monday.com is an online Work OS platform where teams create custom workflows in minutes to run their projects, processes, and everyday work.
Over 100,000 teams use monday.com to work together.
They have launched a brand new app marketplace for monday.com, meaning you can add tools built by third-party developers into your monday.com space.
You can build apps for this marketplace. For example, you could build a React app (framework doesn’t matter) to help make different teams in an organization work better together, integrate other tools, make important information more transparent, or anything else you can think of that would be useful for teams.
You don’t need to be a monday.com user to participate. You can sign up as a developer and get a FREE monday.com account to participate in the contest.
Do a good job, impress the judges with the craftsmanship, scalability, impact, and creativity of your app, and potentially win huge prices. Three Teslas and ten MacBook Pro’s are among the top prizes. Not to mention it’s cool no matter what to be one of the first people building an app for this platform, with a built-in audience of over 100,000.
Animating accordions in JavaScript has been one of the most asked animations on websites. Fun fact: jQuery’s slideDown() function was already available in the first version in 2011.
In this article, we will see how you can animate the native
First, let’s see how we are gonna structure the markup needed for this animation.
The
element needs a element. The summary is the content visible when the accordion is closed. All the other elements within the are part of the inner content of the accordion. To make it easier for us to animate that content, we are wrapping it inside a
.
<details>
<summary>Summary of the accordion</summary>
<div class="content">
<p>
Lorem, ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit.
Modi unde, ex rem voluptates autem aliquid veniam quis temporibus repudiandae illo, nostrum, pariatur quae!
At animi modi dignissimos corrupti placeat voluptatum!
</p>
</div>
</details>
Accordion class
To make our code more reusable, we should make an Accordion class. By doing this we can call new Accordion() on every
element on the page.
class Accordion {
// The default constructor for each accordion
constructor() {}
// Function called when user clicks on the summary
onClick() {}
// Function called to close the content with an animation
shrink() {}
// Function called to open the element after click
open() {}
// Function called to expand the content with an animation
expand() {}
// Callback when the shrink or expand animations are done
onAnimationFinish() {}
}
Constructor()
The constructor is the place we save all the data needed per accordion.
constructor(el) {
// Store the <details> element
this.el = el;
// Store the <summary> element
this.summary = el.querySelector('summary');
// Store the <div class="content"> element
this.content = el.querySelector('.content');
// Store the animation object (so we can cancel it, if needed)
this.animation = null;
// Store if the element is closing
this.isClosing = false;
// Store if the element is expanding
this.isExpanding = false;
// Detect user clicks on the summary element
this.summary.addEventListener('click', (e) => this.onClick(e));
}
onClick()
In the onClick() function, you’ll notice we are checking if the element is being animated (closing or expanding). We need to do that in case users click on the accordion while it’s being animated. In case of fast clicks, we don’t want the accordion to jump from being fully open to fully closed.
The
element has an attribute, [open], applied to it by the browser when we open the element. We can get the value of that attribute by checking the open property of our element using this.el.open.
onClick(e) {
// Stop default behaviour from the browser
e.preventDefault();
// Add an overflow on the <details> to avoid content overflowing
this.el.style.overflow = 'hidden';
// Check if the element is being closed or is already closed
if (this.isClosing || !this.el.open) {
this.open();
// Check if the element is being openned or is already open
} else if (this.isExpanding || this.el.open) {
this.shrink();
}
}
shrink()
This shrink function is using the WAAPI .animate() function. You can read more about it in the MDN docs. WAAPI is very similar to CSS @keyframes. We need to define the start and end keyframes of the animation. In this case, we only need two keyframes, the first one being the current height the element, and the second one is the height of the
element once it is closed. The current height is stored in the startHeight variable. The closed height is stored in the endHeight variable and is equal to the height of the .
shrink() {
// Set the element as "being closed"
this.isClosing = true;
// Store the current height of the element
const startHeight = `${this.el.offsetHeight}px`;
// Calculate the height of the summary
const endHeight = `${this.summary.offsetHeight}px`;
// If there is already an animation running
if (this.animation) {
// Cancel the current animation
this.animation.cancel();
}
// Start a WAAPI animation
this.animation = this.el.animate({
// Set the keyframes from the startHeight to endHeight
height: [startHeight, endHeight]
}, {
// If the duration is too slow or fast, you can change it here
duration: 400,
// You can also change the ease of the animation
easing: 'ease-out'
});
// When the animation is complete, call onAnimationFinish()
this.animation.onfinish = () => this.onAnimationFinish(false);
// If the animation is cancelled, isClosing variable is set to false
this.animation.oncancel = () => this.isClosing = false;
}
open()
The open function is called when we want to expand the accordion. This function does not control the animation of the accordion yet. First, we calculate the height of the
element and we apply this height with inline styles on it. Once it’s done, we can set the open attribute on it to make the content visible but hiding as we have an overflow: hidden and a fixed height on the element. We then wait for the next frame to call the expand function and animate the element.
open() {
// Apply a fixed height on the element
this.el.style.height = `${this.el.offsetHeight}px`;
// Force the [open] attribute on the details element
this.el.open = true;
// Wait for the next frame to call the expand function
window.requestAnimationFrame(() => this.expand());
}
expand()
The expand function is similar to the shrink function, but instead of animating from the current height to the close height, we animate from the element’s height to the end height. That end height is equal to the height of the summary plus the height of the inner content.
expand() {
// Set the element as "being expanding"
this.isExpanding = true;
// Get the current fixed height of the element
const startHeight = `${this.el.offsetHeight}px`;
// Calculate the open height of the element (summary height + content height)
const endHeight = `${this.summary.offsetHeight + this.content.offsetHeight}px`;
// If there is already an animation running
if (this.animation) {
// Cancel the current animation
this.animation.cancel();
}
// Start a WAAPI animation
this.animation = this.el.animate({
// Set the keyframes from the startHeight to endHeight
height: [startHeight, endHeight]
}, {
// If the duration is too slow of fast, you can change it here
duration: 400,
// You can also change the ease of the animation
easing: 'ease-out'
});
// When the animation is complete, call onAnimationFinish()
this.animation.onfinish = () => this.onAnimationFinish(true);
// If the animation is cancelled, isExpanding variable is set to false
this.animation.oncancel = () => this.isExpanding = false;
}
onAnimationFinish()
This function is called at the end of both the shrinking or expanding animation. As you can see, there is a parameter, [open], that is set to true when the accordion is open, allowing us to set the [open] HTML attribute on the element, as it is no longer handled by the browser.
onAnimationFinish(open) {
// Set the open attribute based on the parameter
this.el.open = open;
// Clear the stored animation
this.animation = null;
// Reset isClosing & isExpanding
this.isClosing = false;
this.isExpanding = false;
// Remove the overflow hidden and the fixed height
this.el.style.height = this.el.style.overflow = '';
}
Setup the accordions
Phew, we are done with the biggest part of the code!
All that’s left is to use our Accordion class for every
element in the HTML. To do so, we are using a querySelectorAll on the tag, and we create a new Accordion instance for each one.
document.querySelectorAll('details').forEach((el) => {
new Accordion(el);
});
Notes
To make the calculations of the closed height and open height, we need to make sure that the
and the content always have the same height.
For example, do not try to add a padding on the summary when it’s open because it could lead to jumps during the animation. Same goes for the inner content — it should have a fixed height and we should avoid having content that could change height during the opening animation.
Also, do not add a margin between the summary and the content as it will not be calculated for the heights keyframes. Instead, use a padding directly on the content to add some spacing.
The end
And voilà, we have a nice animated accordion in JavaScript without any library! ?
Other Coil subscribers deposit small bits of money directly into my online wallet (I’m using Uphold). I set this up over a year ago and found it all quick and easy to get started. But to be fair, I wasn’t trying to understand every detail of it and I’m still not betting anything major on it. PPK went as far to say it was user-hostile and I’ll admit he has some good points…
Signing up for payment services is a complete hassle, because you don’t know what you’re doing while being granted the illusion of free choice by picking one of two or three different systems — that you don’t understand and that aren’t explained. Why would I pick EasyMoneyGetter over CoinWare when both of them are black boxes I never heard of?
Also, these services use insane units. Brave use BATs, though to their credit I saw a translation to US$ — but not to any other currency, even though they could have figured out from my IP address that I come from Europe. Coil once informed me I had earned 0.42 XBP without further comment. W? T? F?
Bigger and bigger sites are starting to use it. TechDirt, is one example. I’ve got it on CodePen as well.
If this was just a “sprinkle some pennies at sites” play, it would be doomed.
I’m pessimistic at that approach. Micropayments have been done over and over and it hasn’t worked and I just don’t see it ever having enough legs to do anything meaningful to the industry.
At a quick glance, that’s what this looks like, and that’s how it is behaving right now, and that deserves a little skepticism.
There are two things that make this different
This has a chance of being a web standard, not something that has to be installed to work.
There are APIs to actually do things based on people transferring money to a site.
Neither of these things are realized, but if both of them happen, then meaningful change is much more likely to happen.
With the APIs, a site could say, “You’ll see no ads on this site if you pay us $1/month,” and then write code to make that happen all anonymously. That’s so cool. Removing ads is the most basic and obvious use case, and I hope some people give that a healthy try. I don’t do that on this site, because I think the tech isn’t quite there yet. I’d want to clearly be able to control the dollar-level of when you get that perk (you can’t control how much you give sites on Coil right now), but more importantly, in order to really make good on the promise of not delivering ads, you need to know very quickly if any given user is supporting you at the required level or not. For example, you can’t wait 2600 milliseconds to decide whether ads need to be requested. Well, you can, but you’ll hurt your ad revenue. And you can’t simply request the ads and hide them when you find out, lest you are not really making good on a promise, as trackers’n’stuff will have already done their thing.
Coil said the right move here is the “100+20” Rule, which I think is smart. It says to give everyone the full value of your site, but then give people extra if they hit monetization thresholds. For example, on this site, if you’re a supporter (not a Coil thing, this is old-school eCommerce), you can download the screencast originals (nobody else can). That’s the kind of thing I’d be happy to unlock via Web Monetization if it became easy to write the code to do that.
Maybe the web really will get monetized at some point and thus fix the original sin of the internet. I’m not really up on where things are in the process, but there is a whole site for it.
I’m not really helping, yet
While I have Coil installed and I’m a fan of all this, what will actually make a difference is having sites that actually do things for users that pay them. Like my video download example above. Maybe recipe sites offer some neat little printable PDF shopping list for people that pay them via Web Monetization. I dunno! Stuff like that! I’m not doing anything cool like that yet, myself.
If this thing gets legs, we’ll see all sorts of creative stuff, and the standard will make it so there is no one service that lords over this. It will be standardized APIs, so there could be a whole ecosystem of online wallets that accept money, services that help dole money out, fancy in-browser features, and site owners doing creative things.
The concept of remote work has been there for quite some time now. Many organizations extended this facility to their employees who either had to travel a lot for business or if they were located in some faraway regions.
Earlier the ability to work remotely was considered a sort of luxury and was available only to a few sects of the workforce.
However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, things changed completely. As several countries went into a state of complete lockdown businesses had no other option but to incorporate work from home or remote work policy to keep their employees safe and operations uninterrupted.
Well, the mass transition from the usual work culture to remote work was aided by modern-day technology. Various cloud-based tools came up to support both employees and employers to streamline their efforts and facilitate real-time collaboration. But the only thing that technology couldn’t compensate for much is the essence of human interaction that kept us going on for ages.
In this article, I’ll discuss with you the power of human interaction by breaking it into the following points
The Effects of Remote Work on Human Interaction
Why is it a Big Concern?
Things to do for Encouraging Healthy Social Interaction for Professionals and Employers
So let’s begin
The Effects of Remote Work on Human Interaction
The ongoing pandemic has wreaked havoc on the entire humankind. The global economy tumbled down and physical human connections became invalid due to social distancing protocols. Professionals around the world also felt the adverse effects of the latter.
Confined within their homes to keep themselves and their families safe, it became their new workplace and the virtual world their new playground. Since the majority of the professionals apart from those freelancers were mostly accustomed to their office work environment, the shift to remote working was not that simple.
While in the workplace, they could go up to their peers and discuss work-related issues at the same time share their own emotions. This created a very good professional relationship between them contributing to a positive work environment. It helped them keep their worries at bay and concentrate on their work. Further, it positively impacted their teamwork while enhancing their workplace communication skills.
However, when it came to working remotely this arrangement became obsolete. With everyone separated from each other, water cooler and over the desk conversations got replaced by virtual meetings. The essence of human connection which existed when they were physically in front of each other was gone and it again widened the gap between them.
This indeed created a few ripple effects that are not at all desired for a healthy workforce. For eg, the feeling of isolation.
It is the most common problem that many remote workers are now facing. Human beings are social animals and staying away from it affects other aspects of their life. Since most of the office goers had to shift to remote work the social connections that they shared with their peers through constant interaction got affected. Staying away from their usual work environment and remaining confined within their homes for prolonged periods contributed to the feeling of isolation which has a negative impact on both their physical and mental health.
Why is it a Big Concern?
Many may argue that the issue of loneliness can be bridged easily with the aid of available chat and real-time collaboration software, but the truth is, human emotions can never be replaced by technology no matter how much it advances.
This fact has indeed turned the entire event into a matter of concern for employers as well as those HR professionals who are also dealing with great challenges as we speak.
The majority of the professionals who have recently turned to remote work are still trying to cope up with the changed scenario. As such, being confused and going stray from the set path is very normal. But with the feeling of loneliness, while working from home, professionals are sure to make certain decisions that might not be in their best interest.
Moreover, these times call for staying united and fighting the adversities together, so if you’re an employer especially you shouldn’t think of overlooking this issue that could lead your workforce towards extreme demotivation.
So, what can you do to prevent this situation from happening and how to improve it?
Let’s learn about it in the next section!
Things to do for Encouraging Healthy Social Interaction for Professionals and Employers
1. Creating Virtual Communities
Internet chat rooms and virtual communities have become the norm for all to share themselves with each other. Similarly, both solo professionals and employers can take advantage of this thing by creating a virtual community among themselves.
In this virtual community, one must allow its participants to speak their heart out whenever they want. Irrespective of anything, all members of your virtual community should be encouraged to support their peers and appreciate them for letting themselves out.
2. Organizing and Taking Part in Online Activities
One of the best ways to stay socially engaged while working remotely is through online activities. Being an employer you can surely plan to organize some virtual team building activities and professionals should look out for such opportunities where they can make some new connections.
These events provide a platform for all to showcase their skills and competencies. Moreover, it teaches everyone to grasp each other’s thoughts and act on it mutually that benefits all.
3. One on One Sessions
Face to Face meetings over online platforms is one of the most recommended ways to mitigate the feeling of isolation while working remotely. It allows individuals to speak out their mind in front of who they feel comfortable with. For employers this would provide them with a great opportunity to truly understand their employees and derive solutions for various problems that could arise with remote teams.
4. Online Referrals
Both professionals and employers often come across the issue of connecting to or finding the right persons for a job. Since, everyone is away it becomes quite hard to find and gauge the abilities of an individual who could fit the requirement. As such, one must consider checking out online referrals from the experienced ones who know how things go around and interact with them to get a more refined outlook.
5. After Meeting Sessions
Ok, this one would be a very effective way to encourage people to interact while working remotely. Generally, virtual meetings mostly end once they derive their objective. However, such meetings in the real world provide an opportunity for all the participants to get to know each other closely and also discuss other matters of interest. Similarly, you can create a separate section during the meeting where everyone is allowed to speak or ask anything they want to their peers.
These sessions would allow everyone a great chance for everyone to communicate with each other and also rejuvenate their motivation level from time to time.
Bottomline
The power of human interaction in any aspect can never be undermined. It is not only about talking random things but also sharing thoughts and learning from each other.
In times like these, where everyone is mostly working remotely or from home, the need to keep up the interaction with their other counterparts has become very important for keeping oneself up against the adversities. I hope that this article of mine has helped you understand the importance of keeping up with good human interaction and also I would be obliged to host you for further discussion on this topic.
Loops are one of those features that you don’t need every day. But when you do, it’s awfully nice that preprocessors can do it because native HTML and CSS cannot.
Sass (SCSS)
for Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
while Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
each Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
Less
for Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
while Loop
(That’s what the above is. The when clause could be thought of exactly as while.)
each Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
Stylus
for Loop
CodePen Embed Fallback
while Loop
Only for loops in Stylus.
each Loop
The for loop actually behaves more like an each loop, so here’s a more obvious each loop example:
Here’s a fun page coming from secretGeek.net. You don’t normally think “fun” with brutalist minimalism but the CSS trickery that makes it work on this page is certainly that.
The HTML is literally displayed on the page as tags. So, in a sense, the HTML is both the page markup and the content. The design is so minimal (or “naked”) that it’s code leaks through! Very cool.
The page explains the trick, but I’ll paraphrase it here:
Everything is a block-level element via { display:block; }
…except for anchors, code, emphasis and strong, which remain inline with a,code,em,strong {display:inline}
Use ::before and ::after to display the HTML tags as content (e.g. p::before { content: '
I’m a WordPress user and, if you’re anything like me, you always have two tabs open when you edit a post: one with the new fancy pants block editor, aka Gutenberg, and another with a preview of the post so you know it won’t look wonky on the front end.
It’s no surprise that a WordPress theme’s styles only affect the front end of your website. The back end posy editor generally looks nothing like the front end result. We’re used to it. But what if I said it’s totally possible for the WordPress editor nearly mirror the front end appearance?
All it takes is a custom stylesheet.
Mind. Blown. Right? Well, maybe it’s not that mind blowing, but it may save you some time if nothing else. ?
WordPress gives us a hint of what’s possible here. Fire up the default Twenty Twenty theme that’s packaged with WordPress, fire up the editor, and it sports some light styling.
This whole thing consists of two pretty basic changes:
A few lines of PHP in your theme’s functions.php file that tell the editor you wish to load a custom stylesheet for editor styles
Said custom stylesheet
Right then, enough pre-waffle! Let’s get on with making the WordPress editor look like the front end, shall we?
Step 1: Crack open the functions.php file
OK I was lying, just a little more waffling. If you’re using a WordPress theme that you don’t develop yourself, it’s probably best that you setup achild theme before making any changes to your main theme.
Fire up your favorite text editor and open up the theme’s functions.php file that’s usually located in the root of the theme folder. Let’s drop in the following lines at the end of the file:
// Gutenberg custom stylesheet
add_theme_support('editor-styles');
add_editor_style( 'style-editor.css' ); // make sure path reflects where the file is located
What this little snippet of code does is tell WordPress to add support for a custom stylesheet to be used with Gutenberg, then points to where that stylesheet (that we’re calling editor-style.css) is located. WordPress has solid documentation for the add_theme_support function if you want to dig into it a little more.
Step 2: CSS tricks (see what I did there?!)
Now we’re getting right into our wheelhouse: writing CSS!
We’ve added editor-styles support to our theme, so the next thing to do is to add the CSS goodness to the stylesheet we defined in functions.php so our styles correctly load up in Gutenberg.
There are thousands of WordPress themes out there, so I couldn’t possibly write a stylesheet that makes the editor exactly like each one. Instead, I will show you an example based off of the theme I use on my website. This should give you an idea of how to build the stylesheet for your site. I’ll also include a template at the end, which should get you started.
OK let’s create a new file called style-editor.css and place it in the root directory of the theme (or again, the child theme if you’re customizing a third-party theme).
Writing CSS for the block editor isn’t quite as simple as using standard CSS elements. For example, if we were to use the following in our editor stylesheet it wouldn’t apply the text size to
elements in the post.
h2 {
font-size: 1.75em;
}
Instead of elements, our stylesheet needs to target Block Editor blocks. This way, we know the formatting should be as accurate as possible. That means
elements needs to be scoped to the .rich-text.block-editor-rich-text__editable class to style things up.
It just takes a little peek at DevTools to find a class we can latch onto.
I just so happened to make a baseline CSS file that styles common block editor elements following this pattern. Feel free to snag it over at GitHub and swap out the styles so they complement your theme.
I could go on building the stylesheet here, but I think the template gives you an idea of what you need to populate within your own stylesheet. A good starting point is to go through the stylesheet for your front-end and copy the elements from there, but you will likely need to change some of the element classes so that they apply to the Block Editor window.
If in doubt, play around with elements in your browser’s DevTools to work out what classes apply to which elements. The template linked above should capture most of the elements though.
The results
First of all, let’s take a look at what the WordPress editor looks like without a custom stylesheet:
The block editor sports a clean, stark UI in its default appearance. It’s pulling in Noto Serif from Google Fonts but everything else is pretty bare bones.
Let’s compare that to the front end of my test site:
Things are pretty different, right? Here we still have a simple design, but I’m using gradients all over, to the max! There’s also a custom font, button styling, and a blockquote. Even the containers aren’t exactly square edges.
Love it or hate it, I think you will agree this is a big departure from the default Gutenberg editor UI. See why I have to have a separate tab open to preview my posts?
Now let’s load up our custom styles and check things out:
Well would you look at that! The editor UI now looks pretty much exactly the same as the front end of my website. The content width, fonts, colors and various elements are all the same as the front end. I even have the fancy background against the post title!
Ipso facto — no more previews in another tab. Cool, huh?
Making the WordPress editor look like your front end is a nice convenience. When I’m editing a post, flipping between tabs to see what the posts looks like on the front end ruins my mojo, so I prefer not to do it.
These couple of quick steps should be able to do the same for you, too!
You must have heard the saying ‘the first impression is the last’ quite a few times in your life. People don’t just say it for the sake of saying it; it holds some truth.
All it takes is just a few seconds for your target audience to decide whether to buy products from your website or not.
Here the need and importance of color psychology come into the picture in order to attract the attention of your potential audience and compel them to buy your products.
What Is Color Psychology?
Color psychology is basically a method of attracting attention with the help of beautiful colors and its combinations.
Choosing the right color scheme is important for your website. In marketing, color psychology plays a vital role in attracting the customers, helping them form a perception about your offerings, and positively influence their buying decision.
I am pretty sure that you must have seen malls and brand outlets displaying the sale message on the red-colored banner.
But have you wondered why? It is merely because red is considered as the most vibrant color that incorporates the power to create excitement as well as a sense of urgency and builds curiosity.
Coca-Cola is a major brand that uses red as the primary color in its logo.
Every color has a different part to play. It acts as an additional contributing element in forming the perception about the product in the minds of the buyers or target audience.
Without taking much of your time, let me just give you a brief about the top eight colors along with the industries that prefer to communicate their message using these.
1. Red
The color red helps in creating a sense of urgency as well as considered the most emotional color that induces the gush of emotions in humans. It replicates the meaning of life, boldness, and excitement.
Red is Popular For – The color is widely used by industries like food and beverages, transportation, agriculture, and technology.
Red Is Not Recommended For – Red color is not at all recommended to market your offerings if you have a hospital, or in fact, any healthcare unit because it represents a negative and questionable image. Also, experts say, not to use the color red for marketing household items.
Brands That Used The Color Red In Their Logos – Virgin mobiles, McDonald’s, Coca-cola, Kelloggs, KFC, Colgate, Nike, and Red Bull.
2. Blue
The color blue is one of the most preferred and adored colors because even the color blinds can see things in blue. Blue is one of the most popularly used colors on the web and also for branding. Several banks and financial institutes use this color to represent security and safety. It represents productivity, trust, and tranquillity.
Blue is Popular For – It is primarily used by industries like healthcare, finance, energy, airplanes, technology, and agriculture in their logos.
Blue Is Not Recommended For – It is not recommended to be used by automobile, clothing, and food industries.
Brands That Used The Color Blue In Their Logos – PayPal, OralB, Skype, LinkedIn, IBM, Facebook, Ford, Pepsi, Visa Cards, and Yes Bank.
3. Green
The color green symbolizes peace, growth, harmony, and nature. It is widely used by brands that work toward helping others or improving their lives.
Green is Popular For – The companies that belong to the industry that helps in improving the quality of life by easing up the complex processes use green color for branding. These industries include energy, food, finance, technology, and household.
Green Is Not Recommended For – It is not recommended to use by industries like healthcare, aviation, automobile, and healthcare.
Brands That Used The Color Green In Their Logos – Brands like Whole Foods, Animal Planets, Subway, Spotify, and The Body Shop use green colors for their brand logos.
4. Orange
Orange color demonstrates ambitions, confidence, and enthusiasm. The businesses widely use it for the call to action buttons like selling now, register now, buy today, get a free quote, etc. It is important to note that the orange color is the only color to be recognized by both CSS and HTML 4.01.
Orange is Popular For – Orange color is quite famous for the healthcare industries as well as the IT sector.
Orange Is Not Recommended For – Industries like aviation, automobile finance, energy, and clothing usually do not prefer to market their brand in the color orange.
Brands That Used The Color Orange In Their Logos – Fanta, Nickelodeon, Harley-Davidson, and Hooters.
5. Black
The color black replicates authority, superiority, elegance, and power. It is widely preferred in order to market luxurious products or the products that are used to make a style statement.
Black is Popular For – As already mentioned above, it is used to market luxurious and prestigious products. Hence the luxury automotive brands, clothing brands, and technological brands use the color black to advertise their products.
Black Is Not Recommended For – it is not preferred by agricultural, household, food & beverages, finance, and healthcare industries to offer their products.
Brands That Used The Color Black In Their Logos – Blackberry, Chanel, Jaguar, Mont BLANC, and Louis Vitton.
6. White or Silver
Silver or white color replicates nothing but perfection. Brands who want to convey their message about precision with a relaxed attitude prefer the color white to market or display their messages or brand communications.
White is Popular For – it is widely used for healthcare businesses, designing business cards, promoting charity, and clothing brands.
White Is Not Recommended For – it is not advisable to use either white or grey in agricultural, aviation, energy, technological, finance, and food & beverage industry.
Brands That Used The Color White In Their Logos – Apple, Asos, Honda, Ralph Lauren, Uber, and Adidas.
7. Purple
The color purple is widely used by companies dealing in cosmetics, food, or IT products. It represents wealth, royalty, status, and power. It may work well if you are trading in products that target females of any age.
Purple is Popular For – The companies or brands dealing in beauty health, finance, or technology uses the color purple for marketing their brand and offerings.
Purple Is Not Recommended For – Using purple might raise a lot of questions in the aviation, household, clothing, automobile, energy, or agricultural sector.
Brands That Used The Color Purple In Their Logos – Cadbury, Yahoo, craigslist, Taco Bell, Crown Royal, and many more.
8. Yellow
The color yellow represents joy, happiness, positivity, intellect, and energy. The yellow color is often associated with food and is popularly used by brands that work with the sole motive of bringing joy and smite to their customers.
Yellow Is Popular For – industries dealing in either household, food, or energy.
Yellow Is Not Recommended For – It may not have the most significant impact on the industry like agriculture, healthcare, aviation, clothing, automobile, and finance.
Brands That Used The Color Yellow In Their Logos – DHL, Pennzoil, Shell, National Geographic, Lays, Nikon, Snapchat, Ikea, Ferrari, and Burger King.
Bonus: Best Tips To Decide Colors Schemes For Your Website
Do not overlook the fact that the colors have a tendency to affect emotions. It is highly advisable to understand the color schemes of your website along with their impact on the probable customer base. This proves beneficial in order to maximize the effect of color psychology on your ultimate conversions.
Men and women are different, so are their preferences and impact of color psychology. It is essential for you to note that if you have a brand that focuses mainly on women, then you must use feminine colors like pink and red in order to maximize the chances of final sales. While on the other hand if you are dealing with a brand that focuses on the male section of the society, colors like blue and black are perceived to be ideal. The overall crux is that don’t just ignore the gender’s bifurcation.
Before selecting a color or a combination of it for your website, it is crucial to understand the demographics of your target audience. It would be beneficial if you are already aware of the color choices and preferences of your target audience.
If you are planning to add a color combination theme, then you must thoroughly understand your brand and its purpose first. It is essential because not all colors suit every brand, industry, or company. You must focus on selecting a color combination that helps you to convey the brand message effortlessly.
Don’t just put any color anywhere on your website. You must follow a uniformity because it helps your website look visually aesthetic and appealing to your target audience. Also, make sure to highlight your CTAs in dark or bold colors so that they stand out from the rest of the content and can speak up for themselves.
Conclusion
Color psychology is a lot beyond that just setting your creative mind free. In fact, it is more about attracting the attention of your target audience by setting up a color theme that they prefer, and that helps them form a positive perception of the brand. The power of color psychology is leveraged by the web designers and the UI/UX designers strategically, in order to improve the conversion rate and to increase the ultimate revenue.
Featured image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-office-yellow-school-40799/
With many schools quarantined and a winter-wave of COVID-19 likely ahead, teaching is shifting online once again. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for teachers to embrace online learning to sustain their students’ attention.
While online classes used to be exotic and fun when they first started, Zoom fatigue soon set in for most students. Learning outcomes suffered. After a brief respite at the beginning of the semester, many teachers are now facing another challenge. How to transition back from in-person to online classes and still keep students engaged?
Fortunately, there is a variety of tools out there that can help educators achieve just that. Uncomplicated, engaging, interactive, these platforms and programs can help make distance learning captivating.
One of the most versatile tools available for teachers is Google Classroom. This eLearning platform is explicitly aimed at K-12 educators. Many school districts already use it for in-class assignments.
Google Classroom adapts the tools of the Google Suite for teaching purposes. You can give presentations with Slides, provide worksheets in Docs, give quizzes in Forms, and even assign math and bookkeeping homework in Sheets. In addition, Google Classroom natively integrates with other educational platforms, such as Pear.
Going further, teachers can invite students to private classrooms. The platform also offers a distinct functionality for submitting assignments, grading them, providing feedback, and setting up term assessments.
Finally, Google Classroom has two more significant advantages: It’s entirely free and mobile-friendly.
Edmodo offers a comprehensive online teaching solution. Educators can create classrooms to provide students with materials, interact with them through chats, and respond to queries. They can also assign tasks, create assessments, and track grades.
What’s more, Edmodo also provides Spotlight, a resource library for teachers with quality distance learning content to choose from. Teachers can share content using hashtags.
Another upside is that parents can use their own login data to check on their children’s progress.
Edpuzzle aims to foster self-paced learning through interactive video lessons. Teachers can customize videos to make them more engaging and track their students’ progress. Apart from adding their own voice-over narration and questions, educators can add graphics and images.
It’s also possible to track which students watched a video and how often they watched each section. This allows teachers to check for comprehension difficulties.
As raw material, Edpuzzle accepts videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, and similar platforms.
Especially for younger students, basing parts of lessons on games and questions is an excellent way to hold their attention. Kahoot! makes that possible.
It’s an educational platform that promotes game-based learning. Teachers can create questionnaires, surveys, and discussion boards. These are then projected in the online classroom. Students can interactively answer questions alone or in groups.
It’s also possible to add elements of friendly competition to make tasks more challenging and fun. Through visualizing each student’s or group’s progress, Kahoot! can create a dynamic and social educational environment.
When it comes to checking learning comprehension, Socrative is a premier tool for educators. It simplifies the feedback and evaluation process and lets teachers make sure that no one is left behind during distance learning.
With Socrative, educators can create engaging assessments from quizzes to personal feedback forms. The platform also makes it easy to set up polls and surveys for a group of students.
Blackboard is a comprehensive learning management system (LMS). Instructors at college level have been widely using it for years. Recently, the platform has been adapted to suit digital and high school educators’ needs for distance learning.
Learn, Collaborate, SafeAssign, and Ally are the main features of Blackboard. Teachers can create an online classroom to provide learning materials, host discussions, post recorded lectures, and support mentoring and tutoring programs. They can also provide real-time feedback on students’ assignments, which can be submitted directly on the platform.
Like Blackboard, Canvas is an LMS that allows for the creation of online classrooms to share class materials and conduct assessments. Teachers can upload syllabi, assignments, slides, videos of classes, and take advantage of a wide range of other features. Students can communicate through discussion forums, engage with educators, and submit assignments.
In addition, Canvas integrates with third-party tools and education platforms, especially those built on the LTI standard. It is also mobile-friendly so that both students and teachers can manage their tasks wherever they are.
For educators looking to make their lessons more interactive, Pear Deck is an excellent tool. It’s explicitly designed to make student-teacher interactions more dynamic and social as teachers move through a slideshow.
Pear Deck is platform-neutral. It offers integrations for Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. Teachers can add various types of questions to their slides for students to answer – through selecting multiple-choice options, typing responses, dragging panels, or even drawing schematics. During live presentations, teachers can see these responses in real-time and share them anonymously with the class to illustrate particular points.
Pear also offers integrations with other learning platforms, such as Google Classroom. Additionally, it partners with various organizations – like Newsela and the Encyclopedia Britannica – to provide inspiration for teachers and templates for learning content.
The most widespread solution is currently Zoom. Apart from HD video and voice calling, this platform also offers options to create break out rooms for discussions in smaller groups, screen sharing, and annotation of shared screens.
However, thanks to the widespread implementation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), there is a wide range of alternative platforms available for educators that might better fit their needs.
Microsoft Teams, for example, also offers file sharing, chat, video and voice calling options. The platform provides features to track attendance, use a digital whiteboard, share screens, create break out rooms, and blur out distracting backgrounds. Plus, it integrates easily with other Microsoft Office applications.
A third solid option is Google Meet. This platform offers video conferencing with up to 100 students for up to 1 hour and an unlimited number of meetings. Participants can share their screens and use a parallel chat. If you also use Google Classroom, this may be the best solution for you.
Final Thoughts
Distance teaching is no longer an emergency measure. It has become an integral part of many students’ and teachers’ daily lives, even where schools are open. Considering the current virus situation, it’s likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
For teachers, this means that it is essential to step up their online teaching game. Holding video calls from time to time and emailing out assignments is no longer enough.
By embracing the tools on the list above, teachers can create a dynamic and engaging virtual classroom. So that instead of being held back by closed schools, students can forge their way to success with distance learning.
There are so many things to think about when first starting a business. What will your business offer? How will this differ from existing solutions? Who will benefit most from your offering? And why are you so passionate about this?
If you haven’t done so yet, work through this exercise to come up with your brand identity and business name.
Once you’ve figured out your brand identity, you have to create a visual identity — also referred to as brand imagery — to go along with it.
While you could easily throw together visual elements that speak to you, your goal should be to choose visuals that resonate with your audience. So, building your visual identity is going to require some work.
In the following post, we’re going to look at how your brand’s visual style can give off certain signals to those who encounter it (and how to use those to your advantage). We’ll also break down what you need, to piece together your visual identity.
The Power of Visual Identity
Each of the design choices you make that website visitors, social media followers, and customers can see will impact how they approach your brand. Are you a fun-loving company that caters to a younger crowd? Do you create high-tech products that solve serious global problems? Are you a successful entrepreneur who’s reshaping the way we talk to one another?
When done right, our brand visuals convey our brand’s personality, values, and mission without having to use any words.
Think about your favorite clothing brand. What do you picture? Let’s use Athleta as an example.
The logo is probably the first visual element that comes to my mind:
The grey radial shape is one I’m very familiar with. It’s on their website, their social media, and it’s usually imprinted somewhere on their clothing.
The second thing I think about when I think of Athleta is its physical imagery:
Rather than include images of the clothing on its own, there’s often someone wearing Athleta clothes while hiking along a trail, walking on a beach, or working out in a studio.
There’s so much that just these two visual elements tell us about this brand:
Athleta targets active female consumers; we see this in its images and CTAs. The fine touches and shape of the logo may suggest this as well.
Athleta creates understated but highly functional clothing; we see this in the product photos as well as in the brand’s use of neutral colors and fonts across its designs.
Athleta’s mission is to help customers have a healthier and more balanced life; we see this in its product photos, but we also get a sense of this from the simple symmetric structure of the logo.
There are overt ways to use visuals in your branding (usually through your choice of photos or illustrations). But there are also ways to subtly convey more about your company, what it does, and for whom you work through your choice of colors, fonts, structure, and more.
How to Create a Visual Identity for Your Brand
Let’s walk through each of the elements you need to pull together to create your visual identity:
The Color Palette
Like with everything else in business, you’re here to give your audience something they need, so they have to be at the forefront of your decisions — including which colors you put into your brand’s palette.
So, where do you start in choosing a color palette for your site and other marketing channels?
Have a look through the colors and find one that feels good to you. Open up the page and read more about what the color means:
You’ll find the following on each page:
A brief history on the color;
How it’s been used by people over the years;
What it’s symbolized over the years and around the world;
How to use the psychology of the color to affect people (i.e. your audience);
Alternate shades and colors if this particular one doesn’t send the right signals;
Colors that pair nicely with this one.
While it’s important to consider how colors evoke different emotions, it shouldn’t be the only driving force. Your primary focus should be to choose colors that positively affect the user experience. In other words, you don’t want them to get in the way or distract prospects from getting to know your brand and eventually converting.
2. Create a Full Color Palette
Once you’ve picked a primary color, you need to come up with a color palette. You’ll want one or two colors to use in your logo and a full color palette for your website and other branded channels.
You can use Canva’s palette suggestions (in the top-right corner of the color page) to create a basic color palette.
Color options are a bit limited, but it does a good job of spelling out where you should use each color. You can then adjust the color palette as you see fit.
Typography
The design and pairing of your fonts can greatly impact the way people respond to your brand and the words you’ve written about it.
So, the goal with typography is to make your words easy to read while also giving hints about your company’s personality and style.
1. Understand Font Styles
Figure out what style of font goes best with your brand identity.
This is the simplest way to categorize fonts:
Sans serif: These are simple fonts without any “feet” (lines at the ends of letters).
Serif: These are more traditional-looking fonts (the kinds you see in literature and newspapers) with feet.
Script: These are cursive and curly fonts that mimic handwriting.
Display: These are fonts designed specifically to appear in logos, hero images, and advertising because of their large, bold styling.
Monospaced: These are fonts with characters that comprise the same amount of horizontal space, often resembling typewritten text.
You can break these down even further and really get to the root of the style. Fonts.com has a great explainer page on each of these classifications:
Here are some sources to help you find fonts for your brand:
Choose two or three fonts for your brand. Max. Anything more than that will create a distracting and overwhelming interface for your audience.
You’ll need:
A font for your header text. It needs to look good in big sizes, be easy to read, and easy to identify from other text when scanning through a page or document.
A font for your body text. It needs to look good in small sizes (16 pixels and up) and be highly legible.
Optional: A font for your logo and hero images. It wouldn’t stray too far from the style of your headers, but if you need something a bit more decorative or unique, you can use a different font family for this.
If you find that you need more variety in your fonts to create a clearer hierarchy on the page or to call out certain elements, use superfamilies with dozens or even over a hundred different styles. That way, your users’ eyes won’t get fatigued from having to switch between too many font types.
3. Learn Font Pairing Rules
To pair fonts, use styles that contrast yet complement one another. Ultimately, you want the pairing of your fonts to send a cohesive message to your audience.
For example, a sans serif header and serif body are a common way to combine fonts. Like this pairing of Fira Sans and Merriweather from the FontPair website:
This modern-looking duo sends the message that: “Your comfort is priority #1 for us. Take your time reading and enjoy.”
There are tons of ways to make varying styles play off one another while sending the right signals to your audience: A safe serif with a retro cursive header font to come off as a playful, yet professional brand; a futuristic header and a neutral sans serif body font to give your product pages a very techy feel; and so on…
Once you have one or two fonts you like the vibe of, use FontPair to track down a good complement to the one you want to use.
Imagery
We can use this as a blanket category for any visual content you might use in your branding:
Photos
Videos
Illustrations
Icons
Backgrounds
Textures
Animations or GIFs
But just because there’s all this content to use, that doesn’t mean it should all appear on the same site to represent the same brand. You’ll want to narrow it down based on your company’s personality and how the style of imagery fits with it.
1. Photos vs. Illustrations
You can alter your brand’s voice and style based on the kind of imagery you use.
For instance, tech companies like Stripe often use illustration in their brand designs:
Even though SaaS companies sell one type of product, their audiences are usually quite vast, so it would be hard to find photos that represent everyone. And it’s not like users are focused on their relationships with the people behind the scenes. These companies put technology into the hands of their users, so it’s best to let the product shine and not the people. This opens up the door for some fun and creative possibilities with illustrations.
That said, choosing photos over illustrations doesn’t completely bar you from using vector graphics and icons. You can mix-and-match those visuals so long as they blend well with one another. What you don’t want to do is to mix two very different styles that say different things about your brand at once.
To decide what’s best for your brand, approach this from your users’ point-of-view. What kind of visuals will help them connect to your brand and what you sell?
2. Style
It’s not just the type of image you use that impacts your brand identity. It’s the style you apply to those visuals that can transform your visuals, putting visitors in a different time, place, or headspace.
Will you apply a filter to give your photos a similar look and feel?
Will you place each of your product photos against the same backdrop for a uniform look?
Will you use a completely new style of imagery for one of your product lines the way Apple has done for the iPhone 12?
There’s nothing wrong with using out-of-the-box imagery. However, if they don’t give off quite the right tone, don’t be afraid to use your design skills to make adjustments and cater them to your own style.
Logo
Your logo is the last of the visual elements you’ll need to invest some time in. The good news is that you’ve already done most of the legwork:
You’ve defined your brand’s identity.
You’ve given your business a name.
You’ve selected the main visual components that will represent your brand: colors, fonts, and images.
That’s really all you need to create a logo that is relevant, unique, attractive, potent, and memorable.
That and a way to bring it all together. You have a few options.
Option #1: If you’re a graphic designer, you can create your own from-scratch.
Option #2: If you want help getting started, you can use a tool like Wix Logo Maker:
You’ll fill out a short questionnaire and then receive dozens of pre-made logos to start with. You’ll later have the chance to customize the design to your liking.
Option #3: You can hire someone to design a totally custom logo.
Wrapping Up
In the next post in this three-part series, we’re going to look at the next step:
Getting your business online.
We’ll take everything you’ve done so far in coming up with a business name, brand identity, and now visual identity, and put it towards your website and the marketing channels that are best for your business.
