At first glance, the profession of a graphic designer seems to be the most attractive for creative people. However, the freelancer’s path brings specific challenges you must be prepared for. Today we will discuss the main hardships of freelance graphic designers’ careers.

Graphic designers are among the top most in-demand professions in the internet industry. Designers work with many objects, such as advertisements, websites, apps, book designs, storefronts, press, etc. In addition, graphic designers engage when clients need to design a brand style, logo, and visual concept.

More than talent is needed to build a successful career as a graphic designer. Professional skills and soft skills are equally important. 

Anyone with creative ability can start such a career. However, there are some challenges to overcome and find solutions. 

The path of a designer is winding and thorny, full of uncertainty. Every year the requirements for professionals are increasing. They need to be able to do a lot, understand the product they are creating from beginning to end, and at the same time, have time to find projects for themselves. 

Freelance Graphic Designers’ Operational Challenges 

Time Management

A flexible work schedule is undoubtedly convenient, but only if people can manage their time. Unfortunately, the creative nature of graphic designers can cause them to lose track of time, extending an entire day on tasks that could have taken one hour to complete.

Being creative and passionate about a task is fine, but the clients always want their orders on time. Meeting deadlines is a vital part of a freelancer’s job in any field. Irrational use of time becomes a stumbling block. 

Improper organization of one’s work time results in sacrificing personal needs, boundaries, and physical and mental health. Or on the contrary, the other extreme – is not being able to fulfill the client’s contract in a quality and timely manner. Both options harm their careers.

Tip: Use time management software, and create time limits for your work-time to keep your life and work balanced. Use tools to manage projects and communicate with clients.

Organizing Work

Designers working on their own must understand that they must deal with more than just creative tasks. Freelancers have to advertise and offer themselves, especially in the initial stages. To build a serious career, they must be able to draw up contracts, and documents, make payments, and conduct business activities legally. 

Projects are created in different ways, so every time, freelance designers need to organize and negotiate the time to complete, the cost of services, and the terms of cooperation in detail.

Tip: Study legal business practices in your country, carefully draft specifications and contractor agreements, and study convenient payment and invoicing methods.

Organizing Finance

Designers don’t have to be accountants, but they must understand how payments for services are made and conducted, how to pay taxes, etc. Another challenge in finance is the difficulty in estimating the cost of designing services. How not to inflate the price and scare away the client, but at the same time not to work for a cookie?

First, the salary depends on the graphic designer’s market – the USA, EU, Asia, or CIS countries. Also, the salary level increases in proportion to experience.

Tip: Carefully study the pricing policy of the market and the cost of competitors, exchanges, and stocks. From your experience, compare how much time it takes to complete UI/UX design tasks and how much you can spend on them in the future. Study the models of cooperation “pay per hour,” “pay per result,” etc.

Competition

The competition among graphic designers working from home is very high indeed. The availability of technology for remote work has allowed many professionals to move away from office work to free-floating. In addition, the demand for designers in the traditional industry has decreased. It is much cheaper for companies to hire a designer for a project than to keep him on the staff.

The growth of competition is also conditioned by the appeal of the occupation for young people. On the one hand, they can work creatively without submitting to the strict conventions of the offices, and on the other hand, they can earn decent money. However, as we know, high competition leads to lower fees.

Tip: Work hard to create the best portfolio that shows off your talent and makes you stand out from the competition.

Graphic Designers Career Challenges

Service Promoting

Like any product, graphic designers must promote their services. Often there are difficulties with this since it involves more than just the design of their website, business cards, or contextual advertising. In addition, designers must learn how to communicate with potential clients or collaborate with platforms.

Lifetime Learning

A designer’s career always has room for development and learning. Moreover, keeping up with trends and new technologies is not a privilege but a necessity amidst fierce competition and ever-increasing demand. A designer’s growth can be linear: beginner-experienced-virtuoso, etc. Interestingly, many years of practice do not automatically mean experience growth because one can draw icons for five years or pass from icons to branding. Transitioning to every new level requires increased complexity, knowledge growth, and evolution toward new directions.

Career Uncertainty

Uncertainty follows freelancers along until they establish their permanent client base. Graphic designers often need more stable orders and consistent income. In addition to the lack of stability, career growth is also in question. How to measure it? How to make it move forward? 

To grow professionally as a freelancer, designers need to get a lot of experience, build a steep portfolio, post their work on websites like Behance and Dribbble, follow trends and innovations, learn new tools and software, and jump over the top.

Soft skills should be taught more. And this is almost half of the necessary knowledge. So first, it is important to get the technical background, theory, and observation, then a lot of practice, and then to supplement this luggage with “flexible skills”: plan the work, present a solution, and so on.

Difficulties When Working With Freelance Designers

Low-quality Design

Anyone who has mastered a graphic editor can become a designer. Unfortunately, the conditionally low threshold of entry into the profession leads to many “professionals” on the market not having the best creative, professional, and personal qualities. 

Before choosing a particular designer, research the market thoroughly, review the candidate’s portfolio, and ask for feedback from previous clients.

Unfixed Price Tag

A lousy expert doesn’t know the actual cost of the job because he needs help understanding and estimating the tasks and scope of the job. As a result, he can name one price that seems adequate, but the price tag can increase significantly during the work.

Write the cost and scope of work in the contract, stipulating all the requirements and deadlines.

Lack of Communication

Often freelance designers choose the “take-order-give-order” position. And this can lead to unsatisfactory results. Ideally, the client should seek a system of communication and interim reporting from the performer to ensure the result is consistent with the goal.

Use collaboration tools where you can track the project’s progress and make adjustments in time.

As a designer or as a client of a designer, what problems have you encountered? What solutions have you found? Please share in the comments.

The post Biggest Challenges Of Freelance Graphic Designers appeared first on noupe.

Design systems ensure alignment, reusability, and consistency across a project or brand. And while we have gotten very good at breaking down UIs into reusable components, a lot of design systems aren’t as useful and practical as they could be, or they aren’t even used at all. So how can you make sure that the work you and your team put into a design system really pays off? How can you create a design system that everyone loves to use?

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at interesting design systems that have mastered the challenge and at resources that help you do the same. We’ll explore how to deal with naming conventions, how motion and accessibility fit into a design system, and dive deep into case studies, Figma kits, and more. We hope that some of these pointers will help you create a design system that works well for you and your team.

Inspiring Real-World Design Systems

Nord: Accessibility And Naming Conventions

Bringing together everything that’s required to manage a healthcare business digitally, Nordhealth creates software that aims to redefine healthcare. As such, their design system Nord is heavily focused on accessibility.

Nord offers plenty of customization options, themes, and a fully-fledged CSS framework, plus dedicated guides to naming conventions and localization, for example. Unfortunately, the Nord Figma Toolkit isn’t open-sourced yet.

Workbench: Comprehensive Live Examples

Gusto serves more than 200,000 businesses worldwide, automating payroll, employee benefits, and HR. To enable their team to develop cohesive and accessible experiences for Gusto’s platform, the Workbench design system encompasses Gusto’s design philosophy, design tokens, creative assets, React components, and utilities — and documentation to tie it all together.

What really stands out in the Workbench system are the comprehensive live examples that explain exactly how components should be used in different contexts. Do’s and don’ts, visual explanations, and implementation details ensure that both designers and developers working with Workbench can use the design system effectively. For even more convenience, there’s also a Gusto Workbench VS Code Extension with common snippets for UI components.

Olympic Brand: Branding And Multi-Lingual Design

The Olympic Games are probably one of the most widely recognized brands in the world. Since the birth of the modern Games more than 125 years ago, hundreds of people have grown and enhanced the Olympic brand. To increase consistency, efficiency and impact across all that they do, the IOC hired a Canadian agency to create a comprehensive design system that conveys the timeless values of the Olympic Games and propels the brand into the future.

The Olympic design system is focused on branding and identity design, but also provides examples of illustrations and graphic elements. It shows how to manage multi-lingual challenges and how to use typography, with plenty of good and not-so-good examples and guidance notes along the way.

Brand Estonia: Custom Design Attributes

Pure and contrasting nature, digital society, and smart, independent-minded people are the core values behind the brand Estonia. The Brand Estonia design system maps the country’s strengths and shows how to express them through writing, designs, presentations, and videos.

Stories, core messages, facts, and plenty of examples and templates provide a solid foundation for creating texts and designs across the brand — be it on the web, in social media, or print. A special highlight of Estonia’s design system lies on authentic photos and custom design attributes such as wordmarks and boulders to underline the message.

Audi: Visual Examples Of Do’s And Don’ts

Audi UIs range from websites to applications for a particular service. The Audi design system provides a joint set of components, modules, and animations to create a well-balanced, system-wide user experience — from the app to the vehicle.

Along with brand appearance guidelines and UI components, a handy feature of the design system is its comprehensive set of visual examples of how a component should (and shouldn’t) be used in Audi’s interfaces. There is also a Audi UI Kit for Figma and a Sketch UI library that ensure that designers use the most up-to-date components and icons in their products.

Deutsche Bahn: Content Guidelines And UX Writing

Deutsche Bahn, the national railway company of Germany, is one of the most recognized brands in Germany. With the help of their DB Digital Product Platform, the company enables developers, designers, and copywriters to build flexible digital experiences with an emphasis on mobility.

The design system features content guidelines, accessibility considerations, code examples, components, and contextual examples of how to use them. It also provides guidelines around UX writing and helpful visual guides to accessibility and logo. Everything is open source on GitHub and NPM.

Shopify, If, And More: Data Visualization

Data is pretty much useless if we can’t make sense of it. Luckily, data visualization helps us tell the full story. But how to include data visualization in a design system? Here are some examples.

Shopify’s design system Polaris maps out guidelines for how to approach data visualization and defines five core traits for successful data visualizations. Do’s and don’ts for different data visualizations deliver practical examples. Culture Amp features helpful further reading resources for each type of data visualization they define in their design system. The If Design System shines a light on color in data visualizations, and the Carbon Design System comes with demos and ready-to-use code snippets for React, Angular, Vue, and Vanilla.

Design Systems For Figma

Atlassian, Uber, Shopify, Slack — these are just a few of the design systems you’ll find on Design Systems For Figma. Curated by Josh Cusick, the site is a growing repository of freely available Figma kits of design systems — grouped, organized, and searchable.

Not featured in the collection, but worth looking into as well, is the GOV.UK design system Figma kit. It focuses specifically on complex user journeys and web forms. Lots of valuable insights and inspiration are guaranteed.

Design System Resources

Design System Naming Conventions

Let’s face it, naming things can be hard. Particularly in a design system, where you need to find names for your components, styles, and states that can be easily understood by everyone who works with it. But how to best tackle the task? Ardena Gonzalez Flahavin explores not only why we should care about naming in our design systems but also what we should keep in mind when doing so.

Shayna Hodkin also summarized best practices for solid naming conventions for the different categories in a design system — from colors and text styles to layer styles and components.

Another great read on the topic comes from Jules Mahe. To help you find the right balance between clarity, searchability, and consistency, Jules summarized tips for naming your design files, understanding what you need to name in a design system, and structuring it. Three useful resources for futureproofing your design system.

Accessibility In Design Systems

When building a design system, it’s a good idea to include guidelines and documentation for accessibility right from the beginning. By doing so, you reduce the need for repeat accessibility work and give your team more time to focus on new things instead of spending it on recreating and testing accessible color palettes or visible focus states again and again. In her article on accessible design systems, Henny Swan explores what an accessible design system needs to include and how to maintain it.

To shift the understanding of accessibility from one of basic compliance to a truly inclusive, human-centered experience, the team at AdHoc released their Accessibility Beyond Compliance Playbook. It explores several ways to improve accessibility — from the immediate task of building accessible products to creating teams of people that underscore an Accessibility Beyond Compliance mindset.

Another handy resource to help you incorporate accessibility efforts comes from IBM. Their open-source Carbon Design System is based on WCAG AA, Section 508, and European standards to ensure a better user experience for everyone. It gives valuable insights into how users with vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical impairments experience an interface and what designers should think about to ensure their design patterns are operable and understandable.

For more practical tips, be sure to check out the IBM Accessibility Requirements checklist on which Carbon is based. It features detailed tips to make different components and design patterns comply with accessibility standards. A way forward to empowering your diverse user base.

Brand Expression In Design Systems

When it comes to visual elements like icons and illustrations, many companies have difficulties finding the right balance between being on-brand, useful, and scalable. The team behind Design Systems For Figma also faced this challenge and came up with a recipe for creating and scaling a system of visuals. Elena Searcy summarized how this system works.

In her blog post, Elena starts with the smallest visual element, an icon, explaining what her team aims for when choosing and creating icons to make them align with the brand and provide real value for the user. Elena also shares insights into how they handle illustrations, including a scalable way of creating them and considerations regarding anatomy, style, and color. A great example of how a set of established rules can help make visuals more meaningful.

Motion In Design Systems

Motion in design is powerful. It can help to reduce cognitive load, guide users through pages and actions, provide user feedback, improve the discoverability of features, and improve perceived response time. To make full use of motion, the design team at Salesforce created an end-to-end motion language for their products: the Salesforce Kinetics System.

As Pavithra Ramamurthy, Senior Product Designer at Salesforce, explains, the intention behind the Salesforce Kinetics System is to enable the evolution and scaling of kinetic patterns across products, with design system components that are pre-baked with motion right out-of-the-box.

But how do you scale these motion patterns from design system to product? How would teams actually use the artifacts in their daily workflows? Pavithra wrote a case study that takes a closer look to demonstrate the possibilities. Interesting insights guaranteed.

Enterprise Design System 101

Introducing an enterprise design system is a lot of work. But it is work that will pay off. Especially with large teams, multiple platforms, and numerous user interfaces to manage, having a single source of truth helps maintain a consistent user experience. So what do you need to consider when building your own? Adam Fard takes a closer look.

As Adam explains, an enterprise design system is a system of best practices, reusable design elements, processes, usage guidelines, and patterns that help reinforce the brand, improve the UX design process, and optimize the user experience. He compares it to a box of Lego: the building blocks are the collection of code and design components, the building instructions that you’ll usually find inside the box correspond to a collection of guidelines, processes, and best practices that ensure that co-designing and cross-collaboration are seamless. If your enterprise traverses numerous sites or apps, Adam’s writeup is a great opportunity to get familiar with the concept of enterprise design systems.

Measuring A Design System

When you’ve built a design system or are just about to start working on one, metrics might not be the thing you’re concerned about at first sight. However, measuring your design system is more important than you might think. In his article “How to measure your design system?”, Jules Mahe dives deeper into why it’s worth the effort.

Jules explains how to define the KPIs for your design system and how to get quantitative data measurements to learn more about a design system’s efficiency. Qualitative data conducted with the help of surveys and interviews make the narrative more compelling. Of course, Jules also takes a closer look at how to use the data. As he concludes, measuring a design system is challenging and requires time, but it will be a goldmine and one of the essential levers for your design system’s growth and sustainability.

Design System ROI Calculator

Your boss is hesitant that the work you’ll put into a design system will eventually pay off? The Design System ROI Calculator might be just what you need to convince them that the time and money invested in a design system is a good investment.

The ROI calculator helps you understand and project cost savings when implementing a design system. It calculates total employee savings from implementing a design system, as well as time saving and efficiency gain by component or UI element. To estimate total savings, you can select between different scenarios based on team size and product calculation.

Design System Case Studies

Having robust components and patterns that can be reused in different situations is the essential idea behind every design system and often seems like the magical wand everyone has waited for to solve challenges and improve collaboration. Henry Escoto, UX & Design at FOX Corporation, offers a perspective on design systems that is a bit different. He claims that it’s actually the practice which can truly make a difference.

In his case study “Our Design System Journeys”, Henry shares in-depth insights into FOX Tech Design’s design systems Delta and Arches to find answers to the following questions: How will a design system truly help your product design? What does it take to build and execute a design system within an organization? How to inject the practice into existing workflows? And last but not least, what is the pay off of such an investment?

Another interesting case study comes from Jan Klever. Jan is a designer at Quero Educação and also fills the role of the organization’s Design System Ops. He shares from his team’s experience how having a dedicated Design System Ops role can help when it comes to maintenance and following up on the product.

Design System In 90 Days

When you’re starting to work on a design system, you do it with the intent to build something that lasts, a system that teams love to use and that saves them precious time in their daily work. However, many attempts to build a design system end up in great libraries that don’t get used as much as you had hoped. But how do you create a design system that becomes an established part of your organization’s workflow? SuperFriendly published a practical workbook in which they take you and your team from zero to a design system that lasts — in 90 days.

Written for cross-disciplinary teams of design, engineering, and product, the workbook consists of a 130-page PDF and FigJam prompts and Figma templates you’ll use to complete activities. No theory, only clear instructions on what to do and how to do it over a 90-day timeframe. At $349, the workbook isn’t cheap, but considering that it can save you about 6–9 months of figuring out what work to do, the investment is definitely worth considering.

Wrapping Up

Have you come across a design system you found helpful? Or a resource or case study that eased your work and that you’d like to share with others? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Social media is a way for you to communicate both directly and in a human way. As inbound marketing is all about creating valuable experiences and building long-term relationships, social media can be of great benefit to your inbound marketing. Let’s find out how…

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a relatively new approach pioneered by HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan. Traditional, outbound marketing, is focused on pushing messages to consumers they may not want, or provides little value for driving sales.

The hard-sell approach that was once popular no longer works in today’s digital landscape. Inbound marketing provides an alternative that empowers customers and develops long-term relationships.

Inbound marketing has 3 stages:

• Attract
• Engage
• Delight

Attract

Inbound marketing begins with attracting customers. The attract stage involves your potential customers seeking possible options to help address their challenges or pain points. Most potential customers will be unaware of your brand at this stage.

Delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time, allows you to attract high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into sales. While SEO plays a key role in the attraction stage, social media can also play a pivotal role in delivering messages that provide value.

Understanding your buyer personas (a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer) helps you to better understand your customers. A buyer persona will help to develop a message that provides value to your customers and identify the right channels to deliver your message.

Engage

The engage stage is all about developing long-lasting relationships with the potential customers you gathered during the attract stage. At this stage, your potential customers want to find out more about your brand and how your product/service can alleviate any pain points.

Personalization and creating tailored experiences can go a long way at the engage stage. Around 50% of customers are likely to purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience, highlighting how important it is to deliver the experience customers expect.

You can continue to use social media during the engage stage to encourage customers to interact with your brand. Continuing to post relevant content to your social channels and engaging with customers helps to develop long-lasting relationships.

Delight

The final stage of inbound marketing is the delight stage. Your content strategy, SEO, and social media have all helped to convert your visitors and leads. But even though the hard task of converting customers is done, the job is not finished!

Even after a customer has converted, you need to continue delighting that customer and maintaining the long-lasting relationships you formed at the engage stage. Delighting your customers post-purchase increases loyalty which can lead to repeat purchases and brand advocacy. 

Social media continues to play a role during the delight stage. You can use your social media channels to respond to customer questions or suggestions. You could also look to explore running competitions, surveys, and events to continue showing support and appreciation.

What are the Benefits of Social Media for Inbound Marketing?

We’ve covered what inbound marketing is and how you can use social media at each stage, but what about the benefits of social media for your inbound marketing strategy?

It helps to raise awareness and attract customers

Social media can act as the building blocks for raising brand awareness. Making social media a core area of your inbound strategy will help to grow your reach and inform potential customers about your business.

Creating and sharing videos on your social media can be a great way to attract customers and raise awareness of your brand. Videos that resonate with your target audience and use emotional appeal are more likely to perform well.

Helps build your authority and online presence

Not only is it important for you to raise awareness of your brand and attract customers, but you also need to build trust and authority. Not only do you need to regularly update your social media pages, but you also need to engage to help grow your social presence.

Engaging with customers and responding to feedback goes a lot further in building credibility than just posting new content. Potential customers like to see that you care about customer satisfaction. 

Drives better quality leads and traffic

Social media can be a major source of driving traffic to your site and landing pages. Without social media, your traffic would be heavily limited to those from search (and we all know how difficult gaining top-ranking positions can be).

Social media makes life a lot easier for driving traffic. Every profile you have and every link you post is another gateway for potential customers. Increased exposure plus valuable content is a great formula for expanding your reach and building lasting relationships.

Your social media strategy can organically boost your SEO

Social media can help boost your SEO efforts too. But let’s make one thing clear. Social media is not a ranking factor. However, a link has been established between being active on social media and a boost to your SEO.

Establishing your authority and credibility on social media stands you in a much better position for gaining valuable backlinks to your site. Providing these also come from authoritative websites, you’ll benefit from some nice link juice.

Feedback can help develop your content creation

The great thing about social media is that it’s not a one-way street. Your business can gain from using social media as well as your customers. A brand that is highly engaged on social media can gain great insights from customers.

Social media can provide insights about your customers that will be beneficial for developing your buyer personas. Customers can also provide feedback, giving you ideas and directions that you may not have otherwise considered. 

Gain more insights into your customers

We also mentioned about the insights you can gain from customers on social media. But given how important this benefit is, it deserves a separate mention. The insights that social media provides about your customers are crucial for developing content that provides value.

Creating content that offers value is the bread and butter of any successful inbound marketing strategy. You’ll be able to find out what content appeals most to your customers, the best time for posting, and how customers want to receive the content.

It helps you to continue delighting your customers

While social media is most beneficial at the attract stage of inbound marketing, in no way should you disregard it from every other stage. You can use your social media to delight your customers by:

• Hosting live events or webinars
• Offering customer support through chat
• Conducting surveys and polls
• Engaging in social listening to find what customers are saying away from your page

The important thing to remember is that delighting your customers goes beyond satisfaction. At the delight stage, even the smallest gesture can go a long way in maintaining positive relationships that will continue to bring customers back again.
Social media is a vital tool for any inbound marketing strategy, providing many great benefits. Combined with a successful content marketing strategy, you can provide both valuable and engaging content that helps empower your customers.

The post 7 Benefits of Social Media for Inbound Marketing appeared first on noupe.

Today most small and large businesses use a sales app or a CRM to forecast sales, gauge teams’ performance, and manage the sales funnel. CRM and sales app use has been on the rise of late. 

At least 91% of small businesses with more than 11 employees are now using sales applications to enable collaboration and streamline the sales funnel.

It has become vital for businesses to create and customize their sales applications to match their needs. Designing the right sales app is essential to any business that intends to grow sales. 

Every day new, affordable, and reliable solutions enter the field. It means even companies with fixed budgets can now design or develop a custom sales app. Most sale app solutions tend to focus on communication, automation, flexibility, and user-friendliness.

It is hard to know the best sales apps that improve efficiency and platforms that give  you detailed sales analytics in real time. 

The objective behind having a sales app is to offer sales and marketing teams an informed and streamlined sales path. When having a sales app for your business, these are some features you should be looking for.

1. Mobile access 

Mobile access is becoming paramount for any app today since sales are increasingly mobile. As a business, your sales and marketing team will be working remotely and need to access the sales app on the go. Therefore, you should have a sales app that is as mobile as your sales team to maximize functionality and productivity.

The sales app you develop should also have offline capabilities so that sales reps can serve customers without relying heavily on the internet. The app should be able to synchronize the changes once the user connects to the internet.

2. Ease of use 

When choosing a sales app for your company, usability and versatility should come to mind. The sales app should be simple to use, scalable, and versatile. This makes it easy to adopt by your teams, so your business gets the most out of it.

Additionally, the sales app should be more interactive and offer optimal performance. It should provide a high amount of data and convey the brand image to all users. The app should be compatible with most operating systems, have a multi-language feature, and be a cross-platform.

3. Automation 

Automation plays a critical role in sales success. Ideally, companies that employ sales automation tend to perform better than those that don’t use it. With sales automation, your business can see a sales increase of up to 34%.

A sales app should automate email follow-up. This way, sales reps can keep leads on the conversation trail and convert them. Your sales reps can also encourage leads to take action by sending them customized and purpose-driven content in emails.

Customized content generates high engagement. If your sales app enables your team to respond to customers fast, you increase your sales. Studies show that most users looking for solutions will always go with a company that responds first.

4. User intuitive interface 

All sales apps will always have a learning curve. However, it should be easy to adopt and start using the app. It should be easy for salespersons to start using the app as soon as you launch it. 

An intuitive user interface will make it easy for your team to understand using the app and save you time on training. Your sales reps can get back to work fast when you have a sales app that is easy to adopt.

Ideally, before committing to a sales app, it is vital to try them first. This way, you get a glimpse of how the app functions and what it takes to navigate the different features.

5. Reporting features 

Sales reports are useful to any sales leader. You can use daily sales reports to forecast sales and decide on stock acquisition. Reports are useful in gauging company and individual sales rep performance so you can tell if the set metrics are being met.

Sales reports make it easy for sales leaders to identify all the bottlenecks in the sales process and make all necessary adjustments. You should be able to find out everything you want to know with all the data passing through the sales app daily.

6. Security 

When choosing a sales app for your business, you should consider the security features. The sales app should safeguard customer and business data. 

To guarantee the security of confidential data, a sales app should have a list of security features like encryption, protected access, a recovery system, data fee protection, remote supervision, and many other features.

Final Thoughts 

A reliable sales app is useful in sales process management. You should look out for the most vital features when choosing a sales app for your business. 

Find out if the sales app is easy to use, secure, and enables automation. With these features, you can be confident the sales app will streamline service delivery in your business.

The post 6 Things You Should Look for in a Sales App appeared first on noupe.

We know that the first mode of interaction with anything is the visuals. This is why brands spend huge amounts of money to make their advertisement visually appealing. It highlights the importance of the interface with which the audience interacts with the brand.

In web development, the frontend holds the same value. It is the webpage that is displayed to the user with which they interact. It is very important to build a strong frontend for a web project. If the app or the website is not visually appealing, then there would be very little traffic. 

This would eventually lead to all the hard work getting wasted that was put in the backend.

This is why a well-developed frontend guarantees a smooth user interaction with the website. However, developing the best user interface can get a little tricky. To solve this problem, we have some helpful building blocks which we call frontend frameworks. Below we have provided detail on what the frontend framework is.

What is Frontend Framework?

To put it simply, a frontend framework is a package that contains pre-written code. They allow a user to build apps and websites without the hassle of writing codes from scratch. These frameworks are in no way rigid. You can easily make modifications to set them according to your needs.

Some people might fear that their end product would look similar to the thousands of others who have used the same framework. But, they are highly customizable which means every website or app would be unique. A frontend framework has features like buttons, font style, grids, navigation bar, etc.

These features make the process of web development very easy. The web page turns out to be responsive, easy to use, and interactive. Now, if you are all set to use a frontend framework then you have come to the right place. Below we have created a list of the top 7 best frontend frameworks for admin templates.

Top 7 Best Frontend Frameworks for Admin Templates

There are many frontend frameworks available for people to choose from. We have narrowed it down to the top 7 so you can choose from them easily. These frameworks are very popular amongst developers in 2022. Note that this list is not in any particular order.

VueJS

One of the most popular JavaScript frameworks is VueJs. It has a number of amazing features which make it one of the most demanded frameworks. Being an open-source frontend framework, it can be used to create visually appealing and interactive websites.

If you are looking for a framework for your single-page web project, then VueJS can be your best bet. Many big companies that use this framework include Alibaba, Xiaomi, 9gag, etc. Some of the benefits of this framework are listed below:

• It uses virtual DOM
• It has detailed documentation
• It is highly flexible and customizable
• It has a simple and easy syntax

React

React should be at the top of the list in terms of popularity. With around 3 million users worldwide, it can be categorized as one of the best front-end frameworks in the market. It is the best option for developers who want to build single-page websites. It also works great in building mobile applications.

It is an open-source JavaScript library that has a bunch of reusable components. With a bunch of unique components, a developer can create striking interfaces. Created and maintained by Meta, it is used by companies like Walmart, PayPal, Netflix, Tesla, etc. Some amazing features of React are listed below:

• A huge user community
• Can be used for desktop and mobile applications
• Support from industry giants
• Easy to use

Angular

Another very popular free open-source JavaScript-based framework is Angular. It is created and maintained by Google. Angular is one of the most basic frameworks. Developers try to master it first when they are beginning with JavaScript. Though Angular has a number of useful features, its best one is the two-way data binding feature.

One reason behind its success is that it is highly versatile. It can be used for web applications and mobile applications alike. Some of its striking features are MVC, CLI, Typescript support, directives, etc. Its latest version also includes typed forms. Companies like Forbes, Xbox, and BMW use Angular. Some of the benefits of using Angular are mentioned below:

• Easy to code in
• It has built-in services
• It has amazing server performance

JQuery

Anyone who wants to start with a simple framework should opt for JQuery. It is also an open-source JavaScript framework. It works wonders in creating the frontend of a website. Despite being one of the oldest frameworks in the market, it has been updated from time to time to match modern needs.

Companies like Microsoft and Nokia use this framework on their platforms. JQuery has the following helpful features which make it one of the best frontend frameworks:

• It is compatible with a number of browsers
• It is easy to use
• It has an MIT license

Preact

People who are familiar with React can work with Preact very easily. The reason is that it was created as a lighter substitute for React. Many developers prefer this frontend framework as it comes with a solution for the shortcomings of React.

A big benefit of using Preact is that it can be used with other libraries. It is smaller, lighter, and faster than React which makes it one of the most used frameworks for frontend development. Its benefits are listed below:

• It is faster and more efficient
• Smaller in size
• Easy to understand

Svelte

Unlike JQuery, Svelte is one of the newest frameworks in the market. It is a JavaScript framework that works at an impressively fast speed. It is constructed in such a way that it does not need a DOM. It has brought a revolution in coding and can make beautiful and interactive web pages. Its features are listed as follows:

• It is highly reactive
• It has good stability in his performance
• It does not require virtual DOM

Backbone.Js

Another JavaScript framework on the list is Backbone.Js. The main purpose of creating this framework was to develop impressive single-page web applications. It primarily uses one JavaScript library, which is why it is lightweight.

Another big benefit of Backbone.Js is that it is compatible with REST API. This compatibility makes the frontend and back end synchronize well with each other. It also has other helpful benefits which are listed below:

• One can use a number of tools with this framework like Thorax and Chaplin
• It has a fast processing speed
• It is flexible and easy to understand and learn

So these were some of the best frontend frameworks that are used in 2022. A developer can choose a framework from this list as per their needs. Each comes with a set of unique features that are useful in their own way.

Sources:

1. https://themeselection.com/best-frontend-framework/
2. https://www.bootstrapdash.com/blog/frontend-frameworks-for-admin-templates
3. https://write.agrevolution.in/react-admin-introduction-2aa72e075689
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vue.js
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/React_(JavaScript_library)
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_(web_framework)
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone.js

The post Top 7 Best Frontend Frameworks for Admin Templates in 2022 appeared first on noupe.

The cybersecurity market was valued at about $197 billion in 2020 and is projected to rise to $478+ billion in the next eight years. As the space continues to grow, both startups and legacy cybersecurity vendors are aware of the sheer number of vendors and must consider how they can better work together to help enterprises solve cybersecurity challenges. 

Two of the biggest challenges? The first is that CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers), CIOs, and their teams are juggling too many security products and services. In the unfortunate event of a breach, they must juggle numerous pieces of software to create reports and review all possible indicators of compromise, all of which impacts dwell and response times and ultimately gives bad actors more time to steal data and cause serious damage. The second challenge is that limited budgets and resources are further straining IT teams, forcing them to find more value from their solutions.

For CISOs and their teams to be successful, they cannot rely on a growing list of security products to function. While it is true that many of these solutions are essential and address the unique issues enterprises face today, the volume of technologies CISOs and their teams must navigate is making it difficult to adequately respond to new and emerging threats. 

Vendor consolidation for CISOs is top priority, and a Gartner survey found that 80 percent of respondents are planning for a vendor consolidation strategy in the next three years, and 30 percent are already in the process of consolidating. While consolidating every security product and service is not possible, building a cybersecurity tech stack with open and interoperable solutions is very realistic. To truly solve cybersecurity threats and help practitioners, identity and cybersecurity solutions need to break down existing silos and interoperate. 

An Open and Interoperable Cybersecurity Future

The concept of openness and interoperability as it relates to cybersecurity means solutions integrate with common enterprise applications and services by leveraging common industry standards (aka OpenID Connect, SAML, and FIDO in the authentication space and open APIs for various other offerings). This ensures external developers can access the software they need. 

This concept was first made popular in Gartner’s Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture. Cybersecurity vendors must fully embrace this concept to enable orchestration and automation for CISOs and their organizations to best meet modern business demands. 

All segments within the cybersecurity market can greatly benefit from the concept of openness and interoperability. One such segment is the PKI (public key infrastructure), Certificate Authority (CA), and digital certificate space. Today, the world’s data is secured with technology that acts like a passport. This technology – a PKI digital certificate issued by a CA – contains identity information related to the holder. In the digital world, certificates act as passports for humans and the machines and applications they use (i.e. devices, software, code, bots, IoT/OT, etc.). These cryptographic certificates are proven in their ability to establish digital trust. 

With the rapid shift to remote work, a company’s data is no longer behind a firewall but rather being accessed from locations around the world. Therefore, the data is likely to cross hostile network boundaries. The digital identity of humans and machines is the new perimeter, which is why there’s been a dramatic increase in demand for certificates. The mounting challenge for enterprises now is governing these certificates, which can be issued by any number of CAs. 

According to a Sectigo survey, 59 percent of enterprises have deployed digital certificates from multiple CAs. This is a prime example of IT teams engaging with overlapping solutions to secure their networks. Without open and interoperable security solutions, these teams must invest in multiple Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions or consolidate their certificates under one CA – neither option is realistic. The same survey revealed that 80 percent of enterprise leaders believe it’s important for their CLM solution to support management through a single pane of glass. 

Next-generation Certificate Lifecycle Management 

For a CLM solution to meet these needs of enterprise IT leaders today, it must work with a host of different IT environments, including digital certificate types and use cases, and certificate origins. CLM needs to be CA agnostic with the power to discover, govern, and manage the lifecycle of any certificate, regardless of what CA it came from.  

As IT teams continue to enhance and grow their cybersecurity infrastructures, they face a widening security perimeter that can see millions of endpoints and siloed certificate and identity management. It is critical to have a universal, high-value solution with the power to automate every single certificate’s lifecycle. This is the only way enterprises can effectively manage their digital identities at scale. 

The modern approach to CLM is a CA agnostic cloud-first solution that delivers a single administration portal to secure and manage growing numbers of digital identities, both human and machine. Further than just managing digital certificates, the CLM solution must also focus on enabling use cases that support business outcomes, such as secure email and DevOps security. The goal must be to ease security, complexity, management, and orchestration for IT leaders. This must be enabled at a foundational level, with a focus on openness and interoperability with leading technology stacks. 

No longer can IT teams slap on band-aids and duct tape solutions just to keep things moving along. All digital businesses need a firm foundation of digital trust and identity-first security to compete and operate today, and this must start with flexible, cloud-first, digital identities, enabled with a digital certificate platform that is CA agnostic and includes CLM functionality. Of course, that is in addition to other identity security tools, technologies, and processes. 

Establishing digital trust is no longer a ‘nice to have.’ Enterprises across the globe need to invest in CLM that leverages open standards and can easily interoperate with existing technology solutions. This will only be possible if the cybersecurity industry adopts an open and interoperable approach to developing products.

The post Openness and Interoperability in An Enterprise’s Cybersecurity Stack is Critical appeared first on noupe.

Sacha Greif openly wondered whether CSS has gotten to be, you know, too big. With all the goodies that’ve shipped in browsers the past couple of years — container queries! relative color syntax! cascade layers! logical properties! ranges in media queries! individual transforms! :has() selector! — and all of what’s on the possible horizon — CSS Toggles! nesting! color mixing! scroll-linked animations! scoped styles! — there’s definitely a different learning curve for CSS these days for new and seasoned front-enders alike.

There may have been a time when it was possible to know most CSS properties and how they work. Those days are long-gone, at least for an old hand like me. But that sort of begs the question: what CSS do you absolutely have to know?

Vincas Stonys recently took a stab at a list. Chris put one together based on features released since CSS3. You probably have an idea of what you would include in a list. If I had to put a Top 5 together and limit myself to only properties and selectors, it might look something like this…

writing-mode

I can’t say enough about the writing-mode property. What makes it important — especially from a learning perspective — is that it sets you up for inclusive principles that account for crafting layouts, regardless of the user’s language. A good understanding of writing-mode is going to lead to an understanding of logical properties and values, and those, in turn, set the stage for understanding document flow and thinking in terms of block, inline, start, and end rather than physical directions.

display

I have a hard time believing anyone can write good CSS without having a solid grasp on the display property. It’s both a property and a framework for creating layouts. There’s no Flexbox or CSS Grid without it, making it sort of like a gatekeeper to understanding those important features.

Plus, the display property perfectly complements writing-mode. It’s exactly what you’ll need once writing-mode has exposed you to document flow and logical directions. You’re going to need a property to either change an element’s normal flow (like changing a block element to an inline one) or start laying things out (like creating a flexible layout context) and that is where display comes into play.

margin / padding / border

Ugh, I’m totally cheating here but think learning margin, padding, and border together is sort of unavoidable. They’re all parts of The Box Model, all help with spacing and styling, and all require getting acquainted with CSS length units. Knowing what these properties are desgined to do and how they contribute to the computed size of an element certainly gives you a lot more styling control, and dispels any confusion about why an element is the size that it is — a common CSS headache!

::before and ::after

Another one where I’m cheating a bit. Yes, ::before and ::after are two individual pseudo-elements, but again, I can’t imagine learning about one without the other. It’s a two-fer!

I remember how mind-blowing it was for me to learn that these existed and can be used to create everything from cool UI effects to complete single-div illustrations. It opens up new possibilities and provides a first peek at how powerful CSS really is.

@media

Oof, I’m already at my fifth and final item in the list and feel like there’s still so much CSS goodness that belongs here. But if I have to choose one last thing, it would be media queries. Why? Because it’s a prime ingredient for creating fluid, flexible layouts and different viewing contexts. Container queries might wind up knocking this off my list as it matures, but for now, @media is a great primer for responsive design.

Beyond that, @media is a nice first step into the conditional qualities of CSS. Whether we’re writing a query based on the type of device thats being used (e.g., screen or print) or a when the browser’s viewport meets a certain criteria (e.g., width >= 768px), the @media syntax is incredibly useful for creating layouts that are optimized for different conditions.

Oh, and we haven’t even touched on how @media relates to accessibility, thanks to its ability to apply styles based on a user’s preferences (e.g., prefers-reduced-motion). So, in addition to crafting conditional layouts, media queries are a nice next step toward understanding inclusive design.

Honerable mentions

Distilling CSS into a list of five must-know properties and selectors is tough, especially now that CSS more powerful today than it was, say, even five years ago. There are a number of other items I really wanted to include, like (in no particular order):

• calc()
• has()
• color
• font
• overflow
• position (especially this)
• z-index

But I stand by my choices. Learning CSS is more important than memorizing a list of properties. It’s a journey and I think the five I chose carve a nice little learning path that sets the stage for writing good style rules and next steps for diving deeper into CSS.

Alright, tell me yours!

Disagree with my list? You should! I’ll bet you have some smart opinions and I want to see what how you would have rounded out a Top 5 list.

What CSS Do You Absolutely Have to Know in 2022? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Every month we put together this collection of the best new websites we’ve seen appear on the web in the previous four weeks.

In this month’s collection, you’ll find lots of daring interactions, some inventive portfolio sites, florescent yellow colors, and even some old-school mouse trails. Enjoy!

Joshua’s World

Joshua’s World is a fantastic animated site. Grab and drag to tilt and rotate the island and watch the little cyclist power past important links to milestones in his creative career.

Vana

Vana is a new service aiming to help you take control of your data. Its site is modern and lively and uses some great retro-illustrations to bring its features to life.

Velocity Nitro 2

This slick site has some incredible 3D renders for the Puma Velocity Nitro 2 running shoe. The scrollable animation guides you through each feature in a thrillingly engaging fashion.

Norwegian Soda Co.

The Norwegian Soda Co. uses beautifully shot photographs to capture the zest of its products. It’s an excellent example of how a one-page site can be rich and engaging.

Anytype

Anytype is a collaborative platform pitching itself to creative thinkers. It uses a lovely gradient animation to create a sense of power and technological evolution.

Dash

Dash claims to be almost the best tech company, and its modest site does a great job of expelling the tedium from HR. Plus, it has an old-school mouse trail!

Sileon

Sileon is a site packed with clever details. For example, the hover effect on text links is pleasingly minimal, and the photography shot through distortion is a simple but effective technique.

Karina Sirqueira

Karina Sirqueira’s portfolio is a joy to browse through. The morphing shapes add interest to a collection of case studies that are engaging and beautifully presented.

Hotel Santa Caterina

This beautiful website for the Hotel Santa Caterina on the Amalfi Coast captures the light and wonder of the region with a muted color palette and stunning photography.

La Lulu

La Lulu is a Columbian-American singer, dancer, and musician. Her site uses color to disrupt a fairly standard layout and infuse it with amazonian, psychotropic, South American vibes.

International Magic

International Magic is a design agency that boasts some impressive clients, from Maison Margiela to Nike. Its scroll-to-browse portfolio is a masterful example of selling design.

OAD

OAD uses color expertly to convey contrasting temperatures. At this time of year, who doesn’t want a pullover crafted to withstand the Norwegian weather?

También

También is a creative agency specializing in organizations that positively impact the world. Its scrolling collage of client projects is one of the best examples of this type of portfolio.

Dragonfly

If you were designing a website to be used in a 90s film about the internet, you’d create Dragonfly’s site. It’s packed with glitches, code references, and awesome pixelated imagery.

Elva

There’s a lot of distortion entering the design lexicon at the moment, and one of the best examples is Elva’s portfolio site, which uses it to enliven its black-and-white site.

Sussex Taps

Sussex Taps uses multiple full-screen video clips to sell its carbon-neutral tapware range, but it’s the horizontal scrolling product videos that really make this site stand out.

Angello Torres

Angello Torres’ portfolio is packed with daring typography that breaks pretty much all the rules and yet still manages to work somehow to convey energy and creativity.

Repeat

Repeat is an excellent service for upselling customers with repeat orders. It uses simple illustrations to represent generic products with an attention-grabbing yellow for interactions.

High Five Strategies

High Five Strategies eschew the formality of most business pitches to deliver a positive message with bold colors and typography that makes you feel ready to move forward.

Delight

Delight Snowparks employs a questionable lilac color, but its fantastic imagery and video framing more than makes up for that. Plus, there’s another super-old-school mouse trail!

Source

The post 20 Best New Websites, November 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

The way we write CSS for WordPress themes is in the midst of sweeping changes. I recently shared a technique for adding fluid type support in WordPress by way of theme.json, a new file that WordPress has been pushing hard to become a central source of truth for defining styles in WordPress themes that support full-site editing (FSE) features.

Wait, no style.css file? We still have that. In fact, style.css is still a required file in block themes, though its role is greatly reduced to meta information used for registering the theme. That said, the fact is that theme.json is still in active development, meaning we’re in a transitional period where you might find styles defined there, in styles.css or even at the block level.

So, what does styling actually look like in these WordPress FSE days? That’s what I want to cover in this article. There’s a lack of documentation for styling block themes in the WordPress Theme Developer Handbook, so everything we’re covering here is what I’ve gathered about where things currently are as well as discussions about the future of WordPress theming.

The evolution of WordPress styles

The new developmental features that are included in WordPress 6.1 get us closer to a system of styles that are completely defined in theme.json, but there is still be plenty of work to do before we can fully lean on it. One way we can get an idea of what’s coming in future releases is by using the Gutenberg plugin. This is where experimental features are often given a dry run.

Another way we can get a feel for where we are is by looking at the evolution of default WordPress themes. To date, there are three default themes that support full-site editing:

• Twenty Twenty-One (TT1): This is the first classic version of a block-compatible default theme. There is also a block version (TT1 blocks) and has since been a go-to resource for block theming. However, all 5,900 lines of CSS in TT1 is in style.css. There is no theme.json file. TT1 Blocks is the first look we got at styling in the Block Editor era, and we can consider it a teaser more than a model.
• Twenty Twenty-Two (TT2): This is the first true block-based default WordPress theme, and it’s where we first meet theme.json. The file contains only 373 lines of code. Its lead developers had made concerted efforts to make this a CSS-less theme; however, style.css still shipped with just under 150 lines of code since not all of the issues with theme.json were resolved in the experimental Gutenberg plugin ahead of release.
• Twenty Twenty-Three: This is what shipped in WordPress 6.1, and it is the first example of a theme without any CSS in the required style.css file.

But don’t start trading the CSS in style.css for JSON property-value pairs in theme.json just yet. There are still CSS styling rules that need to be supported in theme.json before we think about doing that. The remaining significant issues are currently being discussed with an aim to fully move all the CSS style rules into theme.json and consolidate different sources of theme.json into a UI for for setting global styles directly in the WordPress Site Editor.

That leaves us in a relatively tough spot. Not only is there no clear path for overriding theme styles, but it’s unclear where the source of those styles even come from — is it from different layers of theme.json files, style.css, the Gutenberg plugin, or somewhere else?

Why theme.json instead of style.css?

You might be wondering why WordPress is moving toward a JSON-based definition of styles instead of a traditional CSS file. Ben Dwyer from the Gutenberg development team eloquently articulates why the theme.json approach is a benefit for theme developers.

It’s worth reading Ben’s post, but the meat is in this quote:

Overriding CSS, whether layout, preset, or block styles, presents an obstacle to integration and interoperability: visual parity between the frontend and editor becomes more difficult to maintain, upgrades to block internals may conflict with overrides. Custom CSS is, furthermore, less portable across other block themes.

By encouraging theme authors to use theme.json API where possible, the hierarchy of “base > theme > user” defined styles can be resolved correctly.

One of the major benefits of moving CSS to JSON is that JSON is a machine-readable format, which means it can be exposed in the WordPress Site Editor UI by fetching an API, thus allowing users to modify default values and customize a site’s appearance without writing any CSS at all. It also provides a way to style blocks consistently, while providing a structure that creates layers of specificity such that the user settings take the highest priority over those defined in theme.json. That interplay between theme-level styles in theme.json and the user-defined styles in the Global Styles UI is what makes the JSON approach so appealing.

Developers maintain consistency in JSON, and users gain flexibility with code-less customizations. That’s a win-win.

There are other benefits, for sure, and Mike McAlister from WP Engine lists several in this Twitter thread. You can find even more benefits in this in-depth discussion over at the Make WordPress Core blog. And once you’ve given that a read, compare the benefits of the JSON approach with the available ways to define and override styles in classic themes.

Defining styles with JSON elements

We’ve already seen a lot of progress as far as what parts of a theme theme.json is capable of styling. Prior to WordPress 6.1, all we could really do was style headings and links. Now, with WordPress 6.1, we can add buttons, captions, citations, and headings to the mix.

And we do that by defining JSON elements. Think of elements as individual components that live in a WordPress block. Say we have a block that contains a heading, a paragraph, and a button. Those individual pieces are elements, and there’s an elements object in theme.json where we define their styles:

{
  "version": 2,
  "settings": {},
  // etc.
  "styles": {
    // etc.
    "elements": {
        "button": { ... },
        "h1": { ... },
        "heading": { ... },
    },
  },
  "templateParts": {}
}

A better way to describe JSON elements is as low-level components for themes and blocks that do not need the complexity of blocks. They are representations of HTML primitives that are not defined in a block but can be used across blocks. How they are supported in WordPress (and the Gutenberg plugin) is described in the Block Editor Handbook and this Full Site Editing tutorial by Carolina Nymark.

For example, links are styled in the elements object but are not a block in their own right. But a link can be used in a block and it will inherit the styles defined on the elements.link object in theme.json. This doesn’t fully encapsulate the definition of an element, though, as some elements are also registered as blocks, such as the Heading and Button blocks — but those blocks can still be used within other blocks.

Here is a table of the elements that are currently available to style in theme.json, courtesy of Carolina:

As you can see, it’s still early days and plenty still needs to move from the Gutenberg plugin into WordPress Core. But you can see how quick it would be to do something like style all headings in a theme globally without hunting for selectors in CSS files or DevTools.

Further, you can also start to see how the structure of theme.json sort of forms layers of specificity, going from global elements (e.g. headings) to individual elements (e.g. h1), and block-level styles (e.g. h1 contained in a block).

Additional information on JSON elements is available in this Make WordPress proposal and this open ticket in the Gutenberg plugin’s GitHub repo.

JSON and CSS specificity

Let’s keep talking about CSS specificity. I mentioned earlier that the JSON approach to styling establishes a hierarchy. And it’s true. Styles that are defined on JSON elements in theme.json are considered default theme styles. And anything that is set by the user in the Global Styles UI will override the defaults.

In other words: user styles carry more specificity than default theme styles. Let’s take a look at the Button block to get a feel for how this works.

I’m using Emptytheme, a blank WordPress theme with no CSS styling. I’m going to add a Button block on a new page.

OK, we know that WordPress Core ships with some light styling. Now, I’m going to switch to the default TT3 theme from WordPress 6.1 and activate it. If I refresh my page with the button, the button changes styles.

You can see exactly where those new styles are coming from in TT3’s theme.json file. This tells us that the JSON element styles take precedence over WordPress Core styles.

Now I am going to modify TT3 by overriding it with a theme.json file in a child theme, where the default background color of the Button block is set to red.

But notice the search button in that last screenshot. It should be red, too, right? That must mean it is styled at another level if the change I made is at the global level. If we want to change both buttons, we could do it at the user level using the Global Styles UI in the site editor.

We changed the background color of both buttons to blue and modified the text as well using the Global styles UI. Notice that the blue from there took precedence over the theme styles!

The Style Engine

That’s a very quick, but good, idea of how CSS specificity is managed in WordPress block themes. But it’s not the complete picture because it’s still unclear where those styles are generated. WordPress has its own default styles that come from somewhere, consumes the data in theme.json for more style rules, and overrides those with anything set in Global Styles.

Are those styles inline? Are they in a separate stylesheet? Maybe they’re injected on the page in a ?

That’s what the new Style Engine is hopefully going to solve. The Style Engine is a new API in WordPress 6.1 that is meant to bring consistency to how styles are generated and where styles are applied. In other words, it takes all of the possible sources of styling and is singularly responsible for properly generating block styles. I know, I know. Yet another abstraction on top of other abstractions just to author some styles. But having a centralized API for styles is probably the most elegant solution given that styles can come from a number of places.

We’re only getting a first look at the Style Engine. In fact, here’s what has been completed so far, according to the ticket:

• Audit and consolidate where the code generates block support CSS in the back end so that they are delivered from the same place (as opposed to multiple places). This covers CSS rules such as margin, padding, typography, colors, and borders.
• Remove repetitive layout-specific styles and generate semantic class names.
• Reduce the number of inline style tags we print to the page for block, layout, and element support.

Basically, this is the foundation for establishing a single API that contains all the CSS style rules for a theme, wherever they come from. It cleans up the way WordPress would inject inline styles pre-6.1 and establishes a system for semantic class names.

Further details on the long-term and short-term goals of Style Engine can be found in this Make WordPress Core discussion. You can also follow the tracking issue and project board for more updates.

Working with JSON elements

We talked a bit about JSON elements in the theme.json file and how they are basically HTML primitives for defining default styles for things like headings, buttons, and links, among others. Now, let’s look at actually using a JSON element and how it behaves in various styling contexts.

JSON elements generally have two contexts: the global level and the block level. The global level styles are defined with less specificity than they are at the block level to ensure that block-specific styles take precedence for consistency wherever blocks are used.

Global styles for JSON elements

Let’s look at the new default TT3 theme and examine how its buttons are styled. The following is an abbreviated copy-paste of the TT3 theme.json file (here’s the full code) showing the global styles section, but you can find the original code here.

{
  "version": 2,
  "settings": {},
    // ...
  "styles": {
    // ...
    "elements": {
      "button": {
        "border": {
          "radius": "0"
        },
        "color": {
          "background": "var(--wp--preset--color--primary)",
          "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--contrast)"
        },
        ":hover": {
          "color": {
            "background": "var(--wp--preset--color--contrast)",
            "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
          }
        },
        ":focus": {
          "color": {
            "background": "var(--wp--preset--color--contrast)",
            "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
          }
        },
        ":active": {
          "color": {
            "background": "var(--wp--preset--color--secondary)",
            "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
          }
        }
      },
      "h1": {
        "typography": { }
      },
      // ...
      "heading": {
        "typography": {
          "fontWeight": "400",
          "lineHeight": "1.4"
      }
      },
      "link": {
        "color": {
          "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--contrast)"
        },
        ":hover": {
          "typography": {
            "textDecoration": "none"
          }
        },
        ":focus": {
          "typography": {
            "textDecoration": "underline dashed"
          }
        },
        ":active": {
          "color": {
            "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--secondary)"
          },
          "typography": {
            "textDecoration": "none"
          }
        },
        "typography": {
          "textDecoration": "underline"
        }
      }
     },
    // ...
  },
  "templateParts": {}
}

All buttons are styled at the global level (styles.elements.button).

We can confirm this in DevTools as well. Notice that a class called .wp-element-button is the selector. The same class is used to style the interactive states as well.

Again, this styling is all happening at the global level, coming from theme.json. Whenever we use a button, it is going to have the same background because they share the same selector and no other style rules are overriding it.

As an aside, WordPress 6.1 added support for styling interactive states for certain elements, like buttons and links, using pseudo-classes in theme.json — including :hover, :focus, and :active — or the Global Styles UI. Automattic Engineer Dave Smith demonstrates this feature in a YouTube video.

We could override the button’s background color either in theme.json (preferably in a child theme since we’re using a default WordPress theme) or in the Global Styles settings in the site editor (no child theme needed since it does not require a code change).

But then the buttons will change all at once. What if we want to override the background color when the button is part of a certain block? That’s where block-level styles come into play.

Block-level styles for elements

To understand how we can use and customize styles at the block level, let’s change the background color of the button that is contained in the Search block. Remember, there is a Button block, but what we’re doing is overriding the background color at the block level of the Search block. That way, we’re only applying the new color there as opposed to applying it globally to all buttons.

To do that, we define the styles on the styles.blocks object in theme.json. That’s right, if we define the global styles for all buttons on styles.elements, we can define the block-specific styles for button elements on styles.block, which follows a similar structure:

{
  "version": 2,
  // ...
  "styles": {
    // Global-level syles
    "elements": { },
    // Block-level styles
    "blocks": {
      "core/search": {
        "elements": {
          "button": {
            "color": {
              "background": "var(--wp--preset--color--quaternary)",
              "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
            }
          }
        },
        // ...
      }
    }
  }
}

See that? I set the background and text properties on styles.blocks.core/search.elements.button with two CSS variables that are preset in WordPress.

The result? The search button is now red (--wp--preset--color--quaternary), and the default Button block retains its bright green background.

We can see the change in DevTools as well.

The same is true if we want to style buttons that are included in other blocks. And buttons are merely one example, so let’s look at another one.

Example: Styling headings at each level

Let’s drive all this information home with an example. This time, we will:

• Style all headings globally
• Style all Heading 2 elements
• Style Heading 2 elements in the Query Loop block

First, let’s start with the basic structure for theme.json:

{
  "version": 2,
  "styles": {
    // Global-level syles
    "elements": { },
    // Block-level styles
    "blocks": { }
  }
}

This establishes the outline for our global and block-level styles.

Style all headings globally

Let’s add the headings object to our global styles and apply some styles:

{
  "version": 2,
  "styles": {
    // Global-level syles
    "elements": {
      "heading": {
        "color": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
      },
    },
    // Block-level styles
    "blocks": { }
  }
}

That sets the color for all headings to the preset base color in WordPress. Let’s change the color and font size of Heading 2 elements at the global level as well:

{
  "version": 2,
  "styles": {
    // Global-level syles
    "elements": {
      "heading": {
        "color": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
      },
      "h2": {
        "color": "var(--wp--preset--color--primary)",
        "typography": {
          "fontSize": "clamp(2.625rem, calc(2.625rem + ((1vw - 0.48rem) * 8.4135)), 3.25rem)"
        }
      }
    },
    // Block-level styles
    "blocks": { }
  }
}

Now, all Heading 2 elements are set to be the primary preset color with a fluid font size. But maybe we want a fixed fontSize for the Heading 2 element when it is used in the Query Look block:

{
  "version": 2,
  "styles": {
    // Global-level syles
    "elements": {
      "heading": {
        "color": "var(--wp--preset--color--base)"
      },
      "h2": {
        "color": "var(--wp--preset--color--primary)",
        "typography": {
          "fontSize": "clamp(2.625rem, calc(2.625rem + ((1vw - 0.48rem) * 8.4135)), 3.25rem)"
        }
      }
    },
    // Block-level styles
    "blocks": {
      "core/query": {
        "elements": {
          "h2": {
            "typography": {
              "fontSize": 3.25rem
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Now we have three levels of styles for Heading 2 elements: all headings, all Heading 2 elements, and Heading 2 elements that are used in the Query Loop block.

Existing theme examples

While we only looked at the styling examples for buttons and headings in this article, WordPress 6.1 supports styling additional elements. There’s a table outlining them in the “Defining styles with JSON elements” section.

You’re probably wondering which JSON elements support which CSS properties, not to mention how you would even declare those. While we wait for official documentation, the best resources we have are going to be the theme.json files for existing themes. I’m going to provide links to themes based on the elements they customize, and point out what properties are customized.

Be sure to give each theme.json file a good look because these themes include excellent examples of block-level styling on the styles.blocks object.

Wrapping up

Frequent changes to the full-site editor are becoming a major sources of irritation to many people, including tech-savvy Gutenberg users. Even very simple CSS rules, which work well with classic themes, don’t seem to work for block themes because of the new layers of specificity we covered earlier.

Regarding a GitHub proposal to re-design the site editor in a new browser mode, Sara Gooding writes in a WP Tavern post:

It’s easy to get lost while trying to get around the Site Editor unless you are working day and night inside the tool. The navigation is jumpy and confusing, especially when going from template browsing to template editing to modifying individual blocks.

Even as a keen early rider in the world of Gutenberg block editor and block-eye themes, I do have tons of my own frustrations. I’m optimistic, though, and anticipate that the site editor, once completed, will be a revolutionary tool for users and techno-savvy theme developers alike. This hopeful tweet already confirms that. In the meantime, it seems that we should be preparing for more changes, and perhaps even a bumpy ride.

References

I’m listing all of the resources I used while researching information for this article.

JSON elements

• Elements API (Gutenberg GitHub Repo)
• Theme.json elements (Full Site Editing)
• Elements styles (Block Editor Handbook)

Global Styles

• Global Styles Roadmap (Gutenberg GitHub issue)
• Global Styles: Elements support tracking (Gutenberg GitHub issue)

Style Engine

• Block editor styles: initiatives and goals (Make WordPress Blog)
• Block styles generation (Style Engine) (Make WordPress Blog)
• Core Styles and Theme Customization: the next steps (Make WordPress Blog)

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your own reflections on using the block themes and how you managing your CSS.

Managing CSS Styles in a WordPress Block Theme originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

When you sit down and think about creating a visual identity for your business, you may not think about starting with your marketing strategy first. 

In fact, some brands go straight to creating their visuals before taking the time to understand who they’re serving and how they plan to market to them. This is a huge disadvantage as the visuals completely dismiss the company’s overarching mission and aren’t tailored to the audience it serves.

In other words, if you want to reach your target audience and remain impressionable, you need to create a visual identity in line with your mission and their needs. 

If you’re interested in giving this a go but don’t know where to start, we’re here to help. 

In today’s article, we’re breaking down how to create a visual identity for your business through your marketing strategy. 

Ready for the details?

Let’s begin.

Outline your brand mission 

Your mission is the most important part of your visual identity. So, in this step, start by outlining your company’s overarching vision.

Think about it. What do you hope to achieve in the next year? Two years? Five years? 10 years?

For instance, maybe you run a graphic design freelance collective, but you’re aiming to scale it into a full-out design and marketing agency in the next two years. 

Or, maybe you run a US eCommerce store and you’re interested in branching out to international markets in the next year. Whatever the case may be, be as specific as possible.

Next, consider your audience. Who do you help and why? Why should they care about you? And how do you help them exactly? For instance, maybe you help mompreneurs create their logo, visual elements, website design, and blog design. If you feel like you need some inspiration when creating your visual identity, startup books can be a goldmine of guidance and advice to get your ideas flowing.

Next, write out your long-term goals, short-term goals, and company milestone goals. For instance, if you run a SaaS company, your goals and milestones may include:

• Long-term goal: Acquire multiple SaaS startups and reach unicorn status
• Short-term goals: Grow customer base by 20% to 25% every quarter 
• Milestone goals: Acquire two funding rounds, one in the Spring of 2023 and the second in the Spring of 2024

When you’re finished, use all this information to create your official brand mission. 

Here’s an example: 

“We’re a project management SaaS company that’s passionate about helping project managers shave unnecessary tasks off their workload each week. With our complete all-in-one platform, project managers can plan, track, and execute projects 30% faster than with any other project management tool. Our top mission? Helping project managers become project warriors.”

When you finish your mission statement, add it to the “About” tab or the “Company Mission” tab on your website. 

Next, refer to your brand mission to create a simplified value statement. 

In your value statement, be sure to list who you help and include a CTA.

Here’s an example:

“We help project managers execute projects 30% faster than with any other project management tool. Sign up for a free trial today.”

Finally, add your value statement to your social media bios and as CTAs on your landing pages, website, and blog. 

Get a firm grip on your target audience 

The people you serve will act as your top inspiration when you create your visual identity. So, in this step, get laser-clear on who you serve. Our favorite way to do just that? Create buyer personas. When you create your buyer personas, get super specific on the details. For instance, if you cater to B2C or DTC audience, be sure to include a faux:

• Name
• Age 
• Occupation 
• Purchase habit list
• Needs list
• Pain point list 
• Desire list 

If you serve a B2B audience, be sure to include a faux:

• Company name
• Company start date 
• Company size 
• Company target audience 
• Purchase habit list
• Needs list
• Pain point list 
• Desire list 

Next, strategy ways to create a visual identity in line with your buyer personas.

For instance, CalAmp, a telematics software company, is a perfect example of a company that’s created a solid visual identity through its marketing strategy. With its clear target audience in mind, CalAmp has structured its visual identity to convey its professionalism and flexibility in the telematics industry.

In this example, we especially love the professional images CalAmp uses to speak directly to highlight the audience it serves. 

To follow suit, consider creating website icons, banners, and professional images that speak to your ideal customer, too.

For instance, if you sell baking supplies, you might take professional images of bakers using your supplies in their professional kitchens. Or you might create bakery-themed icons, such as cupcake icons, cookie icons, and pie icons to use in place of bullets when you create your product list.

And speaking of icons, some businesses use symbols and icons to convey who they help and how in an easy-to-understand way. For instance, VPSBG has a service that allows customers to pay for a VPS with BTC. To make this process easier to understand, VPSBG breaks down its features using simple paragraphs with assigned symbols. 

Here’s what that looks like:

If you’re interested in adding symbols to your website, we recommend hiring a designer to create custom icons for you. You can also test out some free vector graphics to discover what kinds of icons look best before officially hiring a designer. 

Identify the problems you solve and the mood and feelings you want to evoke 

In the next step, it’s time to uncover what root problems you solve and what kind of mood and feelings you’d like to evoke. 

For instance, if you’re a real estate agent for first-time home buyers, you likely solve problems such as:

• Walking customers through required documents and all legal processes
• Holding customers’ hands throughout inspections, appraisals, and last-minute home repairs and renovations 
• Helping customers locate homes according to their specified criteria 
• Helping customers understand how their loan and mortgage payments will work 

After you’ve outlined the problems you solve, consider the feelings you’d like to evoke in your audience. If we refer to the same example, you’d likely want to evoke a sense of calm and ease in your first-time buyers. 

In this case, maybe you’d choose color palettes, fonts, and visuals representing peace, relaxation, and a sense of home. 

For instance, you might use calm colors, such as sage, cream, linen, and tan. You might also go with an easeful font, such as Calm Gray or Calmine Font Duo. 

And as far as images go, you’d probably use professional photos of staged, cozy homes — maybe even with candid, happy families in some of them. 

With that said, let’s take a look at some real brand examples:

Our first example is Luxury Presence, a luxury real estate website design platform that focuses on evoking a sense of… you guessed it: luxury and class. 

As such, Luxury Presence uses high-end and classic colors, fonts, and images to establish its mood. Take a look at its black-and-white palette and classic font style to see what we mean:

Another example is the all-in-one trading journal, TradeZella. 

TradeZella took mood and feelings to a whole new level when it created a character and tool named Zella to help its customers analyze and optimize trading activity. The tool design looks like it’s straight off of Wall Street, helping to further establish a trading theme.

Choose theme sets in line with your marketing strategy

Make your life easier by investing in theme sets in line with your marketing strategy. 

Having collections of theme sets like this ready-to-go can shave hours off of your marketing team’s efforts and remove unnecessary design burdens. 

If you prefer to go custom, consider hiring a designer to create custom theme sets for your brand. 

Whichever method you choose, be sure to finalize your colors, logo, visual elements, and any other visual identity details before settling on your themes. 

Why? To build a visual reputation, it’s important that all of your theme sets stay congruent, so don’t skip this step. Psst: We have a checklist for you in the next step that walks you through each visual detail you need to create!

For instance, let’s say you’ve chosen the following:

• Colors: Black, purple, silver, sparkling white
• Logo: A silver moon with a black and purple outline 
• Icons: A star icon, moon phase icons, and a planet icon
• Graphics: Moon, stars, galaxies, rockets
• Font: Asheboroby by Parker Creative

In this case, you’ll need to make sure that your theme sets include the same colors and visual elements listed above before implementing them. 

For instance, maybe you could include black and purple colors detailed with star and moon icons in your email marketing templates. And maybe you can bedazzle your poster templates with rocket graphics and shooting stars.

Whatever the case may be, make sure all of your theme sets look consistent across the board. 

Add your visuals 

Now that you have a firm grasp on your brand mission, target audience, the problems you solve, and the feelings you want to evoke, it’s time to finalize and add your visuals. 

Here’s a checklist you can use to organize the process:

• Finalize your color palettes, fonts, and visual icons
• Create a custom logo and add it to your company branding materials, website, blog, and email signature line
• Add your brand mission statement to your About tab or Company Mission tab on your website 
• Add your value statement in your social media bios and ensure your profile photos evoke the mood you’re aiming for 
• Revamp your landing pages to include your dedicated color palettes, images, and icons 
• Finalize your email newsletter design or choose from themed templates
• Revamp your website with your color palettes, fonts, visual icons, and professional images
• Create a professional welcome video in line with the mood and feelings you’d like to evoke and add it to the homepage of your website
• Design your physical products, product labels, and print materials using your dedicated palettes, fonts, and visual icons
• Hire a photographer to shoot professional images related to the mood you’d like to convey — stick to the same color palettes when shooting your photos
• Revamp the look and feel of your blog so it’s congruent with your website, landing pages, and social media profiles 
• Hire a copywriter to refresh the copywriting on your website, landing pages, and related marketing channels 
• Batch your social media content 90 days out and make sure it’s in line with your theme sets, colors, and the mood you’d like to convey

Wrap up 

Ready to create a visual identity in line with your marketing strategy and audience’s unique needs? 

We hope the steps we shared today are helping you breathe a sigh of relief as you move one step closer to building a visual identity that sells. 

For good measure, here’s a quick recap of the steps we shared today:

• Outline your brand mission
• Get a firm grip on your target audience 
• Identify the problems you solve and the mood and feelings you want to evoke
• Choose theme sets in line with your marketing strategy
• Add your visuals

And that’s it, friends. Now, go forth and create a visual identity you and your customers can be proud of. To your success!

The post How to Create a Visual Identity for your Business Through Marketing Strategy appeared first on noupe.