, flyers, and various other designs. By changing colors, you can even make it look like a blood-splatter texture.

Free Spray Paint Texture Background

This free texture also comes with a green spray paint design. It features a stain-like design that you can blend with various graphics and backgrounds to create unique designs.

Colorful Free Spray Paint Texture

This is a free spray paint-style texture you can use to create colorful backgrounds. It features a sidewalk with spray-painted spots that add an authentic look to this textured background.

Athletic fonts are all about power, speed, and performance. With strong lines, sharp angles, and bold weights, these fonts are designed to stand out and make an impact.

They’re perfect for capturing the adrenaline of competition and the intensity of physical activity, making them ideal for sports-related logos, apparel, and marketing campaigns. These fonts convey strength and action, helping your designs come to life with a sense of urgency and vitality.

In this post, we’ve curated a selection of the best athletic fonts that will bring high-energy style to any design. From sleek, modern sans-serifs to rugged, vintage-inspired typefaces, you’ll find a range of options that work perfectly for everything from team jerseys to fitness magazine covers.

Borex – Athletic Font

Ideal for sports-themed projects, the dynamic and bold Borex athletic font is customizable with four unique styles including regular, slant, and taper. It adds exceptionally creative touches with alternate characters and unique ligatures, ensuring your designs stand out. The font package includes OTF, TTF, WOFF and more.

Tekrot – Athletic Energetic Font

Tekrot is an athletic and robust font inspired by current design trends, infusing each sturdy letter with a soul that can elevate your brand. Ideal for sports-related designs or projects requiring strength, this font comes with various files (OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2), alternates, ligatures, and multilingual support.

Defen Sport – Athletic Block Font

Defen Sport is an athletic block font designed to enhance sports designs with its bold, dynamic characters. Perfect for creating team logos, posters, or athletic apparel, it injects a burst of energy into your designs and commands attention. With its versatility, Defen Sport is suitable for any sports-related projects, promising consistency and impact across all platforms.

Brockies – Sport Display Font

Brockies is a uniquely crafted sports display font distinguished by its athletic style. This creative asset, provided by a third party, has a dynamic and energetic flair that’s ideal for sports-oriented projects or any design requiring a sense of motion or strength. Engaging and versatile, Brockies would make an impactful addition to your font library.

Champione – Modern Athletic Sport Font

The Champione font is a versatile, futuristic typeface that boasts unique and stylish characters. Perfect for sports events branding, jerseys, logos, and even wedding designs or social media posts, its bold, sans-serif style ensures high legibility. Packaged in a variety of formats (OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2), this font is a must-have for all designers.

MREYBOLL – Athletic Font

MREYBOLL is an exciting athletic font perfect for sports design and more. This unique typeface comes in various styles with contemporary corner cutouts for added dynamism. Its superiority among sports fonts and manly, crisp feel offers a strong impact. The package includes OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2 files, alternate, ligature, and all glyphs.

BAMEN – Bold Athletic Font

The BAMEN is a dynamic, modern addition to any sports-oriented design. Offering boldness reminiscent of a fast-paced sporting environment, this font’s wide strokes and cool cuts add speed and power to your titles. The BAMEN typeface is perfect for vehicle commercials, headlines, and other athletic imagery, infusing each design with strength, speed, and a distinct beauty.

Runner – Athletic Sport Font

Check out Runner, a vibrant, athletic sports font ideal for vivifying your sports titles, racing, cycling, game logos, and other dynamic texts. The wide, italicized font style with modern cutouts and a dynamic slant gives an impactful depiction of speed and power. It’s not only bold and dynamic but also legible and versatile in terms of size, making it truly unique.

Boldye – Sports Athletic Font

Boldye is a sports athletic font reminiscent of the Reebok logo’s style. Characterized by strong curves and sharp edges, it’s ideal for sports-themed branding, logos, and posters. With the Open Type feature, you can explore a range of unique alternative letters and ligatures. Boldye also offers seamless integration with a variety of design tools.

Sutixo – Athletic Font

Sutixo is an athletic font crafted for speed lovers and firmly grounded in a sports racing theme. This unique font offers four different styles, handy alternate characters, and ligatures to enhance your designs. Be it sprucing up graphics for a motorsport event or injecting excitement into your brand, Sutixo is your go-to font.

Sport Maniac – Sport & Athletic Font

The Sport Maniac font is a distinctive athletic typeface ready for diverse creative uses such as logos, album covers, movie titles, posters and labels. It comes with OTF, TTF and WOFF files, readily available for your design projects. Its unique style captures the spirit of sports, making it the perfect choice for all your athletic-themed designs.

Yankees Classic – Athletic Script Font

Check out the Yankees Classic, an athletic font with a vintage feel. It features both uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, extensive punctuation, alternate characters, stylistic sets, extruded font, and ligatures. This font is easy-to-use, accommodating a variety of designs, and comes in OTF and TTF formats.

KUNEX – Athletic Block Font

The athletic display font, KUNEX, is perfect for creating a masculine aesthetic with a sense of strength and speed. Crafted specifically for outdoor sports and other contemporary occasions, this modern slab-shaped font has a unique vitality, creating bold impressions while maintaining a natural feel. The comprehensive package includes OTF, TTF, WOFF files, and more, complete with alternate, ligature, and multilingual support.

Gridiron Glory – Sport Athletic Font

Gridiron Glory is an elegant athletic font designed as a nod to sports. Its bold and dynamic design mimics the energy of the sports world, embodying an air of power and competitiveness. Perfect for use in team logos, jerseys, or sports event promotions, this font carries an element of excitement and anticipation within its sharp, gridiron-inspired lines.

Rockas – Modern Sport Display Font

Rockas is an exciting modern sports display font that features wide italic fonts, contemporary cutouts, and a dynamic slant. It’s perfect for sprucing up sports titles, football match posters, gaming logos, or any text that requires a powerful, modern aesthetic. With optimal legibility and sizing, Rockas is a great resource for your next project.

Croser – Athletic Energetic Font

Check out Croser, a dynamic athletic font designed to embody both speed and power. With its wide italic letters, modern cutouts, and slanted lines, it’s perfect for eye-catching sports titles, automobile game logos, or any text that needs a touch of energy. Known for its legibility and scale, Croser is not just your average fast font, it brings uniqueness in its design.

Runking – Modern Sport Font

Runking offers a bold, genuine display font perfect for various branding projects, from logos to product design. It impressively stands out in numerous contexts. Available in both uppercase and lowercase versions, variants include .otf and .ttf, supports multiple languages, and comes in regular and semi-bold weights.

Sport Solid – Athletic Block Font

Sport Solid is a bold and unique font that brings an athletic vibe to any branding project. Ideal for sports-centric creations like logos, t-shirts, and esports visuals, this display font can make a striking impact in diverse contexts. Provided in both OTF and TTF formats, it features substantial, impactful uppercase characters.

RAVERIST – Stylish Athletic Font

RAVERIST is a modern sports display font featuring a natural, textured style. Available in OTF and TTF formats and as a web font, this stylish athletic font exhibits distinctive clarity and dramatic flair. Ideal for enhancing logos, quotes, invitations, product packaging, and headers, it impeccably complements creative tasks that require a handwriting touch.

Fastrun – Sport Athletic Font

Fastrun is a dynamic, bold font designed to give your sports-related projects a strong character. Available in regular, italic, and outline styles, it includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and multilingual support. This versatile font, provided in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, even features options for alternate characters and ligatures.

SPORT NEWS – Athletic Font

SPORT NEWS is a dynamic and bold typeface that instantly captures attention. This font, with its modern letter cutout and italicized wide letters, exhibits a sense of power and speed, making it perfect for sports headlines, automotive game logos, and high-energy magazine monograms. It is extremely readable and offers both uppercase, lowercase, punctuation and numbers, along with multilingual support.

Sport Play – Athletic Block Font

Check out the Sport Play font, a cool new typeface with a bold and authentic look. It’s perfect for any branding project, whether it’s for logo design, t-shirt printing, or esports. The font shines in numerous contexts and comes in OTF, TTF, WOFF, uppercase, alternative, and ligature options. With its modern feel, this font will excite and inspire your creativity.

Goball – Athletic Script Font

Goball athletic font, inspired by the dynamism of baseball, is perfect for all your sports-themed design needs. Boasting a unique, modern touch, it adds a sporty feel to print, merchandise, and more. The package includes Goball Font in various formats, all characters from A-Z, numbers, punctuation, and more.

Free Athletic Fonts

Hyper Oxide – Free Athletic Font

This is a stylish font featuring a set of modern letters. It has the ideal look for crafting energetic titles and headings for athletic designs. The font includes stencil-style bold characters and it’s free to use with personal projects.

Stander – Free Athletic Font

Stander is another free font you can use to craft attractive titles for athletic-themed projects. The font includes a stylishly futuristic letter design that’s perfect for sports brands, teams, and even merchandise design.

Travax – Free Athletic Font

This font comes with a unique and futuristic letter design that adds a very energetic and sporty look to typography. The font is free to download and you can use it to craft bold titles for your personal projects.

Aguante – Free Athletic Font

Aguante is another creative font you can use to design modern titles and headings for your projects. This font also has an athletic vibe along with bold characters. It’s free to use with commercial projects.

Promesh – Free Athletic Font

This font will allow you to design attractive typography for your sports and fitness designs. It includes tall and narrow letterforms with an athletic look and feel. The font is free to use with personal and commercial projects.

The healthcare industry is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by rapid advancements in technology. These innovations are reshaping how patient care is delivered, making it more personalized, efficient, and accessible. From artificial intelligence and telemedicine to wearable health devices and advanced data analytics, technology is revolutionizing every aspect of healthcare. Here’s an exploration of how …

Continue reading "Healthcare Transformed The Role of Technology in Revolutionizing Patient Care"

The post Healthcare Transformed The Role of Technology in Revolutionizing Patient Care first appeared on Lucid Softech.

Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress.  In this episode, host Brian Gardner and Ryan Bracey, director of web UX at Second Melody, explore accessibility in web design, breaking down what it is and debunking common myths about it. Powered by RedCircle…

The post Press This: Accessibility, Inclusive Design, and Debunking Myths appeared first on WP Engine.

The text-box-trim and text-box-edge properties in CSS enable developers to trim specifiable amounts of the whitespace that appear above the first formatted line of text and below the last formatted line of text in a text box, making the text box vertically larger than the content within.

This whitespace is called leading, and it appears above and below (so it’s two half-leadings, actually) all lines of text to make the text more readable. However, we only want it to appear in between lines of text, right? We don’t want it to appear along the over or under edges of our text boxes, because then it interferes with our margins, paddings, gaps, and other spacings.

As an example, if we implement a 50px margin but then the leading adds another 37px, we’d end up with a grand total of 87px of space. Then we’d need to adjust the margin to 13px in order to make the space 50px in practice.

As a design systems person, I try to maintain as much consistency as possible and use very little markup whenever possible, which enables me to use the adjacent-sibling combinator (+) to create blanket rules like this:

/* Whenever <element> is followed by <h1> */
<element> + h1 {
  margin-bottom: 13px; /* instead of margin-bottom: 50px; */
}

This approach is still a headache since you still have to do the math (albeit less of it). But with the text-box-trim and text-box-edge properties, 50px as defined by CSS will mean 50px visually:

Disclaimer: text-box-trim and text-box-edge are only accessible via a feature flag in Chrome 128+ and Safari 16.4+, as well as Safari Technology Preview without a feature flag. See Caniuse for the latest browser support.

Start with text-box-trim

text-box-trim is the CSS property that basically activates text box trimming. It doesn’t really have a use beyond that, but it does provide us with the option to trim from just the start, just the end, both the start and end, or none:

text-box-trim: trim-start;
text-box-trim: trim-end;
text-box-trim: trim-both;
text-box-trim: none;

Note: In older web browsers, you might need to use the older start/end/both values in place of the newer trim-start/trim-end/trim-both values, respectively. In even older web browsers, you might need to use top/bottom/both. There’s no reference for this, unfortunately, so you’ll just have to see what works.

Now, where do you want to trim from?

You’re probably wondering what I mean by that. Well, consider that a typographic letter has multiple peaks.

There’s the x-height, which marks the top of the letter “x” and other lowercase characters (not including ascenders or overshoots), the cap height, which marks the top of uppercase characters (again, not including ascenders or overshoots), and the alphabetic baseline, which marks the bottom of most letters (not including descenders or overshoots). Then of course there’s the ascender height and descender height too.

You can trim the whitespace between the x-height, cap height, or ascender height and the “over” edge of the text box (this is where overlines begin), and also the white space between the alphabetic baseline or descender height and the “under” edge (where underlines begin if text-underline-position is set to under).

Don’t trim anything

text-box-edge: leading means to include all of the leading; simply don’t trim anything. This has the same effect as text-box-trim: none or forgoing text-box-trim and text-box-edge entirely. You could also restrict under-edge trimming with text-box-trim: trim-start or over edge trimming with text-box-trim: trim-end. Yep, there are quite a few ways to not even do this thing at all!

Newer web browsers have deviated from the CSSWG specification working drafts by removing the leading value and replacing it with auto, despite the “Do not ship (yet)” warning (*shrug*).

Naturally, text-box-edge accepts two values (an instruction regarding the over edge, then an instruction regarding the under edge). However, auto must be used solo.

text-box-edge: auto; /* Works */
text-box-edge: ex auto; /* Doesn't work */
text-box-edge: auto alphabetic; /* Doesn't work */

I could explain all the scenarios in which auto would work, but none of them are useful. I think all we want from auto is to be able to set the over or under edge to auto and the other edge to something else, but this is the only thing that it doesn’t do. This is a problem, but we’ll dive into that shortly. 

Trim above the ascenders and/or below the descenders

The text value will trim above the ascenders if used as the first value and below the descenders if used as the second value and is also the default value if you fail to declare the second value. (I think you’d want it to be auto, but it won’t be.)

text-box-edge: ex text; /* Valid */
text-box-edge: ex; /* Computed as `text-box-edge: ex text;` */
text-box-edge: text alphabetic; /* Valid */
text-box-edge: text text; /* Valid */
text-box-edge: text; /* Computed as `text-box-edge: text text;` */

It’s worth noting that ascender and descender height metrics come from the fonts themselves (or not!), so text can be quite finicky. For example, with the Arial font, the ascender height includes diacritics and the descender height includes descenders, whereas with the Fraunces font, the descender height includes diacritics and I don’t know what the ascender height includes. For this reason, there’s talk about renaming text to from-font.

Trim above the cap height only

To trim above the cap height:

text-box-edge: cap; /* Computed as text-box-edge: cap text; */

Remember, undeclared values default to text, not auto (as demonstrated above). Therefore, to opt out of trimming the under edge, you’d need to use trim-start instead of trim-both:

text-box-trim: trim-start; /* Not text-box-trim: trim-both; */
text-box-edge: cap; /* Not computed as text-box-edge: cap text; */

Trim above the cap height and below the alphabetic baseline

To trim above the cap height and below the alphabetic baseline:

text-box-trim: trim-both;
text-box-edge: cap alphabetic;

By the way, the “Cap height to baseline” option of Figma’s “Vertical trim” setting does exactly this. However, its Dev Mode produces CSS code with outdated property names (leading-trim and text-edge) and outdated values (top and bottom).

Trim above the x-height only

To trim above the x-height only:

text-box-trim: trim-start;
text-box-edge: ex;

Trim above the x-height and below the alphabetic baseline

To trim above the x-height and below the alphabetic baseline:

text-box-trim: trim-both;
text-box-edge: ex alphabetic;

Trim below the alphabetic baseline only

To trim below the alphabetic baseline only, the following won’t work (things were going so well for a moment, weren’t they?):

text-box-trim: trim-end;
text-box-edge: alphabetic;

This is because the first value is always the mandatory over-edge value whereas the second value is an optional under-edge value. This means that alphabetic isn’t a valid over-edge value, even though the inclusion of trim-end suggests that we won’t be providing one. Complaints about verbosity aside, the correct syntax would have you declare any over-edge value even though you’d effectively cancel it out with trim-end:

text-box-trim: trim-end;
text-box-edge: [any over edge value] alphabetic;

What about ideographic glyphs?

It’s difficult to know how web browsers will trim ideographic glyphs until they do, but you can read all about it in the spec. In theory, you’d want to use the ideographic-ink value for trimming and the ideographic value for no trimming, both of which aren’t unsupported yet:

text-box-edge: ideographic; /* No trim */
text-box-edge: ideographic-ink; /* Trim */
text-box-edge: ideographic-ink ideographic; /* Top trim */
text-box-edge: ideographic ideographic-ink; /* Bottom trim */

text-box, the shorthand property

If you’re not keen on the verbosity of text box trimming, there’s a shorthand text-box property that makes it somewhat inconsequential. All the same rules apply.

/* Syntax */
text-box: [text-box-trim] [text-box-edge (over)] [text-box-edge (under)]?

/* Example */
text-box: trim-both cap alphabetic;

Final thoughts

At first glance, text-box-trim and text-box-edge might not seem all that interesting, but they do make spacing elements a heck of a lot simpler.

Is the current proposal the best way to handle text box trimming though? Personally, I don’t think so. I think text-box-trim-start and text-box-trim-end would make a lot more sense, with text-box-trim being used as the shorthand property and text-box-edge not being used at all, but I’d settle for some simplification and/or consistent practices. What do you think?

There are some other concerns too. For example, should there be an option to include underlines, overlines, hanging punctuation marks, or diacritics? I’m going to say yes, especially if you’re using text-underline-position: under or a particularly thick text-decoration-thickness, as they can make the spacing between elements appear smaller.

Two CSS Properties for Trimming Text Box Whitespace originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Credit card designs are now much more creative than they used to be. Thanks to talented designers, every bank now has its own unique credit and debit card designs with colorful and wild designs.

If you’re a designer working on a brand new credit card design, you will also need the perfect mockup to showcase your designs to your clients and on your portfolio. We handpicked this collection of credit card templates just for that purpose.

In this post, you’ll find some beautiful credit card mockups that highlight your designs in a professional way. These mockups are also ideal for showcasing other types of card designs, including membership cards for various businesses.

Check out the credit card mockup templates below and be sure to download them all. There are a few free templates in there too.

Modern Credit Card Mockup Template

A simple and minimal mockup is the best way to show off professionalism through your design presentations. This mockup is perfect for achieving that goal. The template features a simple tilted credit card with lighting effects and editable background. It has smart objects for changing the card design as well.

Hand Holding Credit Card Mockup

Adding a bit of human touch can greatly improve your credit card presentation. With this mockup, you can show off your card design being held by a hand. It not only makes your credit card look more realistic but also offers a clear look at the design. There are 4 different mockups included in this pack.

4 Minimal Credit Card Mockup Templates

If you want to make your credit card appear in a more realistic and creative environment, this mockup is perfect for you. It comes with a modern background design and with 4 different mockup scenes. You can also customize the background and effects to your preference.

Credit Card Mosaic Mockup Template

This mockup template allows you to showcase multiple credit card designs at the same time. It’s perfect for showing off your skills in a portfolio. Or you can use it to make a nice single credit card design presentation as well. The template features well-organized layers and smart objects for easy editing.

Credit Card with Hand Mockup Template

A very useful credit card mockup that can be used for various purposes. The realistic way the hand is holding the credit card gives it a very professional look. You can use it to create advertisements, promote membership cards, social media campaigns, and more. It comes in a fully editable PSD file.

Free Credit Card PSD Mockup

This beautiful credit card template is free to download and use. It comes as a fully customizable PSD file with smart object layers. The template is perfect for showcasing your designs on a portfolio.

Free Credit Card Mockup Template

With this mockup template, you can show off your credit card being held by a human hand. This template is also free to use. And it features editable backgrounds and smart objects.

Credit And Debit Card Mockup

This credit card mockup features a simple layout and allows you to show two card designs at the same time. The template comes in high-resolution PSD format with organized layers. It has an adjustable shadow effect too.

Smartphone with Credit Cards Mockup

This mockup is ideal for showcasing privacy and security alongside your credit card designs. It features a phone and a lock with a credit card mockup. The template is easily customizable and has editable colors.

Credit Cards Scene Mockups

This is a collection of credit card mockups that includes multiple scenes featuring the credit cards. They all have fully customizable layouts with changeable backgrounds and smart object layers.

Dark Debit, Credit, and Membership Card Mockups

This credit card mockup kit includes 5 different mockup scenes for you to choose from. They are ideal for showcasing and presenting your designs to clients in a stylish and professional way.

Free Plastic Credit Card Mockup

This is a free credit card mockup template you can use to show off both sides of your credit card designs. You can also change its background to your preference.

Credit Card with Security Concept Mockup

If you’re working on an app or service related to payment security, this mockup template will definitely come in handy. It will allow you to create a cool scene depicting security and safety with custom credit card designs.

Modern Credit Card & Membership Card Mockup

Use this mockup to show off your credit card designs in style. It includes mockups for showing the front and back sides of the credit card as well. The template is available in a high-resolution, fully layered, PSD file.

Smartphone with Bank Card Mockup

This mockup template features two credit card mockups alongside a smartphone. You can easily customize this mockup to create an amazing scene showcasing your credit card designs. The design of the smartphone is also customizable.

Plastic Discount & Membership Card Mockups

There are 5 unique credit card-style mockups in this bundle. They can be used to showcase many different types of membership cards, discount cards, and more. Each mockup has a different scene with editable shadows and backgrounds.

Free Creative Credit Card Mockup

This mockup is also free to download and use. It has changeable backgrounds with a plastic card mockup that shows your designs in a slightly angled view.

Realistic Credit Card Mockup Template

This mockup template comes with a realistic look and feel that will help make your designs appear more natural and professional. The template features 3 credit cards overlapping one another. You can edit each card mockup using smart objects to place your own designs. It’s ideal for showcasing different variants of a credit card.

Stylish Credit Card Mockup Template

Another elegant and stylish credit card mockup for showcasing your modern card designs. This mockup comes with a stacked card set that you can also customize using smart object layers. The background can be changed to your preference. And it comes as a PSD file with organized layers.

Creative Credit Cards Mockup Set

This mockup is most suitable for showcasing your credit card designs on websites and social media. It includes a fully customizable mockup design where you can even change the color of the card and change the background. You can also place your own design in the mockups using smart objects.

Smartphone Screen & Credit Card Mockup

A useful credit card mockup for banks, small businesses, and eCommerce platforms. With this mockup, you can promote your mobile apps and the payment options available on your app at the same time. The mockup comes in two different styles and they are both easily customizable.

Balanced Credit Card Mockup Templates

Want to show how to balance expenses with your bank’s credit card? Then this mockup will help you spread your message more effectively. This is a collection of creative credit card mockups that shows a credit card being balanced on various objects. There are 5 different mockup designs in this bundle that come in PSD format.

Free Credit Card Mockup with Hand

You can download and use this template free of charge. It comes with a realistic design featuring a human hand holding a credit card. You can easily change the background and replace the card design as well.

Free Modern Credit Card Mockup

This is a computer-generated card mockup that is ideal for showcasing your credit card in a technology-themed environment. The mockup is available in 5 different scenes and in 4K resolution. All free to download.

5 Simple Bank Card Mockup Templates

A collection of minimal and simple credit card mockups. You can use these mockups to showcase any type of credit or debit card design in a very creative way. There are mockups with multiple views and angles to choose from. And they are all easily customizable as well.

Plastic Credit Card Mockup Templates

This bundle also comes with several different styles of credit card mockups. There are 9 unique mockups included in this pack that is designed for showcasing all kinds of credit cards. Each mockup comes with editable effects, smart objects, changeable backgrounds, and much more.

Credit Card with Wallet Mockup Template

With this mockup template, you can showcase your credit card alongside a wallet. The hand removing the credit card from the wallet makes this mockup look more realistic and appropriate for various business promotions as well. You can also easily place your design in the mockup using smart objects.

Credit Card and iPhone Mockup Template

This mockup template allows you to show off your card design next to an iPhone. It’s actually ideal for showcasing credit cards as well as membership cards. The iPhone device also works as a mockup so you can place your own designs in the device as well. Both mockups can be customized using Photoshop.

Luxury Credit Card Mockup Template

If you’re working on a high-tier credit card design, this mockup will help create the appropriate atmosphere for your card. It features a high-end luxury background that gives it a classy look. You can also customize the background color and easily replace the design using smart objects.

Free Realistic Credit Card Mockup

Believe it or not, this high-quality credit card mockup is actually free to download. It features a realistic and professional design that will surely make your credit card presentation more effective.

Free Debit Card Mockup Sketch Template

The dark and stylish look of this mockup gives it a certain elegant feel. It’s perfect for showing off your credit and debit card designs in websites and portfolios. The template comes in Sketch format and it’s free to download.

Professional Credit & Membership Card Mockups

The effects used in this mockup design give it a very realistic-looking plastic look and feel. This makes it perfect for presenting your credit card design in a way that will win over your clients. There are 6 different mockup templates in this pack with fully customizable backgrounds and colors.

Front & Back Credit Card Mockup

This mockup template comes with a design that allows you to showcase the front and back sides of your credit card design at the same time. It features smart objects, editable floor and wall colors, as well as organized layers.

Debit Card Mockup Templates

You can use this simple and minimal mockup template to showcase your credit, debit, and membership cards in style. It’s great for presenting designs to clients as well as showcasing them in portfolios. The mockup comes in 4 different styles as well.

Multipurpose Credit Card Mockups

This mockup template allows you to show off multiple credit card designs at once. It also includes mockups for showcasing both the front and back sides of your designs. There are 3 unique PSD mockup templates in this pack.

Be sure to check out our best business card mockup templates collection as well.

As the world faces a myriad of complex challenges, from climate change and resource scarcity to healthcare disparities and educational inequalities, technology is playing an increasingly vital role in developing innovative solutions. By harnessing the power of cutting-edge technologies, societies around the globe are addressing these global issues more effectively than ever before. Here’s a …

Continue reading "Innovative Solutions for Global Issues How Tech is Making a Difference"

The post Innovative Solutions for Global Issues How Tech is Making a Difference first appeared on Lucid Softech.

I collect a bunch of links in a bookmarks folder. These are things I fully intend to read, and I do — eventually. It’s a good thing bookmarks are digital, otherwise, I’d need a bigger coffee table to separate them from the ever-growing pile of magazines.

The benefit of accumulating links is that the virtual pile starts revealing recurring themes. Two seemingly unrelated posts published a couple months apart may congeal and become more of a dialogue around a common topic.

I spent time pouring through a pile of links I’d accumulated over the past few weeks and noticed a couple of trending topics. No, that’s not me you’re smelling — there’s an aroma of nostalgia in the air., namely a newfound focus on learning web fundamentals and some love for manual deployments.

Web Developers, AI, and Development Fundamentals

Alvaro Montero:

Ultimately, it is not about AI replacing developers, but about developers adapting and evolving with the tools. The ability to learn, understand, and apply the fundamentals is essential because tools will only take you so far without the proper foundation.

ShopTalk 629: The Great Divide, Global Design + Web Components, and Job Titles

Chris and Dave sound off on The Great Divide in this episode and the rising value of shifting back towards fundamentals:

Dave: But I think what is maybe missing from that is there was a very big feeling of disenfranchisement from people who are good and awesome at CSS and JavaScript and HTML. But then were being… The market was shifting hard to these all-in JavaScript frameworks. And a lot of people were like, “I don’t… This is not what I signed up for.”

[…]

Dave: Yeah. I’m sure you can be like, “Eat shit. That’s how it is, kid.” But that’s also devaluing somebody’s skillset. And I think what the market is proving now is if you know JavaScript or know HTML, CSS, and regular JavaScript (non-framework JavaScript), you are once again more valuable because you understand how a line of CSS can replace 10,000 lines of JavaScript – or whatever it is.

Chris: Yeah. Maybe it’s coming back just a smidge–

Dave: A smidge.

Chris: –that kind of respecting the fundamental stuff because there’s been churn since then, since five years ago. Now it’s like these exclusively React developers we hired, how useful are they anymore? Were they a little too limited and fundamental people are knowing more? I don’t know. It’s hard to say that the job industry is back when it doesn’t quite feel that way to me.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, who knows. I just think the value in knowing CSS and HTML, good HTML, are up more than they maybe were five years ago.

Just a Spec: HTML Finally Gets the Respect It Deserves

Jared and Ayush riffin’ on the first ever State of HTML survey, why we need it, and whether “State of…” surveys are representative of people who work with HTML.

[…] once you’ve learned about divs and H’s 1 through 6, what else is there to know? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Once again, we drafted Lea Verou to put her in-depth knowledge of the web platform to work and help us craft a survey that ended up reaching far beyond pure HTML to cover accessibility, web components, and much more.

[…]

You know, it’s perfectly fine to be an expert at HTML and CSS and know very little JavaScript. So, yeah, I think it’s important to note that as we talk about the survey, because the survey is a snapshot of just the people who know about the survey and answer the questions, right? It’s not necessarily representative of the broad swath of people around the world who have used HTML at all.

[…]

So yeah, a lot of interest in HTML. I’m talking about HTML. And yeah, in the conclusion, Lea Verou talks about we really do have this big need for more extensibility of HTML.

In a more recent episode:

I’m not surprised. I mean, when someone who’s only ever used React can see what HTML does, I think it’s usually a huge revelation to them.

[…]

It just blows their minds. And it’s kind of like you just don’t know what you’re missing out on up to a point. And there is a better world out there that a lot of folks just don’t know about.

[…]

I remember a while back seeing a post come through on social media somewhere, somebody’s saying, oh, I just tried working with HTML forms, just standard HTML forms the first time and getting it to submit stuff. And wait, it’s that easy?

Yeah, last year when I was mentoring a junior developer with the Railsworld conference website, she had come through Bootcamp and only ever done React, and I was showing her what a web component does, and she’s like, oh, man, this is so cool. Yeah, it’s the web platform.

Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out

Alex Russell in the last installment of an epic four-part series well worth your time to fully grasp the timeline, impact, and costs of modern JavsaScript frameworks to today’s development practices:

Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic HTML, and Web Components. This is doubly important if your system uses a framework.

Semi-Annual Reminder to Learn and Hire for Web Standards

Adrian Roselli:

This is a common cycle. Web developers tire of a particular technology — often considered the HTML killer when released — and come out of it calling for a focus on the native web platform. Then they decide to reinvent it yet again, but poorly.

There are many reasons companies won’t make deep HTML / CSS / ARIA / SVG knowledge core requirements. The simplest is the commoditization of the skills, partly because framework and library developers have looked down on the basics.

The anchor element

Heydon Pickering in a series dedicated to HTML elements, starting alphabetically with the good ol’ anchor <a>:

Sometimes, the <a> is referred to as a hyperlink, or simply a link. But it is not one of these and people who say it is one are technically wrong (the worst kind of wrong).

[…]

Web developers and content editors, the world over, make the mistake of not making text that describes a link actually go inside that link. This is collosally unfortunate, given it’s the main thing to get right when writing hypertext.

AI Myth: It lets me write code I can’t on my own

Chris Ferndandi:

At the risk of being old and out-of-touch: if you don’t know how to write some code, you probably shouldn’t use code that Chat GPT et al write for you.

[…]

It’s not bulletproof, but StackOverflow provides opportunities to learn and understand the code in a way that AI-generated code does not.

What Skills Should You Focus on as Junior Web Developer in 2024?

Frontend Masters:

Let’s not be old-man-shakes-fist-at-kids.gif about this, but learning the fundamentals of tech is demonstrateably useful. It’s true in basketball, it’s true for the piano, and it’s true in making websites. If you’re aiming at a long career in websites, the fundamentals are what powers it.

[…]

The point of the fundamentals is how long-lasting and transferrable the knowledge is. It will serve you well no matter what other technologies a job might have you using, or when the abstractions over them change, as they are want to do.

As long as we’re talking about learning the fundamentals…

The Basics

Oh yeah, and of course there’s this little online course I released this summer for learning HTML and CSS fundamentals that I describe like this:

The Basics is more for your clients who do not know how to update the website they paid you to make. Or the friend who’s learning but still keeps bugging you with questions about the things they’re reading. Or your mom, who still has no idea what it is you do for a living. It’s for those whom the entry points are vanishing. It’s for those who could simply sign up for a Squarespace account but want to understand the code it spits out so they have more control to make a site that uniquely reflects them.

Not all this nostalgia is reserved only for HTML and CSS, but for deploying code, too. A few recent posts riff on what it might look like to ship code with “buildless” or near “buildless” workflows.

Raw-Dogging Websites

Brad Frost:

It is extraordinarily liberating. Yes, there are some ergonomic inefficiencies, but at the end of the day it comes out in the wash. You might have to copy-and-paste some HTML, but in my experience I’d spend that much time or more debugging a broken build or dependency hell.

Going Buildless

Max Böck in a follow-up to Brad:

So, can we all ditch our build tools soon?

Probably not. I’d say for production-grade development, we’re not quite there yet. Performance tradeoffs are a big part of it, but there are lots of other small problems that you’d likely run into pretty soon once you hit a certain level of complexity.

For smaller sites or side projects though, I can imagine going the buildless route – just to see how far I can take it.

Manual ’till it hurts

Jeremy Keith in a follow-up to Max:

If you’re thinking that your next project couldn’t possibly be made without a build step, let me tell you about a phrase I first heard in the indie web community: “Manual ‘till it hurts”. It’s basically a two-step process:

1. Start doing what you need to do by hand.
2. When that becomes unworkable, introduce some kind of automation.

It’s remarkable how often you never reach step two.

I’m not saying premature optimisation is the root of all evil. I’m just saying it’s premature.

That’s it for this pile of links and good gosh my laptop feels lighter for it. Have you read other recent posts that tread similar ground? Share ’em in the comments.

What’s Old is New originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A good pitch deck is designed for specifically one thing – to help your startup get funding from investors. But how do you stand out from the crowd, and make a memorable impression?

There’s a delicate balance to creating a deck with just enough slides to entice potential funders, without providing so much information that they are overwhelmed.

Most pitch decks contain less than 20 slides. So how do you create a pitch deck design that stands out? Here are our ten tips to help you get started.

1. Pick a Template or Palette

Whether you are designing a pitch deck from scratch or starting with a template, you need to stick to a visual theme. Slides should have a consistent color and type palette as well as design elements, such as page number or a header/footer.

Streamline your deck to a handful of slide types that fit your content so that the design is consistent from the first to the final slide.

In most cases, a simple pitch deck template is the best option. Look for something with darker text on a light or white background. This color combination is easy to read on screens or in darker rooms when projected onto a wall. (It also makes for easy printing if you want to provide a handout copy to meeting participants.)

2. Use Your Branding

By the time you are ready to talk with investors, you should have a simple brand established. This includes a logo or wordmark and basic color palette. It should also include a list of keywords that you use to talk about your business.

Use all of this in your pitch deck. As you create a slide design, make sure the template incorporates your colors and branding.

These visual elements can make a lasting impression. Make it count.

And don’t make this mistake. Too often, pitch decks “save” the branding as a surprise for the end of the presentation. Don’t. Use your brand throughout so that it starts to stick with the people you are talking to. Give them more opportunity to fall in love with your idea, brand, and company.

3. Include Charts to Simplify Content

Pitch decks are packed with heavy content, including plenty of numbers.

Use charts to simplify this content. Are you experiencing revenue growth? Chart it. A chart is an easy way to see and understand that information quickly. Plus, bar and pie charts are easy to create. (Just make sure to label everything clearly.)

Bonus tip: You can also use pie charts to highlight statistics, again making a text element more visual and understandable.

4. Use Stellar Images

Put forth the effort to get some great images for your pitch deck. Not stock images. Actual photos of your team, product or service.

You know that people are more likely to engage with an image than text and that goes for memory as well. A good image will stand out in someone’s memory longer than a slide full of words.

The challenge is that not everyone has a visual product or service. That’s where you’ll have to be a little more creative, show the team in action or create a diagram or illustration.

Don’t feel like you have to have an image on every slide if they get repetitive. Get a few images that best represent what you are selling with the pitch deck and stick to those. Scatter them strategically throughout the pitch deck.

5. Organize with Icons

Another visual element to consider is icons. These small illustrations can help organize complex ideas and provide visual flow throughout a single slide or the entire design.

Pick an icon set that matches your visual theme and use them to break up the copy, create a grouping, and keep the visual flow moving.

6. Try Tiled Layouts for Complex Information

When it comes to presenting complex information, consider a modular tiled layout style. Titles can help you break down information into smaller, more digestible parts.

These bite-sized bits can eliminate the need for using multiple slides for a handful of facts or figures as well.

Design tiles with color blocks or use icons in each to establish different pieces of content visually.

7. Use Professional Headshots for Team Members

If you plan to include images of your team in the pitch deck (many companies do), invest in professional headshots so that photos are consistent and represent your startup brand well.

This isn’t to say they have to be boring. Photos with personality are acceptable, but all team headshots should be in the same style with similar coloring and backgrounds.

Think about the type of investor you are trying to get money from, what type of photo would appeal to them? Consider that for the style of your team headshots or group photo.

8. Create a Type Hierarchy

Just like with any other type of design, create a hierarchy for text elements.

• Title
• Header
• Secondary header or subhead
• Main body text
• Bulleted text
• Captions
• Infographic text
• Footer text

9. Design with Contrast in Mind

Every element in your pitch deck should include plenty of contrast against the background and other elements. Avoid the temptation to use a template where everything has a similar color or contrast, while these might look great on a screen, they can present readability issues and don’t often render well when projected or printed.

It’s important to balance modern design with readability. It is vital that potential investors understand everything about your startup company when they view the pitch deck. Don’t let “overdesigned” slides get in the way.

10. Get Creative with Text-Heavy Slides

There are some content types and information that will just seem heavy.

The history of your company or business trends, lists or SWOT analyses can get a little overwhelming on a slide. Use more visual formats with less focus on every actual work to communicate this information.

Try slides that use word cloud, timeline formats or XY graphs to present text-heavy or complex information in a more visual way. Even though these slides will still be somewhat thick, they’ll be easier to visually digest.

Conclusion

When creating your pitch deck, remember to keep your business goals in mind. Everything about the deck shows potential investors that you understand your company and business.

The design of your presentation communicates this as well. A professional, easy to understand deck is just one tool in the path of growing your startup.

This article is a sponsored by Luzmo

In this article, I’ll introduce you to Luzmo Flex, a new feature from the Luzmo team who have been working hard making developer tooling to flatten the on-ramp for analytics reporting and data visualization.

With Luzmo Flex, you can hook up a dataset and create beautifully crafted, fully customizable interactive charts that meet your reporting needs. They easily integrate and interact with other components of your web app, allowing you to move away from a traditional “dashboard” interface and build more bespoke data products.

While many charting libraries offer similar features, I often found it challenging to get the data into the right shape that the library needed. In this article, I’ll show you how you can build beautiful data visualizations using the Google Analytics API, and you won’t have to spend any time “massaging” the data!

Well, it’s two things, really. First of all, Luzmo is a low-code platform for embedded analytics. You can create datasets from just about anything, connect them to APIs like Google Analytics or your PostgreSQL database, or even upload static data in a .csv file and start creating data visualizations with drag and drop.

Secondly, Luzmo Flex is their new React component that can be configured to create custom data visualizations. Everything from the way you query your data to the way you display it can be achieved through code using the LuzmoVizItemComponent.

What makes Luzmo Flex unique is that you can reuse the core functionalities of Luzmo’s low-code embedded analytics platform in your custom-coded components.

That means, besides creating ready-to-use datasets, you can set up functions like the following out-of-the-box:

• Multi-tenant analytics: Showing different data or visualizations to different users of your app.
• Localization: Displaying charts in multiple languages, currencies, and timezones without much custom development.
• Interactivity: Set up event listeners to create complex interactivity between Luzmo’s viz items and any non-Luzmo components in your app.

What Can You Build With Luzmo Flex?

By combining these off-the-shelf functions with flexibility through code, Luzmo Flex makes a great solution for building bespoke data products that go beyond the limits of a traditional dashboard interface. Below are a few examples of what that could look like.

Report Builder

A custom report builder that lets users search and filter a dataset and render it out using a number of different charts.

Filter Panel

Enable powerful filtering using HTML Select inputs, which will update each chart shown on the page.

Wearables Dashboard

Or how about a sleep tracker hooked up to your phone to track all those important snoozes?

When building data-intensive applications, using something like Recharts, a well-known React charting library, you’ll likely need to reformat the data to fit the required shape. For instance, if I request the top 3 page views from the last seven days for my site, paulie.dev, I would have to use the Google Analytics API using the following query.

import dotenv from 'dotenv';
import { BetaAnalyticsDataClient } from '@google-analytics/data';
dotenv.config();

const credentials = JSON.parse(
  Buffer.from(process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS_BASE64, 'base64').toString('utf-8')
);

const analyticsDataClient = new BetaAnalyticsDataClient({
  credentials,
});

const [{ rows }] = await analyticsDataClient.runReport({
  property: properties/${process.env.GA4_PROPERTY_ID},
  dateRanges: [
    {
      startDate: '7daysAgo',
      endDate: 'today',
    },
  ],
  dimensions: [
    {
      name: 'fullPageUrl',
    },
    {
      name: 'pageTitle',
    },
  ],
  metrics: [
    {
      name: 'totalUsers',
    },
  ],
  limit: 3,
  metricAggregations: ['MAXIMUM'],
});

The response would look something like this:

[
  {
    "dimensionValues": [
      {
        "value": "www.paulie.dev/",
        "oneValue": "value"
      },
      {
        "value": "Paul Scanlon | Home",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ],
    "metricValues": [
      {
        "value": "61",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "dimensionValues": [
      {
        "value": "www.paulie.dev/posts/2023/11/a-set-of-sign-in-with-google-buttons-made-with-tailwind/",
        "oneValue": "value"
      },
      {
        "value": "Paul Scanlon | A set of: \"Sign In With Google\" Buttons Made With Tailwind",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ],
    "metricValues": [
      {
        "value": "41",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "dimensionValues": [
      {
        "value": "www.paulie.dev/posts/2023/10/what-is-a-proxy-redirect/",
        "oneValue": "value"
      },
      {
        "value": "Paul Scanlon | What Is a Proxy Redirect?",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ],
    "metricValues": [
      {
        "value": "23",
        "oneValue": "value"
      }
    ]
  }
]

To make that data work with Recharts, I’d need to reformat it so it conforms to the following data shape.

[
  {
    "name": "Paul Scanlon | Home",
    "value": 61
  },
  {
    "name": "Paul Scanlon | A set of: \"Sign In With Google\" Buttons Made With Tailwind",
    "value": 41
  },
  {
    "name": "Paul Scanlon | What Is a Proxy Redirect?",
    "value": 23
  }
]

To accomplish this, I’d need to use an Array.prototype.map() to iterate over each item, destructure the relevant data and return a key-value pair for the name and value for each.

const data = response.rows.map((row) => {
  const { dimensionValues, metricValues } = row;

  const pageTitle = dimensionValues[1].value;
  const totalUsers = parseInt(metricValues[0].value);

  return {
    name: pageTitle,
    value: totalUsers,
  };
});

And naturally, if you’re reformatting data this way in your application, you’d also want to write unit tests to ensure the data is always formatted correctly to avoid breaking your application… and all of this before you even get on to creating your charts!

With Luzmo Flex, all of this goes away, leaving you more time to focus on which data to display and how best to display it.

Typically, when building user interfaces that display data insights, your first job will be to figure out how to query the data source. This can take many forms, from RESTful API requests to direct database queries or sometimes reading from static files. Your next job will be figuring out when and how often these requests need to occur.

• For data that rarely changes: Perhaps a query in the build step will work.
• For data that changes regularly: A server-side request on page load.
• For ever-changing data: A client-side request that polls an API on an interval.

Each will likely inform your application’s architecture, and there’s no single solution to this. Your last job, as mentioned, will be wrangling the responses, reformatting the data, and displaying it in the UI.

Below, I’ll show you how to do this using Luzmo Flex by using a simple example product.

Here’s a screenshot of a simple data product I’ve built that displays three different charts for different reporting dimensions exposed by the Google Analytics API for page views for my site, paulie.dev, from the last seven days.

You can find all the code used in this article on the following link:

• https://github.com/luzmo-official/luzmo-flex-tutorial

Before we get going, hop over to Luzmo and sign up for a free trial. You might also like to have a read of one of the getting started guides listed below. In this article, I’ll be using the Next.js starter.

• Getting started with Luzmo Data Visualization and Next.js
  • https://github.com/luzmo-official/luzmo-getting-started-next-js
• Getting started with Luzmo Data Visualization and Astro
  • https://github.com/luzmo-official/luzmo-getting-started-astro

To create data visualization, you’ll first need data! To achieve this using Luzmo, head over to the dashboard, select Datasets from the navigation, and select GA4 Google Analytics. Follow the steps shown in the UI to connect Luzmo with your Google Analytics account.

With the setup complete, you can now select which reporting dimensions to add to your dataset. To follow along with this article, select Custom selection.

Lastly, select the following using the search input. Device Category, Page Title, Date, and Total users, then click Import when you’re ready.

You now have all the data required to build the Google Analytics dashboard. You can access the dataset ID from the URL address bar in your browser. You’ll need this in a later step.

If you’ve followed along from either of the first two getting started guides, you’ll have your API Key, API Token, App server, and API host environment variables set up and saved in a .env file.

Install Dependencies

If you’ve cloned one of the starter repositories, run the following to install the required dependencies.

npm install

Next, install the Luzmo React Embed dependency which exports the LuzmoVizItemComponent.

npm install  @luzmo/react-embed@latest

Now, find page.tsx located in the src/app directory, and add your dataset id as shown below.

Add the access object from the destructured response and pass access.datasets[0].id onto the LuzmoClientComponent component using a prop named datasetId.

// src/app/page.tsx


+ import dynamic from 'next/dynamic';

import Luzmo from '@luzmo/nodejs-sdk';
- import LuzmoClientComponent from './components/luzmo-client-component';
+ const LuzmoClientComponent = dynamic(() => import('./components/luzmo-client-component'), {
  ssr: false,
});


const client = new Luzmo({
  api_key: process.env.LUZMO_API_KEY!,
  api_token: process.env.LUZMO_API_TOKEN!,
  host: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_API_HOST!,
});

export default async function Home() {
  const response = await client.create('authorization', {
    type: 'embed',
    username: 'user id',
    name: 'first name last name',
    email: 'name@email.com',
    access: {
      datasets: [
        {
-          id: '<dataset_id>',
+          id: '42b43db3-24b2-45e7-98c5-3fcdef20b1a3',
          rights: 'use',
        },
      ],
    },
  });

-  const { id, token } = response;
+  const { id, token, access } = response;

-  return <LuzmoClientComponent authKey={id} authToken={token} />;
+  return <LuzmoClientComponent authKey={id} authToken={token} datasetId={access.datasets[0].id} />;
}

And lastly, find luzmo-client-component.tsx located in src/app/components. This is where you’ll be creating your charts.

The first chart you’ll create is a Donut chart that shows the various devices used by visitors to your site.

Add the following code to luzmo-client-component.tsx component.

// src/app/component/luzmo-client-component.tsx

'use client';

+ import { LuzmoVizItemComponent } from '@luzmo/react-embed';

interface Props {
  authKey: string;
  authToken: string;
+  datasetId: string;
}

- export default function LuzmoClientComponent({ authKey, authToken}: Props) {
+ export default function LuzmoClientComponent({ authKey, authToken, datasetId }: Props) {

+  const date = new Date(new Date().getTime() - 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000).toISOString(); // creates a date 7 days ago

  console.log({ authKey, authToken });

  return (
    <section>
+    <div className='w-1/2 h-80'>
+      <LuzmoVizItemComponent
+        appServer={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_APP_SERVER}
+        apiHost={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_API_HOST}
+        authKey={authKey}
+        authToken={authToken}
+        type='donut-chart'
+        options={{
+          title: {
+            en: Devices from last 7 days,
+          },
+          display: {
+            title: true,
+          },
+          mode: 'donut',
+          legend: {
+            position: 'bottom',
+          },
+        }}
+        slots={[
+          {
+            name: 'measure',
+            content: [
+              {
+                label: {
+                  en: 'Total users',
+                },
+                column: '<column id>', // Total users
+                set: datasetId,
+                type: 'numeric',
+                format: '.4f',
+              },
+            ],
+          },
+          {
+            name: 'category',
+            content: [
+              {
+                label: {
+                  en: 'Device category',
+                },
+                column: '<column id>', // Device category
+                set: datasetId,
+                type: 'hierarchy',
+              },
+            ],
+          },
+        ]}
+        filters={[
+          {
+            condition: 'or',
+            filters: [
+              {
+                expression: '? >= ?',
+                parameters: [
+                  {
+                    column_id: '<column id>', // Date
+                    dataset_id: datasetId,
+                  },
+                  date,
+                ],
+              },
+            ],
+          },
+        ]}
+      />
+    <div/>
    </section>
  );
}

There’s quite a lot going on in the above code snippet, and I will explain it all in due course, but first, I’ll need to cover a particularly tricky part of the configuration.

Column IDs

You’ll notice the filters parameters, measure, and category content all require a column id.

In the filters parameters, the key is named column_id, and in the measure and category, the key is named column. Both of these are actually the column IDs from the dataset. And here’s how you can find them.

Back in the Luzmo dashboard, click into your dataset and look for the “more dots” next to each column heading. From the menu, select Copy column id. Add each column ID to the keys in the configuration objects.

In my example, I’m using the Total users for the measure, the Device category for the category, and the Date for the filter.

If you’ve added the column IDs correctly, you should be able to see a rendered chart on your screen!

… and as promised, here’s a breakdown of the configuration.

Initial Props Donut chart

The first part is fairly straightforward. appServer and authKey are the environment variables you saved to your .env file, and authKey and authToken are destructured from the authorization request and passed into this component via props.

The type prop determines which type of chart to render. In my example, I’m using donut-chart, but you could choose from one of the many options available, area-chart, bar-chart, bubble-chart, box-plot, and many more. You can see all the available options in the Luzmo documentation under Chart docs.

<LuzmoVizItemComponent
  appServer={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_APP_SERVER}
  apiHost={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_API_HOST}
  authKey={authKey}
  authToken={authToken}
  type='donut-chart'

The one thing I should point out is my use of Tailwind classes: w-1/2 (width: 50%) and h-80 (height: 20rem). The LuzmoVizItemComponent ships with height 100%, so you’ll need to wrap the component with an element that has an actual height, or you won’t be able to see the chart on the page as it could be 100% of the height of an element with no height.

Donut Chart Options

The options object is where you can customize the appearance of your chart. It accepts many configuration options, among which:

• A title for the chart that accepts a locale with corresponding text to display.
• A display title value to determine if the title is shown or not.
• A mode to determine if the chart is to be of type donut or pie chart.
• A legend option to determine where the legend can be positioned.

All the available configuration options can be seen in the Donut chart documentation.

options={{
  title: {
    en: `Devices from last 7 days`,
  },
  display: {
    title: true,
  },
  mode: 'donut',
  legend: {
    position: 'bottom',
  },
}}

Donut Chart Slots

Slots are where you can configure which column from your dataset to use for the category and measure.

Slots can contain multiple measures, useful for displaying two columns of data per chart, but if more than two are used, one will become the measure.

Each measure contains a content array. The content array, among many other configurations, can include the following:

• A label and locale,
• The column id from the dataset,
• The datasetId,
• The type of data you’re displaying,
• A format for the data.

The format used here is Python syntax for floating-point numbers; it’s similar to JavaScript’s .toFixed() method, e.g number.toFixed(4).

The hierarchy type is ​​the Luzmo standard data type. Any text column is considered as an hierarchical data type.

You can read more in the Donut chart documentation about available configuration options for slots.

slots={[
  {
    name: 'measure',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Total users',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Total users
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'numeric',
        format: '.4f',
      },
    ],
  },
  {
    name: 'category',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Device category',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Device category
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'hierarchy',
      },
    ],
  },
]}

Donut Chart Filters

The filters object is where you can apply conditions that will determine which data will be shown. In my example, I only want to show data from the last seven days. To accomplish this, I first create the date variable:

const date = new Date(new Date().getTime() - 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000).toISOString();

This would produce an ISO date string, e.g., 2024-08-21T14:25:40.088Z, which I can use with the filter. The filter uses Luzmo’s Filter Expressions, to determine if the date for each row of the data is greater than or equal to the date variable. You can read more about Filter Expressions in Luzmo’s Academy article.

filters={[
  {
    condition: 'or',
    filters: [
      {
        expression: '? >= ?',
        parameters: [
          {
            column_id: '<column id>', // Date
            dataset_id: datasetId,
          },
          date,
        ],
      },
    ],
  },
]}

The second chart you’ll be creating is a Line chart that displays the number of page views on each date from the last seven days from folks who visit your site.

Initial Props Line Chart

As with the Donut chart, the initial props are pretty much the same, but the type has been changed to line-chart.

<LuzmoVizItemComponent
  appServer={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_APP_SERVER}
  apiHost={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_API_HOST}
  authKey={authKey}
  authToken={authToken}
  type='line-chart'

Line Chart Options

The options for the Line chart are as follows, and the mode has been changed to line-chart.

options={{
  title: {
    en: `Site visits from last 7 days`,
  },
  display: {
    title: true,
  },
  mode: 'grouped',
}}

Line Chart Slots

The slots object is almost the same as before with the Donut chart, but for the Line chart, I’m using the date column from the dataset instead of the device category, and instead of category, I’m using the x-axis slot type. To ensure I’m formatting the data correctly (by day), I’ve used level 5. You can read more about levels in the docs.

slots={[
  {
    name: 'measure',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Total users',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Total users
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'numeric',
        format: '.4f',
      },
    ],
  },
  {
    name: 'x-axis',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Date',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Date
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'datetime',
        level: 5,
      },
    ],
  },
]}

Line Chart Filters

I’ve used the same filters as I used in the Donut chart.

The last chart you’ll be creating is a Bar chart that displays the number of page views for the top ten most viewed pages on your site.

Initial Props Bar Chart

As with the Donut and Line chart, the initial props are pretty much the same, but the type has been changed to bar-chart.

<LuzmoVizItemComponent
  className='w-full h-80'
  appServer={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_APP_SERVER}
  apiHost={process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_LUZMO_API_HOST}
  authKey={authKey}
  authToken={authToken}
  type='bar-chart'

Bar Chart Options

The options for the Bar chart are a little more involved. I’ve included some styling options for the border-radii of the bars, limited the number of results to 10, and sorted the data by the highest page view count first using the sort by measure and direction options.

options={{
  title: {
    en: `Page views from last 7 days`,
  },
  display: {
    title: true,
  },
  mode: 'grouped',
  bars: {
    roundedCorners: 5,
  },
  limit: {
    number: 10,
  },
  sort: {
    by: 'measure',
    direction: 'desc',
  },
}}

Line Chart Slots

As with the Line chart, I’ve used an axis for one of the columns from the dataset. In this case, it’s the y-axis which displays the page title.

slots={[
  {
    name: 'measure',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Total users',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Total users
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'numeric',
        format: '.4f',
      },
    ],
  },
  {
    name: 'y-axis',
    content: [
      {
        label: {
          en: 'Page title',
        },
        column: '<column id>', // Page title
        set: datasetId,
        type: 'hierarchy',
      },
    ],
  },
]}

Bar Chart Filters

I’ve used the same filters as I used in the Donut and Line chart.

As you can see, there are plenty of types of charts and customization options. Because this is just an “ordinary” React component, you can very easily make it configurable by an end user by allowing options to be set and unset using HTML input elements, checkbox, select, date, and so on.

But for me, the real power behind this is not having to mutate data!

This is particularly pertinent when displaying multiple charts with different reporting dimensions. Typically, this would require each to have their own utility function or reformatting method. That said, setting column IDs and dataset IDs is a little fiddly, but once you have the component hooked up to the dataset, you can configure and reconfigure as much as you like, all without having to rewrite data formatting functions.

If you’re interested in bringing data to life in your application and want to get it done without the usual headaches, book a free demo with the Luzmo team to learn more!

It might be one of the most asked questions among freelance designers: what do you charge clients?

There can be so many variables in setting rates that you can stick to, and you have to make a choice between hourly and fixed options. Either way, a good pricing strategy can help you get the clients you want and earn a solid income from freelance work.

After you figure out pricing. Which is a challenge for almost anyone!

How Much Do Other Designers Charge?

The easiest way to figure out your rates is to see how much other designers are charging for their services.

Indeed, one of the largest online job boards, has a salary explorer tool that shows you the hourly rates and the salaries of professionals in each industry. The site allows you to browse the rates based on your country and even provides pricing data for different cities.

If you’re a freelancer, this is a great place to start your search for the ideal rate.

If you’re joining a company, agency, or seeking a full-time role, Glassdoor is the best place to learn about the salaries of other designers. Here you can explore the salaries submitted by fellow designers and even let you filter them based on your years of experience, industry, and more. Payscale is another website that provides similar information.

But don’t stop there. You can also ask directly from other designers. Use forums and sites like Reddit to ask other designers how much they are charging for different types of services. You’d be surprised how helpful the designer community can be.

It’s important to remember that these average rates are calculated based on the pricing data submitted by designers with various levels of experience and skills.

It will be difficult to find your exact number by looking at these websites. But, they will at least help you find a ballpark number to get started.

Set an Hourly Rate, for Starters

For most freelancers, setting an hourly rate is the place to start. It provides a baseline comparison to other freelancers in the market and is something clients can understand, as long as they are flexible with hours worked and pricing.

You can use time tracking software to keep up with exactly how much time you spend on projects – as long as you actually remember to use it and have solid focus while working on projects.

An hourly rate is great if you work at a moderate pace, take on projects that don’t shift a lot in time (clients don’t love getting revised pricing estimates) and like the flexibility of this time accounting method. On the other hand, some designers find that hourly rates hold them back because they can finish projects quickly and hours worked is not the only price consideration.

Be Competitive

If you decide to charge the same rates other designers are charging, it will be very difficult to land clients, unless you already have a good reputation.

In the beginning, it’s important to ask for a competitive rate that will position you above other designers. That doesn’t mean you need to charge cheaper and lower. You can still charge the same rates by providing more value.

For example, including additional tasks or services for free with your existing services is a great way to get the attention of the clients.

Consider Value-Based Pricing

If you’re an experienced designer with a variety of skill sets, years’ worth of knowledge, and success stories to back your claims, you should consider using a value-based pricing model.

This pricing strategy involves charging a rate based on the outcome of the project. For example, if you’re working on an advertising campaign for a high-profile client, you can charge them 10-20% of the sales they generate from the designs you make for them.

Most clients won’t be open to this type of pricing model and that will provide you with an even better opportunity to ask for a higher hourly rate or project price.

TheFutur YouTube channel has a great roleplay video that shows how this strategy plays out.

Know Your Costs

Your rate needs to reflect your costs plus take-home cash for yourself. Remember to include elements like taxes, rent and lights, software and other supplies when pricing projects. You need to be able to cover all costs before you’ll ever make any money as a freelancer.

The first thing you need to do is create a budget for your monthly and yearly expenses. This will help you find a yearly income goal. Simply put, it’s a way to figure out how much you need to earn.

Then figure out how many hours you are willing to work. This is an important factor that will help determine your hourly rate or even fixed rates for projects. If you’re willing to work longer hours, you’ll be able to charge competitive rates.

Again, income goals and work hours all depend on your skill set, experience, and location.

Price Hourly or by the Project

The alternative to hourly pricing is project pricing. Project pricing is preferred by a lot of designers who have been freelancing for a while.

This might be the best case for project pricing out there from Jake Jorgovan for Career Foundry:

When you charge based on the project, you are tying the price of the project to the client’s end result. The end result is all that the client cares about.

Shifting the focus of my freelancing away from the time I worked and toward the value I delivered changed everything. It completely changed my income potential and how much I made.

Setting project rates is a little trickier. Everyone does it a little differently. (Jorgovan even suggests making it up… kind of.)

Over the years, I have developed a little more of a strategy based on market and industry rates, creative flexibility with the project, client budget and potential long-term value, timeline and how I “feel about it” from the start.

• Market and industry rates: What are others charging for similar services in your market? I tend to price well below agency pricing – I am a team of one and can’t provide the round the clock services of a full team – and in the middle of what other freelancers in my market charge based on how long I’ve been in the business.
• Creative flexibility: The dirty secret is that I charge a little more for dud projects. No client will ever know who they are, but I do quote a little lower for a project that I really want to stretch my creative muscles. It helps me grow and expands my portfolio for later. The routine stuff gets more routine pricing.
• Client budget and value: An accountant once said to me, charge every client what they are willing to pay. It took a while to really get this, but it all comes back to value. What is the project worth to them? The client is coming to you for your value and expertise. Price accordingly to show that your work is valuable. (A $5 logo never said “value” to anyone.)
• Timetable: A project with a super-fast turn around is worth more to a client than something they need in 6 months. Think about scheduling to ensure that you can get it in and get it done on time. Think about whether you will have to price more to account for other projects getting bumped back.
• The “feel:” Check your gut when you meet with a client for the first time. Do they know what they want? Or will they waffle? Clients that will require a lot of hand-holding along the way will take a lot more of your time for the same work. You should probably charge a little more here.

The biggest problem with project rates is that sometimes you’ll get it wrong. There are projects that will suck up your time and frustrate you to no end because you just estimated wrong. If this happens frequently, then you are an hourly rate kind of freelancer. If it only happens once in a while, project rates can be a great option.

Pro tip: Use a combination of project and hourly rates. Opt for hourly rates for small projects (or friends and family if you dare work with them) that will come in under $250. This includes simple logo design, a business card or poster for clients that you know and will almost always take the design as is with a few minor revisions. Use project rates for anything that requires a lot of setup or time, such as website redesigns, branding or large packets of information.

Include Contingencies

No matter what pricing structure you use, make sure to include a scope for each project and room for contingencies in the estimate.

Include some rules with client estimates to keep scope creep from eating away at potential earnings.

Include guidelines for:

• What exactly the project entails, such as one website design with up to 10 pages.
• Number of revisions included.
• Rate for changes beyond the scope.
• Payment guidelines; this is vital for big projects or large timelines where you might need to get some of the money up front.
• Any additional fees, such as late charges, processing later or maintenance or upsells.

So What Should I Actually Charge?

As you can figure from all the information above, there’s no magic formula.

Price too low and you’ll worry about making enough money to pay the bills. (You can also run the risk of having too many clients because of underpricing.)

Price too high and you might have trouble getting projects.

You want to be somewhere in the middle, where you can take the clients you want and refer others elsewhere. And so much of it matters where you live and where the clients are based.

Contently has a solid database of freelance rates for writing, design and photography so you can see what people are actually getting paid. (Plus you can sort by category, rate or date.)

Bonsai also has a rates database that you can put in options such as design or development, skills, experience and location to get an idea of what hourly rates look like.

It can be tricky. The good news is that when you figure it out, you’ll know because your client mix will feel just right with a few large project, a few small projects and rewarding work.

Conclusion

OK, so maybe you did not get the exact answer you wanted. I could have told you to charge everyone $75 per hour for any project. But that would be a disservice to you.

It’s all about how you work and your client relationships. Feel them out. Understand their needs and work with clients to find just the right pricing strategy.

Freelancing 101 is an occasional series to help the increasing number of freelancers in the market. Whether you are a designer, writer, developer or wear multiple hats, we will share tips, resources and ideas to help you make the most of your small business. Is there something in particular you want to know? Let me know at carrie@designshack.net.

Creative commons photos by Death to the Stock Photo .

Science fiction has long served as a playground for envisioning the future, presenting imaginative technologies and concepts that captivate our minds. What was once considered fantastical speculation in movies and novels is increasingly becoming a reality in today’s tech-driven world. From advanced robotics to artificial intelligence, many sci-fi innovations are making the leap from the …

Continue reading "Tech Trends from Movies to Reality: How Sci-Fi Innovations are Becoming Real"

The post Tech Trends from Movies to Reality: How Sci-Fi Innovations are Becoming Real first appeared on Lucid Softech.

HTML forms come with built-in ways to validate form inputs and other controls against predefined rules such as making an input required, setting min and max constraints on range sliders, or establishing a pattern on an email input to check for proper formatting. Native HTML and browsers give us a lot of “free” features that don’t require fancy scripts to validate form submissions.

And if something doesn’t properly validate? We get “free” error messaging to display to the person using the form.

These are usually good enough to get the job done, but we may need to override these messages if we need more specific error content — especially if we need to handle translated content across browsers. Here’s how that works.

The Constraints API

The Constraints API is used to override the default HTML form validation messages and allows us to define our own error messages. Chris Ferdinandi even covered it here on CSS-Tricks in great detail.

In short, the Constraints API is designed to provide control over input elements. The API can be called at individual input elements or directly from the form element.

For example, let’s say this simple form input is what we’re working with:

<form id="myForm">
  <label for="fullName">Full Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="fullName" name="fullName" placeholder="Enter your full name" required>
  <button id="btn" type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

We can set our own error message by grabbing the <input> element and calling the setCustomValidity() method on it before passing it a custom message:

const fullNameInput = document.getElementById("fullName");
fullNameInput.setCustomValidity("This is a custom error message");

When the submit button is clicked, the specified message will show up in place of the default one.

Translating custom form validation messages

One major use case for customizing error messages is to better handle internationalization. There are two main ways we can approach this. There are other ways to accomplish this, but what I’m covering here is what I believe to be the most straightforward of the bunch.

Method 1: Leverage the browser’s language setting

The first method is using the browser language setting. We can get the language setting from the browser and then check whether or not we support that language. If we support the language, then we can return the translated message. And if we do not support that specific language, we provide a fallback response.

Continuing with the HTML from before, we’ll create a translation object to hold your preferred languages (within the script tags). In this case, the object supports English, Swahili, and Arabic.

const translations = {
  en: {
    required: "Please fill this",
    email: "Please enter a valid email address",
 
  },
  sw: {
    required: "Sehemu hii inahitajika",
    email: "Tafadhali ingiza anwani sahihi ya barua pepe",
  },
  ar: {
    required: "هذه الخانة مطلوبه",
    email: "يرجى إدخال عنوان بريد إلكتروني صالح",
  }
};

Next, we need to extract the object’s labels and match them against the browser’s language.

// the translations object
const supportedLangs = Object.keys(translations);
const getUserLang = () => {
  // split to get the first part, browser is usually en-US
  const browserLang = navigator.language.split('-')[0];
  return supportedLangs.includes(browserLang) ? browserLang :'en';
};

// translated error messages
const errorMsgs = translations[getUserLang()];// form element
const form = document.getElementById("myForm");// button elementconst btn = document.getElementById("btn");// name input
const fullNameInput = document.getElementById("fullName");// wrapper for error messaging
const errorSpan = document.getElementById("error-span");

// when the button is clicked…
btn.addEventListener("click", function (event) {  // if the name input is not there…
  if (!fullNameInput.value) {    // …throw an error
    fullNameInput.setCustomValidity(errorMsgs.required);    // set an .error class on the input for styling
    fullNameInput.classList.add("error");
  }
});

Here the getUserLang() function does the comparison and returns the supported browser language or a fallback in English. Run the example and the custom error message should display when the button is clicked.

Method 2: Setting a preferred language in local storage

A second way to go about this is with user-defined language settings in localStorage. In other words, we ask the person to first select their preferred language from a <select> element containing selectable <option> tags. Once a selection is made, we save their preference to localStorage so we can reference it.

<label for="languageSelect">Choose Language:</label>
<select id="languageSelect">
  <option value="en">English</option>
  <option value="sw">Swahili</option>
  <option value="ar">Arabic</option>
</select>

<form id="myForm">
  <label for="fullName">Full Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="fullName" name="fullName" placeholder="Enter your full name" required>
  <span id="error-span"></span>
  <button id="btn" type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

With the <select> in place, we can create a script that checks localStorage and uses the saved preference to return a translated custom validation message:

// the <select> element
const languageSelect = document.getElementById("languageSelect");
// the <form> element
const form = document.getElementById("myForm");
// the button element
const btn = document.getElementById("btn");
// the name input
const fullNameInput = document.getElementById("fullName");
const errorSpan = document.getElementById("error-span");
// translated custom messages
const translations = {
  en: {
    required: "Please fill this",
    email: "Please enter a valid email address",
  },
  sw: {
    required: "Sehemu hii inahitajika",
    email: "Tafadhali ingiza anwani sahihi ya barua pepe",
  },
  ar: {
    required: "هذه الخانة مطلوبه",
    email: "يرجى إدخال عنوان بريد إلكتروني صالح",
  }
};
// the supported translations object
const supportedLangs = Object.keys(translations);
// get the language preferences from localStorage
const getUserLang = () => {
  const savedLang = localStorage.getItem("preferredLanguage");
  if (savedLang) return savedLang;

  // provide a fallback message
  const browserLang = navigator.language.split('-')[0];
  return supportedLangs.includes(browserLang) ? browserLang : 'en';
};

// set initial language
languageSelect.value = getUserLang();

// update local storage when user selects a new language
languageSelect.addEventListener("change", () => {
  localStorage.setItem("preferredLanguage", languageSelect.value);
});
// on button click
btn.addEventListener("click", function (event) {
  // take the translations
  const errorMsgs = translations[languageSelect.value];
  // ...and if there is no value in the name input
  if (!fullNameInput.value) {
    // ...trigger the translated custom validation message
    fullNameInput.setCustomValidity(errorMsgs.required);
    // set an .error class on the input for styling
    fullNameInput.classList.add("error");
  }
});

The script sets the initial value to the currently selected option, saves that value to localStorage, and then retrieves it from localStorage as needed. Meanwhile, the script updates the selected option on every change event fired by the <select> element, all the while maintaining the original fallback to ensure a good user experience.

If we open up DevTools, we’ll see that the person’s preferred value is available in localStorage when a language preference is selected.

Wrapping up

And with that, we’re done! I hope this quick little tip helps out. I know I wish I had it a while back when I was figuring out how to use the Constraints API. It’s one of those things on the web you know is possible, but exactly how can be tough to find.

References

• Form Validation series (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Meet the Pseudo Class Selectors (Chris Coyier)
• Constraint validation (MDN)
• Client-side form validation (MDN)

Two Ways to Create Custom Translated Messaging for HTML Forms originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Typography design is a fine balance of aesthetics and readability, and fonts play a crucial role in achieving that harmony. From sleek and modern typefaces to elegant serif fonts, the right typography can add character and distinction to your content.

In this post, we’ve gathered the best magazine fonts that will help you craft stunning, professional layouts that stand out on any print or digital platform. You’ll find fonts that excel in different aspects of magazine design, from bold and striking display fonts for headlines to clean and sophisticated fonts for body text.

Whether you’re working on a lifestyle magazine, fashion editorial, or business publication, these fonts offer the versatility and style you need to create polished, eye-catching designs.

Magazine – Elegant Serif Font

This is an upscale and chic type font that adds sophistication to any branding and logo design. This multifaceted font is ideal for a variety of uses, like social media posts, packaging, photography, and invitations. Its high-level legibility ensures seamless integration across projects.

Vaqoeng – Modern Magazine Font

Vaqoeng offers a modern magazine and logo font that exudes elegance and authenticity. Provided in both OTF and TTF files, this distinct display font can be used to craft attractive titles for posters, book covers, magazines, and more. Vaqoeng is set to redefine your design aesthetics with its contemporary appeal and charming simplicity.

Display Magazine – Modern Title Font

Brighten your creative projects with the Display Magazine font. This versatile font is perfect for both digital platforms and prints, ideal for anything from social media posts to personal projects. Similar to a Vogue magazine font, it lends a touch of sophistication to posters and branding. The set includes OTF, WOFF, and TTF files.

Biomorph – Magazine Font

Biomorph is a versatile, newly-released sans font family, perfect for all your design needs. Ideal for branding, publishing, titles, books, and websites, Biomorph comes in a range of weights including thin, extra light, light, regular, medium, semibold, and bold. Its variety and sleek design give you the freedom to design just the way you want.

Stinker – Modern Magazine Font

Stinker is an excellent choice for projects requiring a touch of elegance and style. Ideal for crafting striking logos, impressive magazine headers, or chic quotes, it offers a wealth of features including a variety of formats (TTF, OTF & WOFF), both uppercase and lowercase letters, ligatures, numerals, and punctuations, as well as regular and italic versions.

Daily Magazine – Serif Display Font

Discover our newest typography offering, Daily Magazine Serif Display Font. A sophisticated and modern choice for a multitude of creative projects, this font offers a versatile range of uses from logos to book covers and fashion branding. The design delicately balances both masculine and feminine tones making it a well-rounded choice.

The Real Magazine – Stylish Title Font

The Real Magazine is a unique, dry-brushed marker font perfect for various applications. Use it to add flair to logos, packaging, t-shirts, posters, book covers, hipster designs, and greeting cards. It’s also ideal for any project requiring brush lettering. This stylish title font makes every creation stand out.

Aloha Magazine – Logo & Title font

The Aloha Magazine logo and title font is a uniquely playful sans serif family boasting nine weights. Perfect for various design projects, it provides seamless typographic harmony, enhancing logos, branding, social media posts, advertisements, or product designs. The package includes Aloha Magazine .otf, .ttf, and .woff files.

Yoshida – Stylish Magazine Font

Yoshida is an elegant, stylish magazine font that provides a distinguished look to your editorial content. Primarily intended for magazines or tabloids, it adds a classic yet fresh appeal to extended paragraphs. This font will significantly enhance readability and aesthetic appeal in your print or online publication.

CS Arthemis – Magazine Blackletter Font

CS Arthemis – Magazine Blackletter Font is a stunning blend of gothic charm and historical elegance. This Medieval display serif font features intricate design details, making it the perfect choice for projects requiring a combination of tradition, authority, and classic appeal. Ideal for luxury branding, formal invitations, and themed designs, CS Arthemis ensures your creations have a distinctive, timeless aesthetic.

Dickson – Geometric Magazine Fonts

Check out Dickson, a versatile sans font with a slim and bold style. Spanning 10 font styles, Dickson boasts of 10 straight-weight variations, perfect for any type of brand, logo, magazine, or movie. Its outlined copy ensures a modern feel to your projects while also offering multilingual support for languages including French, German, Spanish, and more for global accessibility.

Fancyou – Sharp Serif Magazine Font

Fancyou font elegantly merges vintage charm with contemporary dimensions. Its distinguishing feature lies in its sharp, stylish serifs, which are ideal for modern vintage designs. Available in eight diverse styles, this open-type format font is versatile enough for logos, websites, business cards, or branding initiatives.

Bolognia – Classic Serif Magazine Font

The Bolognia is a sophisticated serif typeface, drawing inspiration from both classic and contemporary design elements. With a tall x-height, modern proportions, and contrasting strokes, Bolognia stands out in all the right ways. Versatile across six weights, it’s perfect for editorial content and headline creation that demands clarity and impact.

Merauq – Creative Magazine Font

Merauq is a creative magazine font that provides strikingly harmonious typography across varied design projects. Available in 5 weights, it’s ideal for use in logos, branding, social media posts, advertisements, and product designs. The asset includes Meraq otf, ttf, and woff files, offering a great foundation for diverse and captivating designs.

RNS Miles – Trendy Magazine Font

RNS Miles is a versatile, modern magazine font family, featuring geometric and open forms for a harmonious, low-contrast look. It’s ideally suited for headlines and titles, with seven weights and matching italics. Extended OpenType features, like alternate glyphs and fractions, add to its utility.

Mouzambik – Narrow Magazine Font

Meet Mouzambik, a condensed sans-serif magazine font with a unique and intricate personality, designed to make your projects stand out. Available in regular, Inktrap, and Smooth styles, each with italics, it’s perfect for anything from headlines and branding to websites and posters. It shines in all sizes and includes an array of ligatures, alternates, and features.

Certia – Magazine Font

Certia is a masterfully designed sans-serif font family boasting a blend of elegance and functionality. It includes 16 fonts, providing extensive language support for global communication needs. Ideal for editorial endeavors, branding projects, or digital interfaces, Certia maintains a consistent, readable form while exuding sophistication, closely aligning with varied design settings.

Etnier – Modern Display Magazine Font

Etnier is a captivating modern display font perfect for magazine layouts. This sans-serif typeface offers a striking, squared appearance for superior readability. With a dynamic range of widths, italics, and a bold, robust quality, Etnier is excellent for UI, UX designs. Included in the package are 14 versatile styles available in OTF, TTF, WOFF formats.

Vangeda – Modern Serif Magazine Font

The Vangeda is a modern and elegant serif font that comes in two styles: regular and italic. It has alternate and ligature glyph variations and supports multilingual input. Perfect for various design projects including logos, branding, advertising, and more, it adds a touch of sophistication to your work. Useful for both print and digital mediums, the Vangeda font is an asset to any designer.

Ricordo – Magazine Font

Ricordo, a next-generation Magazine Font, is meticulously crafted for optimal engagement. This typeface has the flexibility to be used across all corporate tasks and a multitude of projects, from logos and headlines to digital ads. With nine weights and multiple file formats, including TTF, OTF, WOFF, and EOT.

Salmond – Clean Magazine Font

Salmond is a clean, geometric, modern sans serif magazine font. With its tightly packed lettering and minimalist allure, it’s perfect for creating striking titles, brand logos, and impactful editorial work. Salmond offers six weight options, including Light, Regular, News, Medium, Semibold, and Bold.

Clover – Bold Magazine Font

A derivative of the Olive Typeface Family, the Clover display font is a distinctive, modern, and elegant asset delivering a bold magazine font ideal for Time Magazine-style title designs. It’s crafted with 16 versatile styles and comes in various formats like TTF, OTF, WOFF. Its strong capitals, smooth lowercase, and quirky warmth make it perfect for branding, headlines, or text overlays.

Free Magazine Fonts

Moderniz – Free Magazine Font

A beautiful, elegant display font for crafting attractive cover designs for magazine concepts. This free font comes with a stylishly bold letter design that will fit perfectly for bold magazines. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Risbeg – Free Magazine Font

Risbeg is another great free font you can use to craft magazine-style titles and headings for your design projects. This font has a professional-looking serif letter design. And it’s free to use with your personal projects.

Angrela Display – Free Magazine Font

This font is ideal for designing elegant magazine-like typography. The font comes with serif letters featuring beautiful curves and swashes. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Free Classic Magazine Font

You can download this font for free to craft stylish magazine-style titles with a classic feel. The font features a professional and minimalist design that will create a bold look for your typography. It’s free for personal use only.

Keryla – Free Magazine Font

A creative and unique font that comes with an elegant aesthetic. This font features a serif letter design with curves and serifs. The font is ideal for a modern magazine look. It’s free to use with personal projects.