Friday Freebies Vol. 1

This week we start our new Friday Freebies series, a collection of FREE downloads from the web! In volume-1 we are featuring some special limited-time offers exclusively from Mighty Deals. Be sure to let us know what you think!

Happy designing, and have a nice weekend everyone! 🙂

Flat UI Kit

FlatUIWebdesignerDepot and FreePik are offering a beautifully designed Flat UI Kit. It is one of the nicest we’ve seen!

Since the introduction of mobile phones and tablets, the lines between mobile and desktop pages have merged. Responsive layout has become the norm, and Flat UI design is part of that trend. These UI Kit graphics will suit any application or web page.

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Balio Web UI Kit

balioHere is another gorgeous UI Kit which comes from Grafpedia. The design style is in the black, light blue, and silver-grey range, but with muted tones. This makes for a classic and timeless design.

This is a massive collection. It includes everything you could need from icons, to form and search boxes, to buttons, ribbons, and more! In fact we liked it so much, we downloaded it too. 🙂

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Choosing the Best Font Types with Google Fonts

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In the early days of web design, choosing fonts wasn’t much of an issue. It basically came down to size and colour. For the PC, fonts consisted of Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, or Times New Roman. The MAC also had its own fonts sets, which were for the most part not Windows compatible. Slowly more fonts emerged with Adobe True-Type fonts, that were cross compatible with everyone, but the selection was still limited.

If you wanted to create fancy font titles and headers, and you wanted it to render correctly on everyone’s screen, whether they were using PC or MAC, that meant using graphics. The problem was graphics ate both bandwidth and memory, and of course they weren’t SEO friendly. You had to either choose between looks or SEO.

In 2010, Google introduced Google Fonts, formerly known as Google Web Fonts, which was a big game changer! Designers and developers could now choose from hundreds of fonts. By using the Google Font library, designers knew that fonts would be cross-compatible, and render correctly on everyone’s screen. It also meant that titles and headers could remain as text, a critical benefit for search engine optimization (SEO).

Like colour, mixing fonts is not easy. Certain fonts work well together and some don’t mix at all. For the general website owner or WordPress user, this created more options. What fonts should I use? What fonts look good together? It also created the potential for poor font and style combinations.

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