Living in the Netherlands, I spend a fair amount of time on trains, and that is usually where I catch up on what the builder community is writing. Until now, that meant opening a laptop or squinting at a browser tab on my phone. This week I found myself scrolling through trending articles and checking a workshop from the AWS Builder Center mobile app while waiting for a delayed train, and it made those spare twenty minutes very useful. That is why I am glad to open this week with the Builder Center mobile app.

AWS Builder Center is now available as a mobile app on iOS and Android, extending the experience beyond desktop and web. Using your AWS Builder ID, you stay signed in across sessions and can browse trending articles, access 600+ AWS Skill Builder courses, and manage hands-on workshops with free sandbox environments from your mobile device. You can follow AWS Heroes, Community Builders, and User Group Leaders, check Builder Loft event calendars on the go, and receive push notifications for subscribed topics and communities. The app also supports the Wishlist feature for submitting product feedback directly to AWS teams. It is available worldwide on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Builder Center also added two features this week. Polls give you a way to ask the community a question from the Home feed: write a question, add 2 to 5 answer options, set a deadline, and people vote, with results updating live and discussion happening in the comments. Votes are anonymous, and creators see aggregate counts and percentages only. Separately, the Zero to Shipped hackathon is open from September 18 to October 2. You connect your coding agent to AWS, build a real application, and ship it live on AWS for a chance to win a share of a $28,000 prize pool. Five winning projects each receive $5,000 in AWS credits and an AWS Builder swag bundle.

Last week’s launches
Here is what else happened this week.

• Amazon Connect Talent is now generally available – Amazon Connect Talent is an AI-powered hiring solution for talent acquisition teams managing hiring at scale. Informed by decades of Amazon hiring science, it uses AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer evidence-based assessments, and score candidates consistently, so recruiters can focus on final decisions. Candidates interview 24/7 from any device, and recruiters review scores, transcripts, and detailed evaluations the next morning. All candidate data is anonymized during AI evaluation, each competency is scored against a rubric with every score tied to specific evidence from the interview, and recruiters keep final decision authority over every hire. General availability includes competency-based assessments, AI-led voice interviews with adaptive questioning, a brand-customizable mobile-first candidate portal, and admin onboarding tools.
• Amazon Corretto 27 is now generally available – Amazon Corretto 27, a Feature Release version of the no-cost, multi-platform distribution of OpenJDK, is now available for download on Linux, Windows, and macOS, with support through April 2027. Notable features include G1 as the default garbage collector across all environments (JEP 523), post-quantum hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3 (JEP 527), compact object headers by default for a smaller memory footprint (JEP 534), and JFR in-process data redaction to remove sensitive data from Java Flight Recorder recordings before they leave the JVM (JEP 536). It also continues previews of enhanced pattern matching, structured concurrency, and lazy constants, along with the Vector API incubator.
• Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – Kimi K3 is now available on Amazon Bedrock for coding and knowledge work. According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K3 is its most capable model and the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It combines native vision capabilities with a 1-million-token context window, making it well suited to long-running coding sessions across large repositories, multi-document analysis, and extended agent workflows. Moonshot AI reports an approximate 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency over Kimi K2. Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model on Amazon Bedrock to support explicit prompt caching, which helps reduce latency and input costs when reusing context across model calls.
• AWS reimagines the getting started experience – We announced a new simplified experience for builders starting a new project. Instead of completing configuration tasks first, you start with sensible defaults: sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple, and for most new customers no credit card is required, with $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. AWS organizes your work in a project, which contains an AWS account and sharing settings, and applies security controls for you. You can invite collaborators by email without setting up IAM users, set a monthly spend limit starting at $20, and activate advanced AWS features later at no additional cost with no migration. The experience is gradually rolling out to new customers.
• New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available – Amazon EC2 T8i instances, powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Granite Rapids), are among the lowest-cost EC2 instances and deliver up to 30% better price performance over previous-generation T3 instances. They are designed for low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads such as microservices, low-traffic websites, development and testing environments, and small databases. T8i instances deliver up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher Amazon EBS bandwidth compared to T3, and they use the same CPU credit system, so upgrading from T3 is straightforward.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk introduces Cluster Mode – AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode is a new fully managed option for teams running a portfolio of applications on shared infrastructure powered by Amazon EKS. Instead of operating each application in isolation, you run multiple applications through one experience with a single operational baseline, so per-application cost decreases as your portfolio grows. You can upload source code in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, or Go, and Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed. Cluster Mode includes production-grade deployment strategies with automatic rollback, event-driven autoscaling, AWS Secrets Manager integration, native OpenTelemetry observability, and AI-powered troubleshooting. Standard and Cluster Mode environments run side by side within the same application, so teams can migrate one environment at a time.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Two new posts cover building on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud for Europe that runs as a distinct partition with its own control plane, IAM, billing, console, and service endpoints, and its first Region in Brandenburg, Germany. The first post walks through architecting a secure landing zone, covering account structure and governance, identity as infrastructure as code, centralized logging, data protection, and partition-aware ARN construction that works across AWS partitions. The second announces the general availability of Gemma 4 open-weight models on the Amazon Bedrock next-generation inference engine in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, with inference staying entirely within eusc-de-east-1 under a zero data retention and zero operator access model.
• The new AgentCore runtime: elastic, optimized, and consistently fast starts – We announced a new version of the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime, the managed compute layer for running agents. The new runtime reclaims memory as a session releases it rather than holding it at the peak, so the bill tracks real usage over the life of a session. It also delivers consistent cold start times regardless of container image size or concurrency by preparing the environment once, snapshotting it, and restoring that snapshot for each new instance. In testing with an empty echo agent, the new runtime delivered a P75 cold start of about 2 seconds from a 200 MB image up to 2 GB, compared to roughly 5.4 to nearly 30 seconds for the original runtime.
• Introducing the updated AWS Well-Architected Streaming Media Lens – We published a revised Streaming Media Lens, which provides architectural best practices for video streaming workloads. The revision expands from the original 2021 version to cover five streaming scenarios, including interactive live streaming with Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming for up to 25,000 concurrent viewers, low-latency live streaming, and ad-supported content monetization, alongside enhanced video-on-demand and live streaming guidance. It also adds new sustainability best practices focused on reducing carbon footprint, expanded observability and incident-response frameworks, and advanced content protection with multi-layered DRM and forensic watermarking. The lens whitepaper and custom lens are available now.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS re:Invent – AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4. 2, 200+ session times, locations, and speakers are live. Reserved seating for AWS re:Invent opens October 6. Register now and be ready to claim your spot in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions when reserved seating opens.
• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free in-person events covering cloud and AI. With re:Invent on the horizon, the Summits are coming to an end for the year. The last Summit is Dubai (September 30) at the Dubai World Trade Center, with 60+ sessions, an AWS Village, and hands-on workshops.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Lebanon (September 26), Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (September 26), Cebu, Philippines (September 26), Davao, Philippines (September 26), ComSum Manchester, UK (October 1), and Italy, Rome (October 2).

Summer has officially given way to September, but the weather where I am has not quite caught up. The days are still unusually warm, and I suspect these are the last mild afternoons before autumn settles in for good. I am making the most of them while they last. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center mobile apps, Amazon Connect Talent GA, Amazon Corretto 27, and more (September 21, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The templates in this collection cover many common production needs, including titles, logo reveals, slideshows, video openers, intros, lower thirds, animated typefaces, and icons. Some provide a complete sequence, while others handle one specific part of a larger edit. Colors, typography, footage, audio, and timing can usually be changed to suit personal and client projects.

Free templates vary considerably in quality. Some are carefully organized and include helpful documentation, while others may require fonts, plugins, presets, or older versions of After Effects. Checking these details before downloading will save time later.

The best results come from treating an After Effects template as a foundation rather than a finished design. Small changes to the pacing, type, color, and movement can make a familiar animation feel far more appropriate for your content. The collections below offer plenty of options for different styles, skill levels, and video formats.

What to Look for in an After Effects Template

A polished preview does not tell you everything about a template. Before downloading, check how the project was built and whether it will work with your version of After Effects.

• After Effects compatibility: Confirm the minimum version required to open the project.
• Plugin requirements: Check whether the template relies on paid or third-party plugins.
• Included assets: See whether fonts, sound effects, music, footage, and images are supplied or need to be downloaded separately.
• Project dimensions: Check the resolution, frame rate, orientation, and duration.
• Layer organization: Clearly named compositions, layers, and placeholders will make editing much simpler.
• Documentation: Look for written instructions or a video showing how the main controls work.
• License terms: Confirm whether commercial and client work is permitted and whether attribution is required.

Titles After Effects Templates

A title sequence is often the first design element viewers see, so typography, timing, and movement all matter. Even a simple title can give a video personality and prepare the viewer for what follows.

Designing animated titles from scratch is rewarding, but it can also take hours of testing keyframes, transitions, and effects. A good template handles much of that groundwork while leaving plenty of room for your own creative choices.

This collection features free title templates for a range of styles and project types. Each can be customized in After Effects with your preferred text, colors, fonts, and timing to create an opening that fits your video.

800+ Text Effect Elements for After Effects

This extensive After Effects template includes over 800 animated text effect elements. Each element is easy to edit with simple text and color controls. These text elements are perfect for bold titles, clean openers, and social videos that need modern animated typography.

2001 Space Odyssey Movie Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free title template recreates the 2001 Space Odyssey film’s familiar typography style and effects in After Effects. You can quickly adjust the text size and spacing for unique branding while honoring the original 2001 look.

Retro Movie Titles for After Effects

Try the Retro Movie Titles template if you’re looking for retro-style typography. The template comes with easily editable layers and full color control, making it easy to customize the title to match your brand.

Glitch Text Maker for After Effects

The glitch effect will help make your videos stand out. This template pack makes it easy to add your own text and is a perfect choice for anyone looking for a retro or vintage effect.

Switch To Text Box Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free kinetic title template includes seven scenes with two media placeholders. Each element is labeled to help speed up the editing process, and the design is suitable for various purposes, including corporate slideshows and personal videos.

Liquid Animation Titles for After Effects

This well-organized title animation opener template is ideal for promoting anything. It contains 110 animated elements pre-rendered into .mov files with a JPEG + Alpha codec. It also includes nine pre-designed text scenes, and you can easily add more.

Flipped Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

Flipped Titles is a clean and well-organized free template for After Effects. It includes seven unique full-screen titles with some cool and creatively animated effects.

Simplicity Title Pack for After Effects

This After Effects pack includes over 60 different titles. The titles are modern and minimal, making them suitable for most projects.

Swirling Letters Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Add a simple yet impressive title to your next video project with this free swirling letters titles template. Easily add a video, edit the text, and match your colors to make this title template your own.

Elegant Serif Titles for After Effects

If you’re looking for an elegant After Effects Title template, look no further than this template pack. It includes 16 different typography styles and a detailed help file to help you customize the project to your needs.

Poly Titles After Effects Titles & Graphics

Free to Download

These title templates will come in handy if you want to give your titles an abstract look and feel. The template includes nine different titles and graphics, and it is easy to customize with your own colors.

4K Rolling Titles for After Effects

This modular 4K After Effects template includes 10 title scenes with up-and-down rolling text animations. It offers editable timing controls and easy text customization. It is ideal for openers, title sequences, or social media videos that need modern kinetic typography.

Basic Animated Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes animated titles and lower thirds in a clean, minimal style. It’s simple to edit with text placeholders and color controls. Great for presentations, YouTube videos, or social content that needs clear and simple text animation with no extra setup.

4K Fullscreen Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This 4K After Effects template includes nine full-screen animated titles. Each title template is fully editable with text and color controls. These clean titles are ideal for openers, presentations, or promotional videos that need a clear, modern, and simple title animation.

Clean & Simple After Effects Titles

Free to Download

This free titles template has a modern aesthetic, with smooth animations and beautiful typography. The title is easy to customize with editable text and color controls. It is perfect for corporate videos or presentations that need a quick title animation with a professional look. It is compatible with After Effects 2023 and above.

Minimal Titles Pack for After Effects

Free to Download

This Free Minimal Titles pack includes 20 animation styles and titles and a royalty-free music track that can be used even in commercial projects. To use it, you just need to add your text and render the file.

Tagline Bold Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Make your headlines pop with this bold titles template. It is a collection of 25 free-to-download titles that can be quickly customized to match your brand.

Cinematic Title Style Library for After Effects

Free to Download

This style library for After Effects and Adobe Premiere is a great way to add style to your titles without wasting time creating them from scratch. You can quickly download and import this style library and use it in your projects.

Pop-Up Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you’re looking for stylish typography, use this free pop-up title template for After Effects. The template allows you to edit the text and customize your titles’ colors and duration.

Classic Kinetic Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

Free Classic Kinetic Titles is a universal and multi-purpose title template perfect for your company’s business presentations. The project includes a color controller for quick changes and editable text layers.

Modern After Effects Titles Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a smooth and elegant title pack, check out this pack of six free After Effects titles. The titles feature a fresh and modern style that’s perfect for young startups and small businesses.

Logo Reveal After Effects Templates

Logo reveals turn a static brand mark into a short animated sequence. By combining motion, sound, and visual effects, they give a logo more presence at the beginning or end of a video.

The best logo animations are usually brief. A few well-timed movements can say more than an overly complicated sequence, whether the logo belongs to a global company, a local business, or a personal creative project.

The free After Effects templates below cover styles ranging from restrained and minimal to energetic and cinematic. They can be adapted for promotional videos, presentations, social media, YouTube channels, and client work, subject to each template’s license.

Typographic Logo Intro for After Effects

This logo reveal or intro template uses bold typography and kinetic transitions to present your brand beautifully. It is easy to customize. Simply swap in your logo, edit the text, tweak the colors, then render. It would be an ideal template for app launches or brand reveals.

Click Three Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo pack includes three reveals in a modern and minimal style. They include a simple circle reveal, a mouse click-to-reveal, and an animated button push.

White Scroll Logo Reveals for After Effects

If you’re looking for a more classic-style logo opener, try the White Scroll logo reveal. The template comes with three background versions and three different logo placement options.

Glitch Logo Reveal for After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo reveal template uses pixelation and static noise to give your logo reveal a glitchy look and feel. This is a great template for gaming content or digital-themed videos.

Search Logo Reveal for After Effects

A unique way to reveal your logo is to use an animated search bar with a sample question. Your logo then shows up as the answer. You can customize the text and quickly drop in your logo.

4K Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template would be great for a startup or a small business. It is easy to use and includes detailed instructions on how to customize and render your logo reveal project.

Battle Logo Reveal for After Effects

The Battle Logo Reveal template would be perfect for a sports or gaming brand. It comes with a detailed help file, a logo placeholder, and an extensive set of backgrounds that you can use to customize your logo reveal.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal for After Effects

This premium animated logo reveal features a dark blue background paired with light blue HUD elements. It’s a perfect logo template for any tech company looking to stand out online.

Super Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free logo reveal template features a clean and high-energy animation with bold transitions and dynamic light effects. It’s very easy to customize. All you have to do is drop in your logo and edit the colors or background. It is perfect for intros, brand openers, or YouTube channels that want a sharp, professional-looking logo animation without any extra setup.

Clean & Light Logo After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple 4K logo reveal template is super-easy to make your own. All you have to do is swap out the logo placeholder and edit the text layer. It is compatible with After Effects CS6 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template uses MoGraph Lines. They are animated lines used to connect elements and add flow or rhythm to animated scenes. The template is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The MoGraph in this logo reveal templates are animated geometric elements used to create movement or transitions within a composition. This bold style is perfect for many business types. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Another 2D Logo Introduction Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a 2D style logo reveal, try this 2D logo introduction Template. This template allows you to easily customize the colors and insert your own logo. It also includes a detailed help file.

Three Animated Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free template pack contains three different logo reveals suitable for any corporate video. This template is an excellent choice for a modern and professional logo reveal.

4K Logo Reveal v.1 After Effects Template

Free to Download

This elegant logo reveal would be perfect for a high-end fashion or luxury brand. The template includes logo placeholders, editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Fast Flip After Effects Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The free Fast Flip After Effects logo reveal template is a great starting point if you’re on a budget. It uses stock photography, which you can replace with photos of your team or company to reveal an elegant logo at the end. All you have to do is customize the colors, replace the images, and add your logo.

Blue Action Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

Try the Blue Action Logo Reveal template if you’re looking for a minimalist logo opener. It features a dynamic animation style, and includes a logo placeholder and editable text layers. You can also easily adjust the colors.

Hiro Anime-Inspired Logo Reveal for After Effects

Free to Download

Try this logo reveal template if you’re looking for an action-packed, hi-tech animation style. To edit the project, drop your logo or text into the logo composition and then render the project.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you want a logo reveal template designed in a Matrix-style, try the Hi-Tech Logo Reveal template. This template contains two color versions, logo placeholders, and two editable text layers.

Slideshow & Gallery After Effects Templates

A good slideshow depends on more than placing images in sequence. The order, timing, transitions, and music all influence how the work is presented. It can be used to showcase a portfolio, document an event, tell a visual story, or bring a set of photographs to life.

Galleries take a slightly different approach, displaying several images within the same composition. Grids, frames, and animated layouts allow related photos to be viewed together without making the screen feel crowded.

Building every layout and transition from scratch takes time. The free After Effects slideshow templates below have the structure, while giving you control over the images, colors, typography, pacing, and soundtrack.

Wall Gallery Photo Slideshow for After Effects

This After Effects template gives you a wall gallery-style photo slideshow with smooth camera moves and realistic lighting. It includes multiple image placeholders and editable text layers. It would be excellent for weddings, personal portfolios, or family photo collections.

Bold Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Bold Slideshow if you want a bold and colorful look. This template includes a detailed help file, editable placeholders and text layers, and full color control so you can easily customize the colors to match your brand.

Old Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Old Slideshow template is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a retro-style gallery or slideshow. The template comes with full-color control, so you can easily customize the color scheme.

Wall Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Wall Slideshow if you want a cool-looking, modern gallery to display your family photos and albums. The template is easy to customize and comes with full-color control.

Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow Video features a unique zoom effect visualized through a telescopic transition. It also includes multiple light leaks and six image placeholders.

Slideshow Constructor for After Effects

This template features a vintage-style slideshow of polaroid photos. It’s a great choice if you want to combine all your photos and create a truly unique photo album.

Parallax Scrolling Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Parallax is a popular animation effect used on many websites. Thanks to this template, you can also use the effect in your videos. This template contains nine image or video placeholders and nine text placeholders.

Creative Slideshow After Effects Template

This Creative Slideshow template features a dynamic, fast-paced animation style and bold typography. It would be perfect for a corporate video presentation and includes full-color controls and editable text layers.

Stylish Slideshow Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects slideshow template includes 23 image or video placeholders and six text layers. It has smooth transitions, clean animation, and allows for simple customization. Replace the media, edit the text, and render. It would be great for photo reels, travel videos, or quick promo videos.

Romantic Photo Slideshow Template for After Effects

This After Effects template creates a polaroid-style photo slideshow with a rustic aesthetic. It includes multiple media and text placeholders and would be perfect for wedding photoshoots, travel reels, or event highlights that need a vintage or a touch of romance.

Digital Film Strip for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template features a digital filmstrip animation with photo or video frames moving in sequence. It includes 18 media placeholders and 10 text layers. The layout is simple to edit and renders in full HD. It is compatible with After Effects CS4 and above.

Fast Slides After Effects Slideshow Template

Free to Download

Use this template if you’re working on a video that needs fast-moving animation. This slideshow would be perfect at the beginning of a video to introduce the different concepts.

Modern Tile Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Modern Tile Slideshow is an excellent choice for professional and corporate videos. The slideshow template features a unique, tiled look and a 3D tile drop-down effect to reveal your images and transition between them in 3D. The template also includes multiple light leaks.

Dynamic Colorful Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template features a modern and colorful style paired with minimal typography. It’s an excellent choice for both business and personal video slideshows. The template includes 23 media placeholders, 19 editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow Template if you’re working on a high-end project. The template includes six image placeholders, a modern spinning column transition effect, and multiple light leaks.

Elegant Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This After Effects template is perfect for corporate and business slideshows. The template features elegant slide transitions and includes several placeholder images. You can easily add more and customize text and colors to match your brand.

After Effects Slideshow Templates

Free to Download

In this template, you will find 14 image placeholders arranged in a stunning grid layout. Thanks to the intelligent color controller, you can easily adjust the colors and replace the text with your own.

Clean Slideshow After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you want a clean slideshow that you can use to present your family photos or if you need a clean slideshow for a corporate project, the Clean Slideshow template is the right choice. It features a stylish design, simple text animations, and smooth transitioning effects.

Opener After Effects Templates

Video openers have a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. They combine footage, typography, graphics, and sound to establish the pace of a video before the main content begins.

Getting those elements to work together can involve detailed editing and plenty of keyframes. A pre-built template provides the timing and structure, while After Effects presets can help with individual animations and effects.

This collection includes free After Effects opener templates for YouTube videos, presentations, promotions, event films, and other creative projects. The styles range from quiet and minimal to fast, colorful, and effects-heavy. Replace the sample footage and text, adjust the colors, add your soundtrack, and shape the opener around your own content.

Colorful AE Opener Template

This creative and colorful opener template works well for travel, fashion, or kids’ brands. It’s also a great choice for simple video or photo slideshows, showreels, corporate presentations, or even a family album.

YouTube Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This classic YouTube opener can be used in business and corporate projects. It comes with full-color control, and you can easily change the text and other elements to make it your own.

Glitch Media Opener for After Effects

Try this Glitch Media opener template for any grunge or retro-style video project. It comes with a detailed help file, animated fonts, and full color control

Mozaic Opener for After Effects

This mosaic opener template is versatile and works for many types of projects. It has a unique mosaic design, and you can easily add your own text and change the colors.

Colorful Sketch Speech Opener for After Effects

This After Effects opener has a fun, hand-drawn style with doodle textures and comic-style speech bubbles. It comes with six editable text spots, a logo slot, and a photo cut-out. It’s great for social media clips, creative presentations, or talk-show intros.

Good News Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This After Effects opener uses bold text, smooth animation, and bright transitions to create a fresh news-style intro. The template is easy to edit with text and media placeholders. Replace the footage, update the titles, and render, and your intro will be ready.

Animated Slideshow Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This slideshow-style opener template uses clean transitions, a simple layout, and subtle motion to present your photos or video clips. Just swap the placeholders with your media, edit the text and colors, then render. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Dynamic Style Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free 4K opener template provides a rapid editing setup for Adobe After Effects. It supports multiple aspect ratios (horizontal, vertical, and square). Use the horizontal format for YouTube, the vertical format for social media, and the square format for posts.

Dynamic & Fast After Effects Opener

This is another opener template that would work well for a company that targets a young audience. It features an energetic, fast-paced animation style. It comes with 16 image or video placeholders and six text placeholders.

Web Presentation Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes eight scenes and a logo reveal, making it ideal for promoting digital products or online services. It includes 45 text placeholders, 12 media placeholders, and a logo placeholder, along with color controllers for quick customization.

Parallax Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a stylish and elegant opener, look no further than this parallax opener. The template includes a stunning parallax animation with eight editable text layers, eight photo or video placeholders, and one logo placeholder.

Creative After Effects Opener

Try this template if you’re looking for a modern opener. It features a fast-paced animation in a slideshow style. You can easily change the colors and fonts, add your own elements, and render the project.

Elegant Corporate Intro AE Template

This elegant intro template can be used in corporate-style videos, weddings, or fashion projects. It includes eight text and image placeholders.

Short Opener After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you need something simple to quickly create a video opener, this is the free After Effects intro template you need. The template is as simple as possible, and you can easily customize colors and add your chosen text.

Glitch Effect Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

Looking for a sleek and edgy way to introduce your video? Check out this glitch template for After Effects. The best part is that no plugins are required – simply edit and render. Even if you’re new to After Effects, you’ll find this glitch intro template easy to customize to your needs.

Instagram Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

Use this opener to engage your Instagram or YouTube followers and stand out in their feed. The template comes with 27 image and video placeholders, 20 editable text layers, and one logo placeholder.

Modern Website Presentation AE Template

If you need a creative and unique way to present your design client work or portfolio, try this modern website presentation template. You can also use it to showcase your website templates or CMS themes.

Clean & Elegant After Effects Intro Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects intro template comes with 15 image placeholders and can be used for corporate videos or any video promoting a fashion or jewelry brand.

Intro After Effects Templates

An intro gives recurring video content a consistent identity. It can combine a channel name, series title, logo, short clips, and music into a sequence that viewers soon recognize.

The most effective intros are usually short enough to avoid delaying the main content. Clear typography, purposeful movement, and well-timed sound can establish the visual style in just a few seconds. They work particularly well for YouTube channels, podcasts, tutorials, episodic content, and branded video series.

These free After Effects intro templates provide the animation and timing needed to build your sequence. Add your logo, replace the text and footage, adjust the colors, and choose music that fits the character of your content.

Boiled Down Intro After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Boiled Down opener template makes things bold and fast. It has six media placeholders, one logo slot at the end, and 17 text-replaceable comps. The resolution is 4K, and it is compatible with After Effects 2020 or later.

Big Bold Typography Intro or Opener

This free opener template, as the name suggests, features overly large, bold text and some lovely clip transitions. It would be perfect as the opener or intro of any travel or vacation-related video.

Retro Wave Intro AE Template

Free to Download

This free Retro Wave Intro template is perfect for any vintage or retro project. The template has a colorful design, two editable text layers, one logo placeholder, and a full-color controller.

Cyberpunk Intro for After Effects

If you’re a fan of the cyberpunk style, don’t miss this Cyberpunk Intro. This is an excellent choice if you want to have a cinematic look in your videos, and it would also be an ideal fit for a tech company.

Smooth After Effects Intro Template

Free to Download

This free intro template features bold titles and duotone colors. You will get five image or video placeholders, four text placeholders, one logo placeholder, and a custom color controller.

Scribble Logo Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template displays your logo with a hint of elegance. The animation starts by outlining your logo and gradually reveals the full design. The animation’s simplicity adds to its beauty, making it the ideal choice for anyone looking for a refined, polished way to showcase their brand.

Business Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This bright, clean After Effects intro template features seven media and seven text placeholders. It features an elegant animation perfect for corporate or business video projects.

Lower Thirds After Effects Templates

Lower thirds may occupy a small part of the screen, but their design still requires careful thought. Names, job titles, locations, and other details need to be readable without drawing attention away from the footage.

Good lower thirds use clear type hierarchy, controlled movement, and enough contrast to remain legible against different backgrounds. They are useful for interviews, documentaries, news videos, presentations, YouTube content, and branded productions.

These free After Effects lower-third templates offer a range of layouts and animation styles. Each can be edited to match your visual identity by changing the typography, colors, timing, shapes, and displayed information. Some collections also include several coordinated designs for speakers, locations, captions, and social media details.

Lower Thirds B&W After Effects Template

The Lower Thirds After Effects template features a classic black-and-white style. Your text appears as a stylish box, and you can easily edit the colors and adjust the text and the duration.

4K Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

This huge template pack includes 24 lower third templates in a bold and colorful style. You can easily adjust the colors to match your brand and set your desired duration.

Titles & Lower-Thirds for After Effects

Another combo pack, this titles and lower-thirds After Effects template features a modern and minimal style that can be used in various video projects. This template comes with full-color control and a detailed help file.

20 Minimal Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

If you love minimalism, try this free lower third pack. The template includes 20 lower thirds and ten premade color schemes. Customize the colors, set the duration, replace the text, and render your project.

After Effects Titles & Lower Thirds

This After Effects template pack includes titles and lower thirds, so it’s an excellent choice for those who need both for their video projects. The template is incredibly easy to edit as it comes with text boxes that automatically adjust to your text size and width.

Sports Lower Thirds Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free sports-themed lower thirds template features a callout with a performance chart and space for a headline and profile picture. With its modern and classy design and customizable features, this template is a great way to add some extra flair to any sport-related video.

Image Lower Thirds & Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This creative and colorful pack of lower thirds also includes images and cartoon-style icons that you can use for extra eye candy. The package comprises 15 titles, lower thirds, and a detailed help file.

Elegant Lower Thirds Templates for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider this template if you’re looking for an elegant lower thirds template. It comes with lower thirds, transitions, a logo reveal, and more. With five text placeholders and a spot for your logo and tagline, this template is an excellent choice for corporate videos.

Flat Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple lower thirds template has been designed in a flat and modern style. It features a circular call-out container that’s easy to use and customize. It’s an excellent choice for modern companies and businesses.

Stylish Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This is another elegant and stylish After Effects template with four different graphics. All the text layers and colors are easy to edit, and the project renders super fast, which makes it an excellent choice if you have a rush project.

Dynamic Lower Thirds AE Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template offers eight beautiful animations that you can fully customize with colors of your choice. With 24 text placeholders, you can quickly replace them and enjoy fast rendering. These lower thirds are a great way to add visual appeal to your next video.

Modern Call-Out After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free lower thirds template includes a left-to-right call-out with floating rating sliders underneath. It’s perfect for brands, businesses, and projects that want to add a touch of modern style to their videos and presentations.

Animated Box Entrance Lower Thirds Template

Free to Download

This modern, beautifully designed free lower thirds template features two call-out boxes, a flawless entrance animation, and a bounce effect.

Animated Text & Font Templates for After Effects

Animated typefaces give individual letters their own movement and character. Text can bounce, stretch, rotate, flicker, or appear one character at a time, making them a playful option for video titles, captions, and short promotional graphics.

Rather than animating every letter by hand, these After Effects templates include pre-built animations, text placeholders, and adjustable controls. You can type your own words, change the colors, refine the timing, and combine different letter movements to suit the project.

The free animated typefaces in this collection cover several visual styles, from clean geometric movement to rough, hand-drawn effects. They are particularly useful for music videos, social media clips, opening credits, and other projects where typography takes a leading role.

PolyNoise Alphabet Animated Typeface

This animated typeface features a glitchy look, so it’s perfect for videos that use glitchy animations. The colors are easy to customize, and you don’t have to worry about dropping each letter on a separate timeline with this typeface.

Alquimia Animated Font

Free to Download

The Alquimia Animated Font has a truly unique look. The font can be freely used in both personal and commercial projects, and you can easily modify the colors.

Paper – Grotesque Shady Animated Typeface

The Paper is a perfect choice if you’re working on a video that requires a creative touch. The font includes a full alphabet, numerical characters, basic currency symbols, and basic math symbols.

Neon Animated Typeface for After Effects

Free to Download

This free preset includes all 26 letters, numbers (0-9), and After Effects AEP file for quick customization. The preset’s glowing neon aesthetic will create an energetic and modern look and feel to any After Effects creation.

Helvetica Neue Free After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Helvetica Neue animated font if your next project needs an elegant or classic touch. This After Effects template font has 43 unique letter, number, and punctuation compositions.

Sketch Animated Font After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Sketch Animated Font is perfect if you want a handwritten look and feel. It includes capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Paint on Animated Typeface

The Pain On animated typeface is a must-have if you want to add a unique style to your videos. Each character paints white, black, and blue colors, which can easily be customized to match your own brand colors.

Animography Animated Font for AE

Free to Download

The Animography font is a full-featured animated font created as a collaborative project between 110 animators and one designer. It has a distinct, bold look and can be used for corporate videos.

Animated Icon Templates for After Effects

Static icons already communicate a lot with very little space. Add movement, and they can also show an action, change of state, or response. A loading symbol can rotate, a notification can pulse, and a button can confirm that it has been selected.

These small animations work well in app demonstrations, interface presentations, explainer videos, infographics, and social media content. Careful timing keeps the movement clear without distracting from the information around it.

The free animated icon templates below save you from keyframing every shape individually. They include coordinated icon sets in several styles, with controls for adjusting colors, scale, timing, and movement to match the rest of your project.

Technicons Animated Business Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

Technicons is a set of technical icons for After Effects. This icon pack comes with 30+ animated icons, and you’ll also find a variety of business icons, making this pack suitable for all kinds of projects.

Animated Icon Set for Video Editors

Free to Download

This free icon pack includes 20 different icons for business and personal projects. The icons are all pre-rendered footage, so you can use them in any video editing or motion graphics software. The project file is also included in the download.

390 Animated Icons for After Effects

This is another icon pack with a large selection of icons for business, technical, and other types of videos. The icons feature a modern, flat design, and you can change the size and color of each icon.

Animated Technical Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

This creative icon pack has 15 icons perfect for any technical niche. The template’s intelligent color controller makes it easy to customize the icons with your brand colors.

Social Media Icons for After Effects

Consider this social media icon pack if you’re looking for icons with a unique design. This icon pack is an excellent choice for any food-related business or brand that specializes in children’s products and uses video as part of its marketing strategy.

AE Animated Social Icons Pack

Free to Download

Check out this free icon pack if you need social media icons for your project. You’ll find icons for all major social media networks, and you can use the default colors or customize them with your own.

Flat Animated Icons Library for After Effects

This icon pack includes an impressive 1,000 icons covering almost any niche. You’ll likely use this library repeatedly in your projects, especially since it was designed using flat design.

Anicons: Customizable Icon Library for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider the Anicons icon pack if you want a complete icon library that can easily be customized. The icon pack allows you to quickly animate and adjust the icon parameters easily. The package contains 40+ icons.

How to Install an After Effects Template

Most After Effects project templates do not need to be installed. They are downloaded, extracted, and opened like any other project file. Keep all supplied folders together so After Effects can locate the linked assets.

• Download the template and extract the ZIP archive to a dedicated project folder.
• Read the included documentation before opening or moving any files.
• Check the required After Effects version, fonts, and plugins.
• Open the supplied .aep file through File > Open Project.
• If After Effects converts an older project, save the converted version as a new file.
• Relink missing footage, images, or audio when prompted.
• Open a .mogrt file through File > Open Project when it needs to be edited in After Effects. Templates intended for Premiere Pro should be added through its Graphics Templates panel.

How to Customize an After Effects Template

Template creators organize projects differently, but most use clearly labeled compositions and placeholder layers. Work on a duplicate of the original project so you can return to the untouched version if an edit causes problems.

• Open the main composition and identify the editable text, image, video, and logo layers.
• Replace placeholder media while preserving its position, scale, and timing.
• Edit the text, then check that longer words do not extend beyond the composition.
• Change the colors and fonts to match the project rather than the preview.
• Adjust keyframes or layer durations when the original animation feels too fast or slow.
• Review any controller, Essential Properties, or Effect Controls layers supplied by the creator.
• Preview the entire sequence before rendering to catch missing media, clipped text, or abrupt cuts.

Tips for Improving Performance

Templates can contain large footage files, complex effects, 3D layers, and many nested compositions. A few temporary adjustments can make editing and previewing them much more manageable.

• Reduce the preview resolution to Half or Quarter while editing.
• Use a Region of Interest when working on one small part of the composition.
• Keep source files and the disk cache on a fast local drive when possible.
• Close unused panels and other memory-heavy applications.
• Temporarily disable motion blur, depth of field, shadows, and demanding effects.
• Use proxies or pre-rendered compositions for large video files and complex scenes.
• Remove unused footage and compositions from a working copy of the project.
• Clear the memory and disk cache if previews become unreliable or storage space runs low.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

The most useful After Effects template is rarely the one with the busiest preview. A simpler project with clear controls, organized layers, and restrained animation is often easier to adapt and more useful across different types of work.

Choose a template that suits the pace and purpose of the video. A rapid sequence may work well for an event promo but feel out of place in a documentary or portfolio presentation. Typography and movement should support the content rather than compete with it.

Before committing to a template, check its license, After Effects version, plugin requirements, and included assets. Open the project and test a short section before replacing every placeholder. This can reveal performance issues or missing dependencies early in the process.

Finally, spend time changing more than the sample text. Adjust the timing, type choices, colors, transitions, and sound so the finished sequence belongs to the wider project. Free After Effects templates can remove hours of setup, but thoughtful editing is what stops the result from looking like the original preview. Keep an untouched copy nearby, make deliberate changes, and give the animation enough space to do its job.

More After Effect Templates

Read more articles by Paul Andrew

The post 80+ Best Free After Effects Templates in 2026 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The WordPress project is slowly but surely inching toward responsive block settings. Version 6.9 introduced the Block Visibility feature, allowing you to temporarily disable a block without deleting it from a post. WordPress 7.0 took it a step further by adding options to hide a block based on device.

Perhaps it’s a niche feature. But it’s also quite handy for targeting mobile or desktop users with specific blocks. And it’s also a gateway to more responsive controls landing in WordPress 7.1.

Today’s tip will show you how easy it is to show or hide a block based on a user’s device. Here we go!

Sample Project: Simplify a Hero Area for Mobile Users

Here’s a common scenario: Your website has a large hero area, complete with a high-resolution image, text, and a call to action (CTA). It looks great on a desktop device but is clunky on a phone. The image is too big, and there’s too much text for users to digest. What to do?

The responsive Block Visibility controls will make this a piece of cake. We’ll create two hero areas – one for desktop and another optimized for mobile. The result will be a better user experience for everyone.

Step 1: Create Desktop and Mobile Hero Areas

The first step is to create the two hero areas for our page. We’ll grab one from the WordPress Block Pattern library and see what we can do with it.

Our desktop hero area is beautiful on the big screen! It should also work well on tablets, such as an iPad. However, it may be overwhelming for mobile users.

Let’s simplify. We duplicated the desktop hero and made a few changes:

• We replaced the image with a cropped version that is optimized for smaller screens.
• We centered the text and CTA.
• We replaced the three columns of text with one, shorter passage.
• Finally, we tightened up the spacing to reduce scrolling.

The mobile hero offers the same immersive look without the extra bulk.

Step 2: Assign Hero Areas to Their Respective Devices

As of now, our page has two hero areas, each contained within a Group block. The next step is to set one of them to display on desktop/tablet devices, and the other on mobile. We’ll use the Block Visibility feature to make it happen.

Desktop/Tablet Devices:

• Click on the Desktop Hero block we created.
• Click on the Options menu (⋮) and select Hide Block.
• Choose the Hide on Mobile option.
• Click the Apply button and save the page.

Mobile Devices:

• Click on the Mobile Hero block we created.
• Click on the Options menu (⋮) and select Hide Block.
• We’ll choose two options this time: Hide on Desktop, Hide on Tablet
• Click the Apply button and save the page.

You may notice that the mobile hero no longer displays on the Block Editor canvas. That’s the desired result, as it won’t be in the way when working in Desktop preview mode.

Switch to Mobile preview mode, and you’ll see the opposite effect. The desktop hero is hidden, allowing the mobile version to take over. You can edit these blocks when in the appropriate preview mode.

Note that you can also view and edit these blocks using the Document Overview (List View) feature (Shift+Alt+O). Select the block, click on the Options menu (⋮), and select Show from the menu. You can hide it again once you’re finished editing.

Oh, and be sure to test on different devices! It’s not enough to shrink your desktop’s browser window. You can use your browser’s dev tools to emulate a mobile device if you don’t have one handy.

Use Different WordPress Blocks on Different Devices

It’s often the little extras that make the biggest difference. Targeting different devices via the Block Visibility feature is a prime example. Its release didn’t draw much fanfare. However, it makes WordPress more flexible for designers.

Before WordPress 7.0, we’d have to work around this limitation. That could mean installing a specialized plugin or writing custom CSS rules in a theme. Now, we’re only a few clicks away from choosing which blocks display on a given device.

The feature saves us time, improves the user experience, and won’t hog server resources. Most of all, it’s a sign of things to come for WordPress.

here. He recently started a writing service for WordPress products: WP Product Writeup. He also has an opinion on just about every subject. You can follow his rants on Bluesky @karks.com.

Read more articles by Eric Karkovack

The post How to Hide WordPress Blocks Based on Device appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Most of us install a dependency once and never look at it again. It does its job, the tests pass, and we move on. But the web platform keeps moving too, and a surprising number of the libraries sitting in your package.json today are now built into the browser.

In a typical mid-sized JavaScript app, you can often find somewhere between 60KB and 90KB (minified and gzipped) of dependencies that the platform can now handle on its own. Date and number formatting, HTTP requests, modals, tooltips, deep cloning, grouping arrays: these were all real gaps a few years ago. A lot of them aren’t gaps anymore.

The reason those libraries stick around isn’t laziness. It’s that most teams don’t re-audit their dependencies on a Baseline cadence, or are simply not aware of how fast browsers are shipping these days. You check npm audit for security, but is this library still doing something the browser can’t? is a question that rarely gets asked. So the libraries stay.

In this article, we’ll run that audit together. Instead of going through dependencies one by one, we’ll work in clusters, because the wins tend to come in groups. We’ll do the bundle math, build a small decision framework you can reuse, and stay honest about the cases where the platform still falls short. By the end, you’ll have a repeatable process you can run on your own package.json.

What “Baseline” Actually Means

Before we start deleting things, let’s quickly recap what Baseline is. Feel free to skip this section if you’re already familiar.

Baseline is a project from the WebDX Community Group that tells you, in plain terms, how safe a web feature is to use across the major browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari). A feature can be in one of three states:

• Limited availability
  The feature hasn’t shipped in all the major engines yet. Not safe to rely on without a fallback.
• Baseline Newly available
  The feature has just landed in all the major engines. It works for users on up-to-date browsers, but older devices in the wild may not have it yet.
• Baseline Widely available
  The feature has been in all the major engines for 30 months. At this point, you can reach for it without much thought.

That 30-month gap between “Newly” and “Widely” matters a lot for this audit. A feature that’s Widely available is something you can usually drop a library for today. A feature that’s only Newly available is something you can drop a library for if you check your audience first, or if you’re comfortable with a small feature check. We’ll treat those two cases differently throughout.

You can look any feature up on webstatus.dev, on MDN (every reference page shows a Baseline badge near the top), or programmatically with the web-features npm package. We’ll use all three later when we run the audit on a real project.

A Decision Framework Before You Delete Anything

It’s tempting to read “the browser does this now” and start ripping libraries out. Let’s not do that. A swap that looks free on paper can quietly break things for a chunk of your users, or cost you a feature you were relying on without realizing it.

So before dropping any library, ask three questions. We’ll reuse these in every cluster below.

1. Is the replacement Baseline-safe for my audience?

Not “is it Baseline” in the abstract, but “is it safe for the people who actually use my app.” If the native feature is Widely available, this is usually a yes. If it’s only Newly available, check your analytics or your browserslist config and see what share of your users would miss out. A B2B dashboard where everyone’s on the latest browser is a very different situation from a public-facing site with a long tail of old Android devices.

2. What does the swap actually cost?

Dropping a library isn’t always free. Sometimes the native feature isn’t supported widely enough yet, so you’d reach for a polyfill. If that polyfill is heavier than the library you’re removing, you’ve made your bundle bigger, unless you load it conditionally. We’ll see exactly this with Temporal later.

3. Does the platform feature cover my real use case?

Libraries often do more than the platform feature they resemble. axios isn’t just fetch with automatic JSON parsing; it has interceptors, request cancellation, and retries. If you’re using those, a straight swap to fetch will leave you reimplementing them. Check what you actually use before assuming it’s a drop-in replacement.

Keep these three in mind. Every cluster below is really just these questions applied to a different corner of your dependencies.

Cluster 1: Internationalization (The Biggest Drop Today Win)

This is the cluster where you’ll usually find the most KBs sitting on top of features that are already Widely available. The browser ships a whole family of formatting tools under the Intl namespace, and a lot of small, popular libraries became unnecessary.

Here are the usual suspects and what replaces them:

• timeago.js (1 KB gz) → Intl.RelativeTimeFormat
• pluralize (2.3 KB gz) → Intl.PluralRules
• numeral (3.9 KB gz) → Intl.NumberFormat
• humanize-duration (6.6 KB gz) → Intl.DurationFormat
• list-joining helpers → Intl.ListFormat

Let’s walk through some of them.

Relative Time

timeago.js exists to turn a timestamp into “3 hours ago”. Intl.RelativeTimeFormat does the same thing, and it’s Baseline Widely available.

const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat("en", { numeric: "auto" });

rtf.format(-1, "day"); // "yesterday"
rtf.format(3, "hour"); // "in 3 hours"
rtf.format(-2, "week"); // "2 weeks ago"

The numeric: "auto" option is the nice touch here: it gives you “yesterday” instead of “1 day ago” where the language has a word for it. You pass a number and a unit, and you get a localized string back.

You may be wondering about the one thing timeago.js does that this snippet doesn’t: it picks the unit for you. Given a date, timeago.js decides whether to say “seconds” or “days.” Intl.RelativeTimeFormat expects you to do that part. It’s a few lines of arithmetic (work out the difference, find the largest unit that fits), and once you’ve written that helper, you don’t need the library anymore.

Numbers, Currency, And Lists

Intl.NumberFormat covers most of what number-formatting libraries do: thousands separators, currency, percentages, and compact notation.

new Intl.NumberFormat("en-US").format(1234567.89);
// "1,234,567.89"

new Intl.NumberFormat("en-US", { style: "currency", currency: "USD" }).format(
  1234.5,
);
// "$1,234.50"

new Intl.NumberFormat("en", { notation: "compact" }).format(1200000);
// "1.2M"

And Intl.ListFormat, Widely available, handles the “join an array into a sentence” problem, including the Oxford comma, which is the kind of thing people write fiddly helper functions for:

const lf = new Intl.ListFormat("en", { style: "long", type: "conjunction" });

lf.format(["Alice", "Bob", "Carol"]);
// "Alice, Bob, and Carol"

The One Caveat: Durations

humanize-duration turns a number of milliseconds into “1 hour, 30 minutes”. The platform equivalent is Intl.DurationFormat:

const df = new Intl.DurationFormat("en", { style: "long" });

df.format({ hours: 1, minutes: 30 });
// "1 hour, 30 minutes"

One thing to keep in mind is that Intl.DurationFormat is Baseline Newly available at the time of writing, not Widely available. It landed in all the major engines in March 2025, and it’s on track to become Widely available in 2027. So this one fails question 1 for broad-audience apps unless you check your traffic first or add a fallback. For an internal tool on modern browsers, it’s fine today. For a public site with old devices, give it another year or guard it with a feature check.

The Math On This Cluster

If your app uses the full set (humanize-duration, timeago.js, pluralize, numeral), that’s roughly 14 KB gzipped of dependencies, most of it replaceable right now with Widely available APIs. The internationalization cluster is usually the easiest win in the whole audit.

Cluster 2: HTTP Clients

This cluster is more nuanced, so it’s a good one to slow down on.

The browser HTTP libraries people reach for are axios (17 KB gz) and superagent (19 KB gz). For most requests, fetch plus AbortController covers what you need, and both are Widely available.

A basic GET looks like this:

// axios
const { data } = await axios.get("/api/users");

// fetch
const res = await fetch("/api/users");
const data = await res.json();

The one extra line (res.json()) is fetch being explicit where axios was implicit. That’s the pattern across this whole cluster: fetch does less for you by default, and you decide whether you want the things it leaves out.

Timeouts

axios has a timeout option. fetch has AbortSignal.timeout():

const res = await fetch("/api/users", {
  signal: AbortSignal.timeout(5000), // abort after 5 seconds
});

Where fetch Doesn’t Replace axios

This is where question 3 does most of the work, so let’s be specific about the gaps:

• fetch doesn’t reject on HTTP errors.
  A 404 or 500 is a resolved promise, not a rejection. You have to check res.ok yourself. axios rejects on any non-2xx status.
• No interceptors.
  If you rely on axios interceptors to attach auth tokens or handle 401s in one place, fetch has no equivalent. You’d wrap fetch in your own function or class to get the same behavior.
• No automatic retries.
  axios (with a plugin) can retry failed requests. With fetch, that’s your code to write.
• No upload progress.
  fetch still can’t report upload progress in a first-class way. If you have a file uploader with a progress bar, that’s a real reason to keep a library.

I personally heavily rely on interceptors in my interactive online courses, such as Learn JavaScript, and I have solved that for years using a custom class on top of fetch. I’ve shipped this to millions of users and have seen lots of success with it.

None of these are hard to rebuild, and most apps only use one or two of them. But this is exactly the kind of cluster where you shouldn’t do a blind find-and-replace. Look at how you actually use your HTTP client first. If it’s plain GETs and POSTs, dropping axios for a thin fetch wrapper saves you about 17 KB gzipped.

Cluster 3: UI Primitives

This cluster has some of the most satisfying swaps, because the platform features don’t just match the libraries, they’re often more accessible than what teams ship by hand.

The libraries here are modal dialogs (something like a11y-dialog, 1.8 KB gz), tooltip and popover libraries (tippy.js, 14 KB gz, which bundles Popper for positioning), focus-trap (6.6 KB gz), and body-scroll-lock (1.3 KB gz). They get replaced by three platform features: the <dialog> element, the Popover API, and CSS anchor positioning.

The <dialog> Element

A huge amount of modal-related code exists to solve accessibility problems: trapping focus inside the modal, closing on Escape, restoring focus to the previous element when the dialog is closed, and rendering above everything else. The <dialog> element, Widely available, does all of that for you.

<dialog id="confirm">
  <form method="dialog">
    <p>Delete this file?</p>
    <button value="cancel">Cancel</button>
    <button value="delete">Delete</button>
  </form>
</dialog>

const dialog = document.querySelector("#confirm");

dialog.showModal(); // focus moves in, background goes inert, Escape closes it

dialog.addEventListener("close", () => {
  console.log(dialog.returnValue); // "cancel" or "delete"
});

Calling showModal() does the work that focus-trap was installed for: focus moves into the dialog, the rest of the page becomes inert so you can’t tab out of it, Escape closes it, and focus returns to the element that opened it. The dialog renders in the browser’s Top layer, so you don’t fight z-index. You also get a ::backdrop pseudo-element to style the overlay.

That single element can replace your modal library and focus-trap. The one piece it doesn’t handle on its own is locking the background from scrolling, which is what body-scroll-lock was for. That’s now one line of CSS:

body:has(dialog:modal) {
  overflow: hidden;
}

If you’re wondering why we’re using dialog:modal instead of dialog[open], it’s because the open attribute is set as soon as you call show(), but the dialog isn’t actually modal so you don’t want to lock scrolling yet. The :modal pseudo-class is only true when the dialog is actually modal, which is the case when you call showModal().

So three libraries collapse into one element and one CSS rule.

Popover API And Anchor Positioning

For things that aren’t full modals (dropdown menus, tooltips, the small floating panels that tippy.js handles), the Popover API gives you light-dismiss behavior, top-layer rendering, and Escape-to-close with no JavaScript at all:

<button popovertarget="menu" id="options">Options</button>

<div id="menu" popover>
  <!-- menu content -->
</div>

Clicking the button toggles the popover. Clicking outside it closes it. It’s Baseline Newly available (since January 2025).

The other half of what a tooltip library does is positioning: keeping the floating element pinned to its trigger and flipping it when it would overflow the viewport. That’s what Popper (bundled inside tippy.js) handles, and it’s now a CSS feature called anchor positioning. Here it pins the same #menu popover directly under its trigger button:

#options {
  anchor-name: --trigger;
}

.tooltip {
  position-anchor: --trigger;
  position-area: top;
  margin: 0;
}

Anchor positioning is the newest feature in this article. It became Baseline Newly available in January 2026, when Firefox 147 shipped it (Chrome had it since version 125, and Safari since version 26). Because it’s this fresh, it’s squarely a question-1 feature: great for modern audiences, but check your traffic, and note that some of the more advanced parts (like position-try fallbacks) have uneven support across versions. Keep a sensible fallback for older browsers.

Between <dialog>, the Popover API, and anchor positioning, the UI primitives cluster (tooltip library, modal library, focus-trap, body-scroll-lock) adds up to roughly 24 KB gzipped, and you come out the other side with better accessibility defaults than most hand-rolled solutions.

Cluster 4: Lodash Utilities

Lodash is rarely imported whole anymore, but its individual functions show up everywhere, either as the full lodash package (25 KB gz) or as standalone installs like lodash.clonedeep and lodash.groupby. Several of the most common ones now have direct platform equivalents.

Grouping

lodash.groupby reorganizes an array into an object keyed by some property. Object.groupBy does exactly that:

const products = [
  { name: "Apple", category: "fruit" },
  { name: "Carrot", category: "vegetable" },
  { name: "Banana", category: "fruit" },
];

const grouped = Object.groupBy(products, (product) => product.category);
// {
//   fruit: [{ name: "Apple", ... }, { name: "Banana", ... }],
//   vegetable: [{ name: "Carrot", ... }],
// }

There’s also Map.groupBy for when you want a Map instead of a plain object (handy if your keys aren’t strings). Both are Baseline Newly available, since March 2024, and on track to become Widely available in late 2026.

Deep Cloning

lodash.clonedeep makes a deep copy of an object. structuredClone is the platform version, and it’s Widely available:

const original = { user: { name: "Sam", roles: ["admin"] } };

const copy = structuredClone(original);
copy.user.roles.push("editor");

original.user.roles; // ["admin"] (unchanged)

structuredClone handles the tricky cases that trip up JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(...)): it clones Date, Map, Set, ArrayBuffer, and circular references correctly. The limit to know about (question 3 again) is that it can’t clone functions, DOM nodes, or class instances; it throws on functions and drops the prototype on class instances. For plain data, which is what most people deep-clone, it’s a clean replacement.

Set Operations

If you’ve ever pulled in a Lodash helper for union, intersection, or difference, the Set object now has these built in. They’re Baseline Newly available, since June 2024:

const admins = new Set(["sam", "alex", "jo"]);
const editors = new Set(["alex", "kim"]);

admins.intersection(editors); // Set { "alex" }
admins.union(editors); // Set { "sam", "alex", "jo", "kim" }
admins.difference(editors); // Set { "sam", "jo" }

The full set of methods is union, intersection, difference, symmetricDifference, isSubsetOf, isSupersetOf, and isDisjointFrom.

What’s Worth Keeping

Not all of Lodash has moved into the platform. debounce and throttle still have no native equivalent, and they’re genuinely useful, so cherry-picking lodash.debounce is reasonable. The point of this cluster isn’t “delete Lodash,” it’s “stop shipping the parts the browser already has.” Dropping lodash.clonedeep and lodash.groupby alone is about 8 KB gzipped, and if you were importing the full lodash for a handful of functions, replacing the platform-covered ones can let you drop it entirely.

Cluster 5: Temporal, A Case Study In Not Dropping A Library Yet

Every cluster so far has ended in “go ahead, drop it.” This one is the opposite, and that’s why it’s worth including: it shows the framework telling you to wait.

Temporal is the long-awaited replacement for JavaScript’s Date, and it’s a genuinely better API: immutable objects, sane time zone handling, and no more month indexes starting at zero. It reached TC39 Stage 4 in March 2026 and is part of the ES2026 specification. Firefox shipped it in version 139 (in 2025), and Chrome shipped it in version 144 (January 2026). Safari hasn’t shipped it in a stable release yet; it’s in Safari Technology Preview, with stable support expected later in 2026.

If Temporal is news to you, check out the Temporal Cheatsheet for a quick overview of the API and a comparison to Date.

However, Temporal is not Baseline. It’s still in limited availability, because Safari users don’t have it. To use it across all browsers today, you need a polyfill, and this is where the math turns against you.

The official @js-temporal/polyfill is about 44 KB gzipped. There’s a smaller polyfill that internally does not depend on BigInt and it weighs 19 KB gzipped. A lightweight date library like dayjs is about 3 KB gzipped. So if you swap dayjs for Temporal plus its polyfill right now, you’re not saving 3 KB, you’re adding roughly 41 KB to your bundle, unless you are able to load the polyfill conditionally.

Run it through the framework:

• Question 1 (audience): Temporal isn’t Baseline. For a broad audience, that’s a lot of people.
• Question 2 (cost): the polyfill is more than ten times the size of the library you’d remove. The swap makes your bundle bigger.
• Question 3 (feature gap): Temporal actually wins here; it does more than dayjs. But that doesn’t matter while questions 1 and 2 are failing.

The verdict is generally clear: keep dayjs (or date-fns) for now. The moment to revisit is when Safari ships Temporal in a stable release and it reaches Baseline. At that point you can use Temporal natively and conditionally load the polyfill for users on older browsers. This is a feature to write down and check again in a few months, not one to act on today.

How To Run This Audit On Your Own package.json

The clusters above are a starting map, but your dependencies are your own. Here’s a repeatable process you can run this quarter.

Step 1: List Your Production Dependencies

Start by listing what actually ships to users:

npm ls --omit=dev --depth=0

Step 2: Measure What Each One Costs

For a quick per-package number, Bundlephobia gives you the minified and gzipped size of any npm package. For the real picture (what each dependency costs in your actual bundle, after tree-shaking and deduplication), run a bundle analyzer against your build. npx source-map-explorer works on most bundles, and npx vite-bundle-visualizer works for Vite projects.

Step 3: Check The Baseline Status Of Each Replacement

For each candidate, find the platform feature that would replace it and check its Baseline status. The quickest way is webstatus.dev or the Baseline badge on the feature’s MDN page.

Step 4: Run The Three Questions

For each library with a platform replacement, go back to the framework: Is it Baseline-safe for your audience? What does the swap cost? Does the feature cover how you actually use the library? Most of your decisions will fall out of question 1 (check the feature’s status against your browserslist) and question 3 (check your own usage).

Step 5: Swap Behind Progressive Enhancement Where Needed

For Widely available features, swap and move on. For Newly available ones, either confirm your audience is on modern browsers or guard the new code with a quick feature check and keep a fallback:

if (typeof Intl.DurationFormat === "function") {
  // use the platform feature
} else {
  // fall back to the library, or a simpler format
}

That way you ship less code to the users who can run it, without breaking the ones who can’t.

Wrapping Up

Add the clusters up, and the picture is concrete. The internationalization cluster is around 14 KB gzipped, HTTP is around 17 KB, the UI primitives are around 24 KB, and the Lodash utilities are 8 KB or more depending on how much of the library you were shipping. For a typical mid-sized app, that’s somewhere between 60 KB and 90 KB gzipped of dependencies you can hand back to the platform, and more if you were shipping the full lodash or several of these libraries at once. (The uncompressed numbers are two to three times larger, which is what you’ll see in a bundle analyzer before gzip.)

I’ve chosen relatively lean packages for most of these features, but some individual packages could still be heavy. Your dialog package, for instance, could alone weigh as much as 50KB gzipped depending on what you’re using.

A few features are worth keeping an eye on over the next year, because they’ll open up further swaps:

• Temporal going native.
  Once Safari ships it in a stable release and it reaches Baseline, you can drop both your date library and the polyfill, turning today’s regression into a real win.
• CSS anchor positioning maturing.
  It became Baseline Newly available in January 2026. As it ages toward Widely available, dropping tooltip and popover positioning libraries gets safer for broad audiences.
• Object.groupBy and friends crossing into Widely available.
  The 2024 batch (array grouping, Set methods) is on track to become Widely available in late 2026, which moves them from “check your audience” to “just use it.”

None of this is a one-time cleanup. The platform ships new features constantly, and the gap between “you need a library for this” and “the browser does this” keeps closing. The habit worth building is small: once a quarter, run the audit. List your dependencies, check what’s now Baseline, and hand back what you can.

Pick one cluster from this article, open your package.json, and see how much of it the browser already does for you.

(yk)

The post How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The design community has entered a period of conversational tunnel vision. Because Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on dialogue, the industry has collectively decided that the chat bubble is the natural home for every AI capability. While the chat interface is a viable and powerful option for many tasks, it is one tool in an expansive toolkit. UX and Product teams must be intentional about the modalities we choose for how users provide their data and commands, and how the system presents its output.

Modality is the way a person uses their senses to interact with a system: seeing, hearing, touching, speaking, or typing.

To pick the best method, you need to think about what the user wants to do, where they are, and how much cognitive effort they are already expending. This guide offers a clear way to figure out the best approach for any product, using two tools to assist in the process: a Task Audit and an Input/Output Alignment Matrix.

Picture a traveler jogging through a loud airport terminal after a sudden gate change. They are dragging their roller bag and carrying a coffee in the other hand. They need to open their airline app to ask the AI assistant where to go. The tool immediately fails the input modality test. It forces the traveler to stop walking, balance their coffee, and type a long booking reference number into a tiny chat box. When they finally hit send, the system fails the output modality test. Instead of flashing a large, high-contrast gate number, the AI returns a dense paragraph explaining the atmospheric weather patterns causing the delay. The actual gate number sits buried at the very bottom.

While they might make the flight just fine, the user won’t forget the moment of anxiety they felt while using the AI tool — an experience that could have served as a way to reinforce a commitment to UX has instead validated the common conception that companies don’t care about or understand customers using their products. In this scenario, the airline built a smart tool, but the interface failed the user. The input required physical dexterity, which the traveler lacked at the time of need. The output demanded a level of reading focus they could not spare. This article will cover how we can avoid this scenario in our AI-powered tools. In order to be successful, we must evaluate the physical and cognitive load of our users to match both the input and output modality to their immediate intent.

Let’s first discuss the limitations of a chat-based interface.

Myth of the Do-It-All Chatbot

The allure of the chatbot is easy to understand from a product development standpoint. It is a blank slate. It suggests that the system can handle anything the user provides. However, a text-heavy interface often causes a high adaptation load. This load increases cognitive demands on users. Over time, this cognitive burden turns into a psychological tax a person pays when changing natural thought processes to accommodate a machine.

When an interface relies solely on conversation, it imposes a dual burden: a linguistic challenge for input and a cognitive challenge for output. We’ll examine both separately below.

Input: Why a Text Box is a Linguistic Barrier

A blank chat box creates a major problem for users who need to discover what a tool can actually do. In a standard graphical interface, menus and buttons provide clear visual cues that signal every available option. A chat box often leads to choice paralysis because users are forced to guess what the AI is capable of. They have to remember the exact phrasing or technical terms required to get the result they want.

Consider a data analyst who wants to find a specific trend in a spreadsheet. In a traditional tool, they might click a filter or sort button. In a chat interface, they must suddenly become a writer and describe that complex logic in a complete sentence. Another example: a manager trying to reorganize a team schedule. Dragging and dropping blocks on a calendar is intuitive. Describing those same scheduling shifts in a text prompt adds a layer of work that makes the task feel more difficult than it should be.

Designing for input means recognizing that composing a prompt is a creative act. It requires a person to translate a vague thought into a specific command. For many professionals, this creates a linguistic barrier. A designer might know exactly how they want an image to look but struggle to describe the lighting or texture in a text prompt. In that case, a slider or a color picker is a much better input method than a text box.

Having addressed the linguistic barrier of constructing input prompts, we must now consider the other half of the conversational burden. This is the cognitive cost the AI imposes when it responds in dense blocks of text.

Output: The Cognitive Cost of Reading Long Text

When an AI responds in long blocks of text, it transfers the interpretive work to you, the user. Text is a serial medium: your brain has to read one word after the next to extract meaning. That takes time. Sequential reading is necessary in many scenarios. Complex legal analysis or reviewing nuanced medical histories requires reading full paragraphs. Teams create friction when they default to text for data that visual formats communicate faster. Visual methods allow parallel processing. You can view a chart and spot a pattern in under a second.

Imagine asking an AI for a project status update. Instead of a color-coded dashboard, you receive three paragraphs listing every task completed that week. Now you must read the entire response and mentally summarize it to find the one piece of information you needed. The quick visual check has been replaced by a reading assignment.

The cognitive tax of this work compounds with professional stakes. A doctor asking for a patient’s vital signs needs a clear numerical display, not a narrative describing the readings. A stock trader looking for a price spike needs a line graph immediately, not a written description of price movement over the past hour. In both cases, a text response forces the professional through a slow, error-prone extraction process when speed and accuracy are most important.

A Taxonomy of Input and Output Modalities

Before selecting a modality, practitioners need a shared vocabulary for what the options actually are. The table below maps common input and output modalities to the contexts where each performs best. This is not a ranking. Each modality has a role; the question is always which role it is playing in a given workflow.

Designing for modality inherently requires a strong focus on accessibility. While visual dashboards provide rapid insight for many people, designers need to provide screen-reader-optimized audio alternatives for users with visual disabilities. Modality choices should multiply pathways to information.

Input Modalities

Output Modalities

Table 1: Input and Output Modality Taxonomy. Use this as a reference during the Task Audit to identify candidate modalities before narrowing to a recommendation.

The following FigureFigure 2 illustrates the cognitive spectrum, mapping how mental effort scales across various interaction methods. This spectrum is a critical tool for designers to visualize the shift from low-effort, ambient interactions to high-effort, focused experiences. By understanding where a specific task sits on this spectrum, teams can identify whether a user needs a “glanceable” output that minimizes mental processing or a high-density format that supports deep, analytical thinking.

With this taxonomy established, the next step is to apply a rigorous method to select the optimal input and output combination. Practitioners must ground this selection process in the user’s real-world environment and context.

Task Audit: A Framework for Modality Selection

To choose the right interaction method, practitioners should complete a Task Audit before interface design begins. A formal Task Audit is the framework that moves teams from assumptions about user behavior to evidence. This process gathers data about the physical, social, and cognitive context in which the work actually happens, which then drives all input and output modality decisions.

Use these four areas of focus to anchor the audit:

• Input Constraints: This addresses whether the user can physically interact with the system using their hands, such as typing or tapping. It often dictates the necessity of hands-free interaction methods like voice input when the user’s hands are occupied by tools or gear.
  • Can the user use their hands to type or tap? A mechanic working under a vehicle might need to ask a question using only voice because their hands are occupied and covered in grease.
• Output Constraints: This defines whether a user can safely and practically view information on a screen. It concerns situations where a user’s eyes must remain focused on their environment, making audio or glanceable visual cues the appropriate display method.
  • Can the user safely look at a screen to read information? A delivery driver’s navigation system should provide audio directions because reading a detailed map while driving through an intersection is dangerous.
• Social Constraints: This considers the environment’s tolerance for audible interaction, either speaking or listening to audio output. It helps determine if a quiet space requires silent alerts or if a loud environment demands a non-audio output method.
  • Is the environment appropriate for speaking aloud or listening to audio? An office worker in a quiet, open-plan space would prefer a silent text notification over a spoken voice response.
• Cognitive Load: This measures the amount of mental effort the user must already dedicate to their primary task. Teams must design the interface output to either minimize mental processing, such as with a quick visual indicator, or support deep thinking with a detailed summary.
  • How much mental effort does the task already require? A surgeon needs a quick visual red indicator during a procedure, while a lawyer researching case strategy needs a detailed text summary to absorb at their own pace.

The audit answers two questions for every feature:

1. What modality can the user physically use to provide input here?
2. What modality can the user realistically process as output here?

Here is how to gather the evidence to inform your task audit. Use one or more of these common UX research-related methods:

1. Contextual Inquiry and Observation

This is the most direct way to capture how people work in their natural setting, and it provides the richest data for identifying physical constraints on both input and output. Observation is necessary because users often perform hidden work: small steps or workarounds they forget to mention in an interview, or environmental details they do not think to describe because they have adapted to them.

The Approach: Go to the user’s actual workspace, whether a field site, warehouse, or office floor. Ask them to perform the task you are studying and observe closely.

What to Look For: This method is most revealing for Input Constraints and Output Constraints.

• Input example
  A technician diagnosing equipment who cannot put down their tools rules out typing and points directly to voice input.
• Output example
  A supervisor in a meeting who looks up and down repeatedly from a screen signals a need for glanceable, low-density output rather than a scrolling text summary.

2. Focused Interviews

Interviews surface the mental models and decision points that observation cannot capture. They are most valuable for understanding Cognitive Load.

The Approach: Conduct one-on-one sessions with end-users and the stakeholders who manage the outcome. Use a structured protocol focused on a specific task. Ask for stories about past successes and failures rather than general opinions.

What to Look For:

• The “Why” Behind High Cognitive Load
  Ask users to describe the hardest part of a task. A lawyer may explain that the volume of detail is not the challenge; synthesis for ethical or strategic judgment is. This confirms a need for detailed text output the user can read and absorb at their own pace, not a summary dashboard.
• Process Ambiguity
  Uncover situations that are unclear or error-prone, which identifies where AI capabilities provide the most leverage and what output format will reduce rather than increase ambiguity.

3. Collaborative Workshops

Workshops are essential for defining task boundaries and establishing required fidelity levels. Product managers and stakeholders bring foundational knowledge of system requirements; researchers apply audit criteria.

The Approach: Use workshops to build a shared Task Inventory. Bring designers, engineers, product managers, and business analysts together to map every step of the process. Product managers and business analysts ensure factual accuracy; the research team applies audit criteria to each step.

What to Look For:

• Social Constraints
  Confirm where tasks are performed. A workflow that takes place on a loud manufacturing floor versus a shared quiet library demands very different output modalities.
• Ambiguity and Speed Tests
  For every task in the inventory, apply two tests. First: Does this step require human ethical judgment? If yes, the AI output must support that judgment, not replace it. Second: Does this step require instantaneous execution? If yes, the interface must support fast input with minimal cognitive overhead.

Once you gather field evidence through these research channels, map your findings directly against the Modality Taxonomy. Each concrete physical or social constraint you document systematically eliminates mismatched interfaces. This process strips away design guesswork, narrowing your architectural choices down to the specific input and output combinations that survive the reality of the user’s environment.

When you ground input and output modality decisions in field evidence rather than interface convention, the resulting design reduces adaptation load for the user and grounds your modality choices in evidence. When you base decisions on field data, you move past interface convention and build a powerful case for the resources needed to create the right experience for your users.

Once the audit is complete, the final step is utilizing the Input/Output Alignment Matrix to formalize the connection between user intent and the optimal modality combination.

Input/Output Alignment Matrix

With Task Audit findings in hand, you can use an Input/Output Alignment Matrix to map user intent to specific modality combinations. This matrix is organized by what the user is trying to accomplish in a given moment. This distinction versus focusing on what your AI is capable of doing matters. If intent changes across a single workday for the same user, the interface should respond to those shifts.

Choosing the wrong modality for the user’s context can lead to user frustration. Users might feel mentally drained if a lot of information is delivered through a format that is hard to process, like getting a massive status update only in text. They may also start worrying if an action was actually completed correctly when a precise command is buried within a long chat exchange. Finally, the system can force users into finding clumsy workarounds, making them adapt to the machine’s method instead of working in their natural, most effective way.

Table 2: Input/Output Alignment Matrix. Map user intent to modality combinations using Task Audit evidence. The two added rows (Monitoring/Alert and Guided Task Completion) cover common enterprise and mobile scenarios not captured in simpler frameworks.

When teams coordinate these factors, they can move past the automatic default of adding a chatbot. Visual layouts enable rapid scanning. Structured inputs remove the burden of constructing perfect sentences. Audio outputs serve users whose hands and eyes are otherwise occupied.

The right modality combination respects the user’s physical and cognitive state at the moment of interaction.

A real-world scenario where environmental constraints dictated a shift in design strategy best demonstrates the practical application of this matrix and the broader audit framework.

Case Study: Adaptive Modality for Field Technicians

The Problem: Cognitive Overload in High-Risk Environments

Field technicians servicing high-voltage electrical grids often face a dangerous misalignment of interface modality. Traditionally, these technicians had to rely on ruggedized tablets to access technical manuals and log status updates. However, the physical constraints of the job — wearing heavy protective gloves and working in bucket trucks at significant heights — made interacting with a standard touch interface nearly impossible while on a job site. Additionally, attempting to read complex, text-heavy diagnostic reports on a screen while maintaining situational awareness created a high cognitive load that increased the risk of safety errors.

Research Methods: Capturing the Reality of the Field

To address this, researchers conducted a Task Audit utilizing three specific methods from this article. First, Contextual Inquiry and Observation revealed that technicians often worked in “hands-busy, eyes-busy” states where any manual input was a significant barrier. Researchers observed technicians wearing mandatory thick protective gloves while in the bucket truck, which made precise screen taps nearly impossible and often triggered the wrong commands.

High-altitude environments also introduced severe screen glare from direct sunlight, washing out the display and making text difficult to read even at full brightness. Furthermore, technicians faced the physical safety risk of trying to manipulate and secure a heavy, ruggedized tablet while balanced in awkward positions, creating a distraction that could lead to dangerous slips or equipment contact. These factors, combined with the need to constantly monitor live wires and the surrounding environment, meant technicians could not safely dedicate their eyes or hands to a standard tablet interface, confirming the severity of the eyes-busy and hands-busy constraints.

Second, Focused Interviews with veteran technicians validated the findings from the field. They confirmed that the operational challenges, including the thick gloves, screen glare, and safety risks, were not unique to one location but were commonly experienced across multiple sites, including high-altitude transmission lines and sprawling power substations. This broad confirmation solidified the need for a non-touch, voice-first solution. The interviews also surfaced a critical cognitive constraint: the need for glance verification of vital signs, such as voltage readings and temperature trends, rather than being forced to read a long narrative description of system health. Technicians stressed that their primary need was immediate, unambiguous verification (is this safe? or where is the fault?), not a lengthy diagnostic report, indicating that a text-heavy response was dangerous to their workflow.

These methods confirmed that the environment required a departure from the traditional chat or form-based AI capability interface.

The resulting solution implemented an adaptive modality handoff designed to mitigate the physical and cognitive barriers researchers identified during the research. While active on a job site, technicians utilize voice input to query the system. This method allows them to remain productive while wearing thick protective gloves that would otherwise prevent precise interaction with a touchscreen.

The AI responds with a short audio summary of immediate diagnostic data. This audio feedback bypasses the challenge of screen glare in high-altitude environments and allows the technician to maintain situational awareness of the high-voltage grid without the safety risk of looking away from dangerous equipment. By providing immediate answers to fault locations through audio, the system meets the technician’s need for glance verification through a hands-free and eyes-free channel.

Once technicians return to a truck and secure safety gear, a system automatically hands off workflows to a 15-inch visual dashboard mounted inside a vehicle. A rugged 10-inch field tablet lacks adequate screen real estate for complex schematics. A larger vehicle display allows for parallel processing of historical trend data and wide electrical grid maps. This case study reflects an actual field audit conducted for a national utility provider. Implementing this adaptive approach reduced diagnostic time by twenty percent and increased daily tool adoption among field crews.

Designing for the Environment

An AI capability is only as usable as the interface that delivers it. Researchers and designers must resist the pull toward the path of least resistance. Building a chatbot is fast and familiar, something we’ve been doing for decades now. Building an interface that feels like a natural extension of how someone already works is harder, and it is the work that matters.

Start by leaving the screen. The Task Audit requires presence in the places where work actually happens: the field site, the warehouse floor, the operating room. The physical and social realities of those spaces are not edge cases. They are the design brief.

The future of AI interface design is a diverse ecosystem: visual, vocal, haptic, and ambient, calibrated to user intent and environmental context. The chat window is one tool in that ecosystem. It is the right tool for specific jobs, and often the wrong tool for the jobs we reflexively assign to it.

In order for us to create the greatest likelihood of acceptance and use of the AI capability we offer users, we must fit the modality to the person and the place.

Where to Start

To get started immediately, run a lightweight version of the Task Audit before your next design sprint. Spend two hours observing the workflow in its actual environment. Conduct three to five interviews with the people who perform the task. Bring a PM or analyst into a 90-minute workshop to build a task inventory and apply the four audit questions. You will not have complete data, but you will have enough to make a defensible modality recommendation backed by evidence rather than convention.

I created a Modality Task Audit Template to help guide teams with moving forward. You can download this worksheet and take it directly to your next field observation. It allows design and product teams to document specific physical barriers before writing a single line of code.

Inside this Template:

• Step 1: Physical Reality Check.
  An observation checklist to log hand availability, eye focus requirements, and ambient noise levels in a specific workspace.
• Step 2: Cognitive Baseline.
  A scoring grid to rate required reading density and verification anxiety for a given workflow.
• Step 3: The Handoff Map.
  A blank flow diagram to chart where a user starts a task (for example, using voice on a mobile phone in a warehouse) and where they finish it (for example, reviewing a visual dashboard on an office monitor).

We focus heavily on training smarter AI models. We owe equal attention to human interfaces. A brilliant underlying model packaged in a lazy text interface fails. When you observe actual work environments and align interaction modalities to them, you remove adaptation friction.

Modality Task Audit Field Template

Use this worksheet during field observations. It allows design teams to document specific physical barriers before writing code.

Part 1: Physical Reality Check

Observe users as they perform a primary task in actual workspaces. Check all applicable conditions.

State of Hands

Visual Focus Requirements

Ambient Noise Level

Part 2: Cognitive Baseline

Rate the mental effort required to complete a specific workflow.

Part 3: Handoff Map

Chart user journeys across different environments. Document required input and output at each stage.

Stage 1: Initial Action

• Location: ________________________
• Input Method: ________________________
• Output Method: ________________________

Stage 2: Context Transition

• Trigger for environment change (example: user returns to a desk): ________________________

Stage 3: Completion Action

• Location: ________________________
• Input Method: ________________________
• Output Method: ________________________

(yk)

The post Matching AI Modality To User Intent: Designing The Right Interface appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

If you manage TLS certificates for your applications, you know the challenge: certificates expire, and when they do, your customers see errors or your service goes down. As certificate validity periods get shorter (the Certification Authority (CA)/Browser Forum mandates reduced maximum validity to 100 days starting March 2027, and to 47 days by 2029), manual renewal processes become untenable. You need automation.

Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) is an open protocol for requesting, renewing, and revoking TLS certificates without human intervention. It’s the same protocol behind Let’s Encrypt, and it’s supported by dozens of clients across every platform.

Today we’re announcing ACME support for public certificates in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). ACM now provides a fully managed ACME server endpoint that works with any ACMEv2-compatible client, such as Certbot, cert-manager for Kubernetes, acme.sh, or any other client you already use. You can issue public TLS certificates from Amazon Trust Services through the standard ACME protocol.

Before today, if you wanted automated certificate management using the ACME protocol, you relied on external certificate authorities alongside ACM, leading to a fragmented visibility experience. Some certificates lived in ACM, others were managed externally with no central dashboard. PKI administrators had limited ability to control who could request certificates or which domains were allowed.

With ACME support in ACM, you can now set up one or more managed ACME endpoint that allows you to centrally manage and monitor ACME certificate usage across your organization.

As a PKI administrator, you get centralized controls that go beyond basic certificate issuance. You can bind IAM roles to ACME accounts for fine-grained access control over which domains each client can request. You can define domain scopes at the endpoint level to enforce organization-wide policies. And you get centralized monitoring and visibility in the same place: AWS CloudTrail logs every certificate request for auditability, Amazon CloudWatch tracks operational metrics, and ACM sends expiry notifications when certificates are approaching renewal. Using ACM, your PKI team can search all certificates, whether issued through the ACM console, an API call, or ACME.

How it works

To get started, you first set up a dedicated ACME endpoint, configure authorization controls using External Account Binding (EAB), validate which domains the endpoint can issue certificates for, and point your existing ACME clients to the new endpoint.

The domain validation step is important: it separates who can set up certificate issuance from who can request certificates. The PKI administrator validates domains once at the endpoint level, using DNS credentials that stay with the admin. Application owners who need certificates never touch DNS. They register with an EAB credential, and the endpoint enforces which domains and scopes they’re allowed to request. This means you can distribute certificate automation broadly across your organization without distributing DNS keys along with it.

I start this demo from the ACME certificates page in the AWS Certificate Manager console.

I already have a few endpoints and certificates in this account, I walk you through creating a new one from scratch. First, I select Create ACME endpoint.

I give my endpoint a name. The Endpoint type is Public. ACME clients will connect over the public internet. The Certificate type is Public. The certificate will be issued by Amazon Trust Services and trusted by browsers and operating systems by default. For the certificate key type, I keep the default ECDSA P-256. RSA 2048 and ECDSA P-384 are also available if your clients require them.

Scrolling down, I configure the domain. I enter my domain name and select the domain scope. The scope controls exactly what certificate patterns your ACME clients are allowed to request for this domain. If I check only Exact domain, clients can only request certificates for that specific domain name. Adding Subdomains allows certificates for any subdomain (for example, api.example.com or dev.example.com). Adding Wildcards allows wildcard certificates (*.example.com). By leaving a scope unchecked, you prevent any client using this endpoint from requesting that type of certificate, even if their ACME request is otherwise valid. For a production endpoint, you might enable only Exact domain and Subdomains while leaving Wildcards unchecked to enforce a stricter security posture.

I also select my Amazon Route 53 hosted zone from the drop down menu. ACM then automatically creates the DNS CNAME records needed for domain validation, so I don’t have to do it manually. When my domain is hosted outside of Route 53, I manually create the provided CNAME record at my DNS provider instead. This is a meaningful difference from typical ACME setups where each client handles its own domain verification independently.

These centralized controls give PKI administrators a single place to authenticate domains, restrict which certificate types (ECDSA or RSA) clients can request, and further limit wildcard issuance. Having these governance capabilities built in means you don’t need to purchase a separate certificate lifecycle management product or invest in building a custom policy layer yourself, both of which come at significant cost and operational overhead.

I select Create ACME endpoint

After a few seconds, the endpoint is created. The console shows a Setup progress tracker with the next steps. My domain shows a “Validating” status. The validation method is DNS validation, where ACM verifies that you control the domain by checking for a specific CNAME record. Because I selected my Route 53 hosted zone during creation, I select Create records in Route 53 to let ACM handle the DNS validation automatically.

The validation completes in a few seconds and the status changes to Success.

Now I need to create External Account Binding (EAB) credentials. EAB credentials are a key identifier and HMAC key pair that lets your ACME client register an account with the ACME server. Once registered, the client generates its own asymmetric key pair, which is then used to authenticate all subsequent certificate requests. On the endpoint details page, I select the External account binding tab, then select Create EAB. I give the credential a name and optionally set an expiration time, ideally no longer than needed to complete client registration.

After I select Create EAB credential, the console shows the Key ID and HMAC Key. I note these values because I need them to configure my ACME client. The setup progress now shows four green checkmarks.

I’m ready to request a certificate. On the endpoint details page, I expand the CLI reference section. The console provides ready-to-use command examples for both Certbot and acme.sh. I copy the Certbot command and run it inside a container using the certbot/certbot image.

certbot certonly --standalone --non-interactive --agree-tos 
    --email <EMAIL> 
    --server https://acm-acme-enroll.us-east-1.api.aws/<ENDPOINT_ID>/directory 
    --eab-kid <EAB_KID> 
    --eab-hmac-key <EAB_HMAC_KEY> 
    --issuance-timeout <ISSUANCE_TIMEOUT> 
    -d <DOMAIN>

I replace the placeholders with my endpoint URL, EAB credentials, and domain name. The --eab-kid and --eab-hmac-key arguments are how Certbot registers with your ACME endpoint using the External Account Binding credentials I generated earlier. Each ACME client has its own syntax for this step, so check your client’s documentation for the exact flags.

Certbot contacts the ACME endpoint and returns a valid certificate signed by Amazon Trust Services.

I use openssl to view the certificate before installing it.

The certificate is now visible in the ACM console under the ACME certificates tab, alongside any certificates issued through the console or API.

Availability and pricing

ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager is available today in all commercial AWS Regions and will be available in AWS GovCloud (US), the China Regions, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud partitions at a later date.

Pricing is per domain included in each certificate at the time of issuance, with a different price for fully qualified domain names and wildcards. Volume tiers are calculated based on total domain occurrences across all certificates issued per month in your AWS account. For details, see the ACM pricing page.

To get started, visit the ACM section on the AWS console or read the documentation.

— seb

The post Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Scrolling is among the most boring necessities of digital design. Or is it? It’s easy for both designers and users to ignore. Yet, we spend much of our days moving up, down, and all around. There’s something to be said for going the extra mile.

Thankfully, there is an opportunity to do more. Scroll effects can add an element of fun to the mix. They’re also great for adding context and drawing attention to important content. Some effects even create a sense of immersion.

Web developers have found all manner of creative use cases. We scoured the CodePen archives to find eight prime examples of how CSS and JavaScript level up the user experience. We were quite impressed with the results.

Below, you’ll find everything from basic elements to jaw-dropping visual presentations. You’re sure to find inspiration for your next project. Let’s get started!

Premium ScrollTrigger Panels

Created by Ashish Ranjan

Here’s a unique way to scroll through the sections of a webpage. This pen creates a “stacking” effect, where each new section is layered on top of the last. The previous section zooms and fades out, allowing you to read the current content distraction-free.

Impressively, scrolling up reverses the effect. The technique uses GSAP scroll trigger and makes a long page seem shorter.

See the Pen PinStack Showcase – Premium ScrollTrigger Panels by Ashish Ranjan

Scrolling Text & Rotating 3D Gallery

Created by Luis Alberto Martinez Riancho

This 3-D gallery turns the classic carousel on its head. It combines scrolling text with a rotating cube that syncs in perfect harmony. Notice the shading and textures used to create a photorealistic feel.

The button-based navigation lets you avoid scrolling altogether, if that’s your thing.

See the Pen Six Faces / Walking The Cow by Luis Alberto Martinez Riancho

Stars Scroll Effect

Created by Aleksa Rakocevic

Scroll effects don’t have to be bold. There are times when subtlety is called for and appreciated by visitors. This starry background features a parallax motif with a hint of sparkles.

The result is a fun, yet classy, trip down the page. Consider it for blogs or other long-form content.

See the Pen Stars scroll effect by Aleksa Rakocevic

Smooth Scroll Behavior

Created by Margarita

Staying with the subtle aesthetic, the on-scroll effects of this pen are a great way to dress up an article. Text gently appears as you make your way down the page.

HTML scroll-behavior is used to ensure a smooth ride and add some flair to static content. This one is appropriate for virtually everyone.

See the Pen It Was Never A Competition — Full Story by Margarita

Infinite Loop Spiral

Created by Toc

Are you looking for a completely twisted take on a photo gallery? This spiral masterpiece will certainly grab attention. Scroll down, and this 3-D ribbon-shaped gallery spins through each image.

Use your mouse or finger to change perspectives. The effect is silky-smooth and will enhance your portfolio projects.

See the Pen Infinite loop spiral by Toc

CSS Scroll-Timeline Word Highlight

Created by Daniel Haim

Here’s a way to list your services and/or accomplishments with style. The text on the left stays put as you scroll, while the right side jumps to the next word or phrase.

It uses the scroll-snap-align and scroll-snap-type CSS properties to keep the presentation tidy. JavaScript sets properties based on user action. The result is an attractive method for making an impact with typography.

See the Pen CSS Scroll-Timeline Word Highlight by Daniel Haim

Springy Section Edges

Created by Tom Miller

Scrolling from one page section to another doesn’t have to be boring. A small effect, like this “springy” animation, adds context and entertainment value to the process. Reach the bottom of a section, and you’re welcomed with a bounce.

Here’s an idea: maybe add some confetti when you reach the end of the page. After all, loyal visitors should be celebrated!

See the Pen Springy Section Edges by Tom Miller

Reverse Scrolling Columns

Created by Ryan Yu

This photo gallery’s multi-column scrolling is reminiscent of a slot machine. The columns are synced, but the middle section moves in the reverse direction. It’s fun and immersive without overwhelming users.

Once again, GSAP scroll trigger serves as the secret sauce to the effect.

See the Pen Reverse scrolling columns by Ryan Yu

Use Scroll Effects To Enhance User Experience

Scrolling doesn’t have to be an afterthought in your design projects. The examples above demonstrate what’s possible with a little code and imagination.

In some cases, these effects can be the star of the show. Consider the photo galleries in our roundup. They become more interesting and interactive when you go beyond the default grid layout. You get high-end form and functionality.

On the other hand, subtlety also has a place when adding scroll effects to more traditional pages. A hint of elegance can transform static content into something more memorable.

The decision is yours to make. Consider your audience and accessibility needs, then choose the effect that makes the most sense.

Want to see even more awesome scroll effects? Check out our CodePen collection!

More CSS Effects Snippets

here. He recently started a writing service for WordPress products: WP Product Writeup. He also has an opinion on just about every subject. You can follow his rants on Bluesky @karks.com.

Read more articles by Eric Karkovack

The post 8 CSS & JavaScript Snippets for Adding Scroll Effects to Your Website appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.