Is the eerie spirit of Halloween haunting your designs? Find spooky inspiration in these ten ghoulish illustrations, videos, and photos.
From Polish artist Piotr Jab?o?ski’s off-kilter and unnerving fantasy paintings to Caley Hicks’ cutesy take on Halloween themes, you’re sure to find something here to get you in the spooky mood.
Looking for spine-chilling photos, graphics, and video clips to use in your projects? Don’t miss our ultimate curated Halloween collection.
1. Día de los Muertos by Shutterstock contributors
Taking place just after Halloween on November 2nd, 2019, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican holiday held to remember the deceased.
Viewed by Mexicans as a day of celebration rather than sadness, colorful costumes, parades, and sugar skulls are prominent features of the holiday. Families gather at the grave of the departed to leave offerings and say prayers, aiding their loved one in their spiritual journey.
Imagery surrounding Día de los Muertos is vibrant and theatrical, giving Day of the Dead-themed designs an otherworldly feel.
A post shared by Shutterstock (@shutterstock) on Sep 25, 2019 at 7:41am PDT
2. Fantasy Dreamscapes by Tithi Luadthong
Inspired by horror, fantasy, and science fiction, illustrator Tithi Luadthong conjures up immersive and deeply compelling dreamscapes that tell intriguing stories.
The digital impressionist injects his images with a sense of dynamism and movement, transporting the viewer to a multitude of action-packed horror-themed scenarios, from a zombie apocalypse to a cave inhabited by a horned demon.
Read more about Tithi’s creative process in this interview with the Bangkok-based artist.
Explore the artist’s full collection of horror- and Halloween-themed content here.
3. Halloween-Themed Curated Collection by Shutterstock
Whether you’re planning a Halloween party, creating a seasonal social media post, or designing a hair-raising webpage, the Shutterstock Halloween curated collection features everything you could need to realize your petrifying project.
From trick-or-treat portraits to ghostly collages, discover a wide range of images to suit every mood and every design this autumn.
4. Animal Halloween Portraits by Kimberly Petts
Horror isn’t for everyone when Halloween rolls around. The holiday is just as much an excuse for indulging in some fun and frivolity.
Shutterstock contributor Kimberley Petts loves to give her animal portraits a spooky yet light-hearted twist. With an air of old-world painting styles, her images manage to balance a somber setting with witty subjects. We especially love her Rembrandt-influenced portraits of her two German Shorthaired Pointers, Branston and Twiglet.
Polish concept artist and digital painter Piotr Jab?o?ski has a cult following for his beautiful yet often disturbing images. His expertly executed digital illustrations see him turn his hand to depicting dark forests filled with mystical creatures, fantastical battle scenes, and freakish humanoid characters.
With a meticulous eye for detail, Jab?o?ski’s images explore themes of horror, the supernatural, and general weirdness. His ability to blur the lines between normality and fantasy in his subject matter makes his images not only unnervingly beautiful to look at, but unforgettable too.
Images by Piotr Jab?o?ski.
6. Cutesy Spooks by Caley Hicks
Florida-based illustrator Caley Hicks, aka There Will Be Cute, looks to vintage children’s illustrations to inform her adorable, retro-tinted drawings and patterns. Influenced by the golden age of Disney, Hicks applies her cute and perky drawing style to a range of seasonal subjects. With Halloween a favorite subject, Hicks depicts black cats, pumpkins, and headless horsemen in a midcentury-inspired palette of burnt orange, cream, and charcoal black.
With fans able to purchase cushions, phone covers, and even shower curtains from her online shop, this talented artist has honed a versatile style that works just as well in the home as it does on screen.
Images by Caley Hicks.
7. High Fashion Halloween by SunCity
Halloween is a great excuse for getting dressed up and transforming yourself into a vampire, witch, or black cat. For the more fashionably-inclined, it’s also the perfect occasion to showcase your fabulous makeup skills.
Shutterstock contributor SunCity takes an ultra-stylish approach to the Halloween theme, casting his subject in dramatic colored lighting and experimenting with skeletal makeup, shadows, and blurring. The final result is a high-fashion take on the spooky holiday. These photos would be perfect for giving a Halloween-themed magazine layout or poster a high-fashion twist.
Who knew a fig could be so frightening? Kiev-based creatives Tough Slate Design gave this Halloween promo campaign for Le Silpo Specialty Grocery store a quirky twist using that most humble of foods — fruit and vegetables.
Carving frightening faces into turnips, peppers, and olives, then photographing them against a seasonal orange background, created a foundation for their “Treat-or-treat!” campaign. The idea behind the posters? With Le Silpo offering a wide range of delicacies in-store, it seemed bland and unoriginal to use a traditional Halloween pumpkin.
Striking the perfect balance between cute and creepy, the final poster is a lesson in discovering an unusual and offbeat angle for a seasonal campaign.
Poster design by Tough Slate Design for Le Silpo Specialty Grocery store.
9. Wall Art by Syda Productions
Simple cut-out shapes made from paper or card can be transformed into stylish and striking works of art with the right concept in mind. Here, Shutterstock contributor Syda Productions turns his hand to collage-style displays of swarming bats. Set against a minimal backdrop, the result is perfect inspiration for style-conscious decorators looking to add a touch of seasonal spirit to a home or office setting.
Why not try creating and photographing your own Halloween collage creations? Decorate a lonely wall with a flock of black crows or flurry of spider webs to conjure a spooky spirit on a budget.
Fortune-telling is deeply connected with the Halloween season. A display of tarot cards across a dining table at a Halloween party is not only a decorative flourish, but is a lovely way of bringing a touch of mystery and spirituality to your event.
These modern and minimal tarot cards by Lille-based graphic designer Theo Boquet offer an ultra-stylish alternative to traditional tarot cards. The collage style mixes black-and-white figures from popular culture and artistic masterpieces with pops of vivid blue and yellow ink.
Boquet’s design is a great example of applying contemporary style to traditional subject matter, to create a hip fusion of old and new.
‘Tarot de Marseille’ card designs by Theo Boquet.
Creating a Halloween-Themed Design?
Discover frightening photos, kooky graphics, and supernatural video clips to use in your projects with the Shutterstock curated Halloween collection.
(This is a sponsored article.) One of the common problems with trying to scale up when working as a solo web designer or a bootstrapping agency is that you’re limited by time. How much time it takes to:
Onboard new clients;
Build websites;
Put out fires;
Do all the other stuff that keeps your business running.
That’s not to say you can’t make good money in web design. It’s just that your time is worth money and if you’re maxed out on time, that’s it. You’ve reached peak scale.
If you’re hoping to not only sustain your design business but scale it into a money-making machine, you need to create a recurring revenue stream. Luckily for you, web designers and agencies have lots of options to choose from.
One of the most popular is WordPress maintenance and support.
Before you go diving into this new gig, really consider what this additional offering will do to your operation. Because although it will bring you more money — and a predictable stream of it, too — it’s not easy work. Especially as you offer that service to dozens and, eventually, hundreds or thousands of clients.
The Benefits Of Selling WordPress Maintenance Services
There are many reasons why designers and developers choose to build websites with WordPress. But as anyone who’s spent enough time with the content management system will tell you, it’s got its flaws.
Security is a big concern. Speed can be difficult to manage. And clients don’t always take too kindly to the platform.
But that’s where WordPress maintenance services come in. Seasoned WordPress users understand the CMS’s weaknesses and are able to craft monthly maintenance and support plans to ensure that all bases are covered long after launch.
While it’s clear what sort of benefits your clients get from maintenance and support, you stand to reap a ton of benefits by adding it to your service offering, too:
Make Your Revenue Stream Predictable
Ever feel like it’s feast or famine with your business? It’s to be expected, especially if you serve smaller clients whose own revenue streams are unpredictable.
That’s one of the reasons why maintenance and support services are so great. Whether you allow clients to go month-to-month or put them on a yearly plan, your cash flow becomes more predictable and easier to manage.
Add An Extra Competitive Edge
If you’re working with the right kinds of clients, they should be asking you “What’s next?” after their website launches. These are the clients that understand the value of protecting their investment.
Wouldn’t you rather be the one who has the answer than to watch them move onto the competition for help? Plus, it’s an easy sell. You’ve already proven yourself a trustworthy designer. Why not round out your offering and become their end-to-end provider?
Make Your Portfolio Even More Impressive
You put a lot of work into the websites you build and you should be proud to show them off. But when left in the hands of your clients (or a subpar maintenance provider), you run the risk of your portfolio quickly going stale.
That’s not to say you should be in this solely to protect your reputation, but it is something to think about if you’re going to leverage those samples to build your business.
Upgrade Your Processes
One of the awesome things about performing WordPress maintenance is that a lot of it can be automated, so you’re not really “performing” much at all. It becomes more about monitoring and support.
What’s more, if you initially build security, speed and SEO automation into your websites, you’ll have even less work to do when maintenance plans kick in. And an awesome justification for raising your web design rates.
Create Additional Revenue Streams
Once you see how beneficial it is to build WordPress maintenance into your offering, you might not want to stop there. Your clients might not either. So, keep your ears peeled. If clients start asking for help with the same kinds of things (e.g. managing their hosting, handling their content marketing, running SEO audits, etc.), think about how you might add that to your offering.
The Drawbacks Of Managing WordPress Maintenance Services
WordPress maintenance is beneficial to your clients and it does a lot of good for your business, too. But there are some things you need to be aware of before you jump in.
Stiff Competition
While offering WordPress maintenance will certainly make you a competitive and formidable force in the eyes of existing and former clients, that might not be the case with newbies. Not only will you have to compete against other web designers and agencies, you’ll also have to compete with dedicated WordPress maintenance pros like WP Buffs and SkyrocketWP.
A New Offering = More Work
Without the right tools or automations in place, WordPress maintenance services could become an even greater burden on your business. Remember, you want to move away from time-based services, so this needs to be set up properly if you want to make it work.
Technical Know-How
Website maintenance is a highly technical matter. If your skillset is mainly in design or strategy, this might not be the right recurring revenue service for you. That’s why it’s important to secure the technology and process before you start selling any new solution.
Support Is Required
Although we usually just refer to these services as “maintenance plans”, support has to be baked in. You’re not just working behind the scenes to do backups or patch vulnerabilities. You have to make yourself available if a client notices that their site is down, they’ve been locked out of the admin or they simply need help editing a page. Do you have the capacity or patience for that?
A Lot At Stake
There’s a lot on the line here. If you do everything right, it could do wonders for your business and your bottom line. But if you fail to provide the right level of maintenance and support, and something happens to your client’s site, you can bet it’s going to hurt your business and reputation.
How To Do WordPress Maintenance And Support The Right Way
That said, the good does certainly outweigh the bad. You just need to handle it the right way, which means you need a plan, the right tools and a solid process.
Here’s what I suggest:
Step 1: Figure Out What Kind Of Maintenance You’ll Do
Before you add a Maintenance page to your website, first sort out what kind of maintenance you’re going to offer.
Ask yourself:
What kinds of clients do you serve? How much maintenance, on average, do you think they need each month?
For instance, a law firm website might only need:
Weekly software updates,
Monthly backups,
Security monitoring,
Uptime monitoring,
2-3 small edits monthly.
But an established sales enterprise might need the whole kit and caboodle:
Backups and restores,
Software updates,
Security monitoring and repairs,
Comment moderation,
Downtime monitoring,
Performance monitoring and optimization,
File/plugin/theme/media cleanup,
Database cleanup,
Broken link monitoring and repair,
2 hours of edits monthly,
Reporting.
If you’re curious about how companies that are 100% dedicated to WordPress maintenance and support do it, here’s an example of how Maintainn breaks it up:
WordPress maintenance company Maintainn offers customers three maintenance and support plans. (Source: Maintainn) (Large preview)
If you target clients at different levels, you could logically break up your plans this way. It would be a good way to form lifelong partnerships with your clients, too, as you can help them grow from fledgling startups to booming enterprises.
If you’d rather not take on a wide range of maintenance responsibilities, that’s fine. Play to your strengths. For example, digital agency Webvizion offers Basic, Advanced and Pro plans:
Webvizion sells the same kinds of website maintenance and support services. The key difference between the plans is quantity though. (Source: Webvizion) (Large preview)
Each plan comes with the same kind of maintenance and support coverage. What differs is how much of it they do with each plan. This is a good option if you’re brand new to maintenance and aren’t sure how much of it you want to branch out into or how much of it your clients will even need. You can safely test the waters with this approach.
However you decide to split up and price out your maintenance services, make it clear to customers what the differences are between the plans and where they’ll get the most value. Just as you want to simplify their lives by handling their WordPress maintenance, you want to simplify this decision for them as well.
Step 2: Create Your Maintenance Toolbox
You might have already laid some of the groundwork when building your client’s website by implementing:
A backup plugin (like UpdraftPlus) paired with secure storage like (like S3).
A solid choice in managed WordPress hosting will not only strengthen this setup, but it’ll make your job easier, too.
Managed Hosting with Kinsta
If your clients are on regular ol’ WordPress hosting, but you and they want to get serious about properly maintaining their website, it’s a good idea to get them over to managed hosting with Kinsta. And I’ll show you why.
This is Kinsta’s multi-site control panel, MyKinsta:
With managed WordPress hosting with Kinsta, users get access to the intuitive control panel called MyKinsta. (Source: MyKinsta) (Large preview)
As you can see in this snapshot, MyKinsta is a really well-organized control panel solution. But this isn’t just a place to manage your clients’ Kinsta accounts and billing. This is where you can set up your own WordPress maintenance services for success.
Let’s look a little more closely at what you can do:
MyKinsta automates website backups and simplifies the restore, too. (Source: MyKinsta) (Large preview)
Backups are a non-negotiable part of WordPress maintenance. You know that your clients aren’t going to do it or know how to do it and you can’t afford a security breach or human error to compromise everything you worked so hard to build for them.
From this panel, you can see that Kinsta has already taken care of this responsibility for you — and it’s doing it at a frequency you most likely couldn’t handle (at least, if you were planning to do this for dozens of clients).
Restoring a backup is just as easy and only requires a couple clicks to take your client’s website back to safety.
The Tools section of MyKinsta also simplifies website security and performance optimization for you:
The MyKinsta control panel’s Tools are all about improving speed and security. (Source: MyKinsta) (Large preview)
Want to instantly upgrade to the latest PHP version? Implement stronger password protection? Clear the cache? You can take care of your security and speed optimization essentials with just a click or two.
Another performance enhancer lives in this control panel, too: the Kinsta CDN.
MyKinsta’s web hosting panel allows users to activate and use Kinsta’s own CDN. (Source: MyKinsta) (Large preview)
For clients with high volumes of traffic from around the world, you can’t afford to skimp on this. It’s nice to see that Kinsta makes it easy to add a CDN instead of forcing users to sign up for an external provider’s CDN and integrate it with their Kinsta website. Again, a lot of the work you’d have to do to set up a maintenance client is already done for you.
There’s a lot more you can do within this control panel. For example:
Sign clients’ up for new hosting plans.
Manage domain names.
View plugin updates.
Set up and use a staging environment.
Migrate a website.
Monitor performance analytics.
Once you have everything set up as you like, you can trust that Kinsta will take care of your clients’ security and performance just as well as you would. And if anything should go wrong or you need help tweaking something on the backend, Kinsta expert support is available 24/7.
Multi-site Management
Managed hosting will cover the server-side maintenance and support piece of your own maintenance care plans — which is huge. You don’t have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night to deal with downed servers and other urgent hosting-related matters.
This frees you up, then, to take care of the website side of things.
That said, don’t try and do this on your own. Setting up the plugins I mentioned earlier is a good place to start, but it’s not enough. Can you imagine having to log in and out of dozens or hundreds of clients’ websites to update their plugins, manage their backups and run security scans? Don’t even think about wasting your time on that.
Instead, find a multi-site management tool you can outsource most of these repetitive tasks to (like InfiniteWP or iThemes Sync).
Most of these tools enable you to:
Add all of your maintenance client sites to a single control panel.
Schedule backups (and do so in a safe manner).
Schedule and automate updates (plus, you can choose which themes and plugins get updated).
Automate security, uptime and performance monitoring.
Auto-generate weekly or monthly status update reports for clients.
This is going to take a lot of the weight off of your shoulders when it comes to managing the maintenance essentials. Knowing that tools like these exist will also help you decide how much you can reasonably offer in the way of maintenance without burning yourself out in the process.
Step 3: Create A Process
Now that you know what you’re offering and which tools you’re going to use to automate and manage at least some of the tasks, it’s time to build out a process for it.
To give you a head start, I’m going to help you create a template that will make scheduling and processizing this whole thing much easier.
First, I want you to make a list of all the maintenance services you’re going to offer. You can choose from the list below or add your own. Again, choose the services that your clients will actually need help with after launch:
Maintenance Services & Support
Backups (and restore)
Software updates
Security monitoring
Downtime monitoring
Performance monitoring
Comment moderation
Database cleanup
File cleanup
User management
Broken link monitoring
Managed hosting and domain
Keyword monitoring
Content marketing
Google Analytics review
Site audit
Website edits
Support
Reporting
Next, identify the tools you’ll use to manage these services. As you’ll see, you can actually accomplish most of this with your multi-site manager and managed hosting solution. You may need additional tools, but many of them are offered by Google for free.
Finally, you need to decide how frequently each of these maintenance tasks need to be completed (or how much support you’ll provide). This may vary from plan to plan, so I’m going to provide you with a few empty columns to input your responses.
For the frequency-based tasks, add one of the following:
Hourly,
Daily,
Weekly,
Monthly.
For the quantity-based tasks, add one of the following:
Number (like for how many website edits you’ll do in a month),
Hours (like for how many hours of support — remember to indicate the level of support, too!).
Multi-site manager and SEO checker tools (like Moz)
Content marketing
Manual
Google Analytics review
Google Analytics reporting and manual
Site audit
Manual (though you can use various premium tools to do most of the heavy lifting)
Website edits
Manual
Support
Manual with the help of a helpdesk solution
Reporting
Multi-site manager and Google Analytics
Now that you have all the essentials broken out, get to work on setting it up.
If you haven’t yet signed up for any of these tools or aren’t familiar with how to use them, sign up for accounts with them now. You don’t want to be learning this on the job.
Next, configure your automations within your tools. You might even want to set up your own website as the first “client”, so you can work out all the kinks with your process safely.
Then, add all of the tasks that require your oversight and hand-holding to your project management tool. There shouldn’t be too many that fall on your plate once you have the help of a managed hosting solution like Kinsta, a multi-site manager and a variety of Google tools on your side.
The Bottom Line
Once things really begin to pick up, you can start thinking about outsourcing. This might involve hiring a contractor to manage those manual tasks for you, switching your clients to one of Kinsta’s managed hosting plans or using a service like WP Buffs to white label your maintenance services entirely.
But, for now, focus on how you can make a difference in the lives of your clients. Then, get in touch with current and former clients and work on your pitch. There’s no point in thinking about scaling and outsourcing if you don’t have clients banging down your door for help.
Once you’ve proven your value as an end-to-end provider for all things WordPress, then you can comfortably start looking at ways to lighten your burden even further while increasing the recurring revenue flowing in.
Earlier, the desire to gleam in the sight of the market lies at the sole end of manual marketing practices. The optimization was the coined term referred for verbal preaching and ranking in the traditional process.
With the advent of technology, things begin to revolutionize and finally begins to fall in places in favor of an organization. The organization tends to move progressively, implementing the crucial steps of reformations in the field of technology.
The organizations are implementing digitalized trends, in order to optimize their ranking on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) through the means of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The app development services bolters in inflating the ranking of the app and glean in the socio-digital platform.
What is App Store Optimization (ASO)?
The App Store Optimization (ASO) is a process of increasing the visibility of an application, in a diverse belvedere of the app store.
According to reports, there are around 2.46 million apps available on Android’s Play Store and 1.96 million apps on Apple’s App Store. Therefore, one can easily understand the completion lying amid the app owners to fight the odd numbers and rank at the top of the list.
The App Store Optimization (ASO) works in similarity with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Where, the SEO aims to upgrade the ranking of a webpage in the result page of the search engine, redirecting the view to the company’s website.
Similarly, the App Store Optimization (ASO), bolster the mechanism related to optimize the result on play store and increase the visibility and ranking of the developed application.
Objectives of App Store Optimization (ASO):
The primary focus of App Store Optimization (ASO) lies in increasing the number of downloads of an application through the visible ranking in the application store.
The Secondary point of focus falls on the additive terms related to burgeon the application and its related app development services.
Let’s explore the expanded preview of defined objectives falling under the shell of App Store Optimization;
Escalate the online review, rating, and management of an organization.
Expand the business opportunities, with the people lying at the remote locations.
Burgeons the brand image and market value.
Increase customer engagement via push notifications and discussion forums.
Pushes the sale and productivity rate.
Distinct Methods of App Store Optimization:
The marketer available in markets move their own set of propagating methods for optimizing their results. The optimization of application can be carried out in two different distinct ways, based on the means of optimization used by an organization.
Optimization Through Keyword:
The keyword is one the major and responsible source to optimize the results and improvise the ranking. In Keyword Optimization, the keywords are inserted in the description and meta in an intricate manner to boost the ranking of the app on the app store’s search engine result page.
Therefore, when an appropriate and re-defined set of the keyword is drawn, it works in favor of improvising the results with the optimized solutions.
Optimization Through Engagement Rate:
Apart from Keyword, the results can be optimized based on several other factors such as conversion rate, engagement rate, location and presence time on the application.
The engagement on social media posts or keyword can be easily altercated in favor of a business and its respective growth. The organizations are installing the use of various tools, catering to the hike in the rate of optimization.
Dedicated Tips for Employing App Store Optimization to Ensure Gain in Business:
The above discussion has made a clearer attempt to the factors holding the responsibility for optimizing the results on the app store. The app development services boost the functionality of the developed application by an organization.
If the following tips are assimilated in the process for optimization of application, it can guarantee to ensure the rise in the scale of designed business.
Tip 1: Triggering Keyword
The inserted keyword should be triggering in nature, in order to rank through spontaneous action. One must consider adding the targeted keywords in the title, name of the application or descriptions of the designed application. The steps to process bolster in optimizing the value of an application and maximize the reach to the customer.
Tip 2: Descriptive Icon and Screenshots
The icon and graphics explaining the core move of an application should be creative enough to explain the functionality of an application, without the need to read the description of an application.
Tip 3: Length of Application’s Name
Limit the name of the brand in 25-30 characters, based on terms and conditions of the app store i.e; Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store. The precise name of an application enables the organization to gain optimized results adhering to the values of ASO.
Tip 4: Comprised App Size
The size of the application should lie in the range of downloadable assets, at the end of a terminal user. If the size is exceeding the average value or MBs, one must consider compressing the graphics and data swaddled in the application.
Tip 5: Regular App Updates
The organization should consider delivering the updates of an application at a regular interval, in order to remain in the top priority list of the customer with magnificent changes in the app’s outlook.
In Conclusion:
The app development services bolster in inflating the ranking of applications on an app store. The development of an application lies at the utmost priority of an organization in order to digitalize each move and gleam the business on the scalable app store.
Businesspeople understand the potentials of B2B markets, and that’s the reason entrepreneurs’ are quickly shifting into the digital world.
It is entirely different from B2C marketplace. In the B2C market, you sell to consumers only, but B2B environment enables you to sell to other businesses. It means that when you deal with enterprises, then there are huge profits and investors involved.
The B2B market is growing faster, and the return on investment is also enormous. But business owners that are about to get started should not only focus on the potential benefits. Entrepreneurs’ must also keep their eyes on the significant risks that are associated with the B2B startups. When you enter into a new market, then you have to face various challenges. Particularly, markets who have more opportunities are full of bigger risks. The same case is with the B2B market.
There are various B2B startups like Direct Macro that are taking their place in the market. The incessant launch of tech startups is encouraging other entrepreneurs to leverage the business-to-business opportunity. Undoubtedly, the B2B market is full of benefits.
If you are also planning to start your B2B tech startup, then keep reading to figure out what challenges you may have to face during the inception phase. Also, find ways to overcome those challenges.
1. Reaching out to Customers
Reaching out to new customers is the first step of lead generation. If you are not reaching out to the right customer base, it means that your lead generation efforts will definitely go down the drain.
Since the B2B business model is entirely different from B2C. B2B business owners have to sell products to other companies which means that they need to be very particular about their target market segment. The first step to reaching out to the target audience is continuous pitching through which you can create strong brand awareness.
Sending emails continuously will help you to explain your services and solutions through which you can help other companies. Keep in mind that sending too many emails will get your account blocked therefore, before starting your email campaign don’t forget to read emailing tricks.
2. Deciding Business Partner
Deciding your potential business partner is one of the biggest challenges that any B2B tech startup has to face. You can partner with other relevant company, it will help your business to grow dramatically.
A lot of startups partners with companies, but later on, several disputes appear that destroy the entire business pattern. Therefore, it is important to mention all the policies clearly and legally.
Moreover, it is essential for the tech startups to partner with well-established companies that can cooperate in the long-term. If a startup will partner with another startup company then there will be more chances for risks. Hence, the combination of a well-established and a new company will mitigate the associated risks.
3. Hiring Employee
Hiring new employees can also be a big challenge for tech startups. Due to the constant technological advancements, startups are required to hire a team of great professionals. However, since they are new in the field, so they face a lot of challenges in hiring professionals. The best way to do so is to start by hiring remote employees for initial project execution. You can also reach social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to let people know about the opportunities that you are offering. It will be very helpful for skillful professionals to reach you.
4. Gathering Relevant Marketing Data
Relevant data can be a powerful tool for any startup. Data collection is vital for so many reasons. With the help of pertinent marketing data, new companies can better understand what marketing channels are effectively working for the business. Tech startups use marketing channels for promotional activities. The right marketing channel not only promote your products but also play a crucial role in generating high sales. To identify the most useful marketing channel, tech startups need to track and monitor marketing channels through which they are receiving maximum prospects and qualified leads.
5. Building Customers’ Trust
For startups, gaining customers’ trust is a next-level challenge. You are new in the market, and there are more champions of the field, who are already doing well in the market. In this case, it is quite a daunting task to gain customers’ trust.
Gaining your customers’ trust is a long term process. You can win clients with time. However, there are some measures that you can take to delight customers around you. The best thing to do is to maintain your work quality.
When you will deliver quality work, then people will do word of mouth marketing which the best and the most potent marketing technique, and it requires no money. Plus, constant marketing of your tech products will definitely help you in the long run and eventually, you will earn your customer’s trust.
6. Rapid Technology Changes
Technology advancements are rapidly emerging into the tech market. As a startup, you have to beat the competition to make your place in the market. Tech companies need to be updated about the modern, cutting-edge technologies plus, it is also essential for the startups to deliver fast. Staying on the top doesn’t mean that you have to invest in every technology that is coming into the market. First, you have to analyze your clients’ business requirements then decide what technologies can benefit your customers. You can ask clients’ via surveys and interviews then implement the most voted technologies. It will save your time and money and will provide you expected reasons to some extent.
Plan Before You Begin the Startup!
The bottom line is starting a new tech company comes with a lot of challenges. You need appropriate resources in terms of both money and human capital. A good strategic plan will save you from various market obstacles.
Being a tech startup, you have to face so much, and you will be required to put so much effort. Your core challenges will be lead generation, building credibility, meeting technological expectations and a lot more.
You first have to analyze all the possible challenges that you will face. Once you have an idea about the potential risks, then you can come up with a plan that will alleviate the initial risks.
Always keep in mind that being realistic is essential rather than keeping unrealistic expectations. The more realistic you will be, the more risks you can analyze and plan accordingly.
Businesspeople understand the potentials of B2B markets, and that’s the reason entrepreneurs’ are quickly shifting into the digital world.
It is entirely different from B2C marketplace. In the B2C market, you sell to consumers only, but B2B environment enables you to sell to other businesses. It means that when you deal with enterprises, then there are huge profits and investors involved.
The B2B market is growing faster, and the return on investment is also enormous. But business owners that are about to get started should not only focus on the potential benefits. Entrepreneurs’ must also keep their eyes on the significant risks that are associated with the B2B startups. When you enter into a new market, then you have to face various challenges. Particularly, markets who have more opportunities are full of bigger risks. The same case is with the B2B market.
There are various B2B startups like Direct Macro that are taking their place in the market. The incessant launch of tech startups is encouraging other entrepreneurs to leverage the business-to-business opportunity. Undoubtedly, the B2B market is full of benefits.
If you are also planning to start your B2B tech startup, then keep reading to figure out what challenges you may have to face during the inception phase. Also, find ways to overcome those challenges.
1. Reaching out to Customers
Reaching out to new customers is the first step of lead generation. If you are not reaching out to the right customer base, it means that your lead generation efforts will definitely go down the drain.
Since the B2B business model is entirely different from B2C. B2B business owners have to sell products to other companies which means that they need to be very particular about their target market segment. The first step to reaching out to the target audience is continuous pitching through which you can create strong brand awareness.
Sending emails continuously will help you to explain your services and solutions through which you can help other companies. Keep in mind that sending too many emails will get your account blocked therefore, before starting your email campaign don’t forget to read emailing tricks.
2. Deciding Business Partner
Deciding your potential business partner is one of the biggest challenges that any B2B tech startup has to face. You can partner with other relevant company, it will help your business to grow dramatically.
A lot of startups partners with companies, but later on, several disputes appear that destroy the entire business pattern. Therefore, it is important to mention all the policies clearly and legally.
Moreover, it is essential for the tech startups to partner with well-established companies that can cooperate in the long-term. If a startup will partner with another startup company then there will be more chances for risks. Hence, the combination of a well-established and a new company will mitigate the associated risks.
3. Hiring Employee
Hiring new employees can also be a big challenge for tech startups. Due to the constant technological advancements, startups are required to hire a team of great professionals. However, since they are new in the field, so they face a lot of challenges in hiring professionals. The best way to do so is to start by hiring remote employees for initial project execution. You can also reach social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to let people know about the opportunities that you are offering. It will be very helpful for skillful professionals to reach you.
4. Gathering Relevant Marketing Data
Relevant data can be a powerful tool for any startup. Data collection is vital for so many reasons. With the help of pertinent marketing data, new companies can better understand what marketing channels are effectively working for the business. Tech startups use marketing channels for promotional activities. The right marketing channel not only promote your products but also play a crucial role in generating high sales. To identify the most useful marketing channel, tech startups need to track and monitor marketing channels through which they are receiving maximum prospects and qualified leads.
5. Building Customers’ Trust
For startups, gaining customers’ trust is a next-level challenge. You are new in the market, and there are more champions of the field, who are already doing well in the market. In this case, it is quite a daunting task to gain customers’ trust.
Gaining your customers’ trust is a long term process. You can win clients with time. However, there are some measures that you can take to delight customers around you. The best thing to do is to maintain your work quality.
When you will deliver quality work, then people will do word of mouth marketing which the best and the most potent marketing technique, and it requires no money. Plus, constant marketing of your tech products will definitely help you in the long run and eventually, you will earn your customer’s trust.
6. Rapid Technology Changes
Technology advancements are rapidly emerging into the tech market. As a startup, you have to beat the competition to make your place in the market. Tech companies need to be updated about the modern, cutting-edge technologies plus, it is also essential for the startups to deliver fast. Staying on the top doesn’t mean that you have to invest in every technology that is coming into the market. First, you have to analyze your clients’ business requirements then decide what technologies can benefit your customers. You can ask clients’ via surveys and interviews then implement the most voted technologies. It will save your time and money and will provide you expected reasons to some extent.
Plan Before You Begin the Startup!
The bottom line is starting a new tech company comes with a lot of challenges. You need appropriate resources in terms of both money and human capital. A good strategic plan will save you from various market obstacles.
Being a tech startup, you have to face so much, and you will be required to put so much effort. Your core challenges will be lead generation, building credibility, meeting technological expectations and a lot more.
You first have to analyze all the possible challenges that you will face. Once you have an idea about the potential risks, then you can come up with a plan that will alleviate the initial risks.
Always keep in mind that being realistic is essential rather than keeping unrealistic expectations. The more realistic you will be, the more risks you can analyze and plan accordingly.
In this post, we’re going to use CSS superpowers to create a visual effect where two elements overlap and weave together. The epiphany for this design came during a short burst of spiritual inquisitiveness where I ended up at The Bible Project’s website. They make really cool animations, and I mean, really cool animations.
My attention, however, deviated from spiritualism to web design as I kept spotting these in-and-out border illustrations.
Screenshot form The Bible Project website.
I wondered if a similar could be made from pure CSS… and hallelujah, it’s possible!
The red frame is created using border. Its box-sizing is set to include the border size in the dimensions of the box so that the frame is centered around the picture after being rotated. Otherwise, the frame will be bigger than the image and get pulled towards the bottom-right corner.
Then we pick a pair of opposite corners of the image and overlay their quadrants with their corresponding portion in a copy of the same image as before. This hides the red frame in those corners.
We basically need to make a cut portion of the image that looks like below to go on top of the red frame.
The visible two quadrants will lay on top of the .rotated-border element.
So, how do we alter the image so that only two quadrants of the image are visible? CSS Blend Modes! The multiply value is what we’re going to reach for in this instance. This adds transparency to an element by stripping white from the image to reveal what’s behind the element.
Chris has a nice demo showing how a red background shows through an image with the multiply blend mode.
OK, nice, but what about those quadrants? We cover the quadrants we want to hide with white grid cells that will cause the image to bleed all the way through in those specific areas with a copy of the bird image right on top of it in the sourcecode.
<div id="design">
<img src="bird-photo.jpg">
<div class="rotated-border"></div>
<div class="blend">
<!-- Copy of the same image -->
<img src="bird-photo.jpg">
<div class="grid">
<!-- Quadrant 1: Top Left -->
<div></div>
<!-- Quadrant 2: Top Right -->
<div data-white></div>
<!-- Quadrant 3: Bottom Left -->
<div data-white></div>
<!-- Quadrant 4: Bottom Right -->
<div></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
.blend > * {
position: absolute;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
}
/* Establishes our grid */
.grid {
display: grid;
grid: repeat(2, 1fr) / repeat(2, 1fr);
}
/* Adds white to quadrants with this attribute */
[data-white]{
background-color: white;
}
The result is a two-by-two grid with its top-right and bottom-left quadrants that are filled with white, while being grouped together with the image inside .blend.
To those of you new to CSS Grid, what we’re doing is adding a new .grid element that becomes a “grid” element when we declare display: grid;. Then we use the grid property (which is a shorthand that combinesgrid-template-columns and grid-template-rows) to create two equally spaced rows and columns. We’re basically saying, “Hey, grid, repeat two equal columns and repeat two equal rows inside of yourself to form four boxes.”
A copy of the image and a grid with white cells on top of the red border.
Now we apply the multiply blend mode to .blend using the mix-blend-mode property.
.blend { mix-blend-mode: multiply; }
The result:
As you can see, the blend mode affects all four quadrants rather than just the two we want to see through. That means we can see through all four quadrants, which reveals all of the red rotated box.
We want to bring back the white we lost in top-left and bottom-right quadrants so that they hide the red rotated box behind them. Let’s add a second grid, this time on top of .blend in the sourcecode.
<div id="design">
<img src="bird-photo.jpg">
<div class="rotated-border"></div>
<!-- A second grid -->
<!-- This time, we're adding white to the image quandrants where we want to hide the red frame -->
<div class="grid">
<!-- Quadrant 1: Top Left -->
<div data-white></div>
<!-- Quadrant 2: Top Right -->
<div></div>
<!-- Quadrant 3: Bottom Left -->
<div></div>
<!-- Quadrant 4: Bottom Right -->
<div data-white></div>
</div>
<div class="blend">
<img src="bird-photo.jpg">
<div class="grid">
<!-- Quadrant 1: Top Left -->
<div></div>
<!-- Quadrant 2: Top Right -->
<div data-white></div>
<!-- Quadrant 3: Bottom Left -->
<div data-white></div>
<!-- Quadrant 4: Bottom Right -->
<div></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
The result!
Summing up, the browser renders the elements in our demo like this:
??
??At bottommost is the bird image (represented by the leftmost grey shape in the diagram below)
??Then a rotated red frame
??On top of them is a grid with top-left and bottom-right white cells (corners where we don’t want to see the red frame in the final result)
??Followed by a copy of the bird image from before and a grid with top-right and bottom-left white cells (corners where we do want to see the red frame) – both grouped together and given the blending mode, multiply?.
You may have some questions about the approach I used in this post. Let me try to tackle those.
What about using CSS Masking instead of CSS Blend Modes?
For those of you familiar with CSS Masking – using either mask-image or clip-path – it can be an alternative to using blend mode.
I prefer blending because it has better browser support than masks and clipping. For instance, WebKit browsers don’t support SVG reference in the CSS mask-image property and they also provide partial support for clip-path values, especially Safari.
Another reason for choosing blend mode is the convenience of being able to use grid to create a simple white structure instead of needing to create images (whether they are SVG or otherwise).
Then again, I’m fully on board the CSS blend mode train, having used it for knockout text, text fragmentation effect… and now this. I’m pretty much all in on it.
Why did you use grid for the quadrants?
The white boxes needed in the demo can be created by other means, of course, but grid makes things easier for me. For example, we could’ve leaned on flexbox instead. Use what works for you.
Why use a data-attribute on the grid quadrant elements to make them white?
I used it while coding the demo without thinking much about it – I guess it was quicker to type. I later thought of changing it to a class, but left it as it is because the HTML looked neater that way… at least to me. 🙂
Is multiply the only blend mode that works for this example?
Nope. If you already know about blend modes then you probably also know you can use either screen, darken, or lighten to get a similar effect. (Both screen and lighten will need black grid cells instead of white.)
Say you have page that has a bunch of transitions and animations on all sorts of elements. Some of them get triggered when the window is resized because they have to do with size of the page or position or padding or something. It doesn’t really matter what it is, the fact that the transition or animation runs may contribute to a feeling of jankiness as you resize the window. If those transitions or animations don’t deliver any benefit in those scenarios, you can turn them off!
The trick is to apply a class that universally shuts off all the transitions and animations:
Now we have a resize-animation-stopper class on the that can force disable any transition or animation while the window is being resized, and goes away after the timeout clears.
There is probably some more performant way of doing this than setTimeout, but that’s the concept. I use this right here on this very site (v17) after noticing some significant resizing jank. It hasn’t entirely eliminated the jank but it’s noticeably better.
Apps for any platform are praised when they are intuitive, good-looking, and provide pleasant feedback to user interactions. Animation is one of the ways to do just that.
Flutter, a cross-platform framework, has matured in the past two years to include web and desktop support. It has garnered a reputation that apps developed with it are smooth and good-looking. With its rich animation support, declarative way of writing UI, “Hot Reload,” and other features, it is now a complete cross-platform framework.
If you are starting out with Flutter and want to learn an unconventional way of adding animation, then you are at the right place: we will explore the realm of animation and motion widgets, an implicit way of adding animations.
Flutter is based on the concept of widgets. Each visual component of an app is a widget — think of them as views in Android. Flutter provides animation support using an Animation class, an “AnimationController” object for management, and “Tween” to interpolate the range of data. These three components work together to provide smooth animation. Since this requires manual creation and management of animation, it is known as an explicit way of animating.
Now let me introduce you to animation and motion widgets. Flutter provides numerous widgets which inherently support animation. There’s no need to create an animation object or any controller, as all the animation is handled by this category of widgets. Just choose the appropriate widget for the required animation and pass in the widget’s properties values to animate. This technique is an implicit way of animating.
The chart above roughly sets out the animation hierarchy in Flutter, how both explicit and implicit animation are supported.
Some of the animated widgets covered in this article are:
AnimatedOpacity
AnimatedCrossFade
AnimatedAlign
AnimatedPadding
AnimatedSize
AnimatedPositioned.
Flutter not only provides predefined animated widgets but also a generic widget called AnimatedWidget, which can be used to create custom implicitly animated widgets. As evident from the name, these widgets belong to the animated and motion widgets category, and so they have some common properties which allow us to make animations much smoother and better looking.
Let me explain these common properties now, as they will be used later in all examples.
duration
The duration over which to animate the parameters.
reverseDuration
The duration of the reverse animation.
curve
The curve to apply when animating the parameters. The interpolated values can be taken from a linear distribution or, if and when specified, can be taken from a curve.
Let’s begin the journey by creating a simple app we’ll call “Quoted”. It will display a random quotation every time the app starts. Two things to note: first, all these quotations will be hardcoded in the application; and second, no user data will be saved.
New flutter project menu in Android Studio. (Large preview)
This will open a new project wizard, where you can configure the project basics.
Flutter project type selection screen. (Large preview)
In the project type selection screen, there are various types of Flutter projects, each catering to a specific scenario.. For this tutorial, choose Flutter Application and press Next.
You now need to enter some project-specific information: the project name and path, company domain, and so on. Have a look at the image below.
Add the project name, the Flutter SDK path, project location, and an optional project description. Press Next.
Flutter application package name screen. (Large preview)
Each application (be it Android or iOS) requires a unique package name. Typically, you use the reverse of your website domain; for example, com.google or com.yahoo. Press Finish to generate a working Flutter application.
Once the project is generated, you should see the screen shown above. Open the main.dart file (highlighted in the screenshot). This is the main application file. The sample project is complete in itself, and can be run directly on an emulator or a physical device without any modification.
Replace the content of the main.dart file with the following code snippet:
This code cleans up the main.dart file by just adding simple information relevant to creating a new app. The class MyApp returns an object: a MaterialApp widget, which provides the basic structure for creating apps conforming to Material Design. To make the code more structured, create two new dart files inside the lib folder: FirstPage.dart and Quotes.dart.
FirstPage.dart will contain all the code responsible for all the visual elements (widgets) required for our Quoted app. All the animation is handled in this file.
Note: Later in the article, all of the code snippets for each animated widget are added to this file as children of the Scaffold widget. For more information, This example on GitHub could be useful.
Start by adding the following code to FirstPage.dart. This is the partial code where other stuff will be added later.
import 'dart:math';
import 'package:animated_widgets/Quotes.dart';
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
class FirstPage extends StatefulWidget {
@override
State createState() {
return FirstPageState();
}
}
class FirstPageState extends State with TickerProviderStateMixin {
bool showNextButton = false;
bool showNameLabel = false;
bool alignTop = false;
bool increaseLeftPadding = false;
bool showGreetings = false;
bool showQuoteCard = false;
String name = '';
double screenWidth;
double screenHeight;
String quote;
@override
void initState() {
super.initState();
Random random = new Random();
int quoteIndex = random.nextInt(Quotes.quotesArray.length);
quote = Quotes.quotesArray[quoteIndex];
}
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
screenWidth = MediaQuery.of(context).size.width;
screenHeight = MediaQuery.of(context).size.height;
return Scaffold(
appBar: _getAppBar(),
body: Stack(
children: [
// All other children will be added here.
// In this article, all the children widgets are contained
// in their own separate methods.
// Just method calls should be added here for the respective child.
],
),
);
}
}
The Quotes.dart file contains a list of all the hardcoded quotations. One point to note here is that the list is a static object. This means it can be used at other places without creating a new object of the Quotes class. This is chosen by design, as the above list act simply as a utility.
Add the following code to this file:
class Quotes {
static const quotesArray = [
"Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best",
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.",
"Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me."
];
}
The project skeleton is now ready, so let’s flesh out Quoted a bit more.
AnimatedOpacity
To lend a personal touch to the app, it would be nice to know the user’s name, so let’s ask for it and show a next button. Until the user enters their name, this button is hidden, and it will gracefully show up when a name is given. We need some kind of visibility animation for the button, but is there a widget for that? Yes, there is.
Enter AnimatedOpacity. This widget builds on the Opacity widget by adding implicit animation support. How do we use it? Remember our scenario: we need to show a next button with animated visibility. We wrap the button widget inside the AnimatedOpacity widget, feed in some proper values and add a condition to trigger the animation — and Flutter can handle the rest.
The AnimatedOpacity widget has two mandatory properties:
opacity
A value of 1 means completely visible; 0 (zero) means hidden. While animating, Flutter interpolates values between these two extremes. You can see how a condition is placed to change the visibility, thus triggering animation.
child
The child widget that will have its visibility animated.
You should now understand how really simple it is to add visibility animation with the implicit widget. And all such widgets follow the same guidelines and are easy to use. Let’s move on to the next one.
AnimatedCrossFade
We have the user’s name, but the widget is still waiting for input. In the previous step, as the user enters their name, we display the next button. Now, when the user presses the button, I want to stop accepting input and show the entered name. There are many ways to do it, of course, but perhaps we can hide away the input widget and show an uneditable text widget. Let’s try it out using the AnimatedCrossFade widget.
This widget requires two children, as the widget crossfades between them based on some condition. One important thing to keep in mind while using this widget is that both of the children should be the same width. If the height is different, then the taller widget gets clipped from the bottom. In this scenario, two widgets will be used as children: input and label.
Cross-fading between the input widget and name widget. (Large preview)
This widget requires a different set of mandatory parameters:
crossFadeState
This state works out which child to show.
firstChild
Specifies the first child for this widget.
secondChild
Specifies the second child.
AnimatedAlign
At this point, the name label is positioned at the center of the screen. It will look much better at the top, as we need the center of the screen to show quotes. Simply put, the alignment of the name label widget should be changed from center to top. And wouldn’t it be nice to animate this alignment change along with the previous cross-fade animation? Let’s do it.
As always, several techniques can be used to achieve this. Since the name label widget is already center-aligned, animating its alignment would be much simpler than manipulating the top and left values of the widget. The AnimatedAlign widget is perfect for this job.
To initiate this animation, a trigger is required. The sole purpose of this widget is to animate alignment change, so it has only a few properties: add a child, set its alignment, trigger the alignment change, and that’s it.
Alignment animation of the name widget. (Large preview)
It has only two mandatory properties:
child: The child whose alignment will be modified.
alignment: Required alignment value.
This widget is really simple but the results are elegant. Moreover, we saw how easily we can use two different animated widgets to create a more complex animation. This is the beauty of animated widgets.
AnimatedPadding
Now we have the user’s name at the top, smoothly animated without much effort, using different kinds of animated widgets. Let’s add a greeting, “Hi,” before the name. Adding a text widget with value “Hi,” at the top will make it overlap the greeting text widget, looking like the image below.
The greeting and name widgets overlap. (Large preview)
What if the name text widget had some padding on the left? Increasing the left padding will definitely work, but wait: can we increase the padding with some animation? Yes, and that is what AnimatedPadding does. To make all this much better looking, let’s have the greetings text widget fade in and the name text widget’s padding increase at the same time.
Since the animation above should occur only after the previous animated alignment is complete, we need to delay triggering this animation. Digressing from the topic briefly, this is a good moment to talk about a popular mechanism to add delay. Flutter provides several such techniques, but the Future.delayed constructor is one of the simpler, cleaner and more readable approaches. For instance, to execute a piece of code after 1 second:
Future.delayed(Duration(seconds: 1), (){
sum = a + b; // This sum will be calculated after 1 second.
print(sum);
});
Since the delay duration is already known (calculated from previous animation durations), the animation can be triggered after this interval.
// Showing “Hi” after 1 second - greetings visibility trigger.
_showGreetings() {
Future.delayed(Duration(seconds: 1), () {
setState(() {
showGreetings = true;
});
});
}
// Increasing the padding for name label widget after 1 second - increase padding trigger.
_increaseLeftPadding() {
Future.delayed(Duration(seconds: 1), () {
setState(() {
increaseLeftPadding = true;
});
});
}
Padding animation of the name widget. (Large preview)
This widget has only two mandatory properties:
child
The child inside this widget, which padding will be applied to.
padding
The amount of space to add.
AnimatedSize
Today, any app having some kind of animation will include zooming in to or out of visual components to grab user attention (commonly called scaling animation). Why not use the same technique here? We can show the user a motivational quote that zooms in from the center of the screen. Let me introduce you to the AnimatedSize widget, which enables the zoom-in and zoom-out effects, controlled by changing the size of its child.
This widget is a bit different from the others when it comes to the required parameters. We need what Flutter calls a “Ticker.” Flutter has a method to let objects know whenever a new frame event is triggered. It can be thought of as something that sends a signal saying, “Do it now! … Do it now! … Do it now! …”
The AnimatedSize widget requires a property — vsync — which accepts a ticker provider. The easiest way to get a ticker provider is to add a Mixin to the class. There are two basic ticker provider implementations: SingleTickerProviderStateMixin, which provides a single ticker; and TickerProviderStateMixin, which provides several.
The default implementation of a Ticker is used to mark the frames of an animation. In this case, the latter is employed. More about mixins.
// Helper method to create quotes card widget.
_getQuoteCardWidget() {
return Card(
color: Colors.green,
elevation: 8.0,
child: _getAnimatedSizeWidget(),
);
}
// Helper method to create animated size widget and set its properties.
_getAnimatedSizeWidget() {
return AnimatedSize(
duration: Duration(seconds: 1),
curve: Curves.easeInOut,
vsync: this,
child: _getQuoteContainer(),
);
}
// Helper method to create the quotes container widget with different sizes.
_getQuoteContainer() {
return Container(
height: showQuoteCard ? 100 : 0,
width: showQuoteCard ? screenWidth - 32 : 0,
child: Center(
child: Padding(
padding: EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 16),
child: Text(quote, style: TextStyle(color: Colors.white, fontWeight: FontWeight.w400, fontSize: 14),),
),
),
);
}
// Trigger used to show the quote card widget.
_showQuote() {
Future.delayed(Duration(seconds: 2), () {
setState(() {
showQuoteCard = true;
});
});
}
Scaling animation of the quotes widget. (Large preview)
Mandatory properties for this widget:
vsync
The required ticker provider to coordinate animation and frame changes.<
child
The child whose size changes will be animated.
The zoom in and zoom out animation is now easily tamed.
AnimatedPositioned
Great! The quotes zoom in from the center to grab the user’s attention. What if it slid up from the bottom while zooming in? Let’s try it. This motion involves playing with the position of the quote widget and animating the changes in position properties. AnimatedPositioned is the perfect candidate.
This widget automatically transitions the child’s position over a given duration whenever the specified position changes. One point to note: it works only if its parent widget is a “Stack.” This widget is pretty simple and straightforward to use. Let’s see.
// Helper method to create the animated positioned widget.
// With position changes based on “showQuoteCard” flag.
_getAnimatedPositionWidget() {
return AnimatedPositioned(
duration: Duration(seconds: 1),
curve: Curves.easeInOut,
child: _getQuoteCardWidget(),
top: showQuoteCard ? screenHeight/2 - 100 : screenHeight,
left: !showQuoteCard ? screenWidth/2 : 12,
);
}
Position with scaling animation of quotes. (Large preview)
This widget has only one mandatory property:
child
The widget whose position will be changed.
If the size of the child is not expected to change along with its position, a more performative alternative to this widget would be SlideTransition.
Animations are an integral part of user experience. Static apps or apps with janky animation not only lower user retention but also a developer’s reputation to deliver results.
Today, most popular apps have some kind of subtle animation to delight users. Animated feedback to user requests can also engage them to explore more. Flutter offers a lot of features for cross-platform development, including rich support for smooth and responsive animations.
Flutter has great plug-in support which allows us to use animations from other developers. Now that it has matured to version 1.9, with so much love from the community, Flutter is bound to get better in the future. I’d say now is a great time to learn Flutter!
You’ll find a few other trends, and sites that ignore trends altogether, in our roundup of the freshest web design this month, but it’s hard to ignore the vibrancy that’s taking over. Enjoy!
Chevalvert
Chevalvert is a French design agency whose site visually bombards you from the moment it loads. The maximalist approach is visually overwhelming in places, and individual work can be hard to distinguish, but what the site conveys brilliantly is the creative passion and courage of the agency.
#24HourAce
We’ve been vibing on minimalism for a decade or more, but recently a more anarchic, more colorful, more visually aggressive style has taken hold. #24HourAce for Gucci is the embodiment of this maximalist trend with crazy animation, color, and glitch effects. More is more.
La Maison de Santé Pantinoise
The web’s not all clashing colors and glitch effects. The site for La Maison de Santé Pantinose, a medical practice in a Parisian suburb, calms potentially anxious patients with pastel tones and simple color block animation that sensitively illustrates the conditions treated at the practice.
Ride & Crash
Back to anarchy, with Ride & Crash‘s energy-packed site. From the variations on its deceptively simple, but carefully drawn logotype, to the text that transforms from gibberish as you scroll, everything about this site communicates creative confidence, admirable in a young project.
Collage Crafting
As if keen to demonstrate that modernist typography can also be expressive, Collage Crafting‘s landing page text explodes deliciously as you scroll. But what I really love is the way the hover effects combine in the product page, making the box appear to slide from one item to the next.
Genesis Block
Genesis Block is an impressive site for a fintech company. The line art illustrations reach another level by using gradients to promote the feeling of three dimensions, and the animation that’s tied to the window scroll — not least the animated Rubik’s Cube — is all presented expertly.
Dropmark
Until the growth of maximalism the biggest trend on the web, favoured by SaaS, was animated blocks of complementary color, looping to produce low file size, high interest motion on a site. Dropmark uses the trend to frame its landing page and divide up the generous whitespace.
Olivia Palermo
As soon as CSS grid was announced we were promised it would herald new web design layouts that broke out of simple RWD grids, and we’re finally starting to see some. Olivia Palermo uses a complex grid to present a fashion magazine-style site that’s vibrant, dynamic, and engaging.
Hest
Hest is a Norwegian photography agency and presents its photographers’ work in a standard way. But in places, the designers have added a sharp drop shadow in pastel, breaking up the grid and creating a sense of depth. It’s such a simple trick, but amazingly effective.
Kaohsiung Music Center
From the moment the brand mark animates as a loader, it’s clear that the Kaohsiung Music Center site is something special. The impressive three dimensional site for a Taiwanese music venue features a flyover of the site based on architects’ renderings. It feels game-like in its futurism.
Ooma
Ooma makes cloud-based home communications services, from security cameras to entry systems. The clean landing page for its home security cameras uses an alternating alignment to create a predictable and reassuring rhythm, perfect for those looking for a safety solution.
Déplacé Maison
Using heavy black outlines and halftone shading, Déplacé Maison‘s art directions evokes the feel of graphic novels. An aesthetic reinforced by the lettering-style typography. It’s a look that makes you feel that you couldn’t fail to find adventure in these shoes, exactly what their customers want.
Guzema
Guzema Fine Jewelry mixes images, text, and video to create a design packed into little boxes, that feels part-browsing experience, part-gift receiving. It’s slow, which is usually a disaster online, but for luxury goods, the sense of anticipation actually adds a positive edge to the experience.
Trux Studio
Trux Studio‘s site opens with a full screen video that clearly explains the Danish business’ unique offering. Packing a portrait studio into the back of a lorry, the team travels to your location to shoot corporate portraits. It’s a shame for us they couldn’t pack it all into a plane.
Black Futurism 2019
Black Futurism is a conference that took place at the start of October. Organized by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union, it’s about exploring liberation and equality through design, and this promotional site is a simple, powerful statement.
Starface
Spots, zits, pimples, and all manner of skin ‘imperfections’ can be crippling on your self-confidence, especially among younger people. Starface is an awesome company that is rebranding its spot treatment as something to be celebrated with its super-positive site.
Old Spitalfields Market
Old Spitalfields Market is a fashionable covered market in East London. Its site uses a classic modernist grid to divide up the page. The grid transforms as you scroll, with different sections pausing, while others glide past. It’s a technique that’s repeated across the sumptuous site.
Graf Lantz
Graf Lantz is an LA-based company producing cute accessories that they market directly to customers in Japan with this dedicated site. It’s fascinating to compare the company’s approach to the Japanese market, with its .com. The Japanese, it seems, love liquid transition effects.
Two Robbers
Convinced the Brutalist trend was destined to be short-lived? Proving there’s life in the harsh style yet, Two Robbers is a site for hard seltzers brewed in Philadelphia. The stark site emphasizes the unique flavors of the drinks by contrasting the black and white with bursts of color.
2nd Street Clothing
Finally, the maximalism trend returns in full effect for the 2nd Street Clothing site, but you’ll have to scroll to see it. With reversed text, colourful animation, spinning images and video, it’s a young, energetic style. This site won’t look the same in a year, which makes it perfect for right now.
Your new sales contract needs to be signed today. You could ask the signer to print it, sign it, scan it, and send it back. Or you could simply request an e-signature.
When you need a signature for an important document, using an electronic signature app is often the most convenient option. An e-signature is as legally binding as a traditional signature but doesn’t include the hassle of printing or scanning.
Today there are dozens of electronic signature apps available. With so many options, you may be wondering which app is right for you. In this article, we’ll break down six of the top apps based on popularity and user satisfaction.
As the market leader in electronic signatures, DocuSign has become a household name. DocuSign’s intuitive platform guides users through the entire e-signature process. The platform has over 350 built-in integrations, including Salesforce, Box, and Google Suite.
For complete, end-to-end management of the agreement process, DocuSign offers the Agreement Cloud. This suite of applications is designed to handle all your document needs. DocuSign also has a range of APIs, making it a strong option for those looking to integrate with other programs.
Adobe is another industry leader in PDFs and electronic signatures. They focus on ease of use and streamlining digital workflows. This allows users to accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently. Adobe Sign integrates with a variety of third-party apps, like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Dropbox.
Adobe Sign meets all legal requirements for e-signatures. Also, any finalized documents you create are stored automatically. Like DocuSign, Adobe offers an end-to-end document management solution called Adobe Document Cloud. Adobe Document Cloud enables you to create, edit, sign, and review documents on any device.
Formerly known as eSignLive, OneSpan Sign places a heavy emphasis on security. For this reason, major financial institutions, such as Wells Fargo, US Bank, and Royal Bank of Canada, use it. OneSpan Sign provides audit trails and advanced security technology. These features can prevent fraud, compliance issues, and legal disputes.
While the price point is higher, so is the user satisfaction rating. Given this high rating, OneSpan Sign is a strong option for security-focused organizations.
PDFfiller is a feature-rich PDF editor and e-signature management tool. Its capabilities include adding text, drawing shapes, highlighting/blacking out text, adding logos, and searching for text within a PDF. When collecting e-signatures, you can send multiple documents, specify a signing order, and create custom editing permissions.
PDFfiller is compatible with both Android and iOS. It also integrates with many popular apps including Salesforce, Google Docs, Dropbox, MS Office, and Slack. Intended for smaller teams, the premium version supports up to five users.
PandaDoc is a popular document management software that focuses on sales documents. The platform is suitable for collecting any type of e-signature. However, PandaDoc’s value proposition is largely centered on empowering sales teams. Their library of templates includes high-quality sales proposals, quotes, and contracts. These can help facilitate a more successful sales cycle.
PandaDoc’s platform is designed to be an all-in-one document solution. It can create, edit, track, and e-sign digital documents. Other features include premium templates, workflow automation, and content management.
While other vendors are positioned as full document management suites, SignNow is primarily focused on the e-signature aspect of the document process. They strive to be the easiest and most intuitive e-signature app on the market. SignNow has won numerous awards.
If you’re looking for a simple tool to get e-signatures done quickly and efficiently, SignNow is a safe bet. In addition to e-signatures, SignNow offers templates, PDF editing, and third-party integrations, such as Salesforce, Oracle, Dropbox, and Box.
Choosing an e-signature app
E-signature applications have completely transformed the document signing process. The signer no longer needs access to a printer and scanner. You can use the above apps to quickly and conveniently collect e-signatures for almost any purpose.
Ultimately, deciding which app to use will depend on your specific needs. If you just need a basic e-signature tool and would like to save money, PDFfiller or SignNow could be great options. Larger organizations that need comprehensive document management may be interested in the cloud suites offered by Adobe and DocuSign.
Pro Tip
JotForm allows you to add e-signature fields to your forms. Try JotForm’s online form signature fields today.
Regardless of which application you choose, one thing is clear: All six of the apps on this list will provide significant benefits over traditional signatures. Signing documents will be faster, more efficient, and more organized.
