Month: October 2024

In the fast-evolving landscape of manufacturing, staying ahead of the competition means constantly adapting and improving. One of the most transformative advancements in recent years is the Internet of Things (IoT). By integrating IoT technologies into inventory management systems, manufacturers can achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and accuracy. In this blog, we’ll explore how IoT …

Continue reading "The Future of Inventory Management: Harnessing IoT for Manufacturing Efficiency"

The post The Future of Inventory Management: Harnessing IoT for Manufacturing Efficiency first appeared on Lucid Softech.

The @supports at-rule has been extended several times since its initial release. Once only capable of checking support for property/value pairs, it can now check for a selector using the selector() wrapper function and different font formats and techs using font-format() and font-tech(), respectively. However, one feature the community still longs for is testing other at-rules support.

@supports at-rule(@new-rule) {
  /* @new-rule is supported */
}

The CSSWG decided in 2022 to add the prior at-rule() wrapper function. While this is welcome and wonderful news, here we are two years later and we don’t have a lot of updates on when it will be added to browsers. So, how can we check for support in the meantime?

Funny coincidence: Just yesterday the Chrome team changed the status from “new” to “assigned” as if they knew I was thinking about it.

Looking for an answer, I found this post by Bramus that offers a workaround: while we can’t check for a CSS at-rule in the @supports at-rule, we can test a property that was shipped with a particular at-rule as a substitute, the thinking being that if a related feature was released that we can test and it is supported, then the feature that we’re unable to test is likely to be supported as well… and vice versa. Bramus provides an example that checks support for the animation-timeline property to check if the @scroll-timeline at-rule (which has been discontinued) is supported since the two were shipped together.

@supports (animation-timeline: works) {
  /* @scroll-timeline is supported*/
}

/* Note: @scroll-timeline doesn't exist anymore */

Bramus calls these “telltale” properties, which is a fun way to think about this because it resembles a puzzle of deduction, where we have to find a related property to check if its at-rule is supported.

I wanted to see how many of these puzzles I could solve, and in the process, know which at-rules we can reliably test today. So, I’ve identified a full list of supportable at-rules that I could find.

I’ve excluded at-rules that offer no browser support, like @color-profile, @when, and @else, as well as deprecated at-rules, like @document. Similarly, I’m excluding older at-rules that have enjoyed wide browser support for years — like @page, @import, @media, @font-face, @namespace and @keyframes — since those are more obvious.

@container size queries (baseline support)

Testing support for size queries is fairly trivial since the module introduces several telltale properties, notably container-type, container-name and container. Choose your favorite because they should all evaluate the same. And if that property is supported, then @container should be supported, too, since it was introduced at the same time.

@supports (container-type: size) {
  /* Size queries are supported! */
}

You can combine both of them by nesting a @supports query inside a @container and vice versa.

@supports (container-type: size) {
  @container (width > 800px) {
    /* Styles */
  }
}

@container style queries (partial support)

Size queries give us a lot of telltale properties to work with, but the same can’t be said about style queries. Since each element has a style containment by default, there isn’t a property or value specific to them. We can work around that by forgetting about @supports and writing the styles inside a style query instead. Style queries work in supporting browsers but otherwise are ignored, so we’re able to write some base styles for older browsers that will be overridden by modern ones.

.container {
  --supports-style-queries: true;
}

.container .child {
  /* Base styles */
}

@container style(--supports-style-queries: true) {
  /* Container queries are supported! */
  .child {
    /* We can override the base styles here */
  }
}

@counter-style (partial support)

The @counter-style at-rule allows us to make custom counters for lists. The styles are defined inside a @counter-style with custom name.

@counter-style triangle {
  system: cyclic;
  symbols: ‣;
  suffix: " ";
}

ul {
  list-style: triangle;
}

We don’t have a telltale property to help us solve this puzzle, but rather a telltale value. The list-style-type property used to accept a few predefined keyword values, but now supports additional values since @counter-style was introduced. That means we should be able to check if the browser supports <custom-ident> values for list-style-type.

@supports (list-style: custom-ident) {
  /* @counter-style is supported! */
}

@font-feature-values (baseline support)

Some fonts include alternate glyphs in the font file that can be customized using the @font-feature-values at-rule. These custom glyphs can be displayed using the font-variant-alternatesl, so that’s our telltale property for checking support on this one:

@supports (font-variant-alternates: swash(custom-ident)) {
  /* @font-feature-values is supported! */
}

@font-palette-values (baseline support)

The same concept can be applied to the @font-palette-values at-rule, which allows us to modify multicolor fonts using the font-palette property that we can use as its telltale property.

@supports (font-palette: normal) {
  /* @font-palette-values is supported! */
}

@position-try (partial support)

The @position-try at-rule is used to create custom anchor fallback positions in anchor positioning. It’s probably the one at-rule in this list that needs more support since it is such a new feature. Fortunately, there are many telltale properties in the same module that we can reach for. Be careful, though, because some properties have been renamed since they were initially introduced. I recommend testing support for @position-try using anchor-name or position-try as telltale properties.

@supports (position-try: flip-block) {
  /* @position-try is supported! */
}

@scope (partial support)

The @scope at-rule seems tricky to test at first, but it turns out can apply the same strategy we did with style queries. Create a base style for browsers that don’t support @scope and then override those styles inside a @scope block that will only be valid in supporting browsers. A progressive enhancement strategy if there ever was one!

.foo .element {
  /* Base style */
}

@scope (.foo) to (.bar) {
  :scope .element {
    /* @scope is supported, override base style */
  }
}

@view-transition (partial support)

The last at-rule in this list is @view-transition. It’s another feature making quick strides into browser implementations, but it’s still a little ways out from being considered baseline support.

The easiest way would be to use its related view-transition-name property since they released close together:

@supports (view-transition-name: custom-ident) {
  /* @view-transition is supported! */
}

But we may as well use the selector() function to check for one of its many pseudo-elements support:

@supports selector(::view-transition-group(transition-name)) {
  /* @view-transition is supported! */
}

A little resource

I put this list into a demo that uses @supports to style different at-rules based on the test recipes we covered:

The unsolved ones

Even though I feel like I put a solid list together, there are three at-rules that I couldn’t figure out how to test: @layer, @property, and @starting-style.

Thankfully, each one is pretty decently supported in modern browsers. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t test for support. My hunch is that we can text @layer support similar to the approaches for testing support for style() queries with @container where we set a base style and use progressive enhancement where there’s support.

The other two? I have no idea. But please do let me know how you’re checking support for @property and @starting-style — or how you’re checking support for any other feature differently than what I have here. This is a tricky puzzle!

Recipes for Detecting Support for CSS At-Rules originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

There is an amazing community effort happening in search of a new logo for CSS. I was a bit skeptical at first, as I never really considered CSS a “brand.” Why does it need a logo? For starters, the current logo seems… a bit dated.

Displayed quite prominently is the number 3. As in CSS version 3, or simply CSS3. Depending on your IDE’s selected icon pack of choice, CSS file icons are often only the number 3.

To give an incredibly glossed-over history of CSS3:

• Earliest draft specification was in 1999!
• Adoption began in 2011, when it was published as the W3C Recommendation.
• It’s been used ever since? That can’t be right…

CSS is certainly not stuck in 2011. Take a look at all the features added to CSS in the past five years (warning, scrolling animation ahead):

(Courtesy of Alex Riviere)

Seems like this stems mainly from the discontinuation of version numbering for CSS. These days, we mostly reference newer CSS features by their individual specification level, such as Selectors Level 4 being the current Selectors specification, for example.

A far more general observation on the “progress” of CSS could be taking a look at features being implemented — things like Caniuse and Baseline are great for seeing when certain browsers implemented certain features. Similarly, the Interop Project is a group consisting of browsers figuring out what to implement next.

There are ongoing discussions about the “eras” of CSS, though, and how those may be a way of framing the way we refer to CSS features.

Chris posted about CSS4 here on CSS-Tricks (five years ago!), discussing how successful CSS3 was from a marketing perspective. Jen Simmons also started a discussion back in 2020 on the CSS Working Group’s GitHub about defining CSS4. Knowing that, are you at least somewhat surprised that we have blown right by CSS4 and are technically using CSS5?

The CSS-Next Community Group is leading the charge here, something that member Brecht de Ruyte introduced earlier this year at Smashing Magazine. The purpose of this group is to, well, determine what’s next for CSS! The group defines the CSS versions as:

• CSS3 (~2009-2012): Level 3 CSS specs as defined by the CSSWG
• CSS4 (~2013-2018): Essential features that were not part of CSS3, but are already a fundamental part of CSS.
• CSS5 (~2019-2024): Newer features whose adoption is steadily growing.
• CSS6 (~2025+): Early-stage features that are planned for future CSS.

Check out this slide deck from November 2023 detailing the need for defining stronger versioning. Their goals are clear in my opinion:

1. Help developers learn CSS.
2. Help educators teach CSS.
3. Help employers define modern web skil…
4. Help the community understand the progression of CSS capabilities over time.

Circling back around to the logo, I have to agree: Yes, it’s time for a change.

Back in August, Adam Argyle opened an issue on the CSS-Next project on GitHub to drum up ideas. The thread is active and ongoing, though appears to be honing in on a release candidate. Let’s take a look at some proposals!

Nils Binder, from 9elements, proposed this lovely design, riffing on the “cascade.” Note the river-like “S” shape flowing through the design.

Chris Kirk-Nielson pitched a neat interactive logo concept he put together a while back. The suggestion plays into the “CSS is Awesome” meme, where the content overflows the wrapper. While playful and recognizable, Nils raised an excellent point:

Regarding the reference to the ‘CSS IS AWESOME’ meme, I initially chuckled, of course. However, at the same time, the meme also represents CSS as something quirky, unpredictable, and full of bugs. I’m not sure if that’s the exact message that needs to be repeated in the logo. It feels like it reinforces the recurring ‘CSS is broken’ mantra. To exaggerate: CSS is subordinate to JS and somehow broken.

Wow, is this the end of an era for the familiar meme? 

It’s looking that way, as the current candidate builds off of Javi Aguilar’s proposal. Javi’s design is being iterated upon by the group, it’s shaping up and looks great hanging with friends:

Javi describes the design considerations in the thread. Personally, I’m a fan of the color choice, and the softer shape differentiates it from the more rigid JavaScript and Typescript logos.

As mentioned, the discussion is ongoing and the design is actively being worked on. You can check out the latest versions in Adam’s CodePen demo:

Or if checking out design files is more your speed, take a look in Figma.

I think the thing that impresses me most about community initiatives like this is the collaboration involved. If you have opinions on the design of the logo, feel free to chime in on the discussion thread!

Once the versions are defined and the logo finalized, the only thing left to decide on will be a mascot for CSS. A chameleon? A peacock? I’m sure the community will choose wisely.

Searching for a New CSS Logo originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, is a vibrant celebration of life, memory, and heritage.

If you’re looking to capture the energy and deep cultural significance of this holiday in your designs, our collection of Día de los Muertos mockups, graphics, and resources is exactly what you need.

Whether you’re designing posters, invitations, or social media content, these ready-to-use templates and graphics will make your work come alive with authenticity. The collection includes a variety of customizable elements that you can easily incorporate into your creative projects.

These Día de los Muertos templates and graphics will surely embody the rich traditions of this beloved Mexican holiday.

Dia De Los Muertos Flyer Template

This flyer template is adorned with an eye-catching, half-page illustration of a lucha libre-styled calacas skull – perfect for any Day Of The Dead celebrations or other Mexican events. Provided in both Photoshop PSD and Illustrator AI files, the template is easily customizable. to your preference.

Day of the Dead Flyer Template

This is a versatile and well-organized flyer template for promoting your Day of the Dead events. It incorporates free Google Fonts and CC0 images and offers editable text, image, and color options. This fully layered template can be easily adjusted to fit different social media sizes.

Dia De Los Muertos Day of the Dead Flyer Template

A striking set of customizable flyers and posters, available in Photoshop and Illustrator format. Boasting hand-drawn La Calavera Catrina illustrations, these vibrant designs perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the Mexican Day of the Dead festivities. Ideal for promoting a host of events, from Mexican-themed parties to community shindigs.

Creative Day Of The Dead Flyer Template

This is a vibrant and colorful flyer template supplied in multiple formats like AI, EPS, and PSD. It features well-organized layers for easy customization, perfect A4 printing size with bleed settings, and matches the visual appeal with a high-resolution print setting of CMYK 300 DPI.

Halloween – Day Of The Dead Flyer Template

An eye-catching, editable flyer template ideal for promoting your Day of the Dead campaigns. The A4 size template, which includes downloadable AI, EPS and PSD files, is easily adjustable using Adobe CS6 and is print-ready in a high quality 300 DPI CMYK format.

Cartoon Dia De Los Muertos Flyer Template

This flyer template offers a fun, animated design perfect for endorsing Day of The Dead gatherings to everyone. Accommodating different formats like Photoshop PSD, Illustrator Ai, and Vector EPS, this A4 sized flyer is a flexible and versatile tool for your event advertising needs.

Day of The Dead Flyer & Poster Template

This flyer template offers a vibrant and dynamic design for your Dia De Los Muertos festivities. Customizable in Photoshop, it comes as a 5×7” flyer and 3.9” x 8.2″ DL Rack Card, with a high 300 dpi quality in CMYK. It utilizes free fonts like AlphaEcho, Selima, Bebas, Teko, and Akrobat that are easy to edit.

Day of the Dead Flyer AI & EPS Template

A versatile and user-friendly flyer template for conveying your information effectively. The template has well-arranged layouts that are easy to edit, and includes neat organization of layers. It is ready in Ai and EPS format, and customizable in A3 and A4 international sizes.

Unique Dia De Los Muertos Flyer Template

This is a captivating flyer template with its rustic-inspired design, echoing traditional Mexican themes. The flyer showcases a sombrero-adorned calcaca skull amidst red roses, complemented by the colours of the Mexican flag. Available in Photoshop PSD, EPS, and Illustrator AI files, it prints to a standard A4 size.

Minimal Dia De Los Muertos Flyer Template

This flyer template is wonderfully designed for advertising Day of the Dead parties with its fun, yet professional design. The template is compact and well-organized, making it easy to customize even in a rush. It features editable text, free fonts, and boasts a high 300 dpi resolution, suitable for A4 and A5 sizes.

Dia de Muertos Festival Day of the Dead Banner Ads

Ideal for creators and designers promoting the Day of the Dead Festival, this template kit feels festive with its vibrant colors and skulls. This multipurpose pack includes 8 different sized, fully editable banners suitable for Google Ads, web, and social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It offers organized layers and a high resolution of 300 DPI as well as modifiable colors and text.

Day Of The Dead Roll-up Banner Template

This is a roll-up banner template, perfect for eye-catching displays. With neat AI, EPS, PSD files included and well-organized layers, you can easily customize this 32×74 inch banner. Created with the latest Adobe Cs6, the template is set with 1-inch bleed, CMYK at 300 DPI, ensuring excellent print quality.

Hidun – Dia de los Muertos Instagram Stories

The Hidun is a set of sophisticated, clear, and elegant promotion templates for the Day of the Dead. Suitable for any business or promotion, these templates are easy to customize on Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, with changeable photos, fonts, and background colors.

Bulon – Dia de los Muertos Instagram Stories

Bulon is a perfect set of Instagram story templates that celebrate the Mexican Day of the Dead. With its professional, yet elegant design, these templates are extremely versatile, suitable for any business promotion or event. Easy to customise with high-res quality, it can be edited through Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, making your posts stand out with ease.

Dia De Muertos 3D Icons Pack

This is a Day of the Dead-themed icon pack that provides visually striking icons inspired by the Day of the Dead celebration. Including PNG, SVG, and PSD files, this set is versatile for various design projects. With its unique aesthetics and beautiful imagery, it’s an excellent tool for designers.

Day of the Dead Icon Set

A collection of 35 high-quality, vector icons. These easily customizable assets are suitable for embellishing a wide array of platforms from websites, mobile apps, books, to social media, infographics, flyers, banners, and posters. This AI, EPS, PNG, JPEG inclusive pack is specifically prepared for an effortless drag and drop process.

Simple Day Of The Dead Icons Set

This is a uniquely curated array of 25 distinctive icons, conveniently prepared for instant usage. Featuring three eye-catching styles – Line, Solid, Line Two-tone Color – it offers a total of 75 icons for a diverse application in print, web, apps, and infographics.

Mexico Day of the Dead Icon Set

This is a vibrant collection of vector icons celebrating Mexican culture. It features a range of uniquely styled icons, including a sombrero, guacamole, an Aztec temple, and Day of the Dead imagery. The set includes 18 differentiated icons in EPS, AI, PNG, SVG, and JPG formats, each reflecting the distinctive charm of Mexico.

Day of the Dead Vector Illustrations

A set of illustrations transports you to the heart of Mexican culture. Available in Illustrator Ai, Vector EPS, Clipart PNG, and SVG formats, these dynamic illustrations embody Dia de Muertos and Cinco de Mayo with iconic skulls, calaveras, cacti, and sombreros. Ideal for adding a splash of Mexican heritage to your design projects, it boasts 16 vibrant elements, a 3000 x 2000px artboard size, and uses RGB color space.

Day of the Dead Patterns Set

A set of vector patterns that captures the spirit of the vibrant Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos. The set contains repeatable illustrations and icons, perfect for parties, events, or graphic design projects. Supplied in Illustrator Ai, Vector EPS, Clipart PNG, and Vector SVG formats, these festive, Mexican themed patterns bring the iconic celebration to life.

Sugar Skull Illustrations & Elements

Another collection of illustrations inspired by traditional Mexican Calaca designs. These playful, cartoon-style, vector-based assets boast customizable size and color. They serve as remarkable decor for various events such as Cinco de Mayo fiestas, Mexican Day festivals, and Day of the Dead or Dia De Los Muertos parties.

Mexican Sugar Skull Illustration Set

This illustration pack offers a vibrant array of colorfully decorated sugar skulls or ‘calacas’, ideal for adding special touches to invitations, posters and other projects. This range of illustrations, suited for Cinco De Mayo and Day of The Dead celebrations, comes in a variety of formats including EPS, PNG, and Illustrator AI.

Free Day of the Dead Mockup Templates

Free Day of the Dead Mockup with Skeletons

This creative and colorful mockup template is perfect for showcasing your Day of the Dead greeting cards, invites, and various other designs. The template is free to use and it comes in PSD format.

Free Halloween & Day of the Dead Mockup

You can download this mockup template for free to create a spooky presentation for your Day of the Dead designs. The template is available in Photoshop PSD format with smart objects that allows you to easily insert your design into the mockup.

Free Day of the Dead Frame Mockup

This is a free frame mockup featuring spooky skeletons and Halloween-themed elements. It’s ideal for all kinds of Halloween and Day of the Dead design presentations. It also comes in PSD format.

Free Day of the Dead with Skull Mockup

This free mockup template comes surrounded with spider webs, skeletons, and other spooky elements to create the perfect scene for your Day of the Dead designs. It comes in JPG format but you can easily turn it into a mockup using Photoshop.

Free Day of the Dead Mockup with Slate

This mockup is perfect for your Day of the Dead and Halloween designs. It features a creative and playful scene with a skull and bones. The template comes in PSD format with easily editable smart objects.

In a fast-paced industry like tech, it can be hard to deal with the fear of missing out on important news. But, as many of us know, there’s an absolutely huge amount of information coming in daily, and finding the right time and balance to keep up can be difficult, if not stressful. A classic piece of technology like an RSS feed is a delightful way of taking back ownership of our own time. In this article, we will create a static Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader that will bring you the latest curated news only once (yes: once) a day.

We’ll obviously work with RSS technology in the process, but we’re also going to combine it with some things that maybe you haven’t tried before, including Astro (the static site framework), TypeScript (for JavaScript goodies), a package called rss-parser (for connecting things together), as well as scheduled functions and build hooks provided by Netlify (although there are other services that do this).

I chose these technologies purely because I really, really enjoy them! There may be other solutions out there that are more performant, come with more features, or are simply more comfortable to you — and in those cases, I encourage you to swap in whatever you’d like. The most important thing is getting the end result!

Here’s how this will go. Astro generates the website. I made the intentional decision to use a static site because I want the different RSS feeds to be fetched only once during build time, and that’s something we can control each time the site is “rebuilt” and redeployed with updates. That’s where Netlify’s scheduled functions come into play, as they let us trigger rebuilds automatically at specific times. There is no need to manually check for updates and deploy them! Cron jobs can just as readily do this if you prefer a server-side solution.

During the triggered rebuild, we’ll let the rss-parser package do exactly what it says it does: parse a list of RSS feeds that are contained in an array. The package also allows us to set a filter for the fetched results so that we only get ones from the past day, week, and so on. Personally, I only render the news from the last seven days to prevent content overload. We’ll get there!

But first...

RSS is a web feed technology that you can feed into a reader or news aggregator. Because RSS is standardized, you know what to expect when it comes to the feed’s format. That means we have a ton of fun possibilities when it comes to handling the data that the feed provides. Most news websites have their own RSS feed that you can subscribe to (this is Smashing Magazine’s RSS feed: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed/). An RSS feed is capable of updating every time a site publishes new content, which means it can be a quick source of the latest news, but we can tailor that frequency as well.

RSS feeds are written in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and have specific elements that can be used within it. Instead of focusing too much on the technicalities here, I’ll give you a link to the RSS specification. Don’t worry; that page should be scannable enough for you to find the most pertinent information you need, like the kinds of elements that are supported and what they represent. For this tutorial, we’re only using the following elements: <title>, <link>, <description>, <item>, and <pubDate>. We’ll also let our RSS parser package do some of the work for us.

We’ll start by creating our Astro site! In your terminal run pnpm create astro@latest. You can use any package manager you want — I’m simply trying out pnpm for myself.

After running the command, Astro’s chat-based helper, Houston, walks through some setup questions to get things started.

 astro   Launch sequence initiated.

   dir   Where should we create your new project?
         ./rss-buddy

  tmpl   How would you like to start your new project?
         Include sample files

    ts   Do you plan to write TypeScript?
         Yes

   use   How strict should TypeScript be?
         Strict

  deps   Install dependencies?
         Yes

   git   Initialize a new git repository?
         Yes

I like to use Astro’s sample files so I can get started quickly, but we’re going to clean them up a bit in the process. Let’s clean up the src/pages/index.astro file by removing everything inside of the <main></main> tags. Then we’re good to go!

From there, we can spin things by running pnpm start. Your terminal will tell you which localhost address you can find your site at.

The src/pages/index.astro file is where we will make an array of RSS feeds we want to follow. We will be using Astro’s template syntax, so between the two code fences (---), create an array of feedSources and add some feeds. If you need inspiration, you can copy this:

const feedSources = [
  'https://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed/',
  'https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/rss.xml',
  // etc.
]

Now we’ll install the rss-parser package in our project by running pnpm install rss-parser. This package is a small library that turns the XML that we get from fetching an RSS feed into JavaScript objects. This makes it easy for us to read our RSS feeds and manipulate the data any way we want.

Once the package is installed, open the src/pages/index.astro file, and at the top, we’ll import the rss-parser and instantiate the Partner class.

import Parser from 'rss-parser';
const parser = new Parser();

We use this parser to read our RSS feeds and (surprise!) parse them to JavaScript. We’re going to be dealing with a list of promises here. Normally, I would probably use Promise.all(), but the thing is, this is supposed to be a complicated experience. If one of the feeds doesn’t work for some reason, I’d prefer to simply ignore it.

Why? Well, because Promise.all() rejects everything even if only one of its promises is rejected. That might mean that if one feed doesn’t behave the way I’d expect it to, my entire page would be blank when I grab my hot beverage to read the news in the morning. I do not want to start my day confronted by an error.

Instead, I’ll opt to use Promise.allSettled(). This method will actually let all promises complete even if one of them fails. In our case, this means any feed that errors will just be ignored, which is perfect.

Let’s add this to the src/pages/index.astro file:

interface FeedItem {
  feed?: string;
  title?: string;
  link?: string;
  date?: Date;
}

const feedItems: FeedItem[] = [];

await Promise.allSettled(
  feedSources.map(async (source) => {
    try {
      const feed = await parser.parseURL(source);
      feed.items.forEach((item) => {
        const date = item.pubDate ? new Date(item.pubDate) : undefined;

          feedItems.push({
            feed: feed.title,
            title: item.title,
            link: item.link,
            date,
          });
      });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(Error fetching feed from ${source}:, error);
    }
  })
);

This creates an array (or more) named feedItems. For each URL in the feedSources array we created earlier, the rss-parser retrieves the items and, yes, parses them into JavaScript. Then, we return whatever data we want! We’ll keep it simple for now and only return the following:

• The feed title,
• The title of the feed item,
• The link to the item,
• And the item’s published date.

The next step is to ensure that all items are sorted by date so we’ll truly get the “latest” news. Add this small piece of code to our work:

const sortedFeedItems = feedItems.sort((a, b) => (b.date ?? new Date()).getTime() - (a.date ?? new Date()).getTime());

Oh, and... remember when I said I didn’t want this RSS reader to render anything older than seven days? Let’s tackle that right now since we’re already in this code.

We’ll make a new variable called sevenDaysAgo and assign it a date. We’ll then set that date to seven days ago and use that logic before we add a new item to our feedItems array.

This is what the src/pages/index.astro file should now look like at this point:

---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro';
import Parser from 'rss-parser';
const parser = new Parser();

const sevenDaysAgo = new Date();
sevenDaysAgo.setDate(sevenDaysAgo.getDate() - 7);

const feedSources = [
  'https://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed/',
  'https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/rss.xml',
]

interface FeedItem {
  feed?: string;
  title?: string;
  link?: string;
  date?: Date;
}

const feedItems: FeedItem[] = [];

await Promise.allSettled(
  feedSources.map(async (source) => {
    try {
      const feed = await parser.parseURL(source);
      feed.items.forEach((item) => {
        const date = item.pubDate ? new Date(item.pubDate) : undefined;
        if (date && date >= sevenDaysAgo) {
          feedItems.push({
            feed: feed.title,
            title: item.title,
            link: item.link,
            date,
          });
        }
      });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(Error fetching feed from ${source}:, error);
    }
  })
);

const sortedFeedItems = feedItems.sort((a, b) => (b.date ?? new Date()).getTime() - (a.date ?? new Date()).getTime());

---

<Layout title="Welcome to Astro.">
  <main>
  </main>
</Layout>

It’s time to show our news articles on the Astro site! To keep this simple, we’ll format the items in an unordered list rather than some other fancy layout.

All we need to do is update the <Layout> element in the file with the XML objects sprinkled in for a feed item’s title, URL, and publish date.

<Layout title="Welcome to Astro.">
  <main>
  {sortedFeedItems.map(item => (
    <ul>
      <li>
        <a href={item.link}>{item.title}</a>
        <p>{item.feed}</p>
        <p>{item.date}</p>
      </li>
    </ul>
  ))}
  </main>
</Layout>

Go ahead and run pnpm start from the terminal. The page should display an unordered list of feed items. Of course, everything is styled at the moment, but luckily for you, you can make it look exactly like you want with CSS!

And remember that there are even more fields available in the XML for each item if you want to display more information. If you run the following snippet in your DevTools console, you’ll see all of the fields you have at your disposal:

feed.items.forEach(item => {}

We’re nearly done! The feeds are being fetched, and they are returning data back to us in JavaScript for use in our Astro page template. Since feeds are updated whenever new content is published, we need a way to fetch the latest items from it.

We want to avoid doing any of this manually. So, let’s set this site on Netlify to gain access to their scheduled functions that trigger a rebuild and their build hooks that do the building. Again, other services do this, and you’re welcome to roll this work with another provider — I’m just partial to Netlify since I work there. In any case, you can follow Netlify’s documentation for setting up a new site.

Once your site is hosted and live, you are ready to schedule your rebuilds. A build hook gives you a URL to use to trigger the new build, looking something like this:

https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/your-build-hook-id

Let’s trigger builds every day at midnight. We’ll use Netlify’s scheduled functions. That’s really why I’m using Netlify to host this in the first place. Having them at the ready via the host greatly simplifies things since there’s no server work or complicated configurations to get this going. Set it and forget it!

We’ll install @netlify/functions (instructions) to the project and then create the following file in the project’s root directory: netlify/functions/deploy.ts.

This is what we want to add to that file:

// netlify/functions/deploy.ts

import type { Config } from '@netlify/functions';

const BUILD_HOOK =
  'https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/your-build-hook-id'; // replace me!

export default async (req: Request) => {
  await fetch(BUILD_HOOK, {
    method: 'POST',
  }).then((response) => {
    console.log('Build hook response:', response.json());
  });

  return {
    statusCode: 200,
  };
};

export const config: Config = {
  schedule: '0 0 * * *',
};

If you commit your code and push it, your site should re-deploy automatically. From that point on, it follows a schedule that rebuilds the site every day at midnight, ready for you to take your morning brew and catch up on everything that you think is important.

With Halloween just around the corner, everyone is busy preparing for fun costume parties, festivals, and events. We picked out some of the best Halloween flyer templates to help you promote those events like a pro.

In this collection, we’re featuring a set of professionally designed Halloween-themed flyer templates you can use to quickly design a flyer to promote Halloween parties, festivals, movie nights, music events, and more.

We made sure to mix a collection of flyer templates that are both spooky and scary so that you can design flyers that appeal to both kids and grown-ups of all ages. The templates are available in Photoshop and Illustrator formats so you can easily customize them to your preference as well.

Halloween Candy Party Flyer Template

This Halloween flyer has a vibrant, easy-to-use design perfect for any event. The template has a colorful design with spooky illustrations and creative elements. Its features include 8.27 x 11.69 in size with 3mm bleeds, 300 dpi CMYK resolution, editable fonts and text, and easily changeable colors. It comes in AI, PSD, PDF, and EPS.

Halloween Party Night Flyer Template

Another highly customizable, print-ready Halloween flyer for your spooky-themed event promotions. Ideal for any project, this monstrous design comes in 8.27 x 11.69 inch size with 300 dpi resolution for high-quality prints. Boasting well-organized layers and editable texts, colors, it includes AI, PSD, PDF, PNG, and EPS files.

Cool Halloween Flyer Template

This is a sleek and modern Halloween flyer for your Halloween event. This easy-to-edit A4 size flyer boasts well-organized layers. Its full editability allows you to modify all colors and text. Top-notch with a CMYK 300 DPI resolution, this print-ready template ensures an eye-catching end result.

Cute Halloween Flyer Template

This Halloween flyer presents an adorable pink design perfect for any Halloween event. This modern and elegantly designed flyer is size A4 and is fully editable, offering easy-to-edit text and image replacement via smart objects.

Creepy Halloween Party Flyer Set

An easy-to-use flyer template perfect for any Halloween event. Fully customizable to fit your brand, the flyer comes in A4 size with a resolution of 300DPI, ensuring quality prints. The package includes organized layers in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator formats.

Happy Halloween Flyer Template

A versatile and customizable Halloween flyer with a timeless, vintage theme. Ideal for businesses of any size, it’s perfect for Halloween-themed marketing or events. The A4 flyer features well-organized layers, is fully editable with adjustable fonts, colors, and objects, and is print-ready at CMYK 300 DPI.

Trick or Treat Halloween Flyer Template

This Halloween flyer is ideal for businesses, design firms, and party planners looking to advertise Halloween parties or events. It follows a corporate theme and color, but is still fully customizable from the font to the photos. The flyer, sized at A4, is readily printable at 300 DPI in CMYK.

Halloween Party Flyer Template

This Halloween flyer offers an eye-catching design that can be customized to fit any brand or business. It’s simple to use with structured files and layers, and compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. At A4 size and print-ready, it offers CMYK 300DPI quality. It also includes free fonts.

Creative Happy Halloween Flyer Templates

Another Halloween flyer template that is perfect for any spooky event you’re planning. These templates sport a modern, elegant design that can be easily customized. You can edit text, change images via smart objects and tweak colors. They come in an A4 format, are print-ready, and well-organized with fully editable layered features in CMYK 300 DPI.

Zombie Halloween Flyer Template

A modern and creative Halloween-themed flyer template that’s ideal for your events. Its A4 format (8.268×11.693 inch) + 3mm bleed, coupled with well-organized layers, makes it completely editable and print-ready with CMYK 300 DPI. What’s most impressive is that all colors and text can be modified to suit your personal preferences.

Creative Halloween Flyer Template

This is a versatile flyer template that can be used across various types of Halloween event promotions. It comes in a festive-themed A4 size format and features easily editable elements such as color, font, objects, and photos. It’s fully customizable, print-ready, and organized in identifiable layers.

Cool Halloween Party Flyer

This Halloween party flyer is perfect for promoting Halloween-themed events. Crafted in Photoshop, it boasts high resolution, print-ready capabilities, and allows for font/text editing. Change colors with ease to match your theme and appreciate its well-organized layering.

Colorful Halloween Flyer Template

Embrace the festive spirit with this Halloween flyer template. It’s professionally crafted using simple shapes, providing you with the flexibility to alter colors, dimensions, objects, fonts, and photos. The template maintains a corporate theme and can be used across different platforms. Other notable features include it being print-ready, fully editable, and well-organized layers.

Simple Halloween Kids Party Flyer

This Halloween flyer template is perfect for spreading the word about kid’s parties. Coming in AI, EPS and PSD file formats, it features well-structured layers and is fully editable. It comes in a print-ready A4 sizing (210mm x 297mm with 3mm bleed) and a high-resolution CMYK 300 DPI.

Modern Halloween Flyer Template

This flyer is perfect for a variety of uses, including for promoting Halloween-themed parties and events. With its creative color and theme, it comes in A4 size and fully editable design.  You can easily change the color, fonts, images, and other items. You can add your own images as well.

Spooky Halloween Movie Party Flyer

This spooky Halloween flyer template is perfect for whipping up impressive flyers for any event. This easy-to-use, A4 design template comes with editable text tools, multiple shapes, backgrounds, and titles. It is equipped with PSD, AI, EPS files, and a help file.

Unique Halloween Flyer Template

This is a creative mockup for creating fun and entertaining Halloween-themed flyer designs. It comes with a simple design with fully customizable colors, fonts, objects, and photos. The A4-sized template includes well-organized layers and it’s print-ready with CMYK 300 DPI quality.

Fun Halloween Party Flyer

This is an enthusiastic, festive creative Halloween flyer perfect for promoting your upcoming party. This print-ready flyer comes in AI, EPS, and PSD formats making it easily editable. Noteworthy features include well-organized layers, full CMYK 300 DPI quality, and a versatile A4 size. This flyer will certainly add an extra touch of fun to your Halloween event.

Stylish Halloween Party Flyer Template

Grab this stylish Halloween party flyer template for quick and easy event promotion. It’s user-friendly, featuring an organized PSD file with editable layers, and is ready to print in A4 size with a high resolution of 300 DPI. It’s especially great for promoting grown-up Halloween events.

Minimal Halloween Flyer Template

This is a highly customizable Halloween party flyer perfect for all sorts of parties, events, and promotions. It includes a single A4 format flyer with editable colors, fonts, and objects. It is print-ready, organized, and fully modifiable with a resolution of 300 DPI in CMYK color.

Halloween Party Flyer Template

This stylish flyer template comes with a colorful and a fun design made specifically for spreading the word about your Halloween-themed parties. It features an easily customizable layout that can be used to promote club events, festivals, and more. The template is available in A4 and A5 sizes.

Creative Halloween Flyer Template

This is a Halloween party flyer template that comes with a creative design that will surely attract the attention of your audience. You can use it to create flyers for parties, festivals, events, and more. The template comes in an editable PSD file with organized layers and vector shapes.

Halloween Trick Or Treat Flyer Template

If you’re looking for inspiration to design a Halloween flyer or a poster for a kids event, this flyer template will come in handy. The template features an adorable design with cute illustrations for promoting Halloween-themed parties, trick or treats, and other events. The template comes in both Illustrator and Photoshop file formats.

Halloween Rock Party Flyer Template

Halloween is also a time where you see lots of fun music festivals and events. This is a flyer template designed to help promote those music events and DJ parties. The template comes with a unique Halloween-themed design for promoting Rock music events. All the items in the design are available as vectors for easily editing them to your preference.

Halloween Live Music Flyer

This Halloween flyer template features a minimalist design with colors that clearly highlight its message. The template comes in a print-ready PSD file that you can easily customize however you like. It’s perfect for promoting Halloween live music events, parties, and other events as well.

Halloween Music Night Flyer

With this creative flyer template, you’ll be able to promote your Halloween music events, open-mic parties, and other fun activities using a clever and humorous design. The flyer template is fully customizable as it comes in AI and PSD formats featuring vector objects. You can easily edit text and change colors to match your own themes.

Monster Mash Halloween Flyer Template

This colorful flyer template has a cute monster-theme that is perfect for promoting all kinds of Halloween events and even special Halloween-themed sales and business promotions. The template features vector objects and comes in AI and PSD formats to let you edit the file using your favorite editor.

Modern Halloween Party Flyer

This creative Halloween party flyer template comes with a design that makes it easier to highlight the important details of your events. It’s ideal for promoting live music events, festivals, parties, and much more. The template comes with organized layers and it’s easily customizable. You’ll need Photoshop CS5 or higher to edit this file.

Spooky Halloween Flyer Template

The use of real images and spooky black and white colors make this flyer template a more suitable choice for designing flyers and posters for grown-ups. The template comes to you in a customizable PSD file in A4 size. It features organized layers for easy editing and customizing the design.

Halloween Pumpkin Party Flyer Template

Halloween is the only time of the year when pumpkins look scary. This flyer truly captures that into its design with a creepy pumpkin. The template comes in both A4 and A5 sizes as well.

Halloween Zombie Party Flyer Template

Everyone loves zombies. This flyer template comes with a creative zombie-themed design that makes it suitable for both kids and grownups. The template is available in PSD, AI, and EPS formats.

Halloween Club Party Flyer

A modern Halloween flyer template that’s most suitable for promoting Halloween-themed club events and parties. It comes with fully organized layers and in PSD file format.

Something Wicked Halloween Flyer Template

A Halloween flyer template featuring a classic design. This template will give your flyer and poster designs a unique and a scary look. You can easily customize the PSD file to change colors and text as well.

Colorful Halloween Party Flyer Template

Featuring lots of colors and adorable illustrations, this flyer template will help you design the perfect promotional flyer or poster for kids. It comes in A4 and A5 sizes and in both AI and PSD file formats to let you customize the template to your preference.

Halloween Skull Party Flyer Template

Another spooky Halloween party flyer template you can use to promote special events, club parties, house parties, and more. This flyer is more suitable for grownups as well. It comes in an easily customizable PSD file.

Halloween House Party Flyer

This fun and colorful party flyer template will make your Halloween flyers look like a poster from a movie. You can use it to promote club events, house parties, and much more.

Minimal Halloween Flyer Template

A Halloween flyer template with a dark theme. This template uses minimal colors to create a truly spooky design. It’s ideal for promoting all grown-up parties, events, and festivals. It’s available in A4 size.

Halloween Flyer Template PSD

This colorful Halloween flyer template comes in 2 different versions with different colors. It’s available in PSD format with fully organized layers. It’s perfect for promoting Halloween festivals and parties.

Scary Halloween Flyer Template

This spooky Halloween flyer template features a design that gives out a scary Stephen King IT vibe. It will surely grab anyone’s attention and effectively promote your events at the same time.

You can also check out our best Halloween fonts collection to find a typeface to design your own spooky flyers.

Photoshop offers many amazing tools for creating visual effects. For example, Photoshop actions let you transform your photos into paintings or cartoon drawings with just a single mouse click.

While these effects are fun to play with, they are also quite useful in creating attractive graphics for various designs like posters and flyers. That’s why it’s always a good idea to keep a few Photoshop actions and effects in your library to help create such graphics in an instant.

In this collection, we showcase different types of Photoshop cartoon actions, effects, and filters you can use to turn photos into cartoons as well as create unique designs. Have a look and add them all to your personal collection.

Retro Comic Photo Effect for Photoshop

This is a uniquely crafted Photoshop template that adds a comic cartoon effect to your images. This easy-to-use template, equipped with meticulous details, allows you to transform your images and graphics with a cartoon effect instantly. It’s fully editable, compatible with 300DPI projects, perfect for print, and features well-organized layers.

Comic Photo Effect PSD Template

A dynamic Photoshop template designed to apply a comic or caricature-inspired transformation to your images. Ideal for pictures with resolutions between 1000px to 3000px, this template applies a vibrant, energetic, and oily effect for a variety of visuals, whether fashion-focused, lifestyle-themed, or product-based.

Cartoonize Photo Effect PSD

This is a dynamic Photoshop template designed to convert your images into lively cartoon effects. It’s ideal for a range of pictures, like fashion, lifestyle, and even product shots. The template is most effective on photos with a resolution between 1000px to 3000px.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This is a professional-grade Photoshop action, ideal for photographers and designers looking to cartoonize their images. It provides striking effects that work beautifully on a wide range of images, even transforming them with just a single click. Adjustments can be made to suit individual photos.

Cartoonize Photo Effect for Photoshop

Another dynamic Photoshop template designed to convert your regular images into vibrant and energetic caricature-style pictures. This versatile asset offers various effects including, but not limited to, oily paint, glamour oil, portrait oil, oil retouch, and cartoon effects.

Retro Cartoon Photoshop Action

The Retro Cartoon Photoshop action is a fun and creative preset designed for photographers and graphic designers. This easy-to-use PS action can be used to instantly transform your photos into cartoon graphics and illustrations. The action is compatible with newer versions of Photoshop, from CS5 and above.

Cartoon Effect Converter PS Action

This PS Action is a quick, easy-to-use tool that can easily convert your photos into stunning painted artwork. It requires no specific skill set and offers customizable features to meet your unique requirements. Suitable for all versions of Photoshop CS4 and beyond.

Cartoon Artistic Photoshop Action

With easy setup, this Photoshop action quickly transforms images into cartoony artwork and it’s most suitable for graphic designs. The package includes a detailed help file and a YouTube tutorial to assist with language settings, making it accessible for anyone desiring fun and unique image edits.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This PS Action provides an array of striking effects, including the Portrait Oil Painting Effect, dramatic oil, oily, painting oil, glamour oil, portrait oil and oil retouch. The package includes one-click actions, an ATN file, and a helpful guide to facilitate easy installations.

Cartoon Oil Paint Photoshop Action

This PS action features a creative cartoon-style oil painting effect. It works with various Photoshop versions, from CS5 to CC. This action set stands out for its simplicity – you just load actions, choose your action, and then hit play.

Colorized Cartoon Effect Photoshop Action

This is a quick and simple PS Action that transforms your images into vibrant paintings within seconds, with a simple click. It’s user-friendly, doesn’t require any extensive Photoshop skills and provides room for personal customization to suit your needs. Compatible with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Paint Beast Photoshop FX PS Action

Offering intense customization possibilities, this PS action works seamlessly with Photoshop CS4 and all advanced versions. It’s ideal for professional graphic designers to add a unique touch to your various projects.

Futuristic Cartoon Effect Photoshop Action

This is a fantastic tool that transforms your images into stunning paintings in seconds with just one click. Very easy to use, all it requires is to load and play the actions. You can heavily customize the end results to suit your needs. It’s compatible with all versions of Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Cartoon Effect FX Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action also offers extensive customization options and it comes with a creative cartoon-style effect, ideal for portrait photos. Compatible with Photoshop CS4 and all later versions.

Soft Oil Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is ideal for photographers and graphic designers. The final result offers a soft, oil-cartoon aesthetic. The asset includes an ATN file and helpful instructions. It’s especially perfect for generating art for posters and flyers.

4 in 1 Cartoon & Vector Art Photoshop Actions

This is a bundle of Photoshop actions that includes 4 different cartoon effects. It has effects for converting photos into cartoon drawings, vector art, and paintings. Each action creates effects with organized layers so you can easily adjust the effect to your preference. You can apply them with just one click as well.

Cartoonish – Modern Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action will allow you to transform portrait photos into cartoon drawings without effort. It features 10 different colorful effects that add a modern cartoon look to photos. The actions work with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Actions

If you’re an Instagram influencer or a blogger, this Photoshop cartoon action will definitely come in handy. It allows you to add a unique cartoon effect to your photos to make them look like a scene out of a cartoon film. It’s great for making your Instagram photos stand out from the crowd.

Balaclava – Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

If you want to create more complex and advanced cartoon effects, you’ll need a Photoshop plugin. This Photoshop plugin allows you to create more realistic cartoon effects using some of the built-in features of Photoshop CC. It will completely transform your portraits with face styles, backgrounds, and color effects.

Cartoon Style Photoshop Text Effects

Want to create titles and headings with cartoon designs? Then you’ll need this Photoshop text effects bundle. It includes editable PSD files with ASL files you can easily customize to create fun and quirky titles with cartoon designs.

Toon Artist – Free Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

A high-quality Photoshop effect crafted by a professional designer. This action allows you to create an amazing cartoon effect with your photos with just a few clicks. The action is free to download and use.

Comic Vintage Vector Tracing Cartoon PS Action

This is a must-have Photoshop action for graphic designs. With this action, you can create a vintage vector design look using photos. The textured cartoon look will turn your photos into a page from a comic book.

Cartoonica – Creative Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action also creates very creative cartoon-like designs from photos. It works well with portraits and photos with objects. The end result will look a lot like a cartoon drawing.

Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

Another creative cartoon Photoshop action for transforming portrait photos. This action is very easy to use and customize. And it seems to work perfectly for selfies and portrait photos. It’s especially great for Instagram.

Realistic Vector Cartoon Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action allows you to easily change the look of your photos with a vector cartoon effect. It’s great for graphic designs, posters, flyers, and even website designs. The action works with Photoshop CS4 and higher.

Anime Speed Lines Photoshop Action

You can use this Photoshop action to quickly generate cool anime-style backgrounds for your graphic designs. There are 15 different actions in this bundle featuring all kinds of anime speed lines background effects.

Free Oil Painting Cartoon Photoshop Actions

A free Photoshop action featuring an oil painting effect. This action will instantly turn your portrait photos into cartoon-like designs. You can apply the effect with just one click. And it works with Photoshop CS3.

Cartoonizer – Photoshop Cartoon Action

Convert your photo to cartoon in Photoshop with the help of Cartoonizer, a high-quality action that will help you achieve the desired results with minimal effort. It’s a versatile Photoshop cartoon filter that can be used for a range of professional and creative applications.

Cartoon Effects Photoshop Text Plugin

Here we have a Halloween-themed Photoshop cartoon plugin that gives your text a cartoonish touch in just a few easy clicks. It’s a great choice for kids’ projects, Halloween party posters, flyers, and invitation cards.

Realistic Photoshop Cartoon Effect

Give your pictures a realistic cartoon look with the help of this amazing Photoshop action that works well with almost any sort of photography. You also get a video tutorial that helps you make the most of this cartoon effect Photoshop plugin.

Netta – Free Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

Searching for the easiest way to transform your pictures into anime scenes? Look no further than Netta, a free Photoshop cartoon filter that will put all your worries about how to make cartoon in Photoshop to rest.

Free Cartoon Painting Photoshop Action

This free Photoshop action lets you add a realistic painting effect to your portrait photos. It will also make photos look like a still from a cartoon film.

Zombie Grime Art Photoshop Cartoon Effect

A very unique Photoshop action that creates a different style of a cartoon effect by combining cartoon style with real-life images, also known as Grime art. Using the PS action, you can make yourself look like a cartoon zombie in portrait photos. The effect requires a few additional steps to apply but the included video tutorial will help you learn how it’s done.

Cartoonize – Photoshop Cartoon Action

With this Photoshop action, you can create a realistic cartoon effect mixed with an oil painting look and feel. It creates a non-destructive effect that you can easily adjust to your preference. And it’s compatible with Photoshop CS3 and higher.

Cartoon Vector Painting Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is perfect for giving a cartoon drawing look to your portrait photos. It’s especially perfect for making your selfies look more creative for Instagram and Facebook. The best part is this PS action even works with older versions of Photoshop, starting with CS3.

Free Photoshop Cartoon Action

Take your everyday pictures to a whole new level with this Photoshop cartoon plugin that’s not just easy to install, but also fun to play around with all the customization options. Drop everything, and grab it right now.

Vector Converter – Cartoon Avatar Photoshop Plugin

Another advanced Photoshop plugins you can use to create cartoon avatars using portrait photos. It will basically turn your ordinary photos into vector cartoon drawings. The plugin requires the Oil Paint filter to function so it’s only compatible with Photoshop CC 2015 and higher.

Photo To Cartoon Photoshop Actions

Use this simple one-click Photoshop action to instantly turn your photos into cartoon drawings. It’s ideal for Instagram selfies and social media graphics. The effect can also be easily customized to your preference to change its strength.

Free Cartoon Art Photoshop Action

Another free Photoshop action you can use to apply a cartoon effect with just a few clicks. This action works well with portrait photos and lets you create a non-destructive cartoon filter.

Free Comic Poster Photoshop Actions

Use this free Photoshop action to add a comic book-like cartoon effect to your photos. This action works with Photoshop CS3 and higher. The effect is fully customizable to your preference.

Smudge Painting Photoshop Action

With this Photoshop action, you can create a cartoon painting-like effect in just a few clicks. It’s a high-quality action that will allow you to create professional results. And, of course, you’ll be able to customize the effect to match different portrait photos as well.

Anime Style Cartoon Photoshop Action

After featuring so many cartoon effects for portraits, we finally have one for outdoor photos. This Photoshop action allows you to apply a subtle anime cartoon effect to your outdoor and nature photos. It creates a fully editable effect with layers and elements.

Photo to Vector Cartoon Photoshop Action

Create vector paintings and cartoons with your photos using this advanced Photoshop action. It creates a non-destructive cartoon effect with your portraits to turn them into cartoon drawings. The effect is compatible with Photoshop CS6 and higher.

Kartoon Painting Photoshop Action

Another simple yet effective effect for adding a cartoon look to your selfies, portrait photos, and even pet photos. The PS action works with just a few clicks and allows you to customize the effect afterward. It works with Photoshop CS6.

Caricature – Fun Cartoon Photoshop Action

Want to give a fun and quirky cartoon look to your photos? Then this Photoshop action is perfect for you. It comes with a weird cartoon effect that gives a funny distorted look to your portrait photos. Perfect for making people laugh.

MicroPro – Cartoon Oil Photoshop Action

Another cartoon Photoshop action for outdoor landscape photos. This action lets you apply a cartoon oil painting look to your outdoor photos. It also works quite well with cityscape, nature, and food photos as well. The action is compatible with Photoshop CS1 and higher.

Free Modern Art Cartoon Photoshop Action

While this free Photoshop action is made for giving a modern art look to your photos, it can also be used to create a cartoon look with just a few tweaks and adjustments. There’s a tutorial on how to use the action as well.

80 Free Smart Easy PSD Text Effects

This is a big bundle of text effects for Photoshop. All text effects are available as PSD files that you can customize to paste your own text. You’ll find a few text effects with cartoon designs in the bundle.

Toon-Me – Photoshop Cartoon Action

With this Photoshop action, you can give a truly cartoonish look to your photos. It adds several effects to portrait photos to make them fun and more cartoon-like. The effect is compatible with Photoshop CS3 and higher.

Cartoon Filter Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action is designed to make photos look like paintings. And it adds a subtle cartoon effect to photos at the same time. It’s perfect for giving an artistic look to your portraits.

GTA Style Cartoon Photoshop Action

Gamers will surely find this Photoshop action useful as it allows you to make your photos look like the loading screen art from Grand Theft Auto games. This bundle comes with Photoshop actions, 5 frame templates, 5 collage templates, and more.

Cartoon Oil Action – 10 Effects

You can use this collection of Photoshop actions to add a creative cartoon oil painting look to your portrait photos. It includes 10 variations of the effect that can be customized to your preference.

Cartoon Photoshop Photo Effect

If you want to add a subtle cartoon look to your photos, this action is the best choice for you. It features a simple effect that only adds a light cartoon effect to portrait photos.

Paint Cartoon Photoshop Action

For another ultra-realistic and modern-looking paint effect that will help you cartoonize any photo, this fun cartoon filter for Photoshop promises high-quality results using versions CS3 and higher and includes full supporting documentation to get you editing straight away.

Smudge Cartoon Photoshop Action

The Smudge Photoshop cartoon plugin will help you cartoonize a photo with a sleek and realistic painted effect that features sharp edges and vibrant colors and is compatible with Photoshop versions CS3 and above. It’s a great choice if you’re after a fun and professional cartoon painting look.

Retro Comic Book Photoshop Cartoon Action Kit

Next, we have a retro-inspired action kit that allows you to cartoonize a photo in an authentic, hand-drawn comic book style. It works best with images that offer a resolution between 72 and 300 DPI, and all comic elements are vector graphics which enables you to scale and tweak the effects as much as you want.

Oil Vector Art Photoshop Cartoon Action

This cartoon filter for Photoshop adds a vector art look to your images that’s inspired by the texture and color profile of a real-life oil painting, and can be applied with amazing results in just a few clicks. You can create up to 40 different color effects, and adjust each layer to your preference.

Balaclava – Photoshop Cartoon Plugin

Balaclava is a Photoshop cartoon plugin containing tools and techniques that help you achieve the most modern, professional, and eye-catching cartoon effects in just a few clicks. The cartoon effect Photoshop Action offers 4 editable Photoshop cartooning styles, 5 face styles, 8 backgrounds, and more than 20 color variations.

Looking for more? Then be sure to check out our best Photoshop actions collection.

Want to give your design a quick facelift? Using new and interesting typography trends might be the answer. Designers are using bold colors, cutouts, gradients, and even customizations to create lettering that stands out.

Changing typefaces or recreating an image or header in a trending style can give a design a fresh look without a full-scale overhaul. Not sure where to start? This list features typography trends with examples to use as inspiration for how to use them.

Here’s a look at the top typography trends this year.

1. Brutalism Typography

Brutalism design is one of the few and rare design trends that survived many decades. This trend dates back to the 1950s. It started out as a design trend in architecture and later inspired many print and digital designs, including graphic design, web design, and even typography.

Brutalist typography is simple and straightforward. There are no fancy typography elements or decorative shapes necessary to convey the idea. It’s simply text with clean, clear-cut letterforms and it gets the job done.

More designers are adopting this design trend to create striking typography for various designs ranging from posters to website headers. It especially works well for bold, raw, and Monochromatic-style designs.

2. Liquid Text

Giving a melting or liquid look to your typography is nothing new. You’ve probably seen it used by food and drink brands. However, there’s a new variant of this trend sweeping across the digital design world.

This new variant of liquid text design only liquefies parts of the letters to create a unique hybrid look. Designers are using this trend in various ways by combining it with other design trends like outline text and retro fonts.

The unique look this trend creates fits perfectly for trendy brands and timely marketing campaigns, especially for fashion and lifestyle branding designs.

3. Ink Traps

Ink trap is a popular technique used in print design when printing in small sizes where corners get removed from letters to trap the ink. So when it gets printed, the ink spreads to those removed areas, preventing the ink from spreading outward.

Ironically, this inspired a new trend in modern digital typography. We are now seeing new fonts being created inspired by ink traps featuring letterforms with deep corners, mimicking the ink trap-style design.

It certainly adds a very unique look to typography and gives a distinctive vibe to titles and headings.

4. Bubbly Text

Bubble fonts and typography are making a comeback. Inspired by typography designs from the groovy 1970s, this bubble text trend can now be seen everywhere.

The fun, creative, and playful look it adds to the text is unmatched. It’s one of the many reasons why designers choose this style to create titles and text for brands with playful vibes.

The bubbly text trend also comes in many different styles and variations, including ones with balloon-style letterforms as well as urban graffiti-style letters.

5. Big, Chunky Titles

When it comes to creating titles that instantly grab attention, nothing beats a good old-fashioned big, chunky letter design. That’s part of why this typography trend has survived many decades and is still relevant today.

Designing titles and headings with big, chunky letterforms is the most effective way to craft typography that stands out. This trend also has diverse use cases across various genres. With a slightly playful font, you can make it fit in with a lifestyle brand. Or with a clean-cut letter design, you can use it for a luxury brand.

6. Art Deco Typography

The beautiful symmetrical lines and sharp edges of the Art Deco style completely transform the look and feel of typography. The blend of elegance and sophistication it brings is unmatched by any other design trend. It’s no wonder why this typography trend has survived longer than a century.

Over the past few months, we saw many brands and marketers use the Art Deco trend to their advantage to create typography that evokes a sense of nostalgia and takes people back to a time when things were simpler.

Art Deco typography is also often used in visual storytelling, especially on websites, posters, and packaging designs. Clearly, it’s a trend that will evolve and stay relevant for many more years ahead.

7. Psychedelic Fonts

The psychedelic design trend has been a popular choice among designers who seek to break free from the traditional and common ways. And it has now made its way over to typography as well.

The bold shapes, curves, and distorted letters of the psychedelic fonts give logos, titles, and badges a unique look inspired by the aesthetics of the 1960s and the hippy culture. The psychedelic typography trend does a great job of bringing out a chill and relaxing feeling while also mixing a sense of a rebellious vibe.

8. Urban Graffiti Titles

Lately, we’ve been seeing less and less graffiti art out on the streets. Graffiti art is one the purest forms of creative expression, especially the graffiti typography is something that always catches your eye. So we’re glad to see this art form transform into the digital world.

Designers have been using graffiti-style typography with various types of graphic designs over the past few years and it seems to be growing in demand. The main reason for the popularity of this typography trend is its ability to create a bold, urban vibe with a gritty aesthetic. The raw, real-world look of the graffiti typography is quite unmatched.

9. Retro Disco Text

The disco era is a time period that everyone longs for regardless of age. The current revival and popularity of disco-style music among modern musicians prove that even the younger generations are enjoying this trend.

As a result of this newfound desire for the disco era, disco-style retro typography is also making a comeback. Nothing beats this typography trend when it comes to creating titles and text that exude fun and energetic vibes.

The blend of retro rainbow colors, sparking elements, and classic weathered textures make this trend one of the best for designing typography for everything from posters to brand logos and much more.

10. Elegant Royal Fonts

This growing typography trend is the go-to choice among many luxury and high-end brands that seek to convey a sense of authority and class. The way it creates a sophisticated and regal look often adds a Royalty-like vibe to any logo, badge, label, or packaging design.

Often used in combination with gold colors, royal-like ornaments, and stylishly curved letterforms, the royal typography trend often succeeds in enhancing the luxurious feel of various types of designs.

Elegant royal-style fonts are also a great choice for adding an authentic and traditional look to create a timeless feel for any digital and print design.

11. Neo-Futuristic Techno Vibes

When talking about futuristic techno-style designs your mind often goes to neon colors and Cyberpunk-style designs. But that’s not what this new trend is all about. Neo-futuristic techno typography offers a much more gritty and bold vibe for creating a strong futuristic industrial look.

This trend is often seen on modern websites and poster designs as it helps create better visibility for your text and titles. The fonts designed in this style often have sharp letterforms with monospaced characters. It also uses strong contrasting colors to make your text pop with a clean, minimal, and stylish look.

12. 3D Text

The 3D typography trend is evolving beyond just blocky, extruded text into more creative styles with perspective views and unique letterform designs.

With easier access to 3D modeling tools like Blender and new 3D tools in Adobe Illustrator, crafting these unique 3D typography designs is now much easier than ever.

Especially when designing with a retro-futuristic style, the 3D text and typography fit perfectly for creating a more immersive look and feel. This trend will likely evolve beyond this year and last for many more years ahead.

13. Variable Fonts

Variable fonts are slowly gaining in popularity as more designers are choosing the new format for their design projects. There are many benefits to using a variable font in your designs and having flexibility is one of them.

When using variable fonts, you have the flexibility to create unique typography with different styles of letterforms, weights, and features without having to use multiple fonts. Variable fonts come with multiple styles packed into one font.

Designers are now finding unique ways to take advantage of this technology to create incredible typefaces with inventive designs.

14. Rounded Typography

The rounded typography trend has been around for several years. However, designers are now taking this trend to new heights by leveraging the new tools available in design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

These new rounded typography designs feature more geometric-style rounded letterforms with a soft and aesthetically pleasing look for big titles and headings. Today, the trend is often used in branding designs and packaging designs.

15. Vertical Text

Usually, we don’t recommend throwing readability out the window but it appears to be the latest trend to take over the design world, especially website designs. This trend will have you tilting your head sideways, literally.

Actually, it’s a clever way to grab attention and engage with the website visitors. It arouses your curiosity and makes you tilt your to read the text.

Designing text and titles sideways in a vertical alignment will also work for banners and posters. You should use large and bold fonts with a clean letter design for this strategy to work more effectively.

16. Unaligned Text

Oftentimes, when designers defy the rules and guidelines, things don’t go well. This new trend is a rare exception where we can disregard the guidelines to make unique typography creations.

Keeping text aligned is an important part of designing typography. This guideline is quite important when designing websites as well as other mediums of digital and print designs. However, breaking this rule seems to be one of the most popular typography trends these days.

We’ve been seeing this unaligned text trend everywhere from websites to posters, album covers, social media posts, and everything in between. Without a doubt, we’ll be seeing it throughout this year too.

17. Mixed Typefaces

Surely, you must’ve thought about this once or twice while designing fun title designs for projects. Mixing multiple typefaces to design a title sounds fun but we are often afraid to go there. Well, now you have permission to try it out thanks to this new trend.

The BMW Motorrad website uses clever animation to infuse this mixed typeface design in a subtle way. However, you don’t have to go to such extreme levels. You can start by blending a few outline and condensed fonts with your regular typography designs.

Admittedly, we haven’t seen this trend a lot but we hope it will catch on this year.

18. Stretched-Out Titles

We’ve seen ultra-condensed title designs, tall and narrow typography designs, but this new trend combines them together to spawn a new way to craft titles by simply stretching them out as much as you can.

It doesn’t matter which way you stretch it. You can stretch it vertically or horizontally. You could also stretch just a couple of letters while the rest of the letters stay the same. The result will always be something pretty wild.

The good news is you don’t always have to go into free transform mode to stretch your text. There are now fonts out there with stretched-out letter designs made for this new trend.

19. Fullscreen Titles

The title is arguably the most important element of most graphic and web designs. You often try different trends and strategies to try and bring more attention to it. So, why not make it as big as the entire canvas and be done with it?

Well, that’s exactly what this new trend is all about. Basically, you just make the title as big as the screen or the design canvas. You can use tall and bold fonts to grab extra attention as well.

It’s a very simple and easy way to make your typography designs stand out, especially for making bold statements.

20. Pixelated Fonts

Pixelated style of text and typography designs is quite popular among tech brands and startups. It adds a subtle tech-savvy look to any design that’s also relatable and familiar to many people who grew up playing pixel-art video games.

Intentionally adding a pixelated look to text is now much easier with many pixelated fonts to choose from. These fonts come in various styles ranging from the classic 8-bit style to modern pixel art designs.

Whether it’s to add a bit of nostalgia to your designs or to make titles look more playful, this is a typography trend that’s worth keeping an eye out for this year.

21. Neon Outline

This isn’t exactly a new trend but it is something that we are likely to see growing this year. Inspired by the bright neon signs from the 80s and the 90s, this typography design gives a classic retro look to your titles with neon glowing outline letters.

Adopting this trend is also much easier than most other trends on our list. All you have to do is find an outline font and apply a neon glowing effect.

You can add more style and appeal to it with animations. In the above example, the website uses a subtle flickering effect to make the text look more like a glitching neon sign.

22. Thin and Condensed

The next two trends have a very yin and yang feel to them. Here, thin and condensed lettering is gaining popularity. Once taboo, a predominance of high-resolution screens has made this style of typography more readable and easier to work with.

Again, this trend needs just the right words and typeface to be effective and works best when you aren’t delving into exceptionally long blocks of text.

In the example above, thin and condensed lettering perfectly fits the style of the overall design and is complemented on the scroll with a monospaced, highly readable option.

23. Slabs

On the other end of the spectrum from thin typefaces is the use of slabs.

While bold headline options have always been rather popular, many designers have shied away from going all-in with slabs because, like caps, they can seem to scream at users. The trick is to combine spacing, short phrasing, and readable typefaces so that usage is an asset, not a challenge.

What we love about the example above is the use of a smaller slab headline at the bottom of the homepage, with super friendly and soft imagery to balance the weight of the font itself. It highlights the importance of the words in an approachable way.

24. Outline Fonts

Outline fonts are a big deal.

You’ll find this trend mostly in the hero area of web pages for the main copy. While uses vary somewhat there are a few elements that you’ll find almost every time:

• Sans serif typeface
• All caps text for outline letters
• Paired with filled lettering
• Oversized text elements

Outline font options can be a lot of fun to use. You just have to be cautious when it comes to readability. Letters can get lost in background images and videos quickly. So take care with color, contrast, and placement.

And don’t overdo it. An outline font works best for a point of emphasis, not to create your entire message.

25. “Unreadable” Layers

The next two typography trends and somewhat similar and both break an unexpected rule: They are a bit unreadable. But that’s ok because the rest of the design fills in the blanks and keeps the site interactive.

In this example of the trend, oversized text elements are in a layer behind a foreground element. Every other type element on the screen is highly readable to provide plenty of support for the element that isn’t.

The foreground object also, in the example above, fades in and out over the text so that you can read it back and forth.

The final element that helps pull it all together is the idea that the word isn’t vital to the design. It’s the brand name, which you might know from the logotype, but is less important than what the company/website does.

26. Text That Goes Off the Screen

Following the trend of “unreadable” layers are text elements that lose readability because they animate on and off the screen. This typography effect is all over the place and often paired with an oversized font and just a couple of words that scroll toward the left side of the screen.

This typography trend works best when there’s not a lot of other motion on the screen and the words are readable with just a few seconds of watching. If the text is too complicated, you risk users never figuring out what the words say.

As with the previous example, make sure the supporting text elements provide plenty of information so that people know exactly what the design is about.

27. Experimental Typefaces

Experimental typefaces are all the rage with expressive and interesting styles that add plenty of personality to design projects. Experimental typefaces come in a lot of different forms – they may include funky shapes or strokes, color, or animation.

The best part about these type-styles is that they can inject a unique, and very specific, vibe into a project.

You can find experimental typefaces from several different foundries or independent type designers. If you want to take a peek at some new experimental options, head over to Typelab.

28. Short, Fat Fonts (Low X-Heights)

Another type style that is trending in a major way is typefaces that have short stature and wide stance. Many of these typefaces feature all-caps character sets, but when they feature lowercase letters, can be identified by a low x-height.

This type style tends to work best when there’s not a lot competing with it on the canvas. It’s also best suited for shorter words or phrases, due to readability.

These short, fat fonts also work best for designs that have a super-modern feel. They are almost futuristic in scope and design in many instances.

29. Handwriting Styles

The Sharpie marker style is quite popular among website designers when it comes to display typefaces. And there are plenty of handwriting typefaces to choose from so that you get just the right look and feel.

Much of the current handwriting typeface trend is focused on printed letters with upper and lowercase characters with thicker strokes and a bit of roughness to them.

Typefaces might also include little extra embellishments that make certain characters feel even more special. When it comes to handwriting styles with more cursive or script-type designs, you are likely to find long tails and elaborate swashes.

30. Subtle Gradients

Designers just can’t seem to get enough of gradients. (I’ll admit to being one of them!)

Subtle gradients as an accent in typography are the next evolution of this trend.

What’s nice about the trend is that gradients are so subtle that you might not even see them at first. There’s just a slight variance in the color that helps pull the eye across the lettering.

Gradients are best used with thicker typefaces and to accent specific words or phrases.

Be careful not to overdo it too much. A good text gradient maintains consistent contrast across the word so that it’s not jarring to read and so that it stands apart from the background.

31. Animated Typography

One of the biggest overall trends in design is animation. And there’s no reason this can’t apply to typography as well.

More designs are using lettering that moves, shifts, or is impacted by a hover state (such as the example above). All of these techniques can lead to a more interactive, richer user experience.

When animating text, it’s important to consider how and where users will be reading the information (some animated elements such as video don’t work well on all mobile devices yet). Make accommodations so that even if the animation doesn’t work properly, there’s still a worthwhile user experience where messaging is clear.

In that regard, the best text animations often start with lettering that is clear and easy to see. Animation comes into play after a delay or as part of user interaction. This can delight and surprise users (maybe even resulting in more time on-site).

Consider speed carefully with typography animations – if the text moves too fast, users will miss the message completely; if the text moves too slowly, users might click away before reading all of the content. It must be just right. (User testing can help you find an ideal speed.)

32. Stacked Text Blocks

While typography is trending toward being somewhat smaller in size, it still carries just as much weight. Designers are stacking multiple lines of text, particularly in hero headers, for a weighted message with more words.

The trend is important to note because it shows a shift in trying to communicate a little more fully with users and less of an expectation that one word will be enough to entice someone to engage with a design. More information presented in a visually engaging way can be a better solution that leads to more user engagement.

The key considerations when it comes to stacking multiple lines of text are to find a typeface that is readable when used with more letters (or even when used in all caps, which is a popular option), has adequate linespacing so that lines are easy to distinguish and that breaks in the copy are logical. When stacking text, there should be a distinct flow from line to line that’s both obvious in how to read the words and that users should move to the next line of copy before any other part of the design.

Because of challenges with line breaks and ease of reading, text stacks are often on one side of the screen so that the designer has more control. This structure can also create harmony between a text element and another visual on the screen for an asymmetrical balance that’s appealing to look at.

33. Color Fonts and Type

Color fonts are a class of type of their own and have popped up all over the place. They’re more popular than many originally expected and have fun applications in design projects.

You can read all about color fonts here in our beginner’s guide. The concept of color fonts has opened up more projects to color in typography overall as well.

While there was a lot of black and white text in more minimalist styles, colors are roaring back. Many designers are using bright color typography with minimal styles, such as the Tilted Chair, above. Color can add extra visual interest and emphasis on the words in color.

Bright options, such as the red in the example, help draw the eye and serve as a great springboard for messaging, building brand identity, and drawing users into the design.

34. Cutouts and Overlays

Layered effects are a great way to make a design look a lot less flat. Doing it with typography can be a nice option.

Cutouts and overlays refer to text elements that have no color fill. A cutout allows whatever is in the background layer to show through the type design, such as the animated sports imagery in the example above. An overlay is often transparent lettering over a background so that you can see the background through letters while still reading them.

Both of these techniques have a lot of visual interest and can be fun to create. They work best with large lettering, not many words, and a display typeface.

Overlays work great with photos, textures, or even video backgrounds. Just make sure to avoid a lot of other design effects when using this technique. (You don’t want to overwhelm the user.)

35. Layering with Other Elements

In most projects, text elements and other elements are kept fairly separate. But that idea has changed quite a bit and designers aren’t shying away from allowing text and other elements to overlap. The end result can be pretty cool and actually help users focus on the words on the screen a little more.

While the most common uses of the typography trend in practice are text elements that overlap boxed images or color, MJND kicks it up a notch. This design merges the person in the image with typography so that it is cut out around him (like the person is walking into the words).

This is a technique that comes from print design where it is more popular – and quite honestly easier to execute – and can create a stunning display. The trick is having the right image and maintaining the readability of every single letter. (Be careful not to create unintended words because of missing character strokes or parts.)

36. “Overdone” Effects

It’s not often that “overdone” is used favorably when talking about any design technique. But when it comes to the overdone typography trend, it can work.

This type trend has a retro feel and is characterized by text and text effects that are so over the top that you must read the words. There are outlines and shadows and bevels and fades and crazy colors. No effect is off the table.

And the more effects you pile on, the more users might look. This style works best with a simple design scheme, such as Schnitzel Love, above.

Conclusion

When using these trends in your designs, remember to carefully analyze your brand style and target audience to ensure they match the message your designs are conveying.

Be sure to bookmark and follow our Trends category to stay on top of all kinds of design trends.

Accessibility is key in modern web design. A site that doesn’t consider how its user experience may differ for various audiences — especially those with disabilities — will fail to engage and serve everyone equally. One of the best ways to prevent this is to approach your site from a bottom-up perspective.

Conventional, top-down design approaches start with the big picture before breaking these goals and concepts into smaller details. Bottom-up philosophies, by contrast, consider the minute details first, eventually achieving the broader goal piece by piece.

This alternative way of thinking is important for accessibility in general because it reflects how neurodivergent people commonly think. While non-autistic people tend to think from a top-down perspective, those with autism often employ a bottom-up way of thinking.

Of course, there is considerable variation, and researchers have identified at least three specialist thinking types within the autism spectrum:

• Visual thinkers who think in images;
• Pattern thinkers who think of concepts in terms of patterns and relationships;
• Verbal thinkers who think only in word detail.

Still, research shows that people with autism and ADHD show a bias toward bottom-up thinking rather than the top-down approach you often see in neurotypical users. Consequently, a top-down strategy means you may miss details your audience may notice, and your site may not feel easily usable for all users.

As a real-world example, consider the task of writing an essay. Many students are instructed to start an essay assignment by thinking about the main point they want to convey and then create an outline with points that support the main argument. This is top-down thinking — starting with the big picture of the topic and then gradually breaking down the topic into points and then later into words that articulate these points.

In contrast, someone who uses a bottom-up thinking approach might start an essay with no outline but rather just by freely jotting down every idea that comes to mind as it comes to mind — perhaps starting with one particular idea or example that the writer finds interesting and wants to explore further and branching off from there. Then, once all the ideas have been written out, the writer goes back to group related ideas together and arrange them into a logical outline. This writer starts with the small details of the essay and then works these details into the big picture of the final form.

In web design, in particular, a bottom-up approach means starting with the specifics of the user experience instead of the desired effect. You may determine a readable layout for a single blog post, then ask how that page relates to others and slowly build on these decisions until you have several well-organized website categories.

You may even get more granular. Say you start your site design by placing a menu at the bottom of a mobile site to make it easier to tap with one hand, improving ease of use. Then, you build a drop-down menu around that choice — placing the most popular or needed options at the bottom instead of the top for easy tapping. From there, you may have to rethink larger-scale layouts to work around those interactive elements being lower on the screen, slowly addressing larger categories until you have a finished site design.

In either case, the idea of bottom-up design is to begin with the most specific problems someone might have. You then address them in sequence instead of determining the big picture first.

While neither bottom-up nor top-down approaches dominate the industry, some web engineers prefer the bottom-up approach due to the various accessibility benefits this process provides. This strategy has several accessibility benefits.

Putting User Needs First

The biggest benefit of bottom-up methods is that they prioritize the user’s needs.

Top-down approaches seem organized, but they often result in a site that reflects the designer’s choices and beliefs more than it serves your audience.

Consider some of the complaints that social media users have made over the years related to usability and accessibility for the everyday user. For example, many users complain that their Facebook feed will randomly refresh as they scroll for the sake of providing users with the most up-to-date content. However, the feature makes it virtually impossible to get back to a post a user viewed that they didn’t think to save. Likewise, TikTok’s watch history feature has come and gone over the years and still today is difficult for many users to find without viewing an outside tutorial on the subject.

This is a common problem: 95.9% of the largest one million homepages have Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) errors. While a bottom-up alternative doesn’t mean you won’t make any mistakes, it may make them less likely, as bottom-up thinking often improves your awareness of new stimuli so you can catch things you’d otherwise overlook. It’s easier to meet user’s needs when you build your entire site around their experience instead of looking at UX as an afterthought.

Consider this example from Berkshire Hathaway, a multi-billion-dollar holding company. The overall design philosophy is understandable: It’s simple and direct, choosing to focus on information instead of fancy aesthetics that may not suit the company image. However, you could argue it loses itself in this big picture.

While it is simple, the lack of menus or color contrast and the small font make it harder to read and a little overwhelming. This confusion can counteract any accessibility benefits of its simplicity.

Alternatively, even a simple website redesign could include intuitive menus, additional contrast, and accessible font for easy navigation across the site.

The homepage for U.K. charity Scope offers a better example of web design centered around users’ needs. Concise, clear menus line the top of the page to aid quicker, easier navigation. The color scheme is simple enough to avoid confusion but provides enough contrast to make everything easy to read — something the sans-serif font further helps.

Ensuring Accessibility From The Start

A top-down method also makes catering to a diverse audience difficult because you may need to shoehorn features into an existing design.

For example, say, a local government agency creates a website focused on providing information and services to a general audience of residents. The site originally featured high-resolution images, bright colors, and interactive charts.

However, they realize the images are not accessible to people navigating the site with screen readers, while multiple layers of submenus are difficult for keyboard-only users. Further, the bright colors make it hard for visually impaired users to read the site’s information.

The agency, realizing these accessibility concerns, adds captions to each image. However, the captions disrupt the originally intended visual aesthetics and user flow. Further, adjusting the bright colors would involve completely rethinking the site’s entire color palette. If these considerations had been made before the site was built, the site build could have specifically accommodated these elements while still creating an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly result.

Alternatively, a site initially built with high contrast, a calm color scheme, clear typography, simple menus, and reduced imagery would make this site much more accessible to a wide user base from the get-go.

As a real-world example, consider the Awwwards website. There are plenty of menus to condense information and ease navigation without overloading the screen — a solid accessibility choice. However, there does not seem to be consistent thought in these menus’ placement or organization.

There are far too many menus; some are at the top while others are at the bottom, and a scrolling top bar adds further distractions. It seems like Awwwards may have added additional menus as an afterthought to improve navigation. This leads to inconsistencies and crowding because they did not begin with this thought.

In contrast,

Bottom-up alternatives address usability issues from the beginning, which results in a more functional, accessible website.

Redesigning a system to address a usability issue it didn’t originally make room for is challenging. It can lead to errors like broken links and other unintended consequences that may hinder access for other visitors. Some sites have even claimed to lose 90% of their traffic after a redesign. While bottom-up approaches won’t eliminate those possibilities, they make them less likely by centering everything around usage from the start.

The website for the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, showcases a more cohesive approach to ensuring accessibility. Like Awwwards, it uses menus to aid navigation and organization, but there seems to be more forethought into these features. All menus are at the top, and there are fewer of them, resulting in less clutter and a faster way to find what you’re looking for. The overall design complements this by keeping things simple and neat so that the menus stand out.

Increasing Awareness

Similarly, bottom-up design ensures you don’t miss as many accessibility concerns. When you start at the top, before determining what details fit within it, you may not consider all the factors that influence it. Beginning with the specifics instead makes it easier to spot and address problems you would’ve missed otherwise.

This awareness is particularly important for serving a diverse population. An estimated 16% of the global population — 1.6 billion people — have a significant disability. That means there’s a huge range of varying needs to account for, but most people lack firsthand experience living with these conditions. Consequently, it’s easy to miss things impacting others’ UX. You can overcome that knowledge gap by asking how everyone can use your site first.

As these benefits show, a bottom-up design philosophy can be helpful when building an accessible site. Still, top-down methods can be advantageous at times, too. Which is best depends on your situation.

Top-down approaches are a good way to ensure a consistent brand image, as you start with the overall idea and base future decisions on this concept. It also makes it easier to create a design hierarchy to facilitate decision-making within your team. When anyone has a question, they can turn to whoever is above them or refer to the broader goals. Such organization can also mean faster design processes.

Bottom-up methods, by contrast, are better when accessibility for a diverse audience is your main concern. It may be harder to keep everyone on the same overall design philosophy page, but it usually produces a more functional website. You can catch and solve problems early and pay great attention to detail. However, this can mean longer design cycles, which can incur extra costs.

It may come down to what your team is most comfortable with. People think and work differently, with some preferring a top-down approach while others find bottom-up more natural. Combining the two — starting with a top-down model before tackling updates from a bottom-up perspective — can be beneficial, too.

Should you decide a bottom-up design method is best for your goals, here are some ways you can embrace this philosophy.

Talk To Your Existing User Base

One of the most important factors in bottom-up web design is to center everything around your users. As a result, your existing user base — whether from a separate part of your business or another site you run — is the perfect place to start.

Survey customers and web visitors about their experience on your sites and others. Ask what pain points they have and what features they’d appreciate. Any commonalities between responses deserve attention. You can also turn to WCAG standards for inspiration on accessible functionality, but first-hand user feedback should form the core of your mission.

Look To Past Projects For Accessibility Gaps

Past sites and business projects can also reveal what specifics you should start with. Look for any accessibility gaps by combing through old customer feedback and update histories and using these sites yourself to find issues. Take note of any barriers or usability concerns to address in your next website.

Remember to document everything you find as you go. Up to 90% of organizations’ data is unstructured, making it difficult to analyze later. Reversing that trend by organizing your findings and recording your accessible design process will streamline future accessibility optimization efforts.

Divide Tasks But Communicate Often

Keep in mind that a bottom-up strategy can be time-consuming. One of the reasons why top-down alternatives are popular is because they’re efficient. You can overcome this gap by splitting tasks between smaller teams. However, these groups must communicate frequently to ensure separate design considerations work as a cohesive whole.

A DevOps approach is helpful here. DevOps has helped 49% of its adopters achieve a faster time to market, and 61% report higher-quality deliverables. It also includes space for both detailed work and team-wide meetings to keep everyone on track. Such benefits ensure you can remain productive in a bottom-up strategy.

You can’t overstate the importance of accessible website design. By the same token, bottom-up philosophies are crucial in modern site-building. A detail-oriented approach makes it easier to serve a more diverse audience along several fronts. Making the most of this opportunity will both extend your reach to new niches and make the web a more equitable place.

The Web Accessibility Initiative’s WCAG standards are a good place to start. While these guidelines don’t necessarily describe how to apply a bottom-up approach, they do outline critical user needs and accessibility concerns your design should consider. The site also offers a free and comprehensive Digital Accessibility Foundations course for designers and developers.

Familiarizing yourself with these standards and best practices will make it easier to understand your audience before you begin designing your site. You can then build a more accessible platform from the ground up.

Additionally, the following are some valuable related reads that can act as inspiration in accessibility-centered and user-centric design.

• Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind by Regine M. Gilbert
• Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility: A Comprehensive Guide to Access Needs by Ashley Firth
• Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

By employing bottom-up thinking as well as resources like these in your design approach, you can create websites that not only meet current accessibility standards but actively encourage site use among users of all backgrounds and abilities.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

• “Getting To The Bottom Of Minimum WCAG-Conformant Interactive Element Size,” Eric Bailey
• “How To Make A Strong Case For Accessibility,” Vitaly Friedman
• “A Guide To Accessible Form Validation,” Sandrina Pereira
• “Creating A High-Contrast Design System With CSS Custom Properties,” Brecht De Ruyte

As the cloud computing landscape continues to evolve, choosing the right platform for your project can be challenging. Firebase, AWS, and Azure are three leading cloud providers, each offering a range of services tailored to different needs. Whether you’re building a web app, a mobile app, or a complex enterprise solution, understanding the strengths and …

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With Thanksgiving just around the corner, it’s time to prepare for the delicious Thanksgiving dinners and big bellies. And of course, it’s also time to bring out your fall and Thanksgiving fonts for all the banners, flyers, posters, and greeting card designs.

In this roundup, you’ll find a blend of free and premium fonts ready for your festive designs. Whether you’re working on a Thanksgiving dinner invitation, an autumn-themed blog post, or a fall sale advertisement, these fall and Thanksgiving fonts will add a seasonal touch to your projects, helping your designs stand out with a seasonal vibe.

From elegant serifs to playful scripts, each Thanksgiving font selection has been crafted to give your designs a stunning aesthetic appeal, enhance readability, and engage your audience. So dive in, and let’s get ready to transform your autumn and Thanksgiving design projects with these beautiful and versatile fall fonts.

Gratefully – Slab Serif Thanksgiving Font

Gratefully is an exciting slab serif font with a unique ‘fall’ theme, ideal for creative Thanksgiving projects. Its bouncy, handmade letters deliver a fun and unique result, perfect for cutting, printing, greeting cards, and merchandise. Offering standard uppercase, lowercase, numerals, symbols, and select ligatures, it fits various software formats including otf, ttf, and woff (Web Font).

Thankful Sunday – Thanksgiving Font Duo

Thankful Sunday is a unique, hand-written font duo, perfect for your Thanksgiving-themed designs. It includes a primary font and an additional doodle font packed with charming illustrations. Available in otf, ttf, and woff file types, this third-party design tool is excellent for adding a personal and festive touch to your projects.

Fall Pies – Modern Handwritten Fall Font

Fall Pies is a modern, handwritten font that is perfect for a variety of uses. Whether you’re designing greeting cards, invitations, posters, or logos, Fall Pies adds a charming, autumnal touch to your work. The font, provided in .otf and .ttf formats, includes both uppercase and lowercase varieties. Try it out for a fresh, seasonal look.

Hello Thankies – Thanksgiving Themed Font

Check out Hello Thankies, a delightful Thanksgiving-themed font duo that’s designed to infuse warm, festive vibes into any project. This unique collection includes two fonts, along with an exclusive ‘Thankies Doodle’ for an added touch of creativity. Whether it’s for branding, posters, clothing, or for that special Thanksgiving decoration, Hello Thankies is a charming solution.

Autumn Brush – Thanksgiving Font

Autumn Brush is a colorful, handcrafted font that brings an energetic and realistic touch to your design projects. With its lively, textured character set, it’s ideal for logos, posters, invites and anything requiring a dash of creativity and warmth.

Holifall Autumn – Tropical Fall Font

Holifall Autumn is a unique and authentic display font perfect for diverse needs. Offering a variety of themes and font styles, it comes in regular OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats. This font is perfect for giving a simple and creative fall vibe to your various seasonal design projects.

Golden Harvest – Fall Font

Golden Harvest is a contemporary, handwritten style font that provides a captivating touch to your designs. It includes upper and lower case letters, numerals, and standard punctuations. It also showcases accents, stunning ligatures, and stylistic sets.

Happy Thanksgiving – Handwritten Script Font

Happy Thanksgiving is a charming handwritten script font that seamlessly melds the warm, festive ambiance of numerous holidays. Beautifully encapsulating the essence of autumn and the cheer of the holiday season, this versatile font adds a touch of artful creativity to your projects.

Beauty Autumn – Simple Handwritten Font

Beauty Autumn is a versatile font perfect for sprucing up your digital and printed materials. Its handwritten style brings an intimate, personal touch to your projects, whether it’s for branding, posters, or social media posts. With included OTF, WOFF, and TTF files, it meets diverse design needs effortlessly.

Autumn Silent – Modern Handwritten Script Font

Autumn Silent, a modern handwritten script font, is an elegant addition to your digital and printed creations. With its stylistic appeal, it’s an incredible choice for enhancing posters, social media posts, branding, and personal projects. It is conveniently offered in OTF, WOFF, TTF and italic versions.

Retro Fall – Cute Fall Font

Retro Fall is a groovy, vintage-inspired font well-suited for various creative ventures. Its playful and authentic vibe makes it ideal for blog posts, logos, greeting cards, branding, or even planners and photo albums. The zip file includes both OTF and TTF files, allowing diverse usage for this unique typeface guaranteed to enhance your designs with a touch of nostalgia.

Lemon – Fall Thanksgiving Font

Lemon Font is a fun, refreshing blend of display and cute styles that add a burst of lively color to your creations. Ideal for seasonal and fun occasions, this whimsical font is perfect for projects that radiate positivity. Lemon Font brings the vibrant spirit of changing seasons to your crafting, decor, and embroidery projects.

Wonderland – Christmas & Thanksgiving Font

Wonderland is an elegantly designed, handwritten font that adds a touch of warmth and sophistication to various projects. Ideally suited for special occasions and festive themes, its graceful style enhances creations from wedding invitations and greeting cards to embroidery designs and unique crafts.

Thanksgiving Joy – Playful Font

Thanksgiving Joy is a cheerful, playful font that’s perfect for celebrating the festive season. The font comes with nine decorative options, all inspired by classic Thanksgiving motifs. Easy to install and use, it’s great for designing invitations, decorations, or logos for the holiday season.

Orange Leafy – Autumn Themed Font

Orange Leafy is a captivating Autumn-themed font. Its playful and vibrant style is great for Autumn branding, logos, invitations, stationery, social media posts, product packaging, merchandise, and more. Offering otf and ttf formats, ligatures, and multilingual support.

Falling Dried – Modern Fall Sans Serif Font

Falling Dried is a beautifully modern sans serif font exuding warmth and recalling the natural splendor of autumn. Its clean and minimal design gives letters a tranquil, soft look, making it perfect for projects that capture the season’s charm. The font, which comes in several formats including otf and ttf, works well for invitations, posters and more.

Fall Season – Handwritten Font

Fall Season is a somewhat wistful, handwritten font with a relaxed vibe that gives each design a unique and captivating touch. It’s perfect for logos, branding, and quotes, offering uppercase, lowercase, symbols, numerals, ligatures, alternates, and multilingual support. The font comes in OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 files, making it versatile for various projects.

Gobbie Gobble – Fun Thanksgiving Font

The Gobbie Gobble font evokes the playful spirit of Thanksgiving with its endearing handwritten style. Available in uppercase and lowercase, along with numerics and symbols, it offers versatility for your creative designs. Alongside, it includes 26 unique Thanksgiving-themed doodles accessible by typing A-Z, enhancing your artwork further. File formats include otf, ttf, and woff for the font and doodles.

Thanks Autumn – Handwritten Fall Font

Thanks Autumn handwritten font is an appealing, artistically crafted font that embodies the heart and warmth of the fall season. Displayed entirely in caps, it includes two different heights, numbers, symbols, and multilingual support. The asset provides OTF, TTF, WOFF files to suit your project needs. Perfect for any charming autumn-inspired project.

Barthley – Handlettering Fall Font

Barthley is an appealing handwritten font with a unique, natural style. Its versatility makes it ideal for a wide variety of designs. The font is user-friendly, easy to install on both PC & Mac and works seamlessly with popular software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and more. It’s PUA encoded which allows for easy access to all its glyphs and swashes.

Gratefully – Slab Serif Thanksgiving Font

Gratefully is a playful, fall-themed slab serif font with a unique, handmade feel. Its bouncy and scribbled characteristics make it perfect for a range of creative projects like Thanksgiving invitations, greeting cards, and posters. Offering a variety of features, including standard uppercase, lowercase, numerals, symbols, and some ligatures, this font is compatible with most software platforms and comes in .otf, .ttf, and web font formats.

Savor Fall – Modern Fall Font

Savor Fall is a modern display typeface that captures the spirit of fall through its distinctive style that instills a warm sense of nostalgia. With delicate lines and gentle curves, the font lends softness and tranquility to your designs. Ideal for invitations, greeting cards, or posters, it infuses every project with an irresistibly natural touch. Available in both otf and ttf formats, with uppercase and lowercase options.

Maple Memories – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

Maple Memories is a beautifully intricate handwritten font that enhances any design with its versatile style. Offered in three formats (.otf, .ttf, .woff) and featuring multilingual support, from English to Zulu, it’s perfect for beginners and experts alike. The additional beginning and ending swash augment its elegance. Designed by Attype Studio, this creative asset is sure to bring your Fall and Thanksgiving projects to life!

Autumn Atmosphere – Creative Fall Font

Autumn Atmosphere is a distinctive and genuine display font, perfect for various branding projects like logos, seasonal decorations, greeting cards, and beyond. Its bold and adaptive style stands out in numerous contexts. The package includes OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats.

Happy Fall – Modern Handwritten Font

Step into Autumn with the Happy Fall handwritten font. Perfect for projects that want to carry the enchanting essence of fall, like invitations, greeting cards, or posters. This charming font features uppercase and lowercase versions along with multilingual support. It will sprinkle a natural and captivating touch on your design, wrapping it in a cozy autumn ambiance. Available in otf and ttf formats.

Turning Leaf – Fall Themed Font

The Turning Leaf is a charming fall-themed creative font. Its delicate lines and gentle curves evoke nostalgia for changing leaves and autumn tranquility, adding a dimension of softness to any design. This font, available in both uppercase and lowercase, is perfect for any project needing a warm, natural touch. It works beautifully on invitations, greeting cards, and posters, and supports multiple languages.

Warm Autumn – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

Warm Autumn is a distinctive, genuine display font with bold characters. It’s versatile enough for a variety of branding tasks, such as creating logos, greeting cards, and other projects that embrace the spirit of Autumn or summer. Available in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, Warm Autumn is a standout choice for a broad set of scenarios.

Lord de Ayodilla – Thanksgiving Style Font

The Lord de Ayodilla is a delightful font for livening up your holiday or spring-themed projects. Its dazzling serif-script style uniquely compliments any cheerful occasion. Perfect for creating engaging social media posts or holiday greeting cards, it even includes foreign language glyphs for added versatility. This font is available in .OTF and .TTF formats.

Autumn Orange – Fall Themed Font

Autumn Orange is a standout, genuine display font that lends a bold finish to various branding projects, including logos, greeting cards, and seasonal-themed graphics. Its versatility is unmatched as it stands out in myriad contexts. Available in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, Autumn Orange is perfect for injecting vibrant, fall-inspired creativity into your designs.

Happy Today – Fall & Thanksgiving Font

The Happy Today font is a versatile, bold display font. Great for branding projects such as logos or greeting cards and perfect for seasonal Autumn and Summer themes, it stands out in various contexts. It comes in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, offering practicality for multiple use cases.

Best Free Thanksgiving Fonts

Free Thanksgiving Font

This free font is designed with Thanksgiving-themed projects in mind. It features a beautiful script-style letter design that will add a more modern and more festive look to your typography designs. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Free Script Fall Font

Another free script font. This font is made for fall-themed design projects. It comes with a set of creative characters suitable for greeting cards, logos, and social media posts. The font is free for personal use only.

With Farmhouse – Free Fall Font

You can use this font to craft beautiful greeting cards and packaging designs for your fall-themed projects. It’s free to download and use with your personal projects.

Sweet November – Free Fall Themed Font

This font has a sweet romantic vibe with a mix of fall-season looks. It’s perfect for designing titles for greeting cards as well as for flyers and posters. The font is free for personal use.

Blushing – Free Fall Font

Blushing is a free fall-themed font that comes with a handwritten-style letter design. The font is ideal for custom prints such as t-shirts, mugs, and greeting cards. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Oklab is a new perceptual color space supported in all major browsers created by the Swedish engineer Björn Ottosson. In this interview, Philip Jägenstedt explores how and why Björn created Oklab and how it spread across the ecosystem.

Note: The original interview was conducted in Swedish and is available to watch.

Philip Jägenstedt: Tell me a little about yourself, Björn.

Björn Ottosson: I worked for many years in the game industry on game engines and games like FIFA, Battlefield, and Need for Speed. I've always been interested in technology and its interaction with the arts. I’m an engineer, but I’ve always held both of these interests.

Philip: For someone who hasn’t dug into colors much, what’s so hard about working with them?

Björn: Intuitively, colors can seem quite simple. A color can be lighter or darker, it can be more blue or more green, and so on. Everyone with typical color vision has a fairly similar experience of color, and this can be modeled.

However, the way we manipulate colors in software usually doesn’t align with human perception of colors. The most common color space is sRGB. There’s also HSL, which is common for choosing colors, but it’s also based on sRGB.

One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception. When using those tools, you sometimes get surprising results, like purple in the gradient.

Philip: How do humans perceive color?

Björn: When light enters the eye and hits the retina, it’s processed in many layers of neurons and creates a mental impression. It’s unlikely that the process would be simple and linear, and it’s not. But incredibly enough, most people still perceive colors similarly.

People have been trying to understand colors and have created color wheels and similar visualizations for hundreds of years. During the 20th century, a lot of research and modeling went into color vision. For example, the CIE XYZ model is based on how sensitive our photoreceptor cells are to different frequencies of light. CIE XYZ is still a foundational color space on which all other color spaces are based.

There were also attempts to create simple models matching human perception based on XYZ, but as it turned out, it’s not possible to model all color vision that way. Perception of color is incredibly complex and depends, among other things, on whether it is dark or light in the room and the background color it is against. When you look at a photograph, it also depends on what you think the color of the light source is. The dress is a typical example of color vision being very context-dependent. It is almost impossible to model this perfectly.

Models that try to take all of this complexity into account are called color appearance models. Although they have many applications, they’re not that useful if you don’t know if the viewer is in a light or bright room or other viewing conditions.

The odd thing is that there’s a gap between the tools we typically use — such as sRGB and HSL — and the findings of this much older research. To an extent, this makes sense because when HSL was developed in the 1970s, we didn’t have much computing power, so it’s a fairly simple translation of RGB. However, not much has changed since then.

We have a lot more processing power now, but we’ve settled for fairly simple tools for handling colors in software.

Display technology has also improved. Many displays now have different RGB primaries, i.e., a redder red, greener green, or bluer blue. sRGB cannot reach all colors available on these displays. The new P3 color space can, but it's very similar to sRGB, just a little wider.

Philip: What, then, is Oklab, and how did you create it?

Björn: When working in the game industry, sometimes I wanted to do simple color manipulations like making a color darker or changing the hue. I researched existing color spaces and how good they are at these simple tasks and concluded that all of them are problematic in some way.

Many people know about CIE Lab. It’s quite close to human perception of color, but the handling of hue is not great. For example, a gradient between blue and white turns out purple in CIE Lab, similar to in sRGB. Some color spaces handle hue well but have other issues to consider.

When I left my job in gaming to pursue education and consulting, I had a bit of time to tackle this problem. Oklab is my attempt to find a better balance, something Lab-like but “okay”.

I based Oklab on two other color spaces, CIECAM16 and IPT. I used the lightness and saturation prediction from CIECAM16, which is a color appearance model, as a target. I actually wanted to use the datasets used to create CIECAM16, but I couldn’t find them.

IPT was designed to have better hue uniformity. In experiments, they asked people to match light and dark colors, saturated and unsaturated colors, which resulted in a dataset for which colors, subjectively, have the same hue. IPT has a few other issues but is the basis for hue in Oklab.

Using these three datasets, I set out to create a simple color space that would be “okay”. I used an approach quite similar to IPT but combined it with the lightness and saturation estimates from CIECAM16. The resulting Oklab still has good hue uniformity but also handles lightness and saturation well.

Philip: How about the name Oklab? Why is it just okay?

Björn: This is a bit tongue-in-cheek and some amount of humility.

For the tasks I had in mind, existing color spaces weren’t okay, and my goal was to make one that is. At the same time, it is possible to delve deeper. If a university had worked on this, they could have run studies with many participants. For a color space intended mainly for use on computer and phone screens, you could run studies in typical environments where they are used. It’s possible to go deeper.

Nevertheless, I took the datasets I could find and made the best of what I had. The objective was to make a very simple model that’s okay to use. And I think it is okay, and I couldn’t come up with anything better. I didn’t want to call it Björn Ottosson Lab or something like that, so I went with Oklab.

Philip: Does the name follow a tradition of calling things okay? I know there’s also a Quite OK Image format.

Björn: No, I didn’t follow any tradition here. Oklab was just the name I came up with.

Philip: I discovered Oklab when it suddenly appeared in all browsers. Things often move slowly on the web, but in this case, things moved very quickly. How did it happen?

Björn: I was surprised, too! I wrote a blog post and shared it on Twitter.

I have a lot of contacts in the gaming industry and some contacts in the Visual Effects (VFX) industry. I expected that people working with shaders or visual effects might try this out, and maybe it would be used in some games, perhaps as an effect for a smooth color transition.

But the blog post was spread much more widely than I thought. It was on Hacker News, and many people read it.

The code for Oklab is only 10 lines long, so many open-source libraries have adopted it. This all happened very quickly.

Chris Lilley from the W3C got in touch and asked me some questions about Oklab. We discussed it a bit, and I explained how it works and why I created it. He gave a presentation at a conference about it, and then he pushed for it to be added to CSS.

Photoshop also changed its gradients to use Oklab. All of this happened organically without me having to cheer it on.

Philip: In another blog post, you introduced two other color spaces, Okhsv and Okhsl. You’ve already talked about HSL, so what is Okhsl?

Björn: When picking colors, HSL has a big advantage, which is that the parameter space is simple. Any value 0-360 for hue (H) together with any values 0-1 for saturation (S) and lightness (L) are valid combinations and result in different colors on screen. The geometry of HSL is a cylinder, and there’s no way to end up outside that cylinder accidentally.

By contrast, Oklab contains all physically possible colors, but there are combinations of values that don’t work where you reach colors that don’t exist. For example, starting from light and saturated yellow in Oklab and rotating the hue to blue, that blue color does not exist in sRGB; there are only darker and less saturated blues. That’s because sRGB in Oklab has a strange shape, so it’s easy to end up going outside it. This makes it difficult to select and manipulate colors with Oklab or Oklch.

Okhsl was an attempt at compromise. It maintains Oklab’s behavior for colors that are not very saturated, close to gray, and beyond that, stretches out to a cylinder that contains all of sRGB. Another way to put it is that the strange shape of sRGB in Oklab has been stretched into a cylinder with reasonably smooth transitions.

The result is similar to HSL, where all parameters can be changed independently without ending up outside sRGB. It also makes Okhsl more complicated than Oklab. There are unavoidable compromises to get something with the characteristics that HSL has.

Everything with color is about compromises. Color vision is so complex that it's about making practical compromises.

This is an area where I wish there were more research. If I have a white background and want to pick some nice colors to put on it, then you can make a lot of assumptions. Okhsl solves many things, but is it possible to do even better?

Philip: Some people who have tried Oklab say there are too many dark shades. You changed that in Okhsl with a new lightness estimate.

Björn: This is because Oklab is exposure invariant and doesn’t account for viewing conditions, such as the background color. On the web, there’s usually a white background, which makes it harder to see the difference between black and other dark colors. But if you look at the same gradient on a black background, the difference is more apparent.

CIE Lab handles this, and I tried to handle it in Okhsl, too. So, gradients in Okhsl look better on a white background, but there will be other issues on a black background. It’s always a compromise.

Philip: Final question: What’s your favorite color?

Björn: I would have to say Burgundy. Burgundy, dark greens, and navy blues are favorites.

Philip: Thank you for your time, Björn. I hope our readers have learned something, and I’ll remind them of your excellent blog, where you go into more depth about Oklab and Okhsl.

Björn: Thank you!