🧑‍💻 5 Tools to Make Your Dev Life Easier in 2024 (Plus, Master Box Shadows!)

Hey 👋

Another week, another dose of design & dev goodness! This week's newsletter is packed with tips and tools to help you level up your skills in just 5 minutes.

Here's a sneak peek:

🧰 Essential Dev Tools for 2024

✨ Mastering Box Shadows

➕ UI Principles for B2B

Enjoy 🤗 - Adam at Unicorn Club.

---

📬 Want More? Subscribe to Our Newsletter!

Get the latest edition delivered straight to your inbox every week. By subscribing, you'll:

• Receive the newsletter earlier than everyone else.
• Access exclusive content not available to non-subscribers.
• Stay updated with the latest trends in design, coding, and innovation.

Don't miss out! Click the link below to subscribe and be part of our growing community of front-end developers and UX/UI designers.

🔗 Subscribe Now - It's Free!

---

Sponsored by Webflow

Take control of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript in a completely visual canvas

Let Webflow translate your design into clean, semantic code that’s ready to publish to the web, or hand off to developers.

Get started — it's free

💻 Dev

5 Tools Every Developer Should Use in 2024

Many developers prefer building things from scratch, but sometimes the workload is so huge that using these tools can make the job easier.

So you think you know box shadows?

A box shadow is a kind of drop shadow. And a drop shadow is a kind of image filter which is particularly popular in graphic design due to how versatile it is at adding an approximation of depth to composition.

Have It All: External, Styleable, & Scalable SVG

Long story short, the svg use element now offers a nice means of referencing SVG symbols, whether they're in the same page or in an external file.

Open Source visibility hacks — No icky marketing needed

Whatever your reason for building Open Source (whether it be pumping up your skills, solving a problem you can’t shake, contributing to something great and promising, or for GitHub stars), you need users.

---

💭 Fun Fact

***Pre-SVG Roots (1990s)*** -Before SVGs, there were several vector graphic languages vying for dominance on the web, like VML (Vector Markup Language) from Microsoft and PGML (Precision Graphics Markup Language) from Adobe. This competition paved the way for the need for a standardised format.

---

🔘 Design + UX

Dribbbles improved search

his is the latest in a series of posts explaining the decisions we make that affect our users, as well as the results of those decisions (positive or negative).

Other UI principles for B2B web apps

Creating user interfaces for expert users, such as engineers or administrators, often requires additional principles on top of universal ones.

🗓️ Upcoming Events

Check out these events

🔘 Hatch Conference

Remote • Berlin

The event where experienced UX & Design Professionals in Europe meet to learn, get inspired and connect. 4-6 September

See event →

💻 Intersection

Turin, Italy

Where Design meets Development. This year, we’re reimagining the way professionals engage with technology, under the theme “Revolutionizing User Interfaces: The Dawn of Intuitive Digital Worlds“. 3-4 October

See event →

🟨 UtahJS Conference

Sandy, UT

The 2024 UtahJS Conference will be a 1-day conference on Friday, September 13

See event →

🧠 UX Y'all Conference

North Carolina

Our local conference encourages our community to share their knowledge and experience. Lightning talks, keynote talks, local speakers and workshops. September 19-20

See event →

🔥 Promoted Links

Share with 2,500+ readers, book a classified ad.

Discover Insanely Cool Tools

Explore unique tools from a retro 90s design system to a diet-tracking telegram bot, an amusingly named app, and an Apple notes website generator. Subscribe for free!

Automate Your Agency

Learn how to automate your processes for SEO, PPC, branding, outreach and customer acquisition.

Keep up with Tech in 5 minutes

Get the most important tech, science, & coding news in a free daily email. Read by +1,250,000 software engineers and tech workers.

What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read.

Handpicked articles summarized into a 5‑minute read. Join 35,000 subscribers for one issue every Tuesday & Friday.

Support the newsletter

If you find Unicorn Club useful and want to support our work, here are a few ways to do that:

🚀 Forward to a friend

📨 Recommend friends to subscribe

📢 Sponsor or book a classified ad

☕️ Buy me a coffee

Thanks for reading ❤️

@AdamMarsdenUK from Unicorn Club