Month: September 2024

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.

PSA: Today’s the day that Google’s performance tools officially stops supporting the First Input Delay (FID) metric that was replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

Quick Hit #18 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Consider the early days of the internet, when websites like NBC News and Amazon cluttered their pages with flashing banners and labyrinthine menus. In the early 2000s, Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think arrived like a lighthouse in a storm, advocating for simplicity and user-centric design.

Today’s digital world is flooded with choices, information, and data, which is both exciting and overwhelming. Unlike Krug’s time, today, the problem isn’t interaction complexity but opacity. AI-powered solutions often lack transparency and explainability, raising concerns about user trust and accountability. The era of click-and-command is fading, giving way to a more seamless and intelligent relationship between humans and machines.

Expanding on Krug’s Call for Clarity: The Pillars of Anticipatory Design

Krug’s emphasis on clarity in design is more relevant than ever. In anticipatory design, clarity is not just about simplicity or ease of use — it’s about transparency and accountability. These two pillars are crucial but often missing as businesses navigate this new paradigm. Users today find themselves in a digital landscape that is not only confusing but increasingly intrusive. AI predicts their desires based on past behavior but rarely explains how these predictions are made, leading to growing mistrust.

Transparency is the foundation of clarity. It involves openly communicating how AI-driven decisions are made, what data is being collected, and how it is being used to anticipate needs. By demystifying these processes, designers can alleviate user concerns about privacy and control, thereby building trust.

Accountability complements transparency by ensuring that anticipatory systems are designed with ethical considerations in mind. This means creating mechanisms for users to understand, question, and override automated decisions if needed. When users feel that the system is accountable to them, their trust in the technology — and the brand — deepens.

Image AI like a waiter at a restaurant. Without AI, they wait for you to interact with them and place your order. But with anticipatory design powered by AI and ML, the waiter can analyze your past orders (historical data) and current behavior (contextual data) — perhaps, by noticing you always start with a glass of sparkling water.

This proactive approach has evolved since the late 1990s, with early examples like Amazon’s recommendation engine and TiVo’s predictive recording. These pioneering services demonstrated the potential of predictive analytics and ML to create personalized, seamless user experiences.

Amazon’s Recommendation Engine (Late 1990s)

Amazon was a pioneer in using data to predict and suggest products to customers, setting the standard for personalized experiences in e-commerce.

TiVo (1999)

TiVo’s ability to learn users’ viewing habits and automatically record shows marked an early step toward predictive, personalized entertainment.

Netflix’s Recommendation System (2006)

Netflix began offering personalized movie recommendations based on user ratings and viewing history in 2006. It helped popularize the idea of anticipatory design in the digital entertainment space.

Designing for anticipation is designing for a future that is not here yet but has already started moving toward us.

Designing for anticipation involves more than reacting to current trends; it requires businesses to plan strategically for future user needs. Two critical concepts in this process are forecasting and backcasting.

• Forecasting analyzes past trends and data to predict future outcomes, helping businesses anticipate user needs.
• Backcasting starts with a desired future outcome and works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve that goal.

Think of it like planning a dream vacation. Forecasting would involve looking at your past trips to guess where you might go next. But backcasting lets you pick your ideal destination first, then plan the perfect itinerary to get you there.

Forecasting: A Core Concept for Future-Oriented Design

This method helps in planning and decision-making based on probable future scenarios. Consider Netflix, which uses forecasting to analyze viewers’ past viewing habits and predict what they might want to watch next. By leveraging data from millions of users, Netflix can anticipate individual preferences and serve personalized recommendations that keep users engaged and satisfied.

Backcasting: Planning From the Desired Future

Backcasting takes a different approach. Instead of using data to predict the future, it starts with defining a desired future outcome — a clear user intent. The process then works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve that goal. This goal-oriented approach crafts an experience that actively guides users toward their desired future state.

For instance, a financial planning app might start with a user’s long-term financial goal, such as saving for retirement, and then design an experience that guides the user through each step necessary to reach that goal, from budgeting tips to investment recommendations.

Integrating Forecasting and Backcasting In Anticipatory Design

The true power of anticipatory design emerges when businesses efficiently integrate both forecasting and backcasting into their design processes.

For example, Tesla’s approach to electric vehicles exemplifies this integration. By forecasting market trends and user preferences, Tesla can introduce features that appeal to users today. Simultaneously, by backcasting from a vision of a sustainable future, Tesla designs its vehicles and infrastructure to guide society toward a world where electric cars are the norm and carbon emissions are significantly reduced.

As businesses increasingly adopt anticipatory design, the integration of forecasting and backcasting becomes essential. Forecasting allows businesses to predict and respond to immediate user needs, while backcasting ensures these responses align with long-term goals. Despite its potential, anticipatory design often fails in execution, leaving few examples of success.

Over the past decade, I’ve observed and documented the rise and fall of several ambitious anticipatory design ventures. Among them, three — Digit, LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones, and Mint — highlight the challenges of this approach.

Digit: Struggling with Contextual Understanding

Digit aimed to simplify personal finance with algorithms that automatically saved money based on user spending. However, the service often missed the mark, lacking the contextual awareness necessary to accurately assess users’ real-time financial situations. This led to unexpected withdrawals, frustrating users, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. The result was a breakdown in trust, with the service feeling more intrusive than supportive.

LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones: Complexity and User Experience Challenges

LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones was marketed as an AI-driven fitness coach, promising personalized guidance during workouts. In practice, the AI struggled to deliver tailored coaching, offering generic and unresponsive advice. As a result, users found the experience difficult to navigate, ultimately limiting the product’s appeal and effectiveness. This disconnection between the promised personalized experience and the actual user experience left many disappointed.

Mint: Misalignment with User Goals

Mint aimed to empower users to manage their finances by providing automated budgeting tools and financial advice. While the service had the potential to anticipate user needs, users often found that the suggestions were not tailored to their unique financial situations, resulting in generic advice that did not align with their personal goals.

The lack of personalized, actionable steps led to a mismatch between user expectations and service delivery. This misalignment caused some users to disengage, feeling that Mint was not fully attuned to their unique financial journeys.

The stories of Digit, LifeBEAM Vi Sense, and Mint underscore a common pitfall: over-promising and under-delivering. These services focused too much on predictive power and not enough on user experience. When anticipatory systems fail to consider individual nuances, they breed frustration rather than satisfaction, highlighting the importance of aligning design with human experience.

Digit’s approach to automated savings, for instance, became problematic when users found its decisions opaque and unpredictable. Similarly, LifeBEAM’s Vi Sense headphones struggled to meet diverse user needs, while Mint’s rigid tools failed to offer the personalized insights users expected. These examples illustrate the delicate balance anticipatory design must strike between proactive assistance and user control.

Failure to Evolve with User Needs

Many anticipatory services rely heavily on data-driven forecasting, but predictions can fall short without understanding the broader user context. Mint initially provided value with basic budgeting tools but failed to evolve with users’ growing needs for more sophisticated financial advice. Digit, too, struggled to adapt to different financial habits, leading to dissatisfaction and limited success.

Complexity and Usability Issues

Balancing the complexity of predictive systems with usability and transparency is a key challenge in anticipatory design.

When systems become overly complex, as seen with LifeBEAM Vi Sense headphones, users may find them difficult to navigate or control, compromising trust and engagement. Mint’s generic recommendations, born from a failure to align immediate user needs with long-term goals, further illustrate the risks of complexity without clarity.

Privacy and Trust Issues

Trust is critical in anticipatory design, particularly in services handling sensitive data like finance or health. Digit and Mint both encountered trust issues as users grew skeptical of how decisions were made and whether these services truly had their best interests in mind. Without clear communication and control, even the most sophisticated systems risk alienating users.

Inadequate Handling of Edge Cases and Unpredictable Scenarios

While forecasting and backcasting work well for common scenarios, they can struggle with edge cases or unpredictable user behaviors. If an anticipatory service can’t handle these effectively, it risks providing a poor user experience and, in the worst-case scenario, harming the user. Anticipatory systems must be prepared to handle edge cases and unpredictable scenarios.

LifeBEAM Vi Sense headphones struggled when users deviated from expected fitness routines, offering a one-size-fits-all experience that failed to adapt to individual needs. This highlights the importance of allowing users control, even when a system proactively assists them.

Anticipatory design should empower users to achieve their goals, not just automate tasks.

We can follow a layered approach to plan a service that can evolve according to user actions and explicit ever-evolving intent.

But how do we design for intent without misaligning anticipation and user control or mismatching user expectations and service delivery?

At the core of this approach is intent — the primary purpose or goal that the design must achieve. Surrounding this are workflows, which represent the structured tasks to achieve the intent. Finally, algorithms analyze user data and optimize these workflows.

For instance, Thrive (see the image below), a digital wellness platform, aligns algorithms and workflows with the core intent of improving well-being. By anticipating user needs and offering personalized programs, Thrive helps users achieve sustained behavior change.

It perfectly exemplifies the three-layered concentric representation for achieving behavior change through anticipatory design:

1. Innermost layer: Intent

Improve overall well-being: Thrive’s core intent is to help users achieve a healthier and more fulfilling life. This encompasses aspects like managing stress, improving sleep quality, and boosting energy levels.

2. Middle layer: Workflows

Personalized programs and support: Thrive uses user data (sleep patterns, activity levels, mood) to create programs tailored to their specific needs and goals. These programs involve various workflows, such as:

• Guided meditations and breathing exercises to manage stress and anxiety.
• Personalized sleep routines aimed at improving sleep quality.
• Educational content and coaching tips to promote healthy habits and lifestyle changes.

3. Outermost layer: Algorithms

Data analysis and personalized recommendations: Thrive utilizes algorithms to analyze user data and generate actionable insights. These algorithms perform tasks like the following:

• Identify patterns in sleep, activity, and mood to understand user challenges.
• Predict user behavior to recommend interventions that address potential issues.
• Optimize program recommendations based on user progress and data analysis.

By aligning algorithms and workflows with the core intent of improving well-being, Thrive provides a personalized and proactive approach to behavior change. Here’s how it benefits users:

• Sustained behavior change: Personalized programs and ongoing support empower users to develop healthy habits for the long term.
• Data-driven insights: User data analysis helps users gain valuable insights into their well-being and identify areas for improvement.
• Proactive support: Anticipates potential issues and recommends interventions before problems arise.

Anticipatory design is inherently future-oriented, making it both appealing and challenging. To succeed, businesses must combine anticipation — predicting future needs — with foresight, a systematic approach to analyzing and preparing for future changes.

Foresight involves considering alternative future scenarios and making informed decisions to navigate toward desired outcomes. For example, Digit and Mint struggled because they didn’t adequately handle edge cases or unpredictable scenarios, a failure in their foresight strategy (see an image below).

As mentioned, while forecasting and backcasting work well for common scenarios, they can struggle with edge cases or unpredictable user behaviors. Under anticipatory design, if we demote foresight for a second plan, the business will fail to account for and prepare for emerging trends and disruptive changes. Strategic foresight helps companies to prepare for the future and develop strategies to address possible challenges and opportunities.

The Foresight process generally involves interrelated activities, including data research, trend analysis, planning scenarios, and impact assessment. The ultimate goal is to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the future to make more informed and strategic decisions in the design process and foresee possible frictions and pitfalls in the user experience.

Actionable Insights for Designer

• Enhance contextual awareness
  Help data scientists or engineers to ensure that the anticipatory systems can understand and respond to the full context of user needs, not just historical data. Plan for pitfalls so you can design safety measures where the user can control the system.
• Maintain user control
  Provide users with options to customize or override automated decisions, ensuring they feel in control of their experiences.
• Align short-term predictions with long-term goals
  Use forecasting and backcasting to create a balanced approach that meets immediate needs while guiding users toward their long-term objectives.

Predicting the future is no easy task. However, design can borrow foresight techniques to imagine, anticipate, and shape a future where technology seamlessly integrates with users evolving needs. To effectively implement anticipatory design, it’s essential to balance human control with AI automation. Here’s a 3-step approach to integrate future thinking into your workflow:

1. Anticipate Directions of Change
   Identify major trends shaping the future.
2. Imagine Alternative Scenarios
   Explore potential futures to guide impactful design decisions.
3. Shape Our Choices
   Leverage these scenarios to align design with user needs and long-term goals.

This proposed framework (see an image above) aims to integrate forecasting and backcasting while emphasizing user intent, transparency, and continuous improvement, ensuring that businesses create experiences that are both predictive and deeply aligned with user needs.

Step 1: Anticipate Directions of Change

Objective: Identify the major trends and forces shaping the future landscape.

Components:

1. Understand the User’s Intent

• User Research: Conduct in-depth user research through interviews, surveys, and observations to uncover user goals, motivations, pain points, and long-term aspirations or Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). This foundational step helps clearly define the user’s intent.
• Persona Development: Develop detailed user personas that represent the target audience, including their long-term goals and desired outcomes. Prioritize understanding how the service can adapt in real-time to changing user needs, offering recommendations, or taking actions aligned with the persona’s current context.

2. Forecasting: Predicting Near-Term User Needs

• Data Collection and Analysis: Collaborate closely with data scientists and data engineers to analyze historical data (past interactions), user behavior, and external factors. This collaboration ensures that predictive analytics enhance overall user experience, allowing designers to better understand the implications of data on user behaviors.
• Predictive Modeling: Implement continuous learning algorithms that refine predictions over time. Regularly assess how these models evolve, adapting to users’ changing needs and circumstances.
• Explore the Delphi Method: This is a structured communication technique that gathers expert opinions to reach a consensus on future developments. It’s particularly useful for exploring complex issues with uncertain outcomes. Use the Delphi Method to gather insights from industry experts, user researchers, and stakeholders about future user needs and the best strategies to meet those needs. The consensus achieved can help in clearly defining the long-term goals and desired outcomes.

Activities:

• Conduct interviews and workshops with experts using the Delphi Method to validate key trends.
• Analyze data and trends to forecast future directions.

Step 2: Imagine Alternative Scenarios

Objective: Explore a range of potential futures based on these changing directions.

Components:

1. Scenario Planning

• Scenario Development: It involves creating detailed, plausible future scenarios based on various external factors, such as technological advancements, social trends, and economic changes. Develop multiple future scenarios that represent different possible user contexts and their impact on their needs.
• Scenario Analysis: From these scenarios, you can outline the long-term goals that users might have in each scenario and design services that anticipate and address these needs. Assess how these scenarios impact user needs and experiences.

2. Backcasting: Designing from the Desired Future

• Define Desired Outcomes: Clearly outline the long-term goals or future states that users aim to achieve. Use backcasting to reduce cognitive load by designing a service that anticipates future needs, streamlining user interactions, and minimizing decision-making efforts.
  • Use Visioning Planning: This is a creative process that involves imagining the ideal future state you want to achieve. It helps in setting clear, long-term goals by focusing on the desired outcomes rather than current constraints. Facilitate workshops or brainstorming sessions with stakeholders to co-create a vision of the future. Define what success looks like from the user’s perspective and use this vision to guide the backcasting process.
• Identify Steps to Reach Goals: Reverse-engineer the user journey by starting from the desired future state and working backward. Identify the necessary steps and milestones and ensure these are communicated transparently to users, allowing them control over their experience.
• Create Roadmaps: Develop detailed roadmaps that outline the sequence of actions needed to transition from the current state to the desired future state. These roadmaps should anticipate obstacles, respect privacy, and avoid manipulative behaviors, empowering users rather than overwhelming them.

Activities:

• Develop and analyze alternative scenarios to explore various potential futures.
• Use backcasting to create actionable roadmaps from these scenarios, ensuring they align with long-term goals.

Step 3: Shape Our Choices

Objective: Leverage these scenarios to spark new ideas and guide impactful design decisions.

Components:

1. Integrate into the Human-Centered Design Process

• Iterative Design with Forecasting and Backcasting: Embed insights from forecasting and backcasting into every stage of the design process. Use these insights to inform user research, prototype development, and usability testing, ensuring that solutions address both predicted future needs and desired outcomes. Continuously refine designs based on user feedback.
• Agile Methodologies: Adopt agile development practices to remain flexible and responsive. Ensure that the service continuously learns from user interactions and feedback, refining its predictions and improving its ability to anticipate needs.

2. Implement and Monitor: Ensuring Ongoing Relevance

• User Feedback Loops: Establish continuous feedback mechanisms to refine predictive models and workflows. Use this feedback to adjust forecasts and backcasted plans as necessary, keeping the design aligned with evolving user expectations.
• Automation Tools: Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deploy automation tools that execute workflows and monitor progress toward goals. These tools should adapt based on new data, evolving alongside user behavior and emerging trends.
• Performance Metrics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness, accuracy, and quality of the anticipatory experience. Regularly review these metrics to ensure that the system remains aligned with intended outcomes.
• Continuous Improvement: Maintain a cycle of continuous improvement where the system learns from each interaction, refining its predictions and recommendations over time to stay relevant and useful.
  • Use Trend Analysis: This involves identifying and analyzing patterns in data over time to predict future developments. This method helps you understand the direction in which user behaviors, technologies, and market conditions are heading. Use trend analysis to identify emerging trends that could influence user needs in the future. This will inform the desired outcomes by highlighting what users might require or expect from a service as these trends evolve.

Activities:

• Implement design solutions based on scenario insights and iterate based on user feedback.
• Regularly review and adjust designs using performance metrics and continuous improvement practices.

Anticipatory design holds immense potential to revolutionize user experiences by predicting and fulfilling needs before they are even articulated. However, as seen in the examples discussed, the gap between expectation and execution can lead to user dissatisfaction and erode trust.

To navigate the future of anticipatory design successfully, businesses must prioritize transparency, accountability, and user empowerment. By enhancing contextual awareness, maintaining user control, and aligning short-term predictions with long-term goals, companies can create experiences that are not only innovative but also deeply resonant with their users’ needs.

Moreover, combining anticipation with foresight allows businesses to prepare for a range of future scenarios, ensuring that their designs remain relevant and effective even as circumstances change. The proposed 3-step framework — anticipating directions of change, imagining alternative scenarios, and shaping our choices — provides a practical roadmap for integrating these principles into the design process.

As we move forward, the challenge will be to balance the power of AI with the human need for clarity, control, and trust. By doing so, businesses can fulfill the promise of anticipatory design, creating products and services that are not only efficient and personalized but also ethical and user-centric.

In the end,

The success of anticipatory design will depend on its ability to enhance, rather than replace, the human experience.

It is a tool to empower users, not to dictate their choices. When done right, anticipatory design can lead to a future where technology seamlessly integrates with our lives, making everyday experiences simpler, more intuitive, and ultimately more satisfying.

An educated workforce is a happier workforce. That’s why it makes sense to invest in corporate training and eLearning. It’ll increase the skills, creativity and innovation of your workforce and help you keep more employees, too.

One key tool in delivering training is the presentation. Get your presentation right, and you can present important information and engage your audience.

To build presentations fast, you can use premium corporate training PowerPoint templates. You’ll find lots of free and premium training PowerPoint templates and other elearning templates across the web. In this article, we’ll share some of the best training PowerPoint templates to help you make appealing presentations.

Business Training PowerPoint Infographics

This is a useful PowerPoint template for facilitating business training sessions. With over 20 unique, fully customizable infographic slides, it offers a modern, user-friendly approach to crafting informative presentations to accompany your business training and seminars.

Bentala – Employee Training PowerPoint Template

Another modern PowerPoint template perfect for business training slides. With a modern, sleek design and user-friendly interface, it’s easy for anyone to produce impressive, professional-looking presentations. It includes 20 editable slides, drag-and-drop image functionality, and customizable color schemes.

Team Building Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is also suitable for training sessions, which can enhance your presentations with its sleek, modern design. Its features include 10 master slides, editable vector graphics, and a convenient drag-and-drop feature for image placement.

Online Course PowerPoint Template

This is a thoughtfully crafted PowerPoint template for educators and online course creators. Designed for clarity and visual appeal, this comprehensive template can brilliantly outline course content, learning objectives, instructor qualifications, and enrolment details.

Team Building & Training Powerpoint Template

This is a sleek, modern PowerPoint template ideal for professional business presentations. Whether you’re pitching a startup, proposing a project, or conducting leadership training, this template is versatile, fitted with 25 editable slides and drag-drop image placeholders.

Modern Online Course Powerpoint Template

A multipurpose business presentation template, perfect for webinars, e-courses, online seminars, and much more. With its clean and professional design complemented by 36 editable slides, resizable graphics, and drag-and-drop image placeholders, it’s suitable for a variety of uses.

Lumiere – Education Course Presentation Template

The Lumiere is a versatile PowerPoint template for various purposes such as education, coursework, technology, corporate pitches, digital marketing, start-up projects, and personal portfolios. The template’s features include 30 unique slides, editable graphics, free web fonts, and more.

e-Learning College Powerpoint Template

This is a top-tier, engaging PowerPoint template tailored for educators and academic administrators. It’s ideal for presenting online learning programs at academic conferences, introducing online courses, or hosting educational workshops. This template’s professional design, high-quality graphics, and easy customization make it a great choice for anyone wishing to highlight the features and benefits of eLearning.

Human Resource Training PowerPoint Template

Take your business presentations to the next level with this PowerPoint template. Boasting 30+ unique slides in a widescreen 16:9 format, this template is versatile for various projects. With all graphics being resizable and editable, as well as an easy drag-and-drop picture placeholder, you have control over your presentation’s look.

Call Center Training PowerPoint Template

This creative PowerPoint template is a uniquely designed graphic pack to elevate your presentation experience. It comes with editable charts and elements, preset color schemes, and diverse slide variations. Convenient and user-friendly, this template is ideal for illustrating every stage of your business development journey.

Employee Training Plan PowerPoint Template

An impressive and user-friendly PowerPoint template designed to heighten business training presentations. With its unique, editable slides and preset color scheme, the template facilitates the creation of comprehensive presentations for every stage of business development.

Online Course Education Presentation

This is a customizable PowerPoint template perfect for educational needs. It features a 16:9 widescreen ratio, a user-friendly master slide layout, and a complimentary font. The Eduwave template style is flexible and well-suited for both corporate and personal presentations.

Lovanda – Language Course PowerPoint Template

An elegant and comprehensive PowerPoint template that helps transform your creative visions into polished realities with ease. This versatile template, perfect for numerous creative enterprises, allows you to brilliantly communicate your ideas with its 10 customizable slides, retina and full HD resolution, resizable vector elements, and more.

Business Training PowerPoint Presentation

Use this PowerPoint template to streamline the creation of your slideshows, whether it’s for business training sessions or seminars. It comes equipped with editable color schemes, image placeholders, and free font, helping to elevate your content without effort.

Leadership Training PowerPoint Template

This is a modern, professional, and minimalist PowerPoint template perfect for business coaches, motivational speakers, and training companies. It comes with 25 total slides, features resizable and editable graphics, and even includes drag-and-drop image placeholders.

Modern Leadership Training Presentation Template

A cutting-edge PowerPoint template designed for leadership training and business workshops. It includes 30 unique, editable slides with a light background suitable for various seminars, training events, and more.

MasterClass Training PowerPoint Template

A dynamic PowerPoint template for business training presentations. With over 30 unique, editable slides in a 16:9 widescreen format, this template allows for aesthetic coherence through its predetermined color scheme and font theme. It provides a comprehensive approach to project storytelling, catering to every phase of your business growth.

Leadership Training PowerPoint Presentation

With a wide array of customizable, eye-catching slide designs, this PowerPoint template effortlessly meets diverse presentation needs. Its notable features include editable graphics, utilization of free web fonts, master slides-based setup, and a user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality.

Business Training PowerPoint Template

This is a versatile PowerPoint template designed for creating professional and engaging business training presentations. It features a simple and modern theme with editable color scheme, image placeholders, and uses a free font.

Training Interview Presentation for PowerPoint

This is the perfect PowerPoint template for constructing impressive training presentations effortlessly. Suitable for businesses, agencies, and training companies, this template will elevate your training programs in a professional way.

Jobtrain Training PowerPoint Template

Jobtrain PowerPoint template combines various design aspects and usability to make your company profile presentation more engaging. Inside the pack, you’ll find a smorgasbord of infographics, vectors, charts, and layouts that you can use inside your presentation.

Learnic – Training PowerPoint Template

This is a well-designed and modern training presentation template. It’s great for teaching and training. The team training template PPT comes with over 100 slides you can work with. You can also use the included maps, charts, and other graphics.

Ronald – Training PowerPoint Template

Roland is a professional, clean, modern, and easy-to-use presentation template. It can be used for various purposes. Roland offers you amazing convenience in terms of replacing images and fonts. Make your clients feel satisfied with this presentation template.

Time Management Training PowerPoint Template

This is one of the best PowerPoint templates for training, thanks to its crisp, minimalist design. The time management training template set includes 12 PowerPoint files and more than 60 slides. Add the finishing touches to your presentation with built-in icons and handmade infographics.

Yogadu – Training PowerPoint Template

Yogadu is an easy-to-edit set of training PowerPoint templates via drag and drop. The training template set includes 80 different slides and 10 color schemes. There are many different business templates and charts with editable shapes.

Arthur – Training PowerPoint Template

This set of corporate PowerPoint templates includes more than 60 unique training slides. There are editable charts and diagrams, making it easy to include data in your business training. This training PPT is attractive, well-designed and well-supported.

Professional Training PowerPoint Template

This is a responsive PowerPoint training template with a clean, professional design. The template set has more than 50 slides and will match your branding with unlimited colors. It also includes a variety of infographic elements such as charts and timelines, as well as editable vector icons.

Clean Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint training template is a fun contemporary choice for your next presentation. This download comes with 40 unique training slides and layouts. These slides are also easy to edit and customize. Take advantage of the device mockups to help illustrate your points.

eLearning PowerPoint Template

Here’s a cool training presentation focused on education. It comes with unique slide layouts, image placeholders, and it’s based on master slides. It has plenty of white space, making it easy for your audience to follow your points. This template is perfect for your next training presentation.

Online Education PowerPoint Template

Design your presentation template quickly with this ready-made E-Learning PowerPoint Template. It has many slide layouts to choose from with stock photos and techy graphic design elements. What is the best part? You can redesign this presentation template quickly. You just have to download it, edit the content, and wow our audiences.

Versatile Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint training template set is designed for online courses. It’s got an eye-catching design and includes animations. There are 51 training slides in the set. It’s easy to change colors to match your chosen color scheme with a single click. Free eLearning templates for PowerPoint usually don’t have these features.

Webinar & Ecourse PowerPoint Template

This template for Microsoft PowerPoint is a modern and sleek presentation that will give a boost to your business meetings and lectures. It contains 46 beautifully designed slides that can be easily edited and adjusted to suit all of your professional and business needs.

Online Training PowerPoint Template

This simple, elegant eLearning PowerPoint template has a clean design to suit any kind of training. It includes 50 slides that are designed and easy to edit with drag and drop. The training template PPT includes vector icons.

Online Class PowerPoint Template

This training PowerPoint presentation template will help you deliver in an online classroom. The slide deck’s layout is minimal and stylish. University also includes more than 42 unique training slides. Features like image placeholders and master slides make this an easy template to customize. It’s hard to find a training PPT template free download that can say that.

Online Training Course PowerPoint Template

Now you don’t need to spend time preparing complicated slides. Just download this presentation and replace text and images in a few clicks. It provides you with more time preparing your speech.

Elearn – Training PowerPoint Template

This training PowerPoint template comes with 16 slides. It also includes infographic elements. Use it for business training or eLearning.

iCourse – Training PowerPoint Template

This training and development PPT template is great for many subjects. If your training relates to sketching or designing, the slide templates are already set up.

Hi- Learning – Training PowerPoint Template

If you need to talk timelines, this training presentation template has the graphics you need already built in. All you’ve got to do is edit the included example, and you’re good to go.

Professional Training PowerPoint Template

This is another free Microsoft Office template featuring images of education. It’s simple to edit fonts and colors to make the training template PPT your own.

Laqu – Training PowerPoint Template

Laqu is a simple training PowerPoint template with a dark background. The dark background is suitable for many purposes, including corporate training. This technical training PPT includes 25 editable slides.