Design your way

It’s important for us web designers to stay up to date with the industry that we are in and with the new resources that are created on a regular basis.

It’s not something easy, because most of our time is spent working and delivering to our clients, not researching for whatever tools and resources our colleagues have been releasing to help the community.

If you’re a DYW subscriber, you probably know about this series of articles. If not, this is my tools and resources shortlist that I make over the course of three months (usually). It has been a while since I did an article of the series because I was busy working on two great UI kits: Ace for iOS 8 and Vonn for Android (material design). These two have taken a lot of my time in the last few months and I barely had the chance to search for resources.

However, now that the UI kits are done, I have had the time to catch up to the interesting and especially useful resources that our fellow colleagues have created. This article contains what I found useful and hopefully what you will to. If there’s a particular type of resource that you want me to look out for in the future articles, let me know.

CSS Reference

An extensive CSS reference with all the important properties and info to learn CSS from the basics.

Materialize

A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design. Created and designed by Google, Material Design is a design language that combines the classic principles of successful design along with innovation and technology.

Google’s goal is to develop a system of design that allows for a unified user experience across all their products on any platform.

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

A standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress plugins.

Vivaldi

A browser for ourselves and a browser for our friends. A browser that is fast, but also a browser that is rich in functionality, highly flexible and puts the user first. A browser that is made for you.

JavaScript I/O

io.js is a JavaScript platform built on Chrome’s V8 runtime. This project began as a fork of Joyent’s Node.js™ and is compatible with the npm ecosystem.

FormatJS

FormatJS is a modular collection of JavaScript libraries for internationalization that are focused on formatting numbers, dates, and strings for displaying to people.

Frameless

Frameless for iOS 8 is the browser that gets out of your way. It’s made for designers and developers who need an easy way to preview prototypes on iOS devices.

Riot

Riot is against the current trend of boilerplate and unneeded complexity. A powerful API and concise syntax are extremely important things on a client-side library.

Typesettings.css

Typesettings.css is the typography boilerplate for your minimal website or blog project. All typographic styles are inspired by traditional graphic design fundamentals—the boring stuff that you learn in Typography 101.

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Toolkit

Extensible front-end HTML, CSS, and JavaScript user interface components for the responsive, mobile, and modern web.

hyhyhy

A tool for creating nice looking HTML5 presentations.

SVG Loaders

Immutable

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

Babel

Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.

Skyline

Skyline is a starting point for building custom CSS frameworks. The starter kit provides a solid CSS architecture that acts as a scaffolding to support your unique design system. It promotes object-oriented CSS, written in SCSS using BEM notation.