Talking about the current trends, one of the most profitable and trending business opportunities have emerged with eCommerce.

This is the reason why more than 3 million eCommerce stores are created using Woocommerce making it the most used and preferred eCommerce plugin. Moreover, talking about the total proportion it has in percentage, it covers around 42 percent of the eCommerce stores on the web.

Though it is quite handy to use for development of an eCommerce store, if you are planning something with solid eCommerce goals in mind, it is essential to reach for some advanced plugins and extensions.

Moreover, some of these additional extensions and plugins may need you to pay extra money but if you work a little wisely, you can pick the best picks for free creating maximum functionality of your store.

Here we have a small list of Woocommerce plugins that can help you generate revenues and conversions through your eCommerce store without spending on big purchases.

Product Import Export

When you move your business to the virtual world taking benefit of eCommerce store development, you actually hit into an industry which is very demanding. Therefore, it gets natural to have a shift towards those tasks and tools that can help you in boosting your eCommerce services.

Product import export is actually that kind of plugin which can save you a lot of effort. It lets you work on product export and import quickly using a CSV file upload. Moreover, it allows you to avoid uploading the data for each product manually because it just needs a simple spreadsheet of detail and the rest is done automatically.

For instance, if you have an inventory management needs or your supplier gets you a spreadsheet for products, all you need to do is export the CSV file matching all the mandatory fields to those of Woocommerce and upload the file into the system.

WooCommerce Multilingual

This is actually the most essential plugin to be added into your Woocommerce store, especially when you need to target a big audience considering diversity factors like language and demographics. Woocommerce multilingual can help you get a better hit because it supports the most frequently used 11 languages in the world targeting more than 90 million users.

Ultimately, it is a goldmine for the sales targeting a massive community of buyers who feel more connected with their own language. Woocommerce multilingual enables you to target users who speak multiple languages with complete support over unique URLs as well as page translations. So, if you are planning to deliver services across multiple nations or you are targeting an area which is diverse in languages, Woocommerce multilingual is a must use plugin.

YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier

If you are looking for some of the biggest factors that can affect your sales, it is the product images which you share on your website apart from the prices which you feature. Every customer who reaches your eCommerce store needs to be very clear about the product quality and features. These goals could only be achieved with the right presentation through images.

Even if you are selling a product similar to that of your competitor, chances are high that the store which features an easy zoom option with a high-quality image would get more conversions. Wondering why? Think of yourself looking for a pair of shoes and you are not able to see the product clearly zooming in on its details? On the other hand, you have a store that helps you with quick zoom option where you can check for every detail precisely.

Now which eCommerce store you would prefer to make that purchase? Obviously, the one where you find more convenient to explore the product. Though the cost of the product on both websites may create a difference of opinion bad quality image and no zoom options could bring doubts in a user’s mind.

So, YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier enables a user to zoom on any image just by hovering the mouse on the product image. However, the zoom view and size of the image on zooming are all customizable for the optimum experience. So, if you are in need of some big jumps with conversions, make sure you don’t forget to use the YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier.

Booster for WooCommerce

If you want to make your store supercharge with entire information related to cost of sales, currency, stock management, payment gateways, checkout customization, invoicing, shipping options, and much more. This plugin is perfect for those who need to keep a check on their sales and profits.

The booster plugin is designed to help you exclude the entire extra costs related to taxes, shipping, and fees paid at the customer end to calculate the overall profit for your business. Some of the additional features you can explore with booster for Woocommerce include:

• Crowdfunding
• Display product availability status
• Display country based products
• Customized shopping cart options

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist

This is one of the most amazing plugins which every eCommerce store needs to have integrated with it. YITH WooCommerce Wishlist enables a user visiting your eCommerce store to have a product wishlist for the favorites and share them with their loved ones for ensuring perfect picks.

This tool is perfect for delivering a great holiday shopping experience to all the users who need to have a great shopping time with friends and family.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search

Now, this is again essential for every eCommerce store to create a completely personalized search experience for the users. It is a perfect plugin for the growing eCommerce enthusiasts because it gives the benefit at the user end to make the search easier. Ajax search enables a user to locate the product which they want by hitting the right category.

When it comes to the user experience on an eCommerce store, you should necessarily present the content in a sorted way. This means a user no longer needs to go through multiple pages and categories before they reach for their need.

For instance, if a user is looking for an iPad, the search can automatically modify to “iPad in tablets” for an easier user reach. This is a great plugin that helps the user to reach the required product by understanding the criteria of search used by the customer.

Stripe Payment Gateway

Earlier, the Woocommerce store only enable support for single payment gateway i.e. PayPal. However, it was not desirable for most of the users as well as store owners to get along with a single payment gateway which needs the user to reach an external PayPal website.

Then comes the introduction of a better payment gateway named, Stripe Payment Gateway. This gateway helps the user to go for onsite payments like PayPal pro or stripe.

The best part of using the Stripe Payment Gateway is that it is free of cost. Moreover, if you would need to install the stripe payment gateway on your eCommerce store a few years back, it needs you to go for downloads and extensions. But watching on its popularity, the installation process has become very streamlined. So, if you need to install this plugin on your website, stripe gateway is just a click away to install on your Woocommerce store.

WooCommerce Currency Switcher

Working on eCommerce store is all about leveraging the potential to the global grounds but before making any move to reach the international consumers, it is very necessary that you should understand every single technicality of the successful project.

But when we talk about the technicalities of the eCommerce store which needs to serve global customers, the first thing that takes the priority is currency converter. In case, you are not able to present your product prices in the local currency of the user, it may cause reduce the chances of the user to buy your product.

Though it offers certain restrictions to the user, it is the best free plugin available till date, for currency conversion goals. First of all, it only allows two currencies at a time and secondly, you need to upload the flag of your country manually into the media library for better conversions. However, you can always pick the premium version which allows multiple currency support, the free version has its own benefits to redeem.

The best part of using this tool is the ease to reach real-time exchange rates which are accurately retrieved from yahoo finance. Moreover, it has three different dedicated widgets for currency, conversion rate calculator, and latest exchange rates enabled with geolocation features based on IP. all in all, it is a perfect plugin for creating a great user experience when a user is having difficulty dealing with the currency or prices.

WooCommerce MailChimp

If you are concerned about your customers, one thing which is necessary to keep in mind is retaining an existing customer is much more important than acquiring new. So rather than keeping your focus on the new users, you have to work on the existing database of customers which can be done quite effectively through a mailing list.

WooCommerce MailChimp is the best plugin for email marketing which is vital for any business that runs on eCommerce. This plugin automatically works on a subscription where a user can either be added to the mailing list the moment they enroll into business or you can get a checkbox for the users to subscribe for your emails.

This means, if you are a person who is concerned about the customers, all you need to do is treat your customers with pleasing information that reaches them through right email marketing done with WooCommerce MailChimp.

Conclusion

If you are planning to turn your eCommerce store into a conversion machine, we got you a perfect list of Woocommerce plugins that can help you solve your purpose, no doubt there are plenty of plugins available all around that may suit your needs, the above collection of plugins is a perfect kit of essentials that every eCommerce store should aim at.
Though it is always a good move to have back from an expert eCommerce Development Company in India, all these plugins are actually the potential keys that can help you interact with your audience in a better way without causing any hindrance to your revenue goals. So, if you are planning to make your eCommerce store more convenient or you need to go for a fresh start, now you have a list of plugins to include with Woocommerce to make the most of your eCommerce business. All the best!

For transforming your WordPress website into a fully operational subscription website, you will require to have a WordPress membership plugin.

With the help of the membership website plugin, you can develop a high-class content collection and let only registered members access it. The stats depicted by statista offers the position of the most famous online subscription websites in the United States of America as of April 2018 depending upon the proportion of visitors. In April 2018, meal kit service provider based on website visitors was successful in capturing 935,599 visitors.

Selecting an ideal WordPress registration plugin is essential for your business house as it is challenging to step back if your decision doesn’t prove to be right.

Be it for producing recurring revenues, developing a list of registered members or for selling online courses, the following list will support you select the best membership plugin WordPress for your needs.

1- MemberPress

MemberPress is the most convincing WordPress membership plugin and holds all essential properties which you will require to develop a robust membership website. MemberPress also permits you to convert your current website into a fully operational membership website without any chaos.

For this, you are required to download MemberPress Plugin on your current website, select your payment gateway data, arrange your products, and initiate inviting your clients to connect with your membership website.

MemberPress will help you limit access to particular web pages, posts, personalized post kinds and any of four clients document. The plugin collaborated ideally with leading e-mail marketing platforms such as AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse, etc.

MemberPress is a WordPress paid membership plugin, whose cost initiated from $129/ year for the license of an individual website.

2- LearnDash

LearnDash is the best membership plugin WordPress 2019. It was developed for building and selling online courses on WordPress platforms. It permits you to deliver a powerful learning experience to your members and helps the newly released gamification, micro-content, and social learning trends.

Offering courses have become comfortable with the help of LearnDash. Some methods to offer your online courses are:

• Membership

Offer traditional access for all the or prevailing online courses.

• One-time price

Execute a shopping cart where your clients can purchase single courses.

• Subscription

Subscription-based selling can offer you a chance to even recurring payments.

It permits learners to explore fresh courses depending on the links they acquire as they finish their current course. This allows them to hike up retention rate and ensure that more users are indulged in your online course. As a reward, customized certificates and badges can be given to the learner based on its performance. You can even provide front end users profile where members can ascertain their tasks.

The cost of LearnDash license initiates from $199 for one year for an individual website.

Additional Helpful Resources Related WordPress Plugins:

11 Best Analytics Solutions for WordPress

15 Best Live Chat Plugins for WordPress: Features and Benefits

9 Plugins Helps to Enhance Your WordPress Site in Search Engine Results

3- Teachable

Teachable is the best free WordPress membership plugin 2018. It is a kind of all rounds solution for developing and publishing an excellent online course. It is a free-stand solution so that the user can collaborate their online courses into their current website or host them using Teachable subdomain.

This comes with a robust editor which permits the user to develop and release top-notch sales pages to hike up the conversion rate.

4- Paid Member Subscriptions

Paid Member Subscription is a flexible WordPress association membership plugin which will aid the users to arrange a fully functional membership website. The basic plan of this plugin is available free of cost while if the user desires to use more advanced properties such as content dripping, they will have to access paid plans.

After downloading the Paid Membership Subscription, the user enjoys the facility to limit access to their website contents with posts, tags, pages, or divisions. The properties can be accessed on a trial basis on the demonstration website to ascertain how the plugin functions.

The properties of the Paid Member Subscription consist of:

• Handling unlimited members
• Through Navigation menu filter, the members can only view what they are permitted to.
• Facilities in accepting payments through PayPal express checkout, PayPal Pro, and stripe.
• Worldwide limited access to content depending upon taxonomy Post types and terms.
• Content dripping with the timed launch of reach
• Discount coupons for functioning promotion of rewards for members while they upgrade to a higher membership level.

In terms of pricing policy, there are 3 plans present:

• Free
• Hobbyist
• Pro

The paid plans need to be updated every year, so for regularly accessing their featured, the user requires to lay yearly continually.

If the user desired to have a membership plugin which offers them a higher level of versatility and the potential to drop content, the Paid member subscription is an ideal choice.

To wrap up,

With the help of ideal Membership Plugin for WordPress which comprises of premium quality of free WordPress membership plugin as well as paid alternatives, any user can initiate delivering limited access content on their websites to their members who opt for it or their subscribers.

If the user desires to develop a private community or a paid online course, these best free WordPress membership plugin 2019 hold the potential to organize and arrange their website in a short span of time with the help any one of these Plugins.

The plugins mentioned above only depict a small proportion of tools present across, for WordPress. There exists not a single size which caters to all ideal WordPress membership plugins as although the above-stated ones are famous and well-known ones they come with their own merits and demerits and the pricing policy as well.

Before taking up a decision, it is best to be well aware of your strategy to handle the member zone and that properties are required to be compiled such as course delivery, content dripping, ease of usage, recurring payments, personalized landing pages or pay on every view access.

Once all these things are, and the specifications see jotted down, taking up a decision will be a much simpler task.

Accessibility is all the rage these days, specifically when it comes to color contrast. I’ve stumbled upon a couple of tools this week that I think are pretty nifty for helping make sure that all of the text on our websites is legible regardless of what background color they might have.

First up is the Accessible Color Generator which happens to be a wonderful tool for picking alternative colors. Let’s say you’re working on a brand with color X. You can generate a host of other complimentary colors like this:

Next up is Contrast, a rather great MacOS app that sits in the menu bar at all times and helps identify accessible color pairings based on WCAG Guidelines. This one is particularly useful if you happen to be a designer:

This reminds me of a wonderful post about how the Lyft design team re-approached the way they use color in their app. Kevyn Arnott explains:

Color, at least on the surface, appears almost naively simple, yet as it scales across larger products it becomes unbelievably complex. You have thousands of people building products all at once, and those products are all heavily reliant on color. This puts a lot of pressure on the color system to ensure that all the products are being created consistently, but very hard to implement since it’s all too easy to apply colors on a one-off basis.

The team then went ahead and built ColorBox.io which lets you systematically build out a ton of colors for your design systems work. It’s pretty nifty!

Plus the folks over at GOV.UK made their own color accessibility tool called Contrast Checker which (as you have guessed by the name) helps check the contrast between the background of an element and the page itself:

And, of course, there’s the trusty WebAIM contrast checker, which is a go-to for many developers out there.

So far, we’ve looked at tools that check contrast. But there is a class of tooling that can automate accessible contrasts during development. Josh Bader wrote up an approach that enforces high contrast by pairing CSS custom properties with the calc() function. Facundo Corradini did something similar that switches font color based on the background color behind it.

Oh! And we may have something to look forward to with the color-adjust property. It is proposed in the CSS Color Module Level 4 specification and could give browsers more control to adjust color values that are declared in the stylesheet. It’s not really geared towards color contrast, but there’s something interesting about handing off the responsibility of rendering color values to the browser based on certain conditions.

The post Color contrast accessibility tools appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Shepherds are good at tending to their sheep, bringing order and structure to their herds. Even if there are hundreds of those wooly animals, a shepherd still herds them back to the farm at the end of the day.

When dealing with data, programmers often don’t know if it is correctly filtered or sorted. This is especially painful when iterating over an array then displaying the data on a site without knowing the locations of each element receiving it. The Grid Shepherd is a technique that helps position and sort items where you want them to be, using CSS Grid instead of JavaScript.

That’s what we’re going to look at in this post. The Grid Shepherd technique can bring order and structure to the data we work with while giving us greater visibility to where and how it’s being used than we would be able to otherwise.

Let’s dig in.

Sorting with JavaScript

We’re going to start by iterating over an unordered array of farm animals. Imagine that cows and sheep are happily grazing the fields. They can be grouped together programmatically with the Array.prototype.sort method and listed on a page:

let animals = [
  { name: 'Edna', animal: 'cow'   },
  { name: 'Liam', animal: 'sheep' },
  { name: 'Fink', animal: 'sheep' },
  { name: 'Olga', animal: 'cow'   },
]
let sortedAnimals = animals.sort((a, b) => {
  if (a.animal < b.animal) return -1
  if (a.animal > b.animal) return 1
  return 0
})
console.log(sortedAnimals)
/* Returns:
  [ { name: 'Elga', animal: 'cow'   },
    { name: 'Olga', animal: 'cow'   },
    { name: 'Liam', animal: 'sheep' },
    { name: 'Fink', animal: 'sheep' } ]
*/

Meet the Grid Shepherd

The Grid Shepherd method makes sorting data possible without the use of JavaScript. Instead, we rely on CSS Grid to do the lifting for us.

The structure is exactly the same as the JavaScript array of objects above, only represented in DOM nodes instead.

<main>
  <div class="cow">Edna</div>
  <div class="sheep">Liam</div>
  <div class="sheep">Jenn</div>
  <div class="cow">Fink</div>
</main>

See the Pen
1. Start by David Bernegger (@Achilles_2)
on CodePen.

To herd the animals, we have to fence them into a common area, which is what we’re using the element to do. By setting that fence with display: grid, we’re creating a grid formatting context where we can define the column (or row) each animal should occupy.

.sheep { grid-column: 1; }
.cow { grid-column: 2; }

And with grid-auto-flow: dense, each animal orders itself into the first available spot of each defined area. This can also be used with as many different sort options as you want — simply define another column and the data will be shepherded magically into it.

main
  display: grid;
  grid-auto-flow: dense;
}

.sheep { grid-column: 1; }
.cow { grid-column: 2; }

See the Pen
2. Final by David Bernegger (@Achilles_2)
on CodePen.

Pro Shepherding

We can take our herding example further with CSS Counters. That way, we can count how many animals we have in each column and — applying Heydon Pickering’s quantity queries from Lea Verou’s Talk in 2011 — conditionally style the them depending on how many there are.

Quantity queries rely on some sort of selector for counting the classes — which would be great with the :nth-child(An+B [of S]?) pseudo-class notation, but it’s currently only available in Safari). That means we have to use the :nth-of-type() selector as a workaround.

We need some new element types for this to work. This could be realized through Web Components or renaming any HTML element to a custom name. This works even if these elements are not in the HTML spec, as browsers use HTMLUnknownElement for undefined tags which results in them behaving much like a div. The document looks now like this:

<fence>
  <sheep>Lisa</sheep>
  <sheep>Bonnie</sheep>
  <cow>Olaf</cow>
  <sheep>Jenn</sheep>
</fence>

Now we can access our custom element types. Let’s apply a red background when the number of sheep or the cows is equal to or less than 10.

sheep:nth-last-of-type(n+10),
sheep:nth-last-of-type(n+10) ~ sheep,
cow:nth-last-of-type(n+10),
cow:nth-last-of-type(n+10) ~ cow, {
  background-color: red;
}

Additionally the the counters can be simply realized by using counter-reset: countsheep countcow; on the parent element and using the before selector to target each element and count up.

sheep::before {
  counter-increment: countsheep;  
  content: counter(countsheep); 
}

Here, we’re going to reach for Vue to dynamically add and remove animals using Vue transitions with two different sort options. Watch as the animals naturally occupy the correct columns, even as more are added and some are removed:

See the Pen
3. Final with Vue Transitions by David Bernegger (@Achilles_2)
on CodePen.

Grid Shepherd can also be used with any non-ordered data to:

• separate and count voters in a poll (maybe as two sections with their corresponding profile picture) with live insertion;
• group people / co-workers according to their position, age, height; and
• create any hierarchical structure

Shepherding and accessibility

grid-auto-flow: dense does not change the DOM structure of the grid — it merely reorders the contained elements visually. A side effect can be seen in the last example when ordering alphabetically as the counter numbers get mixed up. Changing the DOM structure not only affects people who use screen readers, but also effects tab traversal.

Also note that a flat document structure might not be good for screen readers. Instead, I would treat these presentational grids as graphs and provide the information with a longer textual alternative.

Round ‘em up!

It’s pretty neat to see how a powerful CSS layout tool like grid can be leveraged for use cases that fall outside of traditional layouts needs and into things where we may have reached for other languages in the past. In this case, we can see how the layout benefits of CSS Grid and the dynamic data-handling capabilities of JavaScript overlap and how that gives us more choices — and power — to bend rendered data to our will.

The post Using the Grid Shepherd Technique to Order Data with CSS appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Tricking people can be… well… tricky. The problem, at its most fundamental level, is that people only like to be tricked when they expect to be tricked. Obviously, if you trick them and take money they never intended to give away, well that’s theft. They rightfully get angry. If you say, “Hey, wanna see a trick? Give me a dollar.”; well then they expect some David Copperfield-level magic, don’t they?

In fact, they demand it.

And that’s the thing about designing interfaces and websites, isn’t it? People want a certain amount of information provided to them, and then they want everything else to happen where they can’t see it. The amount of information they want to see will vary based on the skills of the user, but ultimately, they want to be “tricked”, at least a little bit.

These are the best, and maybe the only reasons you should ever be allowed to “trick” your users:

1. To Make Waiting Less Tedious

Waiting can be frustrating, and waiting for computers to do, “whatever they’re doing now, Gaaawwd!”, can be extra infuriating at times. That’s why God invented the loading icon.

Loading and waiting icons, particularly the ones that don’t function as actual progress bars, are perhaps the oldest example of distraction-to-improve-the-UX. They distract the eyes with a spinny-thing, while reassuring the brain that something is happening behind the scenes… probably.

Of course, with time, we’ve developed all sorts of ways to make waiting seem like less of a chore. Simple transitional animations can give the browser a few extra milliseconds to load content from the next page or screen. Some more graphically heavy sites are (and I hate that this is still a thing), using animated splash screens as pre-loaders. Chrome gives you a game to play while you wait for your Internet to come back.

Pretty much all solutions involve some sort of animation, if I’m honest. Moving things around on the screen is probably the most effective distraction there is, outside of auto-playing audio. And well… don’t do that.

2. To Give New Context to Old Actions

I featured Kutia, a web development agency, in the May 2019 edition of our monthly portfolio showcase for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the way they “trick” the users into going to the contact page. Basically they just ask, “What can we help you with?”, and provide a number of potential answers for people to click on.

Answers include things like “I need a new WordPress website”, “I want to sell things online”, and others. All of these answers take them straight to the contact page, but they also give people an idea of what the agency can do for them. It also helps the user to focus on communicating their end goal to the agency.

Even when you figure out the trick, it’s helpful enough that I don’t see how anyone could get mad.

3. To Smooth Over Rough Edges in the Experience

The human eye is a strange and wonderful thing, but it’s not half as crazy as the bits of brain that have to interpret everything your eyes see. The brain filters out a lot of what we actually see to keep us from going nuts, or at least getting very dizzy. Even when you’re only moving your eyeballs, your brain “records” everything you see before your eyes twitch, and everything after. Everything seen while your eyeballs are moving fast is filtered out for your own sake.

We can do that with websites, too. Take lazy loading images, for example: It’s a great way to save bandwidth, but then you have to deal with the fact that users will probably see partially or completely empty stretches of website while they scroll.

Or what about when the content is there, but not all the styles have loaded yet, and your custom typeface is taking a second? A flash of un-styled text is, in my opinion, a lot better than missing text, but it’s still not ideal.

There are many ways to make these issues less jarring (with placeholders, and so on), but what about distracting the user? Give them something quick-loading, big, bright, and shiny to look at for a second. Throw in a paragraph for them to read while the first set of images right below the viewport load in advance.

If people just don’t see or really notice the rough bits, they may as well not exist.

4. To Entertain and Surprise People

This is, of course, the essence of stage magic right here. You distract them so you can surprise them, entertain them, delight them. The problem with this approach is that users generally don’t want to be too surprised by the websites they visit. They just want them to work.

An entertaining surprise can be very hard to pull off on the web for the simple reason that most users aren’t there to be wowed. They’re there to get something they need, and get out. “Surprises” are so often the result of bugs or bait-and-switch tactics, that most users would probably prefer that your site behave mostly predictably.

However, if you can give them a surprise they actually like, they’ll gladly forgive any tricks you pulled. The problem is that this is rare enough that I actually can’t think of any examples.

And That’s Pretty Much It

Look, there really aren’t a lot of good reasons for deceiving people outright, even if it’s only for a moment. By and large, transparency will get you a lot farther than tricks. The only times when it’s even remotely acceptable are those occasions when tricking the user’s brain actually makes their experience smoother, and their day a little better.

Anything else is fishy at best.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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Source

The variety of fonts available online at the moment includes Retro Fonts. From vintage to modern, from fancy to minimalist, we try to include all styles in our blog posts here at Web Design Ledger. But for today’s article, we have the pleasure of mentioning some of the coolest retro fonts you can find online, both free and paid. Why did we choose the retro font as the star of our article today? Because they have the ability to take us back in time, in an era we have never lived, but now we are able to, through design.

Of course, some of the fonts we are about to mention below have been designed in the past two decades. Inspired by the depth that this trend can give to a graphics project, font artists haven’t stopped giving retro fonts the attention they deserve. Retro fonts are characterized by colorful details, bold letters, unique shapes, and other cool details we are about to discover throughout this article.

What does retro mean?

The word “RETRO” comes from Latin and it means backward. We need to look back in history into the font’s evolution to find these amazing creations. We will start off with the best retro fonts of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ending with the ’80s.

So fasten your seatbelts, we are about to dive into this amazing trend that keeps being fashionable even 50, 60, 70 years later.

retro fonts ’50s

The retro fonts of 1950 have a cinematic look. When I take a look at any of the fonts below, images of old movies come to my mind. Many of the movies created in this period used this style of fonts for their posters. The fonts of the ’50s tend to be more dramatic due to their bold characteristics. Today, we can use the ’50s fonts in packaging that requires a vintage look, restaurant branding, business cards for different companies, and in any project you think it would do the magic.

1. Palm Canyon Drive

2. Stiff Staff Font

3. Windpeak Script Font

4. The Lunch Box Font Set

5. Lucy Script

6. Hamburger Heaven

7. TV Dinner Font Set

8. American Captain Font

9. Hardman Font

10. Cinqcent Font

retro fonts ’60s

The ’60s fonts will get your attention from the first sight. They might not be love at first sight, but it will be interest at first sight for sure. These retro fonts are often used on billboards even today. The retro fonts of the ’60s feature colorful details, another characteristic that makes it steal the show. These can be used in retro games, movie posters set in the ’60s, obviously, catchy packaging, book covers, and many others.

11. Haike

12. Swung Note

13. Sundowners

14. Ziclets

15. Bright Script

15. LHF Retro Ricky Doohickies

16. Roadside | Vintage Slab Serif

17. DRIVER • Retro action typeface

18. Hitchcut Display font

19. Superb

20. Sunbeat Family

retro fonts ’70s

The fonts of the ’70s are fresh, yet nostalgic, many created for throwback posters or with the sole purpose of helping achieve the look and feel of the era. Many of the ’70s fonts feature retro hand-lettering from the ’70s, added with a touch of pop style, giving them a unique and elegant look. The fonts listed below are best suited for apparel graphics, logos, posters, and fun times, as well as invitations, flyers, greeting cards, product packaging, book cover, printed quotes, cover album, movie, etc

21. Summer 0f 76 – Multi-Line Font

22. Boardley Script – Layered Font

23. Hornet – Retro Style Font

24. “No Worries”

25. Saturday Night Font Family

26. Donatello II new retro script

27. Retro Fonts – Bon Voyage!

29. Ride Slow – Motorcycle Font Bundle

30. Back to the 70s

retro fonts ’80s

The retro fonts of the ’80s begin to evolve into more detailed fonts. We can now observe shadows, neon shades, and tracing elements. The letters are bold, with a strong personality and new features. They are super dynamic, many featuring 3D effects. These amazing fonts are great for any summer projects, due to their bright and joyful looks.

31. Vintage Party – Bold Retro Script

32. Bondie Extrude Font Family

33. Berg layered font (7 Font)

34. NWB UltraViolent – Designer’s Cut

35. Boardson Type

36. Bayshore + New! Neon Glow Styles

37. Thunderstorm + Extras

38. 1980

39. Hermes

40. Default Typeface + 80s Style

Read More at 40 Of the Best Free Retro Fonts Picked by Professional Designers

You’re faced with a lot of decisions in everyday work. There are multiple tasks calling for your focus, and you can burn daylight or even burn out trying to decide what comes first. There’s a phenomenon called decision fatigue. There have been many studies that you can make poor choices when you’re not able to decide what is most important that can lead to things like impaired judgement and even purchase decisions.

So how can you figure out what’s most important to work on first, or even what tasks to work on at all? In this post, we’ll explore how to sift through the inevitable weight of our to-do lists so that we can be efficient and clear with our direction.

If you feel like your to-do list is ruling you instead of you ruling it, read on.

How to invest your time

If you’re going to think smarter (and not harder) about how you prioritize tasks, you have to invest a little time away from your to-do list. Here’s the thing: what you work on informs your values. You may think it’s no big thing to work overtime for a little while, but something will be sacrificed with this decision. If you’re a parent, you might spend less time with your kids. Maybe it’s less time hanging out with friends. Maybe you give up sleep or eating well.

Similarly, if you choose not to work much or effectively, you’re deciding that your values lie outside your career, which is ok too. No judgement here. But where you invest your time is not just about what you value, but also what you don’t value.

Every quarter or so, I break down all the tasks I’ve committed doing. I write them all down, and I create four quadrants containing all of things I care about. This could be: helps the community, helps one-to-one relationships (which can include coworkers, friends, and family), makes money, and things I find personally fulfilling. This is just an example and your quadrants may be different, of course.

I then take all the things I have going and place them in the quadrants. I see how many of the boxes each one takes up. Some endeavors are counted in a quadrant twice to add weight to it.

Here are a couple allotments for me:

• Writing things on CSS-Tricks (like this very article) is one of the rarest instances where all boxes are checked
• Mentoring people checks: building one-to-one relationships, and something that I find personally fulfilling

Anything that fills just one box has to be reconsidered. Anything that fills nothing is usually on the chopping block. This activity allows me to see where I really want to invest my energy. It’s actually illuminating because sometimes I don’t really know what I value and how to prioritize tasks around those things until I do the exercise.

From here, the rest of the prioritization gets a little easier. I now have a better idea where my efforts are really paying off. I also know when I’m wasting my own time. This distinction helps me prevent decision fatigue quite a bit because I have a guiding light to help make choices.

What do you have to do?

In order to figure out a plan for yourself, the first thing you should be doing is gathering all of your tasks, large and small. Letting those things fester in our minds can make us feel burdened by what we have to do, so get it all out on proverbial paper. You can use notebooks, a homemade to-do list, applications like Notion, Evernote, or Clear. It’s up to you.

I use several lists for a few reasons: I tend to retain information better if I write it down multiple in multiple places. For example, I need some things on mobile. I use Clear for those things, Notion on desktop, and a paper teacher planner (which I’ve shared before). I find that the repetition helps me solidify what’s important. That might not be right for you. That’s cool, do what works.

Coding priorities

You may work at a company that creates tickets for tasks. Some tickets are simple and you can knock them out quickly; some can be arduous. Whenever I have a larger coding task, I first break it down into a to-do list as comments in my code. It looks vaguely like this:

// get the request from the server
// give us an error if it failed
// do x thing with that request
// format the data like so

That way, I can fill in the blanks with each task. I usually try to split each one into different pull requests so I can keep myself organized and make it easier on my reviewers. When it’s all done, I’ll go back and prune the comments or replace them with comments that explain the why (not how).

Overall prioritization

There are some tasks that are pretty straightforward. You need to do the thing. It’s indisputable. Other people are counting on you or your future self will depend on it somehow. These are actually easier to prioritize.

First I break down large tasks into smaller pieces. That helps me put things in order:

1. Things that are actively on fire or are time-sensitive
2. Things that can be done quickly
3. Things that need a scheduled block of time
4. Things that I may get to further along

Part of the reason we do the small things first is that morale is important. I feel more incensed to get my other work done because being productive feels good — there’s a small dopamine rush associated with every check. This is also why I put things I’ve already accomplished on my list. It may sound silly, but acknowledging accomplishments makes me more likely to keep going and pushes me through the more complicated tasks.

Some people, like Alice Goldfuss, have this down to a science:

I have a kanban board for my personal life todo list and a cron job that empties my Done column and texts it to me every week, so I feel accomplished

— bletchley punk (@alicegoldfuss) May 25, 2019

Keep yourself motivated

Keeping yourself motivated is key. Sometimes this means keeping your own morale in mind. The good news is you know yourself pretty well. Here are some tricks that have served me well:

• Put things on your to do list that you enjoy. You will start to associate your to do list with happiness. For instance, recently I put “read a dumb thriller fiction” on my to do list. It’s ridiculous, but it works. It also helps me remember to do things outside of code all day.
• Put things on your to do list that you’ve already done. When you mark them off you can get a sense of satisfaction that may entice you to gather more things you can check off. I think a lot of people do this. I definitely didn’t come up with it.
• Customize it a bit. Whether I use paper or digital means, I spend a minute or two customizing it and making it my own. It makes it more important to me, because I’ve invested in it, and I’m more likely to keep up with the contents.

Prioritizing based on energy levels

Chris Coyier mentioned a great blog post by Alex Sexton when I was pondering how I feel better suited for things like meetings on some days and heads-down coding on others.

I think this is brilliant! I’ve definitely had times in my career where I’ve suffered because of sporadic meetings with ill-defined amounts of time in between that were too small to be heads-down coding, and I would make up for it at night. That’s not a recipe for success; it’s a recipe for fatigue.

Lately, I’ve been working on grouping similar tasks. For example, meetings should all happen in succession because it’s easier for me to jump from one to another than it is having an hour in between. I’m also more keen to communicate with others on Monday, when I’m getting the lay of the land. Towards the end of the week, my energy is higher if I’m dedicated to coding, especially if I’ve allotted uninterrupted time.

Notice when your energy levels are high and when they wane. Notice when you’re more productive for social activities and when you’re better off working in isolation. The more you study yourself, the easier planning becomes.

Scheduling

Now that you have your priorities in order, go ahead and schedule your time. I like to use the weekly planner in Notion. I’ll take all the things I think I can get done in a week and break them down day-by-day, based on when it makes the most sense to do each task. When I finish a task, it’s dragged to the top. Anything that’s unchecked at the bottom by the end of the day moves over to the next. I also have general to-do lists, and task-based lists, but the weekly planner is my holy grail. Again, you don’t have to do it exactly like I do, find what works for you.

Know yourself

Most of these systems work for me because I know my strengths and weaknesses and I play to them: I work more efficiently when things are broken down into steps. I work best when my work has the most meaning, and I remove the cruft. I work best when I work along with, not against, my energy levels, where possible.

There’s one more thing I haven’t addressed yet: forgiveness. You’ll be more productive on some days (or hell, even years!) than you will be on others, and that’s OK. Life is full of ebbs and flows.

It’s good to check in to see if your waning productivity is the result of simply moving a little slower, signals signs of depression, represents misalignment with personal goals (or the company where you work), or if you’re reacting to a toxic environment.

In all cases, forgiveness is in order. In some cases, you may need more than a prioritization plan. But truly, you’ll never be able to do everything, because no one is capable of that. People you see on social media might also only be showing their successes, and conveniently leaving out their failures and struggles. The fact is that we all get distraught, and sometimes mental illness isn’t something we want to announce over the megaphone of social media. Try not to compare yourself to others. Forgive yourself a bit. Work an amount that’s reasonable for you.

Hopefully, if you’re prioritizing well, the amount of time that you do have to work is structured in a way that actually relieves stress and allows you to accomplish the most you can, when you can. The goal of prioritizing is to bring into focus the work that you find fulfilling, and removes tasks that don’t. That’s the sweet spot.

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Dark mode designs are all the rage right now but here’s an interesting take: Wei Gao has built a night mode on her own site that uses mix-blend-mode: difference to create an effect that looks like this:

Wei explains how she implemented this technique and the edge cases she encountered along the way. I especially love what she had to say about mix-blend-mode functions here:

I remember first playing around with them in Photoshop years ago. Now that browsers are becoming more powerful and we are seeing complex graphical features native to browser rendering. This doesn’t mean we should implement a full photoshop in browsers and nor should we limit our imaginations to just that. Browsers and web pages have their own contexts and goals, as well as a different set of limits. Maybe we should welcome them like new habitants and discover use cases native to this territory.

Indeed! Although Wei’s technique is pretty unique and awesome on its own, this all ties back into the thing that kicked off the whole trend: the prefers-color-scheme media feature that was released in Safari as part of the MacOS 10.4 release that gave us a dark mode preference setting. This is a developing space, so we’re certain to see more innovations and approaches ahead.

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