Let’s take a look at a carousel I worked on where items slide in and out of view with CSS animations. To get each item to slide in and out of view nicely I used a cubic-bezier for the animation-timing-function property, instead of using a standard easing keyword.
A cubic-bezier can appear confusing at first glance, but when used correctly, it can add a nice touch to the user experience.
While building this carousel, I realized I not only needed a custom animation curve, but had to use it in reverse as well to get the effect right. I figured it was worth sharing what I learned because creating a custom curve and reversing it may seem tricky, but it’s actually pretty straightforward.
First, a primer on easing
Easing is the word used to describe the acceleration and deceleration of an animation’s progress along a timeline. We can plot this as a graph, where x is time and y is the animation’s progress. The graph for a linear animation, which has no acceleration or deceleration (it moves at the same speed all the way through), is a straight line:
Non-linear easing is what gives animations a more natural, life-like feel. We can apply easing to transitions and animations in CSS. The animation-timing-function property allows us to define the easing on an animation. (The same options are available for transition-timing-function.) We have four keywords to choose from:
linear – as described above
ease-in – the animation starts off slow and accelerates as it progresses
ease-out – the animation starts off fast and decelerates towards the end
ease-in-out – the animation starts off slowly, accelerates in the middle and slows down towards the end
ease – the default value, a variant on ease-in-out
Getting to know cubic-bezier
If none of those options suit our animation, we can create a custom easing curve using the cubic-bezier function. Here’s an example:
You’ll notice the cubic-bezier function takes four values. These are the two pairs of coordinates needed in order to plot our curve onto the graph. What do those coordinates represent? Well, if you’ve used vector illustration programs, like Illustrator, the idea of vector points and “handles” that control the size and direction of the curve might be familiar to you. This is essentially what we’re plotting with a cubic-bezier curve.
We don’t need to know about all the maths behind cubic-bezier curves in order to create a nice animation. Luckily there are plenty of online tools, like cubic-bezier.com by Lea Verou, that allow us to visualize an easing curve and copy the values. This is what I did for the above easing curve, which looks like this:
Here, we can see the two points we need to plot, where the cubic-bezier function is cubic-bezier(x1, y1, x2, y2).
Applying easing in two directions
My carousel rotates in both directions — if you click the left arrow, the current item slides out of view to the right, and the next item slides in from the left; and if you click the right arrow, the reverse happens. For the items to slide into or out of view, a class is added to each item, depending on whether the user has clicked the “next” or “previous” button. My initial assumption was that I could simply reverse the animation-direction for items sliding out in the opposite direction, like this:
There’s just one problem: reversing the animation also reversed the easing curve! So, now my animation looks great in one direction, but is completely off in the other direction. Oh no!
In this demo, the first box shows the initial animation (an item sliding left-to-right) and the second box shows what happens when the animation-direction is reversed.
You can see the two animations don’t have the same feel at all. The first box speeds up early on and slows down gently as it progresses, while the second box starts off quite sluggish, then gains a burst of speed before abruptly slowing down. This wouldn’t feel right at all for a carousel.
We have a choice between two options to achieve this:
We could create a new keyframe animation to animate the items out, and then apply the same easing as before. That’s not too hard in this example, but what if we have a more complex animation? It would take quite a bit more work to create the same animation in reverse, and we could easily make a mistake.
We could use the same keyframe animation (with the animation-direction: reverse) and invert the easing curve so we get the same easing in both directions. This isn’t too hard to do, either.
To reverse the easing curve for our reversed animation we need to rotate the curve 180 degrees on its axis and find the new coordinates.
We can do this with some simple maths — by switching the coordinate pairs and subtracting each value from 1.
To visualize this, imagine that our original values are:
x1, y1, x2, y2
Our reversed values will be:
(1 - x2), (1 - y2), (1 - x1), (1 - y1)
In this demo, the third box shows what we want to happen: the item sliding in the opposite direction, but with the easing reversed to give it the same feel.
Now, if we make any changes to the first set of variables, the reversed curve will be calculated automatically. To make this a bit easier to scan when examining and debugging our code, I like to break these new values out into their own variables:
To help visualize this, I’ve built a little tool to calculate the reversed values of a cubic-bezier. Enter the original coordinate values to get the reversed curve:
Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time, effort, patience, and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. After all, somebody has to build a good team and make all those arrangements: flights, catering, parties, badges, and everything in between.
The work that takes place behind the scenes often goes unnoticed and, to an extent, that’s an indication that the planning went well. There are hundreds of accessible and affordable meet-ups, community events, nonprofit events, and small local groups — all fueled by incredible personal efforts of humble, kind, generous people donating their time on the weekends to create an environment for people to share and learn together. I love these events, and I have utter respect and admiration for the work they are doing, and I’d be happy to speak at these events and support these people every day and night, with all the resources and energy I have. These are incredible people doing incredible work; their efforts deserve to be supported and applauded.
Unlike these events, commercial and corporate conferences usually target companies’ employees and organizations with training budgets to send their employees for continuing education. There is nothing wrong with commercial conferences per se and there is, of course, a wide spectrum of such events — ranging from single-day, single-track gatherings with a few speakers, all the way to week-long multi-track festivals with a bigger line-up of speakers. The latter tend to have a higher ticket price, and often a much broader scope. Depending on the size and the reputation of the event, some of them have more or less weight in the industry, so some are perceived to be more important to attend or more prestigious to speak at.
Both commercial and non-commercial events tend to have the so-called Call For Papers (CFPs), inviting speakers from all over the world to submit applications for speaking, with a chance of being selected to present at the event. CFPs are widely accepted and established in the industry; however, the idea of CFPs is sometimes challenged and discussed, and not always kept in a positive light. While some organizers and speakers consider them to lower the barrier for speaking to new talent, for others CFPs are an easy way out for filling in speaking slots. The argument is that CFPs push diversity and inclusion to a review phase, rather than actively seeking it up front. As a result, accepted speakers might feel like they have been “chosen” which nudges them into accepting low-value compensation.
The key to a fair, diverse and interesting line-up probably lies somewhere in the middle. It should be the organizer’s job to actively seek, review, and invite speakers that would fit the theme and the scope of the event. Admittedly, as an organizer, unless you are fine with the same speakers appearing at your event throughout the years, it’s much harder to do than just setting up a call for speakers and wait for incoming emails to start showing up. Combining thorough curation with a phase of active CFPs submission probably works best, but it’s up to the organizer how the speakers are “distributed” among both. Luckily, many resources are highlighting new voices in the industry, such as WomenWhoDesign which is a good starting point to move away from “usual suspects” from the conference circuit.
Many events strongly and publicly commit to creating an inclusive and diverse environment for attendees and speakers with a Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct explains the values and the principles of conference organizers as well as contact details in case any conflict or violation appears. The sheer presence of such a code on a conference website sends a signal to attendees, speakers, sponsors, and the team that there had been given some thought to creating an inclusive, safe, and friendly environment for everybody at the event. However, too often at commercial events, the Code of Conduct is considered an unnecessary novelty and hence is either neglected or forgotten.
Now, there are wonderful, friendly, professional, well-designed and well-curated commercial events with a stellarreputation. These events are committed to diverse and inclusive line-ups and they always at least cover speaker’s expenses, flights, and accommodation. The reason why they’ve gained reputation over years is because organizers can afford to continuously put their heart and soul into running these events year after year — mostly because their time and efforts are remunerated by the profit the conference makes.
Many non-commercial events, fueled by great ideas and hard work, may succeed the first, second, and third time, but unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for them to fade away just a few years later. Mostly because setting up and maintaining the quality of such events takes a lot of personal time, effort and motivation beyond regular work times, and it’s just really hard to keep it up without a backbone of a strong, stable team or company behind you.
Some conferences aren’t quite like that. In fact, I’d argue that some conferences are pretty much the exact opposite. It’s more likely for them to allocate resources in outstanding catering and lighting and video production on site rather than the core of the event: the speaker’s experience. What lurks behind the scenes of such events is a toxic, broken conference culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation (to say nothing of the personal and professional time they are already donating to prepare, rehearse, and travel to and from the event) from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
The Broken State Of Commercial Conferences
Personally, I’ve been privileged to speak at many events over the years and, more often than not, there was a fundamental mismatch between how organizers see speaking engagements and how I perceive them. Don’t get me wrong: speaking at tech conferences has tremendous benefits, and it’s a rewarding experience, full of adventures, networking, traveling, and learning; but it also takes time and effort, usually away from your family, your friends, and your company. For a given talk, it might easily take over 80 hours of work just to get all the research and content prepared, not to mention rehearsal and traveling time. That’s a massive commitment and time investment.
But many conference organizers don’t see it this way. The size of the event, with hundreds and thousands of people attending the conference, is seen as a fair justification for the lack of speaker/training budgets or diversity/student scholarships. It’s remarkably painful to face the same conversations over and over and over again: the general expectation is that speakers should speak for free as they’ve been given a unique opportunity to speak and that neither flights nor expenses should be covered for the very same reason.
It’s sad to see invitation emails delicately avoiding or downplaying the topics of diversity, honorarium, and expenses. Instead, they tend to focus on the size of the event, the brands represented there, the big names that have spoken in the past, and the opportunities such a conference provides. In fact, a good number of CFPs gently avoid mentioning how the conference deals with expenses at all. As a result, an applicant who needs their costs to be covered is often discriminated against, because an applicant, whose expenses will be covered by their company is preferred. Some events explicitly require unique content for the talk, while not covering any speaker expenses, essentially asking speakers to work for free.
Preparing for a talk is a massive commitment and time investment. Taking care of the fine details such as the confidence monitor and countdown on stage is one of those little things. (Large preview) (Image source: beyond tellerrand)
It’s disappointing (upon request) to receive quick-paced replies explaining that there isn’t really any budget for speakers, as employers are expected to cover flights and accommodation. Sometimes, as a sign of good faith, the organizers are happy to provide a free platinum pass which would grant exclusive access to all conference talks across all tracks (“worth $2500” or so). And sometimes it goes so far as to be exploitative when organizers offer a “generous” 50% discount off the regular ticket price, including access to the speakers’ lounge area where one could possibly meet “decision makers” with the opportunity and hope of creating unique and advantageous connections.
It’s both sad and frustrating to read that “most” speakers were “happy to settle for only a slot at the conference.” After all, they are getting an “incredible amount of exposure to decision makers.” Apparently, according to the track record of the conference, it “reliably” helped dozens of speakers in the past to find new work and connect with new C-level clients. Once organizers are asked again (in a slightly more serious tone), suddenly a speaker budget materializes. This basically means that the organizers are willing to pay an honorarium only to speakers that are actually confident enough to repeatedly ask for it.
And then, a few months later, it’s hurtful to see the same organizers who chose not to cover speaker expenses, publishing recordings of conference talks behind a paywall, further profiting from speakers’ work without any thought of reimbursing or subsidizing speakers’ content they are repackaging and reselling. It’s not uncommon to run it all under the premise of legal formalities, asking the speaker to sign a speaker’s contract upon arrival.
As an industry, we should and can be better than that. Such treatment of speakers shows a fundamental lack of respect for time, effort, and work done by knowledgeable and experienced experts in our industry. It’s also a sign of a very broken state of affairs that dominates many tech events. It’s not surprising, then, that web conferences don’t have a particularly good reputation, often criticized for being unfair, dull, a scam, full of sponsored sessions, lacking diversity or a waste of money.
Speakers, Make Organizers Want To Invite You
On a personal note, throughout all these years, I have rarely received consultancy projects from “exposure” on stage. More often than not, the time away from family and company costs much more than any honorarium provided. Neither did I meet many “decision-makers” in the speaker lounge as they tend to delicately avoid large gatherings and public spaces to avoid endless pitches and questions. One thing that large conferences do lead to is getting invitations to more conferences; however, expecting a big client from a speaking engagement at corporate events has proved to be quite unrealistic for me. In fact, I tend to get way more work from smaller events and meet-ups where you actually get a chance to have a conversation with people located in a smaller, intimate space.
Of course, everybody has their own experiences and decides for themselves what’s acceptable for them, yet my personal experience taught me to drastically lower my expectations. That’s why after a few years of speaking I started running workshops alongside the speaking engagements. With a large group of people attending a commercial event, full-day workshops can indeed bring a reasonable revenue, with a fair 50% / 50% profit split between the workshop coach and the conference organizer.
Admittedly, during the review of this article, I was approached by some speakers who have had very different experiences; they ended up with big projects and clients only after an active phase of speaking at large events. So your experience may vary, but the one thing I learned over the years is that it’s absolutely critical to keep reoccurring in industry conversations, so organizers will seize an opportunity to invite you to speak. For speakers, that’s a much better position to be in.
If you’re a new speaker, consider speaking for free at local meet-ups; it’s fair and honorable — and great training for larger events; the smaller group size and more informal setting allows you seek valuable feedback about what the audience enjoyed and where you can improve. You can also gain visibility through articles, webinars, and open-source projects. And an email to an organizer, featuring an interesting topic alongside a recorded talk, articles and open source projects can bring you and your work to their attention. Organizers are looking for knowledgeable and excited speakers who love and live what they are doing and can communicate that energy and expertise to the audience.
Of course, there may be times when it is reasonable to accept conditions to get an opportunity to reach potential clients, but this decision has to be carefully considered and measured in light of the effort and time investment it requires. After all, it’s you doing them a favor, not the other way around. When speaking at large commercial conferences without any remuneration, basically you are trading your name, your time and your money for the promise of gaining exposure while helping the conference sell tickets along the way.
Organizers, Allocate The Speaking Budget First
I don’t believe for a second that most organizers have bad intentions; nor do I believe that they mean to cut corners at all costs to maximize profit. From my conversations with organizers, I clearly see that they share the same goals that community events have, as they do their best to create a wonderful and memorable event for everybody involved, while also paying the bills for all the hard-working people who make the event happen. After all, the conference business isn’t an easy one, and you hardly ever know how ticket sales will go next year. Still, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch of priorities and expectations.
Setting up a conference is an honorable thought, but you need a comprehensive financial plan of what it costs and how much you can spend. As mentioned above, too many promising events fade away because they are powered by the motivation of a small group of people who also need to earn money with their regular job. Conference organizers deserve to get revenue to share across the team, as working on a voluntary basis is often not sustainable.
All organizers have the same goal: to create wonderful, memorable events for everybody involved. (Large preview) (Image source: ColdFront)
To get a better understanding of how to get there, I can only recommend the fantastic Conference Organizer’s Handbook by Peter-Paul Koch, which covers a general strategy for setting up a truly professional event from planning to pricing to running it — without burning out. Bruce Lawson also has prepared a comprehensive list of questions that could be addressed in the welcome email to speakers, too. Plus, Lara Hogan has written an insightful book on Demystifying Public Speaking which I can only highly encourage to look at as well.
Yes, venues are expensive, and yes, so is catering, and yes, so is AV and technical setup. But before allocating thousands on food, roll-ups, t-shirts, and an open bar, allocate decent budgets for speakers first, especially for new voices in the industry — they are the ones who are likely to spend dozens or hundreds of hours preparing that one talk.
“The speaking budget should come before the venue and the catering. After all, the attendees are paying to see the speakers. You can have a middling venue and mediocre catering, but if you have an excellent program, it’s a fabulous event. In contrast, you can have a great venue and fantastic food, but if the speakers are boring or off topic, the event will not be successful. Speaking budgets are an investment in the value of the program. Every penny invested is one that pays back in multiples. You certainly can’t say the same for venue or food.”
No fancy bells and whistles are required; speaker dinners or speaker gifts are a wonderful token of attention and appreciation but they can’t be a replacement for covering expenses. It’s neither fair nor honest to push the costs over to speakers, and it’s simply not acceptable to expect them to cover these costs for exposure, especially if a conference charges attendees several hundred Euros (or Dollars) per ticket. By not covering expenses, you’re depriving the industry of hearing from those groups who can’t easily fund their own conference travel — people who care for children or other relatives; people with disabilities who can’t travel without their carer, or people from remote areas or low-income countries where a flight might represent a significant portion of even multiple months of their income.
Costs, such as speakers and venue are the biggest for break-even numbers. Catering costs are mostly variable costs and should be calculated on a per-attendee basis, to then subtract them from the price. To calculate the speaker budget, determine what the ticket price and variable per-attendee costs are up front, then use the net margin from that to figure out how many speakers you can afford, by diving net margin into the total speaker budget. That will tell you how many tickets you must sell to make a profit. (If you follow the same strategy for the venue, you’ll know your overall break even and when you start making profit.) Consider paying a bonus to speakers who the audience rates as delivering the best value. Hence, you’re rewarding exactly what benefits the attendees.”
That’s a great framework to work within. Instead of leaving the speaker budget dependent on the ticket sales and variable costs, set the speaker budget first. What would be a fair honorarium for speakers? Well, there is no general rule of how to establish this. However, for smaller commercial events in Europe, it’s common to allocate the price of 3–5 tickets on each speaker. For a large conference with hundreds and thousands of attendees, three tickets should probably be a minimum, but it would also have to be distributed among simultaneous talks and hence depend on the number of tracks and how many attendees are expected per talk.
Dear organizers, options matter. Keep in mind to label food (e.g. vegan/vegetarian, and so on). It’s the little details that matter most. (Large preview) (Image source: performance.now())
Provide an honorarium, even if it isn’t much. Also, ask speakers to collect all receipts, so you can cover them later, or provide a per diem (flat daily expenses coverage) to avoid the hassle with receipts. As a standard operating procedure, suggest buying the flight tickets for the speaker unless they’d love to do it on their own. Some speakers might not have the privilege to spend hundreds of dollars for a ticket and have to wait months for reimbursement. Also, it’s a nice gesture to organize pre-paid transport from and to the airport, so drivers with a sign will be waiting for a speaker at the arrival area. (There is nothing more frustrating than realizing that your cabbie accepts only local cash to pay for the trip — and that after a frustrating flight delay arriving late at night.)
Once all of these costs are covered, consider providing a mentor to help newcomers draft, refine, adjust, review and iterate the talk a few times, and set aside a separate time when they could visit the venue and run through their slides, just to get a feeling of what it’s going to be like on stage.
On a positive side, if you’ve ever wondered about a high speakers’ drop-out rate at your event, not covering expenses might be a good reason for it. If speakers are paying on their own, you shouldn’t expect them to treat the speaking engagement as a priority.
As Laurie Barth noted when reviewing this article:
“If you aren’t paid for your time, then you likely have less unpaid time to give to preparing your talk and/or have less incentive to prioritize the travel and time for the talk.”
The time, work, effort, and commitment of your speakers are what make the conference a success.
Organizer’s Checklist
Cover all speaker’s expenses by default, and outline what’s included from the very start (in invitation letters) and before someone invests their time in completing a CFP form;
Avoid hassle with receipts, and offer at least a flat per diem;
Suggest buying the flight tickets for the speaker rather than reimbursing later, and organize pre-paid transport pick-up if applicable,
Allocate budgets and honorarium for speakers, coaching and mentoring early on. Good content is expensive, and if your ticket prices can’t cover it, refine the conference format to make it viable;
Provide an option to donate an honorarium and expenses covered by companies towards diversity/student scholarship;
As a principle, never accept voiding the honorarium. If the speaker can’t be paid or their expenses can’t be covered, dedicate the funds to the scholarship or a charity, and be public about it;
Be honest and sincere about your expectations, and explain which expenses you cover and which not up front in the CFP or in the speaking invitation.
Speakers, Ask Around Before Agreeing To Speak
Think twice before submitting a proposal to conferences that don’t cover at least your costs despite a high ticket price. It’s not acceptable to be asked to pay for your own travel and accommodation. If an event isn’t covering your expenses, then you are paying to speak at their event. It might seem not to matter much if your time and expenses are covered by your employer but it puts freelancers and new speakers at a disadvantage. If your company is willing to pay for your speaking engagement, ask the organizers to donate the same amount to a charity of your choice, or sponsor a diversity/student scholarships to enable newcomers to speak at the event.
Come up with a fair honorarium for your time given your interest and the opportunity, and if possible, make exceptions for nonprofits, community events, or whenever you see a unique value for yourself. Be very thorough and selective with conferences you speak at, and feel free to ask around about how other speakers have been treated in the past. Look at past editions of the event and ask speakers who attended or spoke there about their experience as well as about the reputation of the conference altogether.
If you are new to the industry, asking around could be quite uncomfortable, but it’s actually a common practice among speakers, so they should be receptive to the idea. I’m very confident that most speakers would be happy to help, and I know that our entire team — Rachel, Bruce, me and the entire Smashing Crew would love to help, anytime.
Before committing to speak at a conference, ask questions. Ethan Marcotte has prepared a useful little template with questions about compensation and general treatment of speakers (thanks to Jared for the tip!). Ask about the capacity and expected attendance of the conference, and what the regular price of the ticket is. Ask what audience is expected, and what profile they have. Ask about conference accessibility, i.e. whether there will be talk captioning/transcripts available to the audience, or even sign language interpreters. Ask if there is a commitment to a diverse line-up of speakers. Ask if other speakers get paid, and if yes, how much. Ask if traveling and accommodation are covered for all speakers, by default. Ask if there is a way to increase honorarium by running a workshop, a review session or any other activities. Since you are dedicating your time, talents, and expertise to the event, think of it as your project, and value the time and effort you will spend preparing. Decide what’s acceptable to you and make exceptions when they matter.
Dear speakers, feel free to ask how other speakers have been treated in the past. It’s your right; don’t feel uncomfortable for asking what is important to you and want to know beforehand. (Large preview) (Image source: ColdFront)
As you expect a fair treatment by organizers, also treat organizers the same way. Respect organizers’ time and efforts. They are covering your expenses, but it doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable to spend a significant amount without asking for permission first. Obviously, unexpected costs might come up, and personal issues might appear, and most organizers will fully understand that. But don’t use the opportunity as a carte blanche for upscale cocktails or fancy meals — you probably won’t be invited again. Also, if you can’t come to speak due to occurring circumstances, suggest a speaker that could replace your session, and inform the organizer as soon as you are able to upfront.
Speaker’s Checklist
Think twice before applying to a large commercial event that doesn’t cover your expenses;
If your company is covering expenses, consider asking organizers to donate the same amount to a charity of your choice, or sponsor a diversity/student scholarship;
Be very thorough and selective with conferences you speak at, and ask how other speakers have been treated in the past;
Prepare a little template of questions to ask an organizer before confirming a speaking engagement;
Support nonprofits and local events if you can dedicate your time to speak for free;
Choose a fair honorarium for a talk, and decide on case-by-case basis;
Ask whether videos will be publicly available,
Ask about conference accessibility, i.e. whether there will be talk captioning/transcripts, or sign language interpreters,
Treat organizers with respect when you have to cancel your engagement or modify your arrangements.
Our Industry Deserves Better
As an attendee, you always have a choice. Of course, you want to learn and get better, and you want to connect with wonderful like-minded people like yourself. However, be selective choosing the conference to attend next. More often than not, all the incredible catering and free alcohol all night long might be carried on the shoulders of speakers speaking for free and paying their expenses from their own pockets. Naturally, conferences that respect speakers’ time and professional skills compensate them and cover their expenses.
So support conferences that support and enable tech speakers. There are plenty of them out there — it just requires a bit more effort to explore and decide which event to attend next. Web conferences can be great, wonderful, inspirational, and friendly — regardless of whether they are large commercial conferences of small community-driven conferences — but first and foremost they have to be fair and respectful while covering the very basics first. Treating speakers well is one of these basics.
I’d like to kindly thank Rachel Andrew, Bruce Lawson, Jesse Hernandez, Amanda Annandale, Mariona Ciller, Sebastian Golasch, Jared Spool, Peter-Paul Koch, Artem Denysov, Markus Gebka, Stephen Hay, Matthias Meier, Samuel Snopko, Val Head, Rian Kinney, Jenny Shen, Luc Poupard, Toni Iordanova, Lea Verou, Niels Leenheer, Cristiano Rastelli, Sara Soueidan, Heydon Pickering, David Bates, Mariona C. Miller, Vadim Gorbachev, David Pich, Patima Tantiprasut, Laurie Barth, Nathan Curtis, Ujjwal Sharma, Lea Verou, Jesse Hernandez, Amanda Annandale, Benjamin Hong, Bruce Lawson, Matthias Ott, Scott Gould, Charis Rooda, Zach Leatherman, Marcy Sutton, Bertrand Lirette, Roman Kuba, Eva Ferreira, Sara Soueidan, Joe Leech, Yoav Weiss, Markus Seyfferth and Bastian Widmer for reviewing the article.
This collection of new tools and resources is our gift to you this season. And there are plenty of holiday-themed elements sprinkled in. Enjoy!
If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered!
Humaaans
Humaaans is a design kit packed with illustrations of people with a fun style. You can mix and match people and styles – from clothes to hairstyles – to find illustrated humans to match your design projects. Use the illustrations alone or add extra elements to create an entire scene. (The only probably with this free, creative commons-licensed tool is that you might spend all day playing with it.)
Hookbin
Hookbin allows you to capture and inspect HTTP requests. The free tool lets you inspect a number of content types – JSON, XML, YAML, Multipart and URL-encoded requests and every request uses SSL endpoints. Plus you can inspect headers, body, query strings, cookies, uploaded files and more in a private environment if you like.
Advent of Code
Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. Use them as a speed contest, training, coursework, practice problems, or to challenge other designers. You don’t need a computer science background to participate – just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far.
Fibre
Fibre is a WebGL application for visualizing and coding 3D vector fields and dynamic systems. Vector fields can be authored in the code editor and shared via HTML link with the embedded code.
Giddyapp
Giddyapp is a lightweight invoicing tool that’s made for small businesses and creatives. Invoices have a sleek design that’s easy to use and send. Payment processing is integrated with Strip, Square and PayPal and notifications let you know when clients open and pay invoices. If you need a way to manage clients, this is it.
Milanote
Milanote is a brainstorming tool for teams. Use it to collect elements for moodboards or event to outline design projects. The interface is easy to engage with and you can add structure and purpose to how projects are created and even invite others to collaborate. One of the best things is that it all works in the cloud and is available anywhere eon any device.
Christmas HQ
Working on holiday themed projects? Christmas HQ is packed with designs including clip art elements, backgrounds, fonts, borders images and other elements to jumpstart creative projects.
Color Koala
Color Koala is a fun project that helps you create color palettes. Just press the spacebar and new combinations appear on screen for you to grab and use. Choose from light, dark or trending bright color palettes.
CSS File Icons
This collection of CSS file icons includes popular file icon extensions in a colorful flat style. Just include the CSS to the header and you are ready to go.
Squoosh
Optimize images for the web with one drag and drop. Squoosh is a project that lets you do just that and works for images, artwork, mockups and SVG files. You can adjust optimization settings for each file.
Write Freely
Write Freely is open-source software for creating a simple blog. It’s lightweight and the intuitive editor is made for getting your words on screen quickly. Without a bunch of unnecessary add-ons, this tool provides a distraction-free way to write (and read).
VR/AR Icons
InVision App is offering a collection of 48 colorful icons featuring virtual reality and augmented reality designs. It’s a nice collection for themed projects.
Christmas Desktop Backgrounds & Wallpapers
Decorate your computer screen for the holidays. This collection of 25+ desktop backgrounds all feature cool designs with holiday themes. Perfect for getting you in the holiday (and creative) spirit.
UX Store
UX Store is a collection of design resources made for UI/UX designers. From tools such as sketchbooks and stencils to freebies including UI kits, icons and illustrations, this site is packed with elements that you can use. (Still looking for gifts for the designer in your life? UX Store might be the answer.)
Tutorial: HTML Canvas API
The Canvas API allows browsers to draw on the screen in the design process. This tutorial takes your through the process of using the API step-by-step.
Talk: How to Read Color Hex Codes
The transcript from this Dot Conferences talk is a fascinating look at color. Here’s the description: “How does a colorblind designer work with color? Not with his eyes! Instead David relies on reading color hex codes. He shares his process into understanding those six-digit codes and related insights into human vision, computer history, and digital color.” What are you waiting for? Go read the transcript!
Guide to Voice User Interfaces
Are you ready for VUI? Voice user interfaces are exploding in popularity, and you need to be ready to design for them. Justin Baker’s guide is a great place to start. And it flips everything you know about design upside down: “Keep in mind, a VUI does not need to have a visual interface?—?it can be completely auditory or tactile (ex. a vibration).”
Emoji Builder
For those times when the standard emojis just won’t do it, there’s Emoji Builder. Using standard starting points and plenty of add-ons, you can create the right virtual face for whatever you are feeling.
Web.dev
Google’s new learning tool is designed to help make you a better, modern designer. There are structured curriculums to help you build “a better web.” The good news is that it’s all rooted in Google’s user research. (And there’s a lot of it.)
Designer’s Eye Game
This game tests your visual skills. Can you tell if dots are in the middle of shapes? (It’s harder than you think.)
Animosa
Animosa is a fun, free serif font family with 508 characters in five weights. It features sharp edges and a light vibe that’s highly versatile.
Bumblebear
Bumblebear is a handwriting style typeface that can work for display use. It includes upper- and lowercase characters, numerals and punctuation.
Christmas Ornaments
Christmas Ornaments is an icon font with line and hand-illustrated holiday icons. It includes 50+ characters to play with.
Geller
Geller is a solid serif typeface made for editorial use. The premium typeface includes a full family with every variation you could need and is highly readable.
Hermann
Hermann is a beautiful and highly readable premium typeface family made for body type as well as display. The discretionary ligatures are what set this font apart for display use.
Pumpkin Pie Lattes
Pumpkin Pie Lattes is a thin, hand-drawn font that makes a great addition to holiday projects. The feel is simple and light in this all uppercase typeface.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
Designers are not Happy with this Photoshop Update
How We Fixed the World’s Worst Logo
Animate an SVG Icon in After Effects CC
10 CSS Flowcharts
What do You Name Color Variables?
Bad Designer, OK Designer, Awesome Designer
Beautiful 2019 Calendar Designs for your Inspiration
The Chatbot Bubble has Officially Burst
Keep Math in the CSS
Creating Custom Content Blocks: WordPress Gutenberg Vs. Sanity
The Hottest Branding Trend of the Year is Also the Worst
2018 Design Tools Survey Results Now Available
“Plus Codes” by Google
Medium.css – Use Medium’s Typography in your own Projects
Millennial Pink is Dead, and Pantone’s Color of the Year Killed it
Information is Beautiful Awards 2018: The Winners
Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem with Full Stack
The Ultimate Marketing Technology Stack for 2019
Testing Made Easy with these Top 7 Testing Tools
There’s More to Mailplane’s Dark Mode than You Think
Browser Games for Designers
Risking a Homogeneous Web
2019 UI and UX Design Trends
The Typography of WALL·E
How do We Build an Impactful Digital Product?
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Online tools are designed to help us with our jobs. Whether you’re an accountant or a designer, there are plenty of tools out there to help you. But, there lies the problem. There are often so many choices, that it can be hard to decide which one suits you. Sure, you could sign up for free trials, but that could still take ages to sort out which one you prefer. It might sound daunting, but rest assured that this article has you covered. It might not be the longest list of helpful tools, but it’s certainly got the best of the best. Let’s jump right into it. Here are 8 tools every designer needs to know about:
As a designer, it’s pretty common to have very busy times and times that, well, aren’t so busy. For that reason, it’s insanely important to keep up with your budgets. The online project management software called Teamweek offers quite a few helpful features, but for this, we’re going to focus on the budget calculator feature.
It’s really no secret that it’s important to keep up with your budget. After all, we have to make money somehow. The Teamweek budget calculator is a powerful and simple tool that makes it easy to calculate and estimate your budget for your next big project, and it’s a great tool to have in your arsenal.
You can’t really talk about tools every designer needs without mentioning Photoshop think everyone, regardless of their career choice, has used or seen Photoshop at some point. Photoshop is one of those tools that everyone just knows about. As a designer, it’s pretty mandatory to have editing software, and Photoshop is definitely one of the best. The only drawback to Photoshop is the amount of time it takes to learn how to use it. Yes, it’s a powerful tool, but it is packed full of every feature and shortcut you can imagine. My advice would be to take a few online courses and set time aside each day to make sure you know every little secret that Photoshop has to offer. It’ll be worth it in the end.
As a designer, I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of files to send and receive. It helps to have a tool dedicated to making sure you get those files to where they need to be on time. Dropbox is the perfect solution for you file sharing needs. They offer a few different packages with varying amounts of storage, but what really sells it is the speed and security. Your files are safe, and they’re shared with lightning fast speeds.
Presentations are powerful visual tools to help you sell your services to clients. Keynote has been praised by its users for years. Although it’s only available for iOS, it’s a very comprehensive tool that takes your presentations to the next level. Whether you customize your own, or use a template provided for you, Keynote is the fastest and most useful tool for creating engaging presentations to bring your work to life.
In the design field, there will always be a need to make brochures, ebooks, online magazines, and things related to them. There’s something about flipping the pages of a book, whether is digital or physical that will always bring a smile to people’s’ face. Flipsnack is a simple and powerful tool that allows you to bring the familiarity of a book to the digital word. You can use it for anything really, but you’ll be able to create interactive brochures and flyers for your customers to enjoy.
When you’re with someone, standing right next to each other, it’s fairly simple to point something out. All you really have to do is point and speak. However, online, it’s a little more complicated. Skitch allows you to highlight the important parts of any online publication, but it doesn’t stop there. You can use Skitch to markup a PDF file, snap a screenshot, add annotations to a photo, or even draw up something completely new. Skitch is one of those tools that you don’t realize you need until you’ve actually used it.
If you’re ever in the need for stock photos, then look no further than Pexels. You can shop (for free btw) for literally thousands of photos. Visuals are super important in any project, and Pexels makes it easy to find the image that you’ve been looking for. They’re all completely free, and all it takes is a quick search at the top of the page to browse images based on your keywords.
Have you ever had a hard time with deciding the color scheme of a project? Not anymore. Coolors was designed specifically with designers in mind. It’s a super quick color scheme generator that has saved tons of time for designers across the world. There are an infinite amount of color schemes that you could get, and it’s all based on your preferences. Once you’ve found the right colors, you can export them and save them to your profile easily.
We could go on and on for days about these tools every designer needs, but you’ll never really find out exactly how great they are until you use them for yourself. So, with that said, go and take advantage of those free trials, and let us know what you think!
When you’re putting together a build process for a site, it’s so dang useful to look at other people’s processes. I ran across Andrew Welch’s “An Annotated webpack 4 Config for Frontend Web Development” the other day and was glad he blogged it. If I was kicking off a new site where I wanted a webpack build, then I’d almost certainly reference something like this rather than start from scratch. At the same time, it made me realize how build processes all have such different needs and how unique those needs are now from even a few years ago in the hay day of Grunt and Gulp build processes.
I was looking around for an annotated Gulp reference file and came across another one of Andrew’s articles — “A Gulp Workflow for Frontend Development Automation” — from just one year earlier! Here’s a simplified list of what he was doing with Gulp (which he explains in more detail in the post):
Compile Sass
Run Autoprefixer
Create Sourcemaps
Minify
Inject critical CSS and bits of scripts
Run Babel
Uglify
Do style injection/reloading
Run accessibility audit
Generate icon font
Optimize images
Speaking of Gulp and annotated build processes, I’m working on a CSS-Tricks redesign and, for various reasons, went with a Gulp build. Against my better judgment, I wrote it from scratch, and this is how far I’ve gotten. It doesn’t feel particularly robust or efficient, so rewrites and suggestions are welcome!
Now, a year later, here’s what the build process is being asked to do:
Run differently-configured web servers
Hot module replacement
Dynamic code splitting
Lazy loading
Make modern and legacy code bundles
Cache busting
Create service worker
Compile PostCSS
Optimize images / create .webp
Process .vue files
Run Tailwind and PurgeCSS
It’s funny how quickly things change. We’re still essentially asking for help compiling files and optimizing things, but the tools we use change, the code we write changes, the way we talk about development changes, the expectations of development changes, the best practices change… makes ya sweat. ?
At Twitter I used the approach described here to publish the company’s SVG icon library in several different formats: optimized SVGs, plain JavaScript modules, React DOM components, and React Native components.
One thing different systems tend to share is some kind of build process to turn a folder full of SVG files into a more programmatically digestible format. For example, gulp-svg-sprite takes your folder of SVGs and creates a SVG sprite (chunk of s) to use in that type of SVG icon system. Grunticon processes your folder of SVGs into a CSS file, and is capable of enhancing them into inline SVG. Gallagher’s script creates React components out of them, and like he said, that’s great for delivery to different targets as well as performance optimization, like code splitting.
This speaks to the versatility of SVG. It’s just markup, so it’s easy to work with.
Here are two ways to build a site (abstractly) that feel diametrically opposed to me:
Build a site as an SPA (Single Page App). The page loads a skeleton HTML page that executes JavaScript as quickly as it can. The JavaScript calls an API to get data, and then the page renders content. Navigation of the site is more API calls to get the data it needs and re-rendering.
Build a site as statically-generated. A build process runs in which the entire site is built out as static HTML files with all the content baked into them. JavaScript isn’t required at all for the site to work.
That feels just about as different as can be. But weirdly, they kinda aren’t:
They are both JAMstack. They can be hosted statically as neither of them needs backend languages running on the server they are hosted on.
They are both building content based on an API of data. It’s more obvious in the first one, but you can think of a static site generator as hitting an API of data as it runs and builds itself. It’s just that the API might be temporarily created from content files it finds on disk. Or it might be the exact same API used for the former site.
It’s the last edition of this year, and I’m pretty stoked what 2018 brought for us, what happened, and how the web evolved. Let’s recap that and remind us of what each of us learned this year: What was the most useful feature, API, library we used? And how have we personally changed?
For this month’s update, I’ve collected yet another bunch of articles for you. If that’s not enough reading material for you yet, you can always find more in the archive or the Evergreen list which contains the most important articles since the beginning of the Web Development Reading List. I hope your days until the end of the year won’t be too stressful and wish you all the best. See you next year!
News
Microsoft just announced that they’ll change their Edge strategy: They’re going to use Chromium as the new browser engine for Desktop instead of EdgeHTML and might even provide Microsoft Edge for macOS. They’ll also help with development on the Blink engine from now on.
Chrome 71 is out and brings relative time support via the Internationalization API. Also new is that speech synthesis now requires user activation.
Firefox will soon offer users a browser setting to block all permission requests automatically. This will affect autoplaying videos, web notifications, geolocation requests, camera and microphone access requests. The need to auto-block requests shows how horribly wrong developers are using these techniques. Sad news for those who rely on such requests for their services, like WebRTC calling services, for example.
General
We’ve finally come up with ways to access and use websites offline with amazing technology. But one thing we forgot about is that for the past thirty years we taught people that the web is online, so most people don’t know that offline usage even exists. A lesson in user experience design and the importance of reminding us of the history of the medium we’re building for.
Erica Hall shows us examples of why most of ‘UX design’ is a myth and why not only design makes a great product but also the right product strategy and business model. The best example why you should read this is when Erica writes “Virgin America. Rdio. Google Reader. Comcast. Which of these offered a good experience? Which of these still exists?” A truth you can’t ignore and, luckily, this is not a pessimistic but very thought-provoking article with great tips for how we can use that knowledge to improve our products. With strategy, with design, with a business model that fits.
Available behind flags in Chrome 71, the new Background Fetch makes it possible to fetch resources that take a while to load — movies, for example — in the background.
Is it still a good idea to use JavaScript for loading web fonts? Zach Leatherman shares why we should decide case by case and why it’s often best to use modern CSS and font-display: swap;.
Doka is a new standalone JavaScript image editor worth keeping in mind. While it’s not a free product, it features very handy methods for editing with a pleasant user experience, and by paying an annual fee, you ensure that you get bugfixes and support.
“The Power of Web Components” shares the basic concepts, how to start using them, and why using your own HTML elements instead of gluing HTML, the related CSS classes, and a JavaScript trigger together can simplify things so much.
Security
Scott Helme shares information about a new security header that we can make use of: Clear Site Data allows site owners to clear data from cache, (local/session/permanent) storage, or cookies. This could be useful to delete sensitive or private data stored in localStorage or authentication cookies easily.
Terence Eden explores how a lot of big sites offering payment are including unauthenticated, unverified JavaScript from third parties. He elaborates what this means, why it’s so harmful, and how we could solve the issue. That said, the Stripe JavaScript bundle that you need to include isn’t offering Sub Resource Integrity either.
Another security incident happened with a very popular npm package: event-stream was published with malware code that steals specific Bitcoin wallets from computers. Please check the dependencies on your machine and ensure you update to the latest package versions. npm audit also helps identify such issues.
Privacy
Do you have a husband or wife? Kids? Other relatives? Then this essential guide to protecting your family’s data is something you should read and turn into action. The internet is no safe place, and you want to ensure your relatives understand what they’re doing — and it’s you who can protect them by teaching them or setting up better default settings.
Amazon’s cloud unit launches Arm-based server chips, and by that, they’re able to reduce costs by about 45% (e.g. for web servers). This means that the energy consumption is much lower and overall efficiency is higher which is a good sign for our planet as well. We need more of these evolutionary infrastructure upgrades that lower the impact of tech on our climate.
Shana Lynch tells us what makes someone an ethical business leader, which values are important, how to stand upright when things get tough, and how to prepare for uncomfortable situations upfront.
Ozoemena Nonso tries to explain why we often aren’t happy. The thief of our happiness is not comparing ourselves with others; it’s that we struggle to get the model of comparison right. An incredibly good piece of life advice if you compare yourself with others often and feel that your happiness suffers from it.
Jeffrey Silverstein is a teacher and struggled a lot with finding time for side projects while working full-time. Now he found a solution which he shares with us in this great article about “How to balance full-time work with creative projects.” An inspiring read that I can totally relate to.
Ben Werdmüller shares his thoughts on why lifestyle businesses are massively underrated. But what’s a lifestyle business? He defines them as non-venture-funded businesses that allow their owners to maintain a certain level of income but not more. As a fun sidenote, this article shows how crazy rental prizes have become on the U.S. West Coast.
Jake Knapp shares how he survived six years with a distraction-free smartphone — no emails, no notifications. And he has some great tips for us and an exercise to try out. I recently moved all my apps into one folder on the second screen to ensure I need to search for the app which usually means I really want to open it and don’t just do it to distract myself.
Ryan Avent wrote about why we work so hard. This essay is well-researched and explains why we see work as crucial, why we fall in love with it, and why our lifestyle and society embraces to work harder all the time.
Instagram truly is the social media platform of this decade. It has exploded in popularity and seen massive growth. Instagram has become a social media platform for the masses, and for all types of purposes. From billion dollar companies like Snickers, to influencers, to freelancers. Instagram has one thing that everyone, no matter what they wish to achieve wants, and that is people’s attention.
In order to do anything, whether it is to convince someone to hire you as a freelancer, or whether you’re just looking to spread awareness about your business and what you do, you need people’s attention.
As such, the usage of Instagram has exploded, because people realize the immense power that Instagram has. In fact, it was not long ago that Instagram reached the staggering number of 1 billion monthly users.
Instagram has proven to be an effective tool for getting people’s attention and spreading the message you want to spread, but with increased users comes increased competition. No longer is it enough to simply snap a photo, upload it and wait for the results to roll in. Now, you need a more thought-through and well-planned strategy for how you’re going to operate and win on the platform.
Since Instagram is a visual platform, driven by visual content, visual content is everything. Of course, as a designer, you are one step ahead, but in order to fully succeed on Instagram, you need to know how to create a visually appealing Instagram that stands out from the crowd and gets people’s attention.
How to Create a Visually Appealing Instagram
Before starting to post content on Instagram, you want to decide on an overall theme. Think of your theme as the way you want to be perceived and what feelings you want to create. By creating a theme, you’ll be able to make your Instagram posts and profile more consistent—as opposed to just sharing random posts without any thought behind them. Creating an overall theme is also great since it makes your profile more instantly recognizable and makes it stand out from your competitors.
There are several elements to creating a theme with your Instagram posts, and these elements make up an overall theme, but these are the most important aspects you want to pay attention to:
1. Pick a Color Scheme
Having a consistent color scheme on Instagram is probably the easiest way you can make your Instagram profile more visually appealing fast.
Creating a color scheme is simple, too! Simply decide on which colors/side of colors that you want your account to lean towards and then go with that. It’s not necessarily that your posts need to be all about a single color every time, but it’s more common to focus on warm/cold schemes, as well as choosing a color and then incorporating various colors that are variants of the chosen color.
You can choose 1-3 colors that you want to focus on, and which you will always incorporate in your posts. Just take a look at Coca-Cola. No matter where you come across them, it’s obvious which colors they want you to associate their brand with.
A consistent color scheme is key to a consistent theme, and this allows your posts and profile to look more coherent, but most importantly, it helps make your posts Instantly recognisable. Once you’ve chosen your colors, there are several ways to make your posts aligned with your color scheme.
One of the most common is to edit them in the same way and then increase the saturation of the objects in the image that are your color scheme color.
Another common and effective method is to strategically include elements in your images which have the color of your color scheme.
2. Choose One Filter and Stick With It
This is similar to having a color scheme, but there is nothing that say you can’t work with filters AND use a filter as well.
Choosing a filter and then using it consistently is the ultimate way to make your posts more coherent. The filter adds a similar look and style to your posts, and this allows you to create an obvious connection between all of your posts.
Using a consistent filter to make your posts more connected is super simple. Simply go through Instagram’s filters (or filters in any editing app) and then choose one that you like. Now, just use it consistently across all your posts.
A great example is @Aleksandrazee. With her consistent filters, she has been able to create a very coherent feed that looks extremely inviting.
3. Don’t Forget to Take Great Photos
First things first.
Before you do anything else, it’s crucial that you focus on this above all.
The reason is that it’s very hard to save a low-quality image with the help of a filter.
Instagram is a visually-driven social platform, and this demands you to pay great attention to the images you take. Not just the way you edit them.
You don’t need a super expensive camera to take great photos anymore. The phone in your pocket is more than enough. Just make sure that you avoid any rookie mistakes when photographing, such as having a dirty lens, shaking, taking blurry pictures, and so on. Also, when taking photos, you also want to think of what you’re going to post about, and this brings me to my next point…
4. Choose a Subject
This one is super important. While how your images look is also very important, if your posts are just beautiful but don’t really bring any real value, they won’t see a lot of traction anyway.
This is why you need to not only focus on creating appealing images, but also focus on what you’re going to take images of.
Ask yourself: ”What are my followers and fans interested in?” and then build upon that.
After all, this may be the most important step to creating a visual appealing feed, so pay some extra attention to it.
5. Audit Your Images
Before posting on Instagram, you need to make sure that they are up to standards. Both in terms of quality, but also in a visual theme and style sense.
Does your post align with your visual theme? Does your post align with your style, color scheme, and overall theme?
If so, great! Go ahead and post it. If not, you may want to rethink posting it.
6. Use Natural Light
Bad lightning is often the reason for low-quality images on Instagram, and I cannot emphasise just how important good lightning is for your Instagram posts’ quality.
If you have bad lightning for your images, it won’t matter that much if you use consistent colors or a consistent filter, because good lightning really lays the foundation for a great photo on Instagram.
And make sure you don’t use poor lightning, for example from a lamp. Natural light is always best. With natural light, you’ll be able to take higher quality photos with a greater sharpness and quality.
7. Plan Your Feed Layout
Most people on Instagram just choose pictures to upload randomly, but think about the fact that your Instagram posts are after posting, showcased in your profile like a collage, and paying attention to how your posts look in unity is part of making your Instagram profile visually appealing.
Sharing visually appealing images is the first step, but if you truly want to go above and beyond, planning your feed layout is the answer.
Don’t just pay attention to how the image looks in people’s feed, but consider how you can make your profile feed visually appealing and coherent.
Before sharing any new posts, ask yourself, “How will my feel look with this image in it?” This allows for greater planning with your feed.
8. Set up Your Profile Properly
When it comes to designing your Instagram profile properly, it’s not only about creating visually appealing content for your page. Even though the visual content you post plays an important role in your success on Instagram—no matter what you wish to achieve—If you haven’t designed and set up your profile properly, it will cripple your success on the platform.
As such, you need to begin by completing all of the information boxes in your Instagram profile.
Start by adding a profile picture to your account. Make sure that it is high-quality and attention grabbing. Ideally, it should be in a strong color, alternatively the color of your visual theme. If you have your own personal brand where you yourself are your brand, a faceshot is great. On Instagram, your profile picture will display as 110 x 110 pixels in the mobile app. But if you look at your profile from the web, it will be displayed in a larger size, so Instagram recommends that you use an image that is 180 x 180 pixels for optimal quality.
Second, you have your bio, also known as profile description. This is probably the most important part of your Instagram profile. You only have 150 characters for your Instagram bio, so it’s important that you are clear, concise, and to the point.
Your Instagram needs to quickly tell people who you are, what you do, and why they should follow you.
Lastly, you have the contact information. If you have an Instagram business profile, you have the option to add contact buttons to your Instagram profile, which includes call, email, and location. If you don’t, you still have the option to add your website to your profile. This helps add more context to your audience, and allows you to tell them what you do.
