Blog | Tutorials | Ideas

Resources

Here are some resources you can use for your business and personal projects. Blog topics categories include Tutorials, Web Design and Development, Business, Graphic Design, UX Design, UI Design, and Ecommerce.

Articles

As graphic designer, UX UI designer, and also tackling web development and maintenance, I’ve encountered some hiccups along the way while working on projects. I’ve written some tutorials, articles, to share what I’ve learned so far.

Display Caption to Featured Image on Extra Theme Post Page

Display Caption to Featured Image on Extra Theme Post Page

One of my clients needed a solution to automatically add the caption under the featured image on the blog post using Elegant Themes Extra theme. He was using a work around by manually adding the caption under the image in the WordPress editor. But sometimes he will...

Resources for Business Owners (some are free)

Online tools you can use for your business

This section is the TL;DR section if you only have a few minutes to spare. Longer version follows in the next section.

Canva

Canva is a free online design tool that you can use through your browser. They have a free account plan and it’s very easy to use! They have templates available for social media post, banner, flyer, presentation, they have it! Create an account for free or get their paid plan if you need more resources available to you. Select the type of project you want and then add text and graphics- drag and drop what you want then download the file. Voila! Social media posts, done!
A friend of mine asked for help creating an 18 x 24 inch poster for a BBQ office party. I created one using Canva then sent a jpg and a link to the Canva poster I created for her.

Colour Palette Picker

If you need help choosing a colour palette, there are plenty of online colour palette generators for you. Coolors.co will generate random colour combinations. No need to create an account, just press the spacebar to generate a palette or explore trending colours.

WHAT I USE: I use Adobe Color because I can save the palette into an Adobe library which I can access while using any Adobe app. Talking about colours make me so happy. If you are the same, head to Google’s Material Design and geek away. 🙂

Free images and graphics

There are so many free icons and graphics shared by artists around the world. A lot of them are free but needs some attribution. I’ve used two here on this page from IconScout. It takes design skill and time to make these icons and graphics. If you decide to use these freebies, please give the designer some credit love. I shared more free resources on my post on Free Photography and Graphics.

Free Fonts - Google Fonts

Google Fonts is the best place to get free fonts. It’s an open source library of 1,451 font families. Great selection and easy to download and install. It’s also free! Check out Google Noto fonts includes Japanese, Arabic, Balinese, Thai, so many international fonts.
WHAT I USE: Aside from Google Fonts, I use Adobe Fonts included in my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and Font Squirrel. If I need to identify a font, Font Squirrel has Font Identifier called Matcherate, which tries to identify the font from an image you upload. Not 100% but gives me an idea where to look next.

File storage - The Cloud!

You will need storage if you manage large files like high resolution images, graphics, and videos. File storage in the cloud (really this is just a very powerful server that’s highly secured) where you can access your files using any computer or by app in your phone.

If you are an Apple user in Canada, you get 5 GB for free, then the starter iCloud plan lets you store up to 50GB at $1.29/month. If you have a Google account, you get a Google Drive. free 15GB in storage.

WHAT I USE: I use Dropbox all the time for sharing files with clients during and after completion of projects. I also use Google and Apple storage.

The Free Dropbox account lets you store up to 2GB storage. Convenient if you need to share files with your team or family. If you need more, the next plan up is $12.99/month for 2TB (that’s 2,000 GB) for one user.

Booking Appointments

If you need a tool for your clients to book your time on a calendar, look no further than Calendly. Create 45-minute meeting, set the time clients can book on a calendar. You can set yourself unavailable during holidays or vacation, of course! They have a free plan you can use to try it out. Acuity is another tool similar to Calendly. If you’re curious, this is my Calendly booking page for meetings. You will get an email notification when someone schedules a call. You can connect your Zoom account if you’re on a paid plan so your Zoom links will be automatically sent.