GoodUI is a website that regularly shares handy tips for creating “converting and easy-to-use” user interfaces.
The tips are described in detail, visualized nicely and usually easy to apply.
Some of the tips in the list include: “try recommending instead of showing equal choices” or “try undos instead of prompting for confirmation”.
New tips are being added regularly and they a mailing list to update you about these fresh items.
w2ui is a jQuery UI library with many widgets for creating desktop-like and data-driven web applications.
The library comes as plugins for each widget so that you can choose which ones to use.
It consists of the following widgets: layout, sidebar, toolbar, grid, popup, tabs, forms and field controls.
They all play well with each other, make use of HTML5-CSS3 and have powerful APIs for controlling all the aspects of them.
w2ui is very well-documented, has lots of demos to play with and it is being improved regularly.
jKit is a free user interface library for jQuery that offers lots of functional features and components.
It works cross-platform and includes slideshow, tabs, accordion, parallax, zoom, tooltip, form handling, ticker and much more.
The functions can be integrated as JavaScript or with the help the data-jkit attribute as HTML.
jKit has a very handy “macro” feature that allows defining any custom code (like a tooltip with a specific fading value) that can be used by simply calling the macro’s name.
The UI kit is very well-documented with examples and a cheat sheet exists as well.
The talented team at DesignModo has created a new UI design kit, The Bricks, and they are giving away 3 licenses to WRD readers (2 personal and 1 developer license).
The Bricks is a PSD UI kit which comes in 4 parts: Forms, Elements, E-commerce and Words.
It consists of many beautiful, pixel-perfect items which play well with each other and each having multiple variations.
A 12 column grid is used and every UI element in the kit fits to the grid perfectly.
Each layer in the PSD file is named, grouped and organized carefully so that working with them don’t get complicated.
Also, The Bricks comes with a slick icon set that looks good with the rest of the kit. It is in Photosop Shapes format so that it can scale as we wish.
3 licenses of The Bricks is being given away:
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining the giveaway.
As a designer/developer with developer part being a little stronger, I love making use of ready-to-use design resources as they help creating very good looking stuff quicker.
Vandelay Premier, a place for premium design resources with lots of beautiful items, has also various attractive UI kits and they are giving away a huge pack to 3 WRD readers (details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of the post). Vandelay Premier members get access to all of these UI sets plus hundreds of other design resources.
Here are the UI kits in the pack:
A PSD UI set with 100s of items from navigation to charts, buttons, sliders, loaders, notifications, ribbons and more.
Exotico's design is stylish and each element is editable through well-layered PSDs.
For anyone working on an e-commerce project, Zepphiro is a real helper as it has all the major e-commerce related design elements.
There are pricing tables, checkout, shopping cart, product listing/filtering designs, buttons, banners and even more.
Creating mock-ups of an e-commerce project with Zephirro would save serious time.
When designing a website, if you don't prefer to create everything from scratch, having ready-to-use design elements simplify the process so much.
Besides the ease they offer, such high-quality elements also beautifies the websites being created.
If you are looking for such UI sets, DesignModo is probably the best place to find them as they have a bunch of professionaly-built PSD UI packs.
These packs are all full-layered PSD and includes lots of design elements from buttons to menus, sliders, navigation solutions, pricing tables, charts, icons and much more. And, all having free versions.
Let's take a closer look at the options:
Impressionist UI is the world’s biggest user interface elements pack with 300 elements, 5 styles and all being created PSD shapes.
It has almost every element we can think of and also comes with a 200 icons (both PSD & AI).
And, you can get a taste of this huge set with Impressionist UI Free.
With 200+ elements, all being rasterized PSD layers
There are 2 sets of elements in different colors and two examples of use in web design.
Make sure you also check its free version: Futurico.
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Pandora UI for iOS comes with lots of elements (completely focused on mobile interfaces), 5 skins and sample apps for helping mobile developers create good looking apps.
It targets iOS developers, the pack has support for retina display and all elements can be infinitely scaled as they are all Photoshop shapes.
And, as usual, here id the Pandora Free.
This is a relatively smaller (yet still big) UI kit which is focused on both web and mobile interfaces.
It has ~60 elements, all have retina display support
And, every Dark Amber UI purchase is bundled with the popular Unicons icon set.
Backbone.Notifier is a powerful and flexible framework for displaying and controlling UI notifications.
It is built on top of jQuery, Backbone.js + Underscore.js and has many cool features like a 3D module or animations support.
The notifications can be displayed on the top or in the middle, modal notifications exist and it is possible to set custom styles via CSS + JS API.
Messages can be timed to be shown or hidden as wished, an integrated loader exists and there are pre-defined styles: default, info, error, warning and success.
Mobello is an open source JavaScript UI framework that simplifies developing mobile web apps.
The framework aims to provide a native-like experience in mobile, it is optimized for touch events and has 20+ widely-used UI components.
It also has an IDE, named Mobello Studio, that focuses on building mobile apps with HTML5, CS3 and the Mobello framework..
Mobello Studio has a drag 'n' drop enabled visual design editor, a JavaScript debugger and built-in mobile device emulator.
The API of the framework is documented in detail and it can be a good alternative to other popular ones if improved regularly.
Gumby is a responsive and 960px-grid CSS grid framework that can be customized to work in every resolution with almost no effort.
Its fluid-fixed layout self-optimizes the content for desktop, tablet and mobile resolutions and there is support for nested grids.
Similar to Twitter Bootstrap, it includes a web UI Kit of good looking buttons, forms, navigation + tabs and a tiny JavaScript file that brings these components to life.
Gumby has multiple versions to download: 12 columns, 16 columns, a hybrid one or an all-in-one package. And, there are PSD files provided to ease designing with the grid.
The framework is very well-documented, has demos for all of its features and totally free to use.
DesignModo, a website providing informative design, development + art-oriented articles and releasing design resources, is giving away 3 Personal Licenses of Impressionist UI (details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of this post).
It is a huge pack of user interface elements with over 300 elements for web design and includes almost any design element we can imagine.
The pack comes as a .PSD file where each element inside is created as a Photoshop shape (they can be resized to any size).
There are edit boxes, tabs, buttons, notification windows, menus, windows, backgrounds, graphics, sliders, informational blocks and much more in it.
Web elements are not the only stuff in Impressionist UI but there is also a slick set of 200 icons accompanying them. The items in the set are well-chosen and will fit perfectly to any web project.
Such a giant user interface set is a very handy resource for quickly creating good looking, consistent interfaces.
As each element is a layer, we can easily prepare high-quality prototypes, customize colors (if needed) and get going fast.
The UI packs DesignModo offer are not limited to Impressionist UI and there are others as well.
For example, Pandora UI is another UI pack created specially for iOS interface designers.
DesignModo is giving away 3 Personal Licenses ($39/each) of Impressionist UI to WRD readers.
If you want to join the giveaway, you can choose one of the methods below or do both to increase your chances:
Winners will be selected randomly on 30 April 2012 (1 week later). Good luck to all.
P.S. You can also follow DesignModo both on Twitter and Facebook to get notified about the updates on these UI packs and any new ones.
Here they are:
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.
