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The new Apple MacBook Pro 16" is the first new size of laptop from Apple in years – since the now-defunct 12" MacBook, in fact. Overnight, it has replaced the 15" MacBook Pro in Apple's lineup, meaning that the only two size options for portable Macs now are the MacBook Pro 13" and the MacBook Pro 16". Being of the same family, the two laptops are obviously very similar, including lots of speed, top-tier screens, reliability, and a focus on being as small and lightweight as possible – reasons that Mac laptops have been staples for creative pros for so long. Despite the similarities, there are seemingly small differences in the design, and potentially big differences in the power, that could be the decider for creative pros when working out which of the two laptops to buy. That why we've put the two sizes of Apple laptop head to head here, to help you nail down which option is the best choice for you. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Performance This, along with the screen (which we'll talk about shortly), is the big difference between the two machines. Though the two are equally fast at the little stuff, such as launching lighter apps, when it comes to raw power for high-end software, the 16" model offers more head-room – more than you may need, in fact. The MacBook Pro 13" comes with an Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, at 1.4GHz in the cheapest version ($1,299/£1,299). There's also a $1,799/£1,799 version that features a much faster 2.4GHz quad-core chip. These processors are HyperThreaded, which means they can act as eight cores (though without the full performance a real eight-core processor can manage). There's also the option to custom configure a model with a faster-still 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 processor. The MacBook Pro 16" comes with a six-core 2.6GHz Intel Core i7 processor as standard in the cheaper ($2,399/£2,399) model, which is also HyperThreaded, so can act as 12 cores. You might guess that this would be about 50 per cent more powerful than the MacBook Pro 13", and in practice it really can be for tasks that really tax the processor, such as complex file exports or software compiling. And then there's the higher-end MacBook Pro 16", which comes with an eight-core 2.3GHz Intel Core i9 for $2,799/£2,799. And yes, that can act as 16 cores. The fact that the 13" models top out at quad-core, while the 16" models start at six-core, means that for some users, the decision of which one to get takes care of itself. Live 4K playback while editing is possible on the 13" model, but for 6K or 8K, you'll need the bigger one. If you need to compile large and complex software on more cores, you'll need the bigger one – it will save you time, and therefore money. The difference is similarly stark when it comes to graphics performance. The MacBook Pro 13" uses integrated Intel Iris graphics, which are capable enough for lots of work, but don't include proper dedicated VRAM, and can't really be considered 'pro'. The MacBook Pro 16" uses AMD's 5000M series graphics chips, which come with 4GB of dedicated GDDR6 memory as standard, so they can take some reasonably heavy workloads. And you can configure the bigger machine with a GPU that includes 8GB of memory, if you're really planning to push the 3D or visual effects apps. Speaking of memory, the RAM options might make your decision for you too. The MacBook Pro 13" comes with 8GB of memory as standard across all models, though this can be configured to 16GB, but that's the max. 8GB is fine for a standard user, but it doesn't take long to hit when you've got Photoshop CC and Lightroom open, and especially not when you're editing video. 16GB is more reasonable for creative pros, but can still be really limiting when working on multi-layered creations. The MacBook Pro 16" comes with 16GB of RAM as standard, but can also be configured to 32GB or even 64GB, which is a first for Apple laptops. So for some pros, this alone will mean they need to go for the big model – but even if you think 16GB would probably be enough, it's worth considering future-proofing, because the RAM in these machines cannot be upgraded down the line. Being fine with 16GB now doesn't mean you will be in a couple of years, so we absolutely recommend playing it safe and upgrading to 32GB. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Design The current design of Apple's laptops has been set for a few years, and it's very similar across the two models here. They come in silver or a darker grey, and feature straight, clean lines of unbroken aluminium. The new MacBook Pro 16" model has some very small tweaks to this formula: specifically, it has thinner bezels around the screen, so that the move from a 15" screen to a 16" one in the bigger model doesn't increase the size by much (around 2 per cent, in fact). Both models have generously sized trackpads that dominate the space beneath the keyboard, and the 16" model has big empty sections on the left and right of the keyboard, unlike the 13" model – a result of them having roughly the same-sized keyboard. These include the new speakers, which are exclusive to the bigger machine, and are pretty amazing. Using four woofers and two tweeters, the sound is like a solid pair of (small) external speakers, and doesn't vibrate through the machine so dramatically, because Apple uses drivers in opposition to each other, cancelling out a lot of unwanted vibration. They're extremely impressive, though we imagine most people will stick with headphones or proper monitors in most situations still anyway. Both models are pretty thin and light for this class of laptop – the 16" model is obviously still bulky, but considering the screen real estate you get compared to other 15" machines (or even 17" laptops), it's a fairly compact laptop. The 13" model is 30cm wide, 21cm deep, and 1.5cm thick when closed, and weighs 1.37 kg. The 16" model is 35cm wide, 24cm deep, and 1.62cm when closed – it's not a small amount of extra footprint overall, but really isn't that egregious for its size, especially for a bigger-than-15" screen. It weighs 2kg. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Display The MacBook Pro 16" has, of course, a 16" display, with a resolution of 3072x1920. The MacBook Pro 13" has a 13" display with a resolution 2560x1600. That gives the both essentially identical display densities of 226 pixels per inch on the 16" model, and 227 pixels per inch on the 13" model. This means they're both equally crisp and detailed – it's just that the bigger screen gives you more space to work on at the same quality level. In terms of work, this means you can fit more tools on the 16" model – you could fit a Photoshop working window the size of the smaller MacBook's screen, and still have room for palettes to be open and more tools. Or there's space to have documentation open alongside the tools you're working in – there's no doubt that bigger screens give more options for productivity. The question tends to be whether you need the extra space, and whether it's worth the trade-off for having a machine that's bulkier and heavier – and that comes down entirely to your work. For a photographer who has to move around a lot, maybe the smaller screen is detailed enough for location work, and you appreciate the lightness. For a video editor who wants something to work on during occasional time away from the main desk, the screen space is probably more valuable. They both have a peak brightness of 500 nits, and support Apple's Extended Dynamic Range feature in apps such as Final Cut Pro, which can tweak video output to provide an approximation of what HDR video footage will look like in practice, despite the screen not being HDR rated. Both screens support the P3 colour gamut too, so for film work or wide-colour image editing, you can get an accurate view of the final results. Finally, both screens support Apple's True Tone tech, which adjusts the colour tone of the screen to match the ambient lightning in the room, and is much easier on the eyes when working on documents in artificial light. Those who want careful calibration will likely turn it off, but for the times when you need to blast through emails or write a pitch document, it makes these machines much more pleasant to use than competitors, or older Macs. Ultimately, then, when it comes to screens, it's just down to which size suits you best. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Connectivity The MacBook Pro 16" comes with four Thunderbolt 3 ports – two on each side – which are basically all things to all people. As long as you've got the right adapter, these ports are fast enough to connect just about anything: 6K displays (and later, 8K, though support isn't official yet); giant RAIDs; external graphics cards for extra 3D/compute power; or even a USB stick. They're the same type of port as USB Type-C, so anything that's USB Type-C works with them too, including docks (though USB Type-C docks can be hit and miss in terms of seamless support – be sure to research carefully before buying one for mission critical work). These are the only four ports on the MacBook Pro 16", apart from the 3.5mm headphone jack. Even the power goes through them, which does give you the nice option of being able to charge on either side of the machine. It also means it's easy to power the machine through a hub, using a single cable – great for people who need to grab their laptop and go at a moment's notice. The MacBook Pro 13" also relies solely on Thunderbolt 3 ports (with the headphone jack again), but how many you get changes depending on the model you go for. There are three basic Apple options for the MacBook Pro 13", and the first two (starting from $/£1,299) only have two ports, situated on the left-hand side. The higher-end model ($/£1,799) comes with four ports, making it equal to the 16" model for connectivity. Because of the giant bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3, for most use, two ports is actually fine if you're using an external hub of some kind. However, if you're working in a way where you need to maximise throughput (8K video, or using an external graphics option, for example), then the more ports the better, to avoid any chance of bottlenecking. Both machines have the same wireless connectivity options: 802.11ac Wi-Fi (now also known as Wi-Fi 5), plus Bluetooth 5.0. There is a new, faster wireless standard (Wi-Fi 6), but neither model supports it as yet. There's no option for having 4G (or 5G, for that matter) built into either model. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Storage The MacBook Pro 13" includes 128GB of storage in its basic model, which is fine for regular users, but can't be considered a pro option, really. The good news is that you can configure the 13" machines to have up to 2TB of storage built in, which is healthy – but costs. The MacBook Pro 16" basic version comes with 512GB as standard, while the higher-end option has 1TB. Here's the juicy part, though: you can configure these with up to 8TB of built-in storage, which gives you a ton of flexibility. It'll be a big outlay, but if you really need it, it's invaluable. Like the RAM, storage is not upgradable in the future in these machines, so do not skimp when you buy (though the speed of Thunderbolt 3 means that using fast external SSDs shouldn't slow you down at all). If in doubt, get the next level up, because it will always be double whatever you're looking at now – plenty of room to grow. One of the secret weapons that Apple's laptops have for high-end work is the sheer speed of Apple's storage, which is one reason to configure high levels of built-in storage rather than external. It's basically the fastest in the business, and is comfortably up to the task of 8K editing with live playback (when combined with the processing power on higher-end models), or opening large and complex files rapidly. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Keyboard The MacBook Pro 13" uses Apple's butterfly-mechanism keyboard, which has been standard on its laptops for a few years, and has proven controversial. It's very low travel (so doesn't require much pressing to activate the keys), though it still provides plenty of feedback, and has had reliability issues – Apple has a specific repair program for replacing keyboards on these machines, in fact. A lot of people are happy with the feel and usability of the Butterfly keyboard, but there are also lots of people who just don't like it – who prefer longer key travel, or the slightly softer feel. The reliability issue is the bigger concern, though: the keys seem more prone to getting stuck when debris makes it in, and also appear to wear out easier than other types of keyboard. This is obviously a concern on a vital professional machine. The MacBook Pro 16" uses a 'Magic Keyboard' instead, which has a scissor mechanism, giving it longer travel, and likely fewer reliability problems – we say "likely" because we haven't been able to long-term test the keyboard, but its construction appears to be nearly identical to Apple's older keyboards, which were rock solid. For people who need to do a lot of writing, this may well make the MacBook Pro 16" the preferred choice. As we said, it partly comes down to personal preference, but the reliability Russian roulette of the type of keyboard used in the 13" models means the bigger machine is the safer option overall. There's another change that people have been clamouring for on the keyboard: the return of a physical Escape key. When Apple introduced the Touch Bar as a replacement for the function keys, the Escape key was rolled into that as a virtual button. But, given how often it's used in everything from IDEs to Photoshop to Final Cut to InDesign, not having an easily-found physical key was a downside. The MacBook Pro 16" now has a physical Escape key as well as a (shortened) Touch Bar. The MacBook Pro 13" still has the longer Touch Bar, with the Escape key part of that. Both laptops have Touch ID sensors, for easy fingerprint logon, which is a nice, er, touch. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Battery The new MacBook Pro 16" has the biggest battery you're going to find in any laptop in the foreseeable future: 100Wh. That's because this is the upper limit set by the USA's FAA for what's allowed on planes, and no one's going to bother with laptops that aren't allowed on planes. Having such a huge battery is great for battery life overall, of course, though the large screen is a big drain. Apple rates it for 11 hours of light web browsing use. The MacBook Pro 13" has a much smaller battery (58Wh), but because the screen uses significantly less power, it lasts nearly as long – it's rated for 10 hours of web browsing. Of course, these figures are a bit pie in the sky anyway, since real-world usage varies wildly depending on which apps you have open, and what you're doing. The much beefier specs of the MacBook Pro 16" will really burn through electricity if you throw tough tasks at them, but the important part is that you've got plenty of electricity to feed them for a few hours at least. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Pricing The MacBook Pro starts at $1,299/£1,299, with a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. This model isn't really suitable for pros – unless you're doing very light work that's heavily cloud based. The next model up is $1,499/£1,499, and is the same except for having 256GB of storage, which is a very mild improvement. Then there's the $1,799/£1,799 version, which has a much more powerful 2.4GHz quad-core processor, but still 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. And finally there's a $1,999/£1,999 version, which is the same as above, but with 512GB of storage. You can, of course, configure these models, as we've described, for more money. The MacBook Pro 16" basic model is $2,399/£2,399 for a 2.6GHz six-core processor, with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. This is a really strong sweet spot for the whole product line – though some may need more storage and RAM, it's a solid starting point. The final MacBook Pro 16" model is $2,799/£2,799, and includes an eight-core 2.3GHz processor, and bumps storage to 1TB, though keeps the 16GB of RAM. Here's the problem for the 13" model: taking the $1,999/£1,999 version, with the more powerful processor and 512GB of storage as standard, then adding a RAM increase to 16GB, comes in at $2,179/£2,179. The MacBook Pro 16" basic version already has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, plus a significantly more powerful six-core processor, and the bigger screen, and the more reliable keyboard… all for $220/£220 more. That seems like damn good value to us, which is why we've picked that as the stand-out option. MacBook Pro 13" vs MacBook Pro 16": Conclusion There's so much shared between the MacBook Pro 13" and MacBook Pro 16" that the decision comes down to two key areas: portability and power. The bigger size of the 16" MacBook Pro enables it to fit in so much more performance than the smaller version is capable, and depending on exactly what you want to do with it, that could vital – a machine that slows down your work is liability, after all. That applies to the bigger screen, too – if it can help you work faster, it's well worth getting. But the flip side is the extra bulk and weight. If you don't need something that's close to a portable workstation for your mobile work, and would prefer something that either takes up less space or just weighs less on the back, then the 13" MacBook Pro will work great. It's a matter of priorities – choosing which element you value more. Price can be a factor too: the MacBook Pro 13" starts at over $1,000/£1,000 cheaper than the 16" version. But start adding more storage, RAM and power, the overall bang-for-buck rating starts to tip in the favour of the 16" model. Read more: The best MacBook Pro alternatives for designers Why we're unexpectedly excited about Apple's Airpods Pro Surface Laptop 3: The MacBook Air killer? View the full article

How's your office chair feeling? We know from experience it can take hours of intermittent adjusting to get your chair position to hit the sweet spot. And even after all that adjustment, the angle still might be doing your back more harm than good. (Check out our best chairs post if you need an upgrade.) That low burn in the small of your back and the tightness in your shoulders that comes from too long sitting at your desk could now be thing of the past due to a clever invention. UX designer Olesya Chernyavskaya put her design skills to good use (see our great web design tools list to improve your own skills) and created the Fix Posture website. The Fix Posture system is a nifty piece of design, that Chernyavskaya describes as an 'experiment'. Chernyavskaya made use of machine learning software PoseNet– a vision model that estimates the pose of a person in an image or video by checking where their joints are. She then enlisted the help of the webcam so that the website can automatically detect if the user's position becomes suboptimal. You start by setting the optimal sitting position by giving the system reference points – detailed instructions are on the website but it's as you'd expect, feet on the ground, shoulders relaxed and back fully supported – and then the computer screen turns blurry if you aren't sitting correctly, for example if your shoulders hunch or you start slouching. The website explains in much more detail how the design works, including Chernyavskaya's processes and even details like user journey maps. We think it's a pretty cool experiment. One of the designer's original mock ups of how the system would work People on Twitter love the idea, with the original tweet gaining 1,096 retweets and 4,625 likes at time of writing. Responses range from outright joy: To some interesting points about back health. Chernyavskaya also drew attention to her step-by-step design processes and codes, encouraging people to access them and remix their own stuff. It's worth checking our the rest of her Twitter feed for more AI experiments, including one that changes the size of text depending on how close to the screen the user is. The Fix Posture website has certainly raised a discussion about future health-related possibilities in AI. Also included on the site are tips for keeping good posture and back health, and given the health implications that come from a sedentary career (see our post on how web design can affect your health, and what to do about it ), the link between AI and mental/physical health is potentially worth exploring further. Read more: 8 steps to inclusive web design 7 signs of burnout Really useful responsive web design tutorials View the full article

Check Point researchers found that hundreds of marquee Android mobile apps still contain vulnerabilities that allow remote code-execution even if users update. View the full article

Generate – the conference for web designers and developers – is coming back to Shoreditch, London in April 2020. Following on from the roaring success of its first short-form conference Generate CSS, it’s back but this time out it’s all about JavaScript. GenerateJS – brought to you by leading design brands net and Creative Bloq – brings with it a host of top-quality speakers offering inspiring talks on all things JavaScript. Learn about the latest libraries, find out about the most fashionable frameworks and how JavaScript can be used in a modern-day developer’s workflow. Here are just three things to be excited about. 01. Jeremy Keith is back After the success of his closing talk at Generate CSS, we’re thrilled to announce that Jeremy Keith will returning to GenerateJS. The author, speaker and web developer will be delivering our closing keynote, Going Offline, telling audiences all about the awesome power of service workers and how they can allow you to design and develop websites that work even when users are offline. Your worries of Wi-Fi outages and 4G coldspots will soon be a thing of the past. 02. Remy Sharp signs up There’s plenty of fresh faces on the GenerateJS lineup too: it also gives us great pleasure to reveal that Remy Sharp will also appear and deliver our opening keynote. The founder and curator of ffconf, the UK based JavaScript conference, manager of the jQuery for Designers website and co-author of Introducing HTML5, Sharp will be harking back to coding’s nostalgic – and deeply user-unfriendly – roots. Encouraging you to revel in the creative spirit of hacking together creaking contraptions, he’ll show you how to put together delightfully slow, old retro loading screens using JavaScript. 03. Even more to be announced! But there’s a lot more on offer. Not only are there many exciting speakers still to be announced, there is so much more to make the whole day an experience not to be missed. You’ll have the chance to mingle with other like-minded developers, get involved with inspiring breakout sessions, receive a free professional headshot for your portfolio, enjoy a mouth-watering lunch, chat with JavaScript experts and get interactive with some great web tech. As if this wasn’t enough to make you want to get your hands on a GenerateJS ticket, you can unwind after the conference finishes and join fellow attendees and speakers for a free beverage or two in the bar. And if you get your ticket now, you can save a whopping £110 off the full price: head on over and get yours now. Related articles: The best JavaScript libraries How to code faster, lighter JavaScript 21 top examples of JavaScript View the full article

A movie poster is the first look into the world of a new film. Summing up the cinematic vibe with a piece of epic artwork and a catchy slogan is sure to draw a popcorn-munching crowd. And there have been some splendid examples – The Birds springs to mind, and Ready Player One is so good that it made it into our best poster designs roundup. But one movie poster trend stands out above them all. Not for being the most groundbreaking piece of design, you understand, but for being the most persistent. Yes film fans, it's the 'words over an intense face' movie poster. We have to thank Radio 1's film critic Ali Plumb for bringing this to our attention, as we are now kind of obsessed with it. Of the posters shared by Plumb, kicking things off at the beginning of the decade was Angelina Jolie's Salt poster. Jolie started strong with a particularly focused glare straight into the camera. And the trend continued from there, encompassing Chris Hemsworth as Thor and ending this year with Chadwick Boseman in 21 Bridges. We found a few other examples to add to the haul. The contagious words-on-face affliction has affected big names like Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch, too. But the star of the show is none other than Matt Damon. When you look into it, it becomes clear that Damon's best intense looks are rarely allowed to shine without a bunch of words interrupting the emotion. And Damon has been battling through the typographic overlay for even more than a decade, as user TMT pointed out: It's something that's been noticed before. Twitter user Litmus Configuration may have won this one with the mockup he shared on Twitter in 2017: There was even a through the looking glass inversion of the trend that saw Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich peering out (still intensely) from underneath the typography of the film Stone. Where would this trend fit into our roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly of movie posters, we wonder? Though the frequency of use leaves us uninspired, it must be a design that reaps rewards, otherwise surely Hollywood wouldn't bother with it? Maybe we should ask Mr Damon how he feels... Read more: Check out these incredible posters for movies that never happened The force is strong with this illustrated Star Wars poster The best print adverts ever View the full article

Anyone working within digital design is bound to have heard the term 'design systems' by now; you might not be sure what it means, though. In which case, we're here to help. In this article, we'll define exactly what a design system is, the reasons for using one, how to create one and what tools you'll find useful. On page 2, you'll find a deep dive into the history of the web to find out where design systems came from. The best design style guides, to inspire you What is a design system? A design system is a single source of truth that designers and developers create, reference and develop together. It’s a matrix of rules comprised of a library of symbols – fonts, icons, colours, shapes, grids, animations, tone of voice or more – that carry different meanings, determined by their function and hierarchical relevance. It’s essentially a living organism made of elements that evolve from fulfilling pre-existing requirements to newly defined ones as the product grows in complexity. These elements are translated into development-ready components that can be picked up and used immediately in a live environment. Who defines a design system? Designers and developers work closely together with an agile approach to establish the rules of a design system. Designers define all aspects of visual communication – UI, branding and user experience – while working with developers to transform those properties into coded components, by iterating them consistently until they perform technically and stylistically in a self-contained manner. Why have a design system? Though a design system is a foundational requirement for any digital products that scale, at its core are principles that apply to any design work. The most important aspect is to put in place a set of rules that, when repeated over and over again, will consistently return the same principles. In the same way responsive web design is considered a modular approach in terms of how blocks of content behave on a web page in different viewports, a design system follows an atomic approach by addressing each particular element that defines the properties of a component. The purpose of setting up a system is having a library of tried and tested components that can be reused consistently and expected to perform each time on all product dimensions – style, branding, behaviour, function and delivery. The biggest advantage of a design system is to be able to prototype efficiently and iterate both design and code symbiotically in a journey towards a high-quality product. How do I develop a design system? Now let's take a look at the steps you might take to put together a design system for a digital product project. 01. Establish a clear product vision First, you need to have a clear idea of the product you are developing. Here are a few essential questions to consider: What does it do? What is the purpose of your product? What are the requirements for this product? What sort of functionality will the product need in order to perform? Who is it for? Who is the audience for this product? Does the user have any quirks that might affect how the product is received? Why will the user engage with this product? What makes it unique? Is the user familiar with similar products? Is the product responding to an identified need or creating a new one? Does it address accessibility? Where will it live? Is this product a website? A web app? An app? Something else? Is it device agnostic? Should it deliver the same experience cross-platform or focus on particular micro-experiences within specific contexts? The purpose of a design system is to reduce complexity in development, by addressing known concerns as well as identifying new ones during the conception stage. It’s important to define the product mapping early on in the process, as it will help recognise potential hold-ups that can be avoided at the prototyping stage. 02. Work out your plan of attack Secondly, you’ll need to assess the best approach. If you’re working on a new product, you’ll likely start with an MVP (minimum viable product), where the attention will be on validating functionality and learning users’ feedback. In those cases, it makes sense to use existing UI kits from established platforms, such as Google’s Material UI or Apple’s UI kit. Google’s Material UI is changing product development with its in-depth graphic exploration and open source code If you’re past the MVP stage or creating a whole design system from scratch, your product mapping – which should include key aspects such as information architecture, a sitemap and user journeys – will inform you which basic functionality needs to be addressed first. For example, if your product is an ecommerce app, what elements do you need to have throughout the user journey to perform a purchase – from the homepage through to product page, checkout and order confirmation? Is it vertical or horizontal navigation? What do CTAs look like: are they icons, text only, have a coloured background? What image ratios are you considering: portrait, square, landscape? By addressing each element’s properties by hierarchical functionality, you’ll be able to lay solid foundations for progressive UI releases, thus building a consistently reliable system. 03. Choose the right tools Thirdly, developing a product should always be an inclusive process that depends on all parties involved: designers, developers, product owner, client and users. Together, these individuals create an ecosystem, a testing ground that will shape the design system throughout the journey to the end product delivery. As progress needs to be shared and, sometimes, worked on in real time, it’s important to choose the tools that best fit your workflow. Thankfully, we’re fairly spoilt for choice when it comes to design and prototyping tools. Design+Code is the place to learn if you’re a designer looking to prototype in code There are currently platforms that cater for slightly different file-sharing goals. Adobe XD is gaining strides with its latest release; InVision is a solid platform as well as a valuable design resource and Figma is breaking ground by bringing together desired features. Alternatively, if you’re one of those designers who enjoys writing code in order to push your work, you’ll love Framer X. Need an extra hand? Check out Design+Code, one of the best learning resources out there. You should also consider the following tools: Google Docs Google Docs is a great starting point While limited in its scope, Google Docs (within Google Drive) can be a great, simple and accessible tool for documentation or at least give you a solid start. Style Guides tools Style Guides is packed with useful design system tools There are many other tools to aid design system documentation and also the design, build and management of design systems. Style Guides is a good place to search for them. Just be wary of which tools you invest in. Your team is going to invest a lot of time in these tools, so you need to be confident they will still exist a year from now. Sketch Sketch is an absolutely essential tool When it comes to design, it's hard to go wrong with Sketch. Sketch's nested symbols, symbol overrides and Sketch Library are invaluable when working with a system and/or a team. Developing a design system is a collaborative approach that relies on principles of teamwork and transparency. It’s a commitment between teams willing to make mistakes and learn from them, discover new ways of doing things, innovate together and, all-in-all, just get a kick for a job well done because the product works and exceeds expectations. Which is the best feeling in the world. Next page: the history of design systems Digital design has been navigating uncharted waters for about 20 years, since the advent of mainstream internet. In the 1990s, any aspect of ‘design’ was in full control of the programmer – black backgrounds, bright web-safe colours in a highly pixelated 8 x 8 font, infamous vintage gradients that are now making a comeback and ASCII character drawings that made anything look cool. ifindit.com is a late 1990s search engine that’s a real graphic gem and still live today At the time, concerns about web layout, information architecture and user experience were secondary – or even tertiary – in relation to content. The more that could be dumped on a web page, the better. Whatever information you couldn’t include on the landing page would be signalled by hyperlinks to drive the user to additional pages – who can forget those long, heavy text lists of rainbow coloured, underlined hyperlinks? In some cases, there was a certain attention given to navigation but only by absolute logical need. Navigational consistency between pages was another matter. Early days. The start of user journeys When designers joined the web revolution, it was like a whole new world had been unveiled. Suddenly, content didn’t have to be static. You could not only hyperlink it by absolute meaning but also create an interrelation of meanings with other types of content within the same environment. Hyperlinks could be a full line of copy or just a couple of words, without any particular hierarchy. The groundbreaking innovation was that hyperlinks enabled the creation of more complex journeys – you could now tell a story. These were the early stages of what we now call user journeys, where web designers defined how and when the user would see and interact with content. What was previously a new, fascinating world was becoming a limitless reality Moving into the 2000s, technology developed rapidly and with it arrived a myriad of new devices, mediums and channels. As a relatively and recently acknowledged discipline, digital design had been limited to react in response to technical developments. Until then, it was merely adapting while playing catchup with technology rather than evolving and help defining it. Suddenly, what was previously a new, fascinating world was becoming a limitless reality. Designers now had not only to worry about multiple screen resolutions but also endless device types. Questions of adaptive layout, hidden content on smaller screens and readability – just to name a few – came front and centre. With the complexity of new challenges and opportunities, design became a key element of web build. Aspects like information architecture, user journeys and overall user experience now complemented purpose, functionality and branding. Elements of cognitive science slowly but surely came into full play when designing a website. A responsive game-changer By the time touchscreen smartphones hit the mainstream market, companies started taking mobile design more seriously. Mobile web access, faster network speeds, higher image resolution and developments in secure online payments became highly persuasive arguments for companies to invest in additional touch points, rather than just sticking to a desktop experience. In the early days of ecommerce, brands with the most economic foresight started developing dedicated mobile websites, leading other industries to follow. Market confidence grew and with it further investment in tech and design, which eventually led to the groundbreaking development of responsive web design – a term coined by Ethan Marcotte in 2010. This approach was a complete game changer. It introduced a new way of coding that allowed for fluid grids and control of content display across any screen resolution regardless of device via media queries. A true innovation that put designers in control, it instantly elevated the quality of the output while allowing the focus and time to be spent on optimising a 360-degree user experience. It’s easy to see how digital design as a discipline became more focused on execution back then. It had been intimately tied in with build since its infancy, having to compromise on the process of design thinking and problem-solving more often than not, due to the medium’s technical limitations. Do first, think later During this monumental leap forward, what was meant to be an exception ended up becoming the rule. Though executional knowledge thrived during the last decade, it also meant a reversed process took root as a standard workflow: ‘do first, think later’. This was a consequence of clients interpreting time to think as money wasted and thus something that had a negative impact on their own product development. Many have learned the hard way but it pays well to let designers do their job properly from the start. You need to let them analyse and understand the client’s problem and pain points first, then – and only then – propose a solution that works and delivers the desired outcome. It’s called a process for a reason – when essential steps are missed for the sake of a speedy delivery, it means foundational elements have been forcibly ignored and the chances of a successful output are reduced exponentially. Many have learned the hard way but it pays well to let designers do their job properly from the start Concurrently, as design tools matured into web development, it became easier to concentrate almost exclusively on the visual side of digital. This is a mistake and one many clients willingly take at face value. Just because it looks good, it doesn’t mean it works. Equally, just because something works doesn’t mean it’s right. That’s the distinction between good design and none at all, though in many cases it might appear otherwise. The combined learnings of the last two decades have brought the industry to a place where tech and design converge harmoniously. It’s finally possible to give due value to design thinking and process, while at the same time building products with an agile approach that benefits all teams involved, the client and, most importantly, the user. As digital semantics becomes common language at a global scale, universal patterns of behaviour emerge, enabling shared thought structures to be immediately understood, across any physical borders or cultures. Elements on screen become symbols, associated with specific functions that are not limited or defined by a particular alphabet. They’re called design systems. This article was originally published in net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Subscribe to net here. Read more: Explore top companies' design systems 50 awesome new tools for developers in 2019 The best web hosting services in 2019 View the full article

The Adobe software list is a long one. But one thing's for sure – whether you're a graphic designer, web designer, photographer, illustrator, marketing professional or working in the TV and movie industry, it contains most of the tools your profession considers industry standard. Unfortunately, few of them come for free. Most Adobe software requires a subscription, and you have the choice of subscribing to just a single app or the whole Creative Cloud suite. It's a big decision to make and so it's important to be well informed, and know what you're buying. To help you out, in this post we round up the 10 main apps on the Adobe software list (we'll mention the well-known apps such as Photoshop CC at first, and then get into the more niche tools) and explain, in simple terms, what they do and why you might need them. And if you are thinking of signing up, then don't miss our Adobe Black Friday deals, because you might just be able to save on a CC subscription. Get Adobe Creative Cloud here 01. Adobe Photoshop Photoshop is now also available on the iPad Used for: Image editing and manipulation, photo retouching, graphic design, web and app prototyping, 3D modelling Pros: Feature-rich, powerful Cons: Complex, big learning curve Available for: Mac, Windows, iPad If you want to edit images, this is the industry standard; so much so, that the word ‘Photoshop’ has become synonymous with image editing in common parlance. But tweaking photos isn’t all that Photoshop does: it’s also a fully fledged graphics editor. Photoshop can be used, for example, to edit and compose raster images, graphics and text in multiple layers; edit and render text and vector graphics; and create and edit 3D graphics and video. This wide range of capabilities means that Photoshop is not just used by photographers and photo retouchers, but also by digital artists, graphic designers and art directors, and even, increasingly, by 3D designers and VFX artists. It’s important to note that Photoshop works with raster graphics, in contrast to Illustrator (below), which works with vector graphics. To understand the difference between these, read our guide to common file formats. Also check out our best alternatives to Photoshop and our review of Photoshop for iPad. 02. Adobe Illustrator Illustrator can be used to create both simple vector graphics and detailed illustrations Used for: Illustration, designing vector graphics Pros: Feature-rich, industry standard Cons: Expensive compared to Sketch or Affinity Designer Available for: Mac, Windows While Photoshop has wide and ever-expanding capabilities, Illustrator is much more focused on a specific tasks. It’s essentially a drawing programme based on vector graphics (which contain less detail than raster graphics and are infinitely scalable). As the name might suggest, Illustrator is most commonly used by artists, illustrators and graphic designers, to create everything from simple graphics, such as logos, icons and infographics, to complex illustrations, and everything in-between. Illustrator for the iPad is also coming soon. You can read our review of Illustrator CC here. 03. Adobe After Effects After Effects is used for motion graphics, VFX and compositing Used for: VFX, motion graphics, compositing Pros: Feature-rich, integration with Cinema 4D Cons: Not sophisticated enough for full movie production Available for: Mac, Windows After Effects is a popular tool for visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing. Although you wouldn’t use it to create an entire movie, it might be used by a creative studio to create the kind of simple animations you’d feature on a website, in an explainer video, or on a credit sequence, for example. After Effects is also used in the post-production process of film making and television, for tasks such as keying, tracking and compositing, and creating visual effects such as explosions and lightning strikes. As well as being smoothly integrated with other Adobe apps, it also plays nicely with Maxon’s 3D application Cinema 4D. See our After Effects tutorials for help on getting to grips with After Effects. 04. Adobe XD Adobe XD is used to prototype websites and apps Used for: Web and app prototyping Pros: Starter Plan free, available for Windows (unlike Sketch) Cons: Sketch remains the industry standard Available for: Mac, Windows, with iOS and Android app for testing Launched a few years back as Adobe's rival to Sketch, Adobe XD is a vector-based UX tool for prototyping web and mobile apps. In other words, you don’t create the whole app in XD, but use it for visualising the interface and defining how all the different parts function and relate to each other. This makes it easier to get everything working correctly, before you embark on the final coding. Note that XD's starter plan is free, and you don’t need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it. 05. Adobe InDesign CC InDesign is the industry standard for desktop publishing Used for: Desktop publishing Pros: Industry standard Cons: Learning curve Available for: Mac, Windows InDesign is a page layout tool that’s used primarily for print, but also has digital publishing capabilities. The industry standard tool for the publishing industry, it’s typically used by graphic designers and production artists to create posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. 06. Adobe Lightroom Lightroom combines image organisation and image editing features Used for: Image organisation and editing Pros: Superior organisation features Cons: Not as powerful as Photoshop for image editing Available for: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android Lightroom is a family of tools for image organisation and image manipulation. Its strength lies primarily in the former, and is a good tool for a photo studio or photographer that needs handle large numbers of images. It doesn’t have all the image editing features offered by Photoshop, but that does make for a simpler interface that’s easier to use for standard tasks. Also note that Lightroom's edits are always non-destructive. This means both the original image and the edits you’ve applied to it are saved separately, so it’s easy to undo changes if things don’t turn out how you wanted. 07. Adobe Premiere Pro Premiere Pro is used by video editors at all levels of the profession Used for: Video editing Pros: Powerful, integration with other Adobe apps Cons: Steep learning curve Available for: Windows, Mac Premiere Pro is a comprehensive video editing tool, based on a visual timeline, that’s used widely in the film and TV industry, as well as by YouTubers and marketing and design studios, to edit everything from commercials and music videos to TV series and feature-length movies. Recent new features include Auto Reframe, which applies intelligent reframing to your footage (keeping the action inside the frame for different aspect ratios) and the ability to snap graphic elements to guides, to each other, or to tracked items. Premiere Pro is often used in conjunction with other Creative Cloud apps including After Effects, Audition and Photoshop. It’s quite a complex tool to learn, and for this reason Adobe has recently released a more lightweight video editing app, Premier Rush, for beginners and more casual users. 08. Adobe Spark Adobe Spark makes it super-easy to create social media content Used for: Creating graphics, web pages and short videos Pros: Simple to use Cons: Basic tool Available for: Mac, Windows, iOS, Android Adobe Spark is a suite of apps for creating graphics, web pages, and short videos for social media, easily and quickly. It’s aimed at marketing and social media professionals, as well as amateurs and beginners who want to create cool content for Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, but don’t have the time to learn more complicated software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. 09. Adobe Dimension Create photorealistic scenes using 2D and 3D asssets with Adobe Dimension Used for: Mocking up, compositing and rendering photorealistic 3D images Pros: Unique, easy to use Cons: Photorealism can look fake if not done with care Available for: Mac and Windows Adobe Dimension is a tool for mocking up, compositing and rendering photorealistic 3D images based on 2D and 3D models, photos and textures you have imported from elsewhere, including Adobe Stock. It’s used by graphic designers to, for example, create product mockups, brand visualisations and packaging designs. The main advantage is being able to create scenes that look like photographs, without having to organise a photoshoot. Learn how to use it by following our article, Get started with Adobe Dimension CC. 10. Adobe Dreamweaver Dreamweaver is a veteran warhouse for code-free website building Used for: Creating websites Pros: No need to learn code Cons: More complex to use than other, more recently released web builders Available for: Mac, Windows First created in 1997, Dreamweaver is Adobe’s tool for people who want to build websites without learning how to code. It was cutting edge at the time, but nowadays there are many alternative tools that offer similar capabilities, not least Adobe’s own Muse CC. The main reason to use Dreamweaver in 2019, then, is that you’ve used it before, but for those who are unfamiliar with it, there’s not really a compelling reason. Certainly check out our list of the best website builders first to see if there’s a platform that suits you better. Read more: All the best free Photoshop brushes Lightroom vs Photoshop: What's the difference? 6 super-cool things you can do with Illustrator on the iPad View the full article

Linux users running the enterprise-search platform Solr are potentially vulnerable to remote code execution attack. View the full article

If your main priority when shopping for a new phone is the camera, you're unlikely to do a lot better right now than Huawei's P30 Pro. The runner-up in our roundup of best camera phones, it uses quadruple camera technology to ensure that you can always get the best shot, giving you fantastic image processing, noise reduction and super zoom features. And right now you can get your hands on one for £100 off the usual price at Amazon. In fact there are two great Huawei P30 deals happening at Amazon right now; there's the P30 Pro available for £800 rather than £900, but if you don't need quite all of its whizz-bang features and curved screen, there's an even sweeter deal in the form of the standard P30, which has had its price smashed down from £700 to £450. So what are you waiting for? Snap up a bargain camera phone right now. If these ones don't tickle your fancy, you can check out the best deals on other camera phones below. Also make sure you bookmark our best Black Friday deals for more tech bargains. Read more: The best cameras for creatives The best waterproof cameras The best camera bags and cases View the full article

Further details of the flaw, which has recently been patched by Microsoft, were disclosed Tuesday by researchers. View the full article

The majority give outside partners, contractors and suppliers administrative access -- without strong security policies in place. View the full article

Apple AirPods are an accessory that many Apple lovers would love to get their hands on, but they're not exactly cheap. Today, however, retailers Amazon and Walmart are making them all the more affordable with some early Black Friday deals, which see them reduced to the lowest price we've ever seen. In the US, Walmart his offering standard 2019 AirPods for just $139, knocking $30 off the original price. AirPods with the wireless charging case offer an even bigger saving, reduced from $199 to $164.99. In the UK, Amazon is also offering the lowest prices in the land, with AirPods in the standard charging case just £129, and £169 with the wireless charging case. We probably don't need to tell you discounts on Apple AirPods are rare, so if you want to get hold of these top Apple accessories, you need to snap these deals up now. And if you're looking for more tech to compliment your new Apple headphones, be sure to check out our best Apple Black Friday deals post too. US Apple AirPod deals UK Apple AirPod deals Read more: The best Adobe Black Friday deals in 2019: How to get a Creative Cloud discount Apple Pencil vs Apple Pencil 2: which should you buy? The best cheap Apple laptop deals in 2019 View the full article

The Mandalorian has been released on Disney Plus and while the idea of Star Wars TV show is all very exciting, what has really got people going is that it contains a BABY YODA. And this Baby Yoda just happens to be the most adorable thing anyone's seen. Ever. When Jon Favreau revealed the original Baby Yoda concept art on Twitter yesterday, people went pretty wild. He's obviously been following our character design tips. Love him, we do, yes The true identity of this ridiculously cute character has yet to be revealed. He's so far been referred to as 'the Child' in The Mandalorian. He can't be actual Yoda because Yoda died in The Return of the Jedi, and The Mandalorian is set five years later. Unless The Force is somehow stronger than we thought. The other odd thing about Yoda Baby is that he's actually 50 years old. But that really didn't stop people cooing over his cute little foot or adorable eyes. And the fan art has already begun. We look forward to seeing more. What's the lesson here? If you want to make a cute character, dress it up in an oversized costume, use big eyes, and add in a sneaky peek of a tiny foot or hand. The internet will be yours. No matter that there a lot of other creatures out there that look... well, pretty much the same (did someone say Gremlins?). Just look at that tiny foot! Read more: The Force is strong with this illustrated Star Wars poster 6 free Star Wars fonts Push your character designs further with this workout View the full article

A brand's logo is one of the most important things to get right. How do you distill the entire identity of an organisation into one simple symbol? And then, when things go stale, how do you find a new look that your loyal fans will recognise and embrace? The whole process is a tricky balancing act. Get it wrong and it's a catastrophe. Which is why we were surprised to discover that Microsoft took such a wild misstep in its branding history. It's now one of the world's most popular brands (fans: take a look at our roundup of the best early Microsoft Black Friday deals), with a brand mark that wouldn't be out of place in our ranking of the best logos ever. As a reminder, here's what it looks like now: Microsoft's current, sensible logo However, in 1980, Microsoft took a bold step with a logo redesign that left it looking much more like a wild metal band than a reliable, respectable tech company. Sadly, this look only lasted two years. Microsoft's badass 1980-1982 logo It has more than a whiff of the Metallica logo about it, doesn't it? In fact, during that whole period, Microsoft seems to have been embracing a band logo design aesthetic – the 1975 logo is an impressively 'disco' effort too. Between 1975 and 1980, Microsoft got funky Thanks to Ian Bogost for first bringing this to our attention on Twitter. We will say this for Microsoft though: back in the day, it clearly wasn't afraid of embracing a confident new look. No blink-and-you'll-miss-it redesigns for this software company. For advice on creating a great brand mark, see our logo design tips, or for more recent efforts, explore our roundup of the biggest logo redesigns of 2019. Read more: Reebok tweaks its classic logo IKEA's latest logo tweak is "amazing" Gloriously glitchy logos show the power of a strong brand View the full article

UI design is misunderstood. It's not only about visual design, however it doesn't quite encompass UX in its entirety either. Great UI design is, in fact, a mixture of clarity and efficiency. In this article, we're going to reveal the golden rules of effective UI design, and how to achieve it. These rules relate to typography, colour palettes, CTAs, components, and design systems. Here, we're using InVision Studio. However, the rules apply whatever tool you're using, and often the process is very similar (take a look at our guide to the best UI design tools for some other options, or alternatively our general guide to the leading web design tools). UI design is about usability. While visual design is solely about form, UI design is about how the form aids the function. Let's take a look at some essential rules to guide your UI design process, starting with typography. Rule #1: Good type is all about accessibility Great typography boils down to accessibility. In a design system, font size, line height, paragraph spacing and letter spacing should be designed in a way that enhances readability and legibility. Visual design – i.e. colours and fonts – certainly add to the user's overall experience, but at the end of the day users are using the UI, not looking at it as art. Legible letters result in clarity, and readable words are what help users digest content efficiently. However, well-designed typography can still be aesthetically satisfying. There's a side to the science that we often forget about, and it's the side where form and function become one. In fact, you'd be extremely surprised at how beautiful black-on-white Helvetica (or a similar font) can be after only a few simple typographic enhancements. By enhancements, what we mean is tweaking the font size, line height, letter spacing, and so on. Similarly, 'beautiful' fonts can become ugly when they're unreadable simply because frustration always trumps aesthetics. Simple but clear type systems can be beautiful However, like many aspects of UI design, fine-tuning these individual styles isn't really the challenge. The challenge is maintaining consistency throughout the entire design, since, as humans, we navigate the world (and our user interfaces) based on mental models, patterns, past events, and familiarity. And this is where design systems come into the story. Design systems help us to maintain consistency and establish a clear visual hierarchy between elements of varying importance, which in turn helps users understand our UI faster and even digest our content more efficiently. Now, while design systems can be almost as elaborate as a Bootstrap-like framework, they actually start off more like a style guide, and that's exactly what we're going to create today, starting off with the typography. 01. Font size When it comes to legibility and readability, the minimum acceptable font size as defined by the WCAG 2.0 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is 18pt (or 14pt bold). We couldn't really tell you what font size to use, as this largely depends on the font itself, but it's important to be mindful of visual hierarchy and how this base size distinguishes itself from summarised text such as headings (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.). With your UI design tool of choice (InVision Studio is used here), create a series of text layers (T) and adjust the sizes to correlate with the following template: <h1> 44px <h2> 33px <h3> 22px <p> 18px With Studio (and all other UI design tools), this is done by adjusting the styles using the inspector on the right-hand side. Next, choose the font. Now, what you might notice with some fonts is that 18px <p> and 22px <h3> doesn't look all that different. We have two choices here: tweak the font sizes, or consider using a different font for headings. Consider the latter if you anticipate that your design will be text-heavy. Keep in mind that visual UI design is often a gut-feeling approach, and nothing is fixed – everything is subject to change. 02. Line height Optimal line height ensures that lines of text have enough spacing between them in order to achieve decent levels of readability. This is becoming more recognised as a standard, with even Google's PageSpeed Insights suggesting it as a manual check or a flag if the text contains links too close together as a result of line height. Once again, the WCAG helps us out with this one, declaring that line heights should be 1.5x the font size. So, in your UI design tool under 'Line' (or similar), simply multiply the font size by – at least – 1.5. As an example, if the body text is 18px, then the line height would need to be 27px (18*1.5). Again, though, be mindful of your gut instinct – if 1.6x feels better to you, then go for it. You can execute the maths operation directly by using the inspector. It's way too early to start thinking about using real data in our design, but at the very least, we can use somewhat realistic data (even if it's just lorem ipsum). InVision Studio has a native real data app to help us see what our typography might actually look like. 03. Paragraph spacing Paragraph spacing (or text spacing) isn't a style that we can declare using the inspector. Instead, we'll need to manually align layers using smart guides for exactness. Similar to line height, the magic multiplier is 2x (meaning, double the font size). As an example, if the font size is 18px, then there should be a 36px space before leading into the next text block. In regards to letter spacing, this should be at least 0.12. However, we don't need to worry about this until we begin using these elements to create components, much like a UI kit. 04. Shared styles If your UI design tool supports it (InVision Studio doesn't yet), consider turning these typographic styles into 'Shared Styles' to make them rapidly reusable while ensuring visual consistency. This is usually accomplished via the inspector. Next page: Choosing a colour palette Rule #2: Three colours is enough Colours can have a huge impact on a design – there's no question about it. But it's not necessarily about how beautiful they are. When it comes to UI design, colour is habitually one of the first things that we enjoy dabbling with, but we're taught that diving straight into visual design is a bad thing. This is still true, however, when it comes to creating design systems – colour should be a top concern because it plays many different roles. Colour can be used for visual hierarachy Colour in UI design can be mighty effective, but since some users (many, actually) suffer from various types of visual disabilities, it's not always reliable. That being said, it's not necessarily about the specific colour that's being used, but rather the type of colour. This may not be true when it comes to branding – since colour is used for emotional impact in this regard – but with UIs, colour can also be used for visual hierarchy. 01. Choose your colours Colours hold meaning, so it's important to not have too many of them. Too many means more things that the user has to understand and remember, and for us, more colour combinations to worry about. Generally speaking, this would be the recommended format to use: A call-to-action colour (also the main brand colour) A neutral light colour (ideal for text-heavy content) A neutral dark colour (better for UI elements, and also for dark mode) Then, for all of the above, a slightly lighter and slightly darker variation The final point on the list means that it's easy to achieve the following: Dark mode will be easily possible Our CTA colour will never conflict with other colours In any scenario, we'll can emphasise and de-emphasise as we wish 02. Create a palette With your UI design tool of choice, create one fairly large artboard (tap A) for each colour (named Brand, Neutral / Light, and Neutral / Dark). Then, in each artboard, create additional smaller rectangles displaying the darker and lighter variations of the colour and also the other colours themselves. Generally, consider slightly lighter and darker as 10% extra white and 10% extra black respectively. When you're done, display a copy of the typographic styles on each artboard. The colour of these text layers should be neutral light, except when on the neutral light artboard, where they should be neutral dark. 03. Check contrast levels Ensure your contrast meets accessibility standards Next, we'll need to check our colours for optimal colour contrast. There are a variety of colour tools that can do this, for example the Stark Plugin for Sketch and Adobe XD or Contrast for macOS. However, an online solution such as Contrast Checker or Colour Contrast Checker will do just fine. Check the colour contrast for each combination and tweak the colours accordingly. If you're not sure which colours to use, try using Colorsafe's recommendations. Next page: CTAs Rule #3: CTAs need hierarchy The majority of decisions made about our design lead the user towards an action – but this is only effective if the target looks clickable and communicates the visual hierarchy. Buttons and links, much like typography, should have a few variations. You'll need some different button variations for different situations After all, not all actions are of equal level of importance, and colour is an unreliable method of communication, so it cannot be our main method of influencing visual hierarchy. 01. Size Keep the text size the same when creating bigger buttons We need to think with size. Generally, it is recommended that button text be declared as 18px (same as the body text), but have three variations in size: Normal: 44px in height (rounded corners: 5px) Large: 54px in height (rounded corners: 10px) Extra large: 64px in height (rounded corners: 15px) This allows us to make certain buttons appear to be more important without reliance on colour, and also to nest buttons (for example, use a button inside a minimal-looking form field). 02. Shadows Shadows should be used to increase depth and therefore suggest interactivity. A single shadow style for all variants of buttons and form fields is fine – no need for anything fancy. 03. Interactivity Each button type needs a variation to indicates its hover state. This clarifies to the user that what they've attempted to do is totally fine and ensures that they carry on without delay. This is actually one of the more complex aspects of creating a design system, because the colour is often the favoured style to change when creating a state. Luckily, these state changes can be relatively subtle, so it's fine to change the colour into its slightly lighter or darker variation – that's what they're for. This applies to links as well. Deciding against this will cause us to use a colour that either already has significant meaning, resulting in users becoming confused, or else deciding to come up with another colour. Now, deciding to use a secondary colour is totally fine, but it should be saved for marketing visuals rather than UI elements. Less is more (and easier). Remember to repeat this step for every artboard. Don't include the branded CTA buttons on the brand artboard – later on we'll talk about what happens when certain combinations don't work. Next page: Components Rule #4: Design elements must be consistent Converting design elements into components means we can reuse them, helping us speed up our workflow and maintain consistency across our design. Components are a huge time saver and all UI design tools offer this feature (e.g. in Sketch, they're called Symbols). In Studio, we can create components by selecting all of the layers that should make up the component and using the K shortcut. 01. Using components Speed things up by turning elements into components We can reuse a component by dragging it onto the canvas from Libraries Document on the left-hand side, although bear in mind that this workflow may differ depending on your UI tool. This method of creating design systems (and eventually creating the design itself) works especially well with modular/card-based layouts, although 'common areas' – such as headers, footers, and navigations – will also be excellent candidates for components. Like we've done with our typographic styles, colours, and buttons, we must remember to organise our components carefully. 02. Establish rules It's important not to use branded CTA buttons on top of the brand colour, since branded CTA buttons will obviously need to stand out amongst everything else. So how do we go about creating a branded component while still being able to use a branded CTA button? After all, if we're using neutral dark buttons for, say navigational buttons or simply less important buttons, that just wouldn't be an option, right? This would be an ideal opportunity to go ahead and create a component – specifically, a heading + text + button combination. Notice how we've created a neutral light 'card' backdrop to enable the use of the branded button. Similarly, the neutral light form field (form fields are usually white because of the mental model historically synonymous with paper forms) doesn't look amazing on the neutral light background, so they can only be used on the neutral dark background – either directly, or within a neutral dark component. This is how we make our design flexible, whilst also obeying our rules and maintaining consistency. 03. Stress test The quickest and most effective way of ensuring robustness in our design system is to stress test it. Putting a design system to the test means, unfortunately, needing to be cruel, putting the system through the wringer. Let's say that we have a navigation with [x] amount of nav items, because that was the requirement; in order to really ensure flexibility, try changing these requirements by adding more nav items. To really throw a spanner in the works, try also adding a nav item with a much higher visual hierarchy than the others. Do our size, typography, and colour rules allow for something like this, or, in order to offer optimal usability, do we need another rule? Bear in mind that there's a major difference between adding rules and bending the rules. More edge cases means less consistency, so in most cases, it's much better for usability to rethink the component. Next page: Design systems Rule #5: Design systems must be organised Designing systems means deciding and documenting when and where various styles are allowed to be used. Bold text for example can be used for extra emphasis, but... headings are already bold, so what happens in this case? Can we highlight specific words? When do we need to left-align, and when to center-align? As you create your rules, you need to document them for our own use or for anybody else who might work with the design system. Designers of all types know about design principles, but these rules are unique to our app or website, and even our brand as a whole. Choosing Title Case over sentence case, for instance, can be the difference between formality and informality. But most importantly, these rules help us make meaningful but quick decisions that result in total clarity. Stay flexible and expect to make a number of changes as new elements, colours, and use-cases emerge. A design system is not a one-and-done task — it's normal to be updating it constantly. In order for it to be useful, your design system needs to be well organised. 01. Colours Create swatches of all your scheme's colours Step one is to save all of the colours to the 'Document Colors' swatch if you haven't done so already – this will make them easier to access when we need to apply them in our design. To do this, open the colour chooser widget from the inspector, choose 'Document Colors' from the drop-down, and then simply click the + icon to add the colour to the swatch – this workflow is the same (or very similar) in all UI design tools. 02. Shared libraries Next, we need to convert our document – complete with typographic styles, colours, buttons, common areas, and basic components – into a shared library. Essentially, this means that every element needs to be a component, even if it consists of only one layer. After doing this, it's simply a case of clicking the +‌ button in the left-hand side Libraries sidebar and importing this very document into a new document. The very document we're working on right now is the library itself. Right now, InVision Studio is limited in the sense that it doesn't yet sync with InVision's official Design System Manager tool, but it's easy enough to house the library in Dropbox. When a change is made (either locally or remotely), every Studio file that uses the library will ask if you would like to update the colours and components. This is exactly how the design system is used across teams. 03. Design systems at scale As a design system expands, managing it inevitably becomes harder. There are various adjustments that we might want to make to our design system to make it more efficient, especially since InVision's Design System Manager doesn't work with Studio yet. For instance, we might want to use text layers to annotate our design system as a means of explaining the rules and use-cases of various elements. For the typographic styles, we could even edit the text to be more descriptive (e.g. <h1> / 1.3 / 44px). 04. Design handoff Design handoff tools display the various styles used by every element in the design so that developers can build the app or website. These tools include an overview of styles, and also a copy of the 'document colors' swatch. Developers can copy these styles as code, which is excellent if you've created written documentation for your design system, and like to include code snippet representations of the components. InVision's design handoff tool is called Inspect, and to utilise it, all we need to do is click the 'Publish to InVision' button/icon in InVision Studio, open the resulting URL, and then tap to it switch to 'Inspect Mode'. It's really convenient. This article originally appeared in Web Designer magazine. Read more: Get started with Grav CMS How to animate with the mo.js library Calls to action: How to create successful CTAs View the full article

If you’re a videographer, you’ll know how important it is to get it right when it comes to a new PC. But what are the latest things to be aware of? In this feature, we’ll tell you exactly what you should be looking for (as well as what you shouldn’t). Processor If you’re going to be editing 4K footage – we would now usually opt for an 6 or 8-core Intel or AMD processor or above. However, this isn’t as important as memory and graphics – see below. We’d recommend an 8th generation quad-core Core i5 as an minimum. You don’t need a workstation level machine – running Intel Xeon processors or similar – to edit 4K video. In fact, you need a lot less than that. But to get the best out of your laptop for video, you’ll want a Core i7 or equivalent. Newer Core i9 processors are desirable for out-and-out performance, but you don’t necessarily need to move up from a Core i7. Memory To make things easy, 16GB of DDR4 memory is now our recommended base level of memory for pro video editing. It’s possible to get by on less, but it’s not desirable. 32 or 64GB of memory on a laptop is the reserve of the rich, but more will always help you in the long run. Memory speeds aren’t as important as some make out, but 2,666MHz is a good speed to aim for if you’ve a choice. Often you get what you’re given. If you’re buying a new performance laptop, we doubt you’ll be lacking in terms of RAM speed. Graphics Although you can get by on Intel’s integrated Iris Pro or Iris Plus graphics for, say, Full HD video editing, for anything involving 4K you should have a discrete graphics chip inside your laptop from Nvidia or AMD. Intel’s graphics are getting better all the time, but there’s no current substitute for Nvidia RTX or AMD’s Radeon Pro at the high end. You can’t skimp on graphics power, notably because many video editing suites use GPU acceleration – you’re going to be doing graphically-intensive work, so stands to reason. Check the hardware requirements of the software you’re going to be using as well in case there are any specific graphics requirements. Display Many laptop screens are not yet 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) although we are seeing more 4K displays hit the streets. In reality, having a sub-4K display is a compromise many are willing to make in favour of portability. Plus it’s also true that most high-end notebooks can drive multiple 4K external displays with DisplayPort across USB-C so you can always plug in to a more capable display when you get to the office. Display size is less important because there isn’t exactly a massive choice when it comes to laptop screen sizes and it really depends on the portability of the laptop you want; if your only consideration is making the most of your projects, then get the biggest display you can. Storage and connectivity The quantity of storage is important, but it depends on where you are going to work. If you’re mostly going to be editing projects at a desk with a laptop and monitor, then you may be happy with an external SSD to store your work on, so you don’t necessarily need to have bucketloads of storage on the laptop itself. Even if you’re not going to store projects on the laptop’s main drive, we recommend an absolute minimum of 256GB for an SSD. In our experience, 128GB drives tend to get maxxed out pretty quickly with apps and files. Obviously if you want to also store projects on the drive, you will need several terabytes. Look also for the type of drive. We recommend NVMe PCIe SSDs. Connected to this is that we always recommend you choose a laptop with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. Thunderbolt 3 is being included in the forthcoming USB 4.0 standard, but currently it isn’t a standard part of the USB 3.x spec. Therefore, you’ll need to make sure your new laptop actually supports it. Most new laptops will now use the newer USB-C connector and we always recommend you look for it as it’s the easiest way to power your new notebook as well as transfer data and drive external displays. Premiere Pro in action Warranty It always sounds boring, but an expensive laptop needs a warranty that’s firstly going to cover you if something goes wrong and secondly will repair or replace your laptop in double-quick time. The last thing you need is to be left in the lurch when you need to finish an important project. Read more: The best video editing apps How to design video game cinematics you won't want to skip How to get a job as a video games artist View the full article

If the epic Lego Star Wars Millennium Falcon set has always been on your wishlist but its monumental price tag has put it out of bounds, you may well be in luck. A recent Amazon US press release has detailed some early Black Friday deals set to land this Friday 22 November, and it includes a 40% discount on the 7,000+ piece Lego Star Wars Ultimate Millennium Falcon. Usually retailing on Amazon at $999, this incredible saving would take the impressive Star Wars Lego set down to less than $600 – the lowest price we've ever seen. Don't get us wrong, we know $600 is still a lot of money to spend on Lego. But If you're a fan of Lego, Star wars or both, this is the (very aptly named) ultimate in Lego art. The level of detail and sheer number of pieces (7,541 incase you were wondering) it takes to build in its entirety is mind-blowing. The set highlights favourites from the 1977 film, including Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia and C-3PO minifigures. The main hold features a seating area, Dejarik holographic game, combat remote training helmet, and engineering station with turning minifigure seat. The rear compartment features the engine room with hyperdrive and console and two escape Pod hatches. The ultimate Lego Star Wars set could soon become a whole lot more affordable Whether you're a Lego collector, or a creative simply looking to splash out on a treat, if the Lego Falcon has long been on your wishlist, now is the time to buy. A 40% saving is the biggest discount we've ever seen on this Star Wars Lego set, and there's nothing to suggest it will come up again in the near future. The only slight caveat is the press release not detailing the unique Lego set number. It does, however, name the set as Lego Star Wars Ultimate Millennium Falcon, which is an exact match for model no 75192. Here's hoping Amazon isn't playing Yoga-like mind games and the press release does, in fact, refer to this very set. The epic early Black Friday Lego deal is due to go live on Friday 22 November, so stay tuned and we'll update this post as soon as it goes live. In the meantime, here are the best Lego Star Wars Ultimate Millennium Falcon prices in your area: Read more: Introducing Lego, as you've never seen it before The Knight Bus Lego review Stranger Things Lego set available now – and it's EPIC! View the full article

The list of routers that have critical RCE bugs, that have reached end of life and that won’t get fixed has grown. View the full article

Apple AirPods are an accessory that many Apple lovers would love to get their hands on, but they're not exactly cheap. Today, however, retailers Amazon and Walmart are making them all the more affordable with some early Black Friday deals, which see them reduced to the lowest price we've ever seen. In the US, Walmart his offering standard 2019 AirPods for just $139, knocking $30 off the original price. AirPods with the wireless charging case offer an even bigger saving, reduced from $199 to $164.99. In the UK, Amazon is also offering the lowest prices in the land, with AirPods in the standard charging case just £129, and £169 with the wireless charging case. We probably don't need to tell you discounts on Apple AirPods are rare, so if you want to get hold of these top Apple accessories, you need to snap these deals up now. And if you're looking for more tech to compliment your new Apple headphones, be sure to check out our best Apple Black Friday deals post too. US Apple AirPod deals UK Apple AirPod deals Read more: The best Adobe Black Friday deals in 2019: How to get a Creative Cloud discount Apple Pencil vs Apple Pencil 2: which should you buy? The best cheap Apple laptop deals in 2019 View the full article

In many creative projects, photography can be the perfect way of conveying emotion and giving your audience an instant sense of what you're trying to say. But sometimes photography doesn't quite cut it. If you're trying to communicate more complex ideas and emotions, often illustration is the way to go, and current illustration trends mean that there's a vast choice of exciting visual directions in which you can take your work. We spoke to top iStock illustration contributors, Sam Posnick and Andre Jolicoeur, and iStock graphic designer Paul Braga, to get their take on when it's better to use illustration rather than photography in your projects. 01. Web design and UX Clean and simple works best in web design Full-screen photos are a popular and eye-catching choice in web design at the moment, but they can often get in the way of providing a good user experience. To make a website easy for visitors to use, you need a clean and simple design that signposts everything that your users need to know, and that's where vector illustrations and simple icons can help. "When designing for website elements like nav menus or checkout pages, you don't want anything distracting the user from the task at hand," says Braga. "In these cases, a simple, single-colour set of illustrated icons would be a better starting point than a photograph." To create a strong visual message, simplicity can be key, and many of iStock's contributors make a concerted effort to keep things straightforward. "I tend to keep [my stock illustrations] simpler—no detailed backgrounds, lots of copy space, etc.," says Posnick. "I like to give the folks who use them room to play creatively and allow their designs to shine." 02. Unique or large-format print projects Vector illustrations can be used at all sizes Just because a photograph looks good on your monitor, that doesn't mean it'll take well to being enlarged to poster or even billboard size. Not only are you likely to hit resolution issues, you'll also find that in large-scale print applications, flaws such as JPG artefacts in your image become a lot more obvious. "The final size of the printed product will determine how the file should be constructed," says Jolicoeur. "A raster illustration may work well for a smaller application, while vector art is usually ideal when it needs to be able to scale to massive print sizes." Another advantage to using illustrations is that they're often a much better fit for unique print placements such as t-shirts, tote bags or packaging. They're usually more visually inviting than a photo, they're easier to adjust and tweak to fit perfectly, and often use fewer colours than a photo, which makes them a lot more print-friendly. "My illustrations have been featured on a few tote bags from some leading fashion brands," says Posnick. "And one of those totes was actually featured in an episode of a Netflix show!" A photo-based design probably wouldn't have had the same character as Sam's illustration, and might not have been such a good fit for the show. 03. Infographics Stock icons and vectors make it easier to create infographics One area in which illustration almost always works much better than photography is infographics. These need to explain complex subjects in a visually-arresting and easily digestible way; photography is likely to complicate matters, and as a rule you need to take a custom approach, which might be a tall order for all but the most experienced designers. Using stock icons, vectors or diagram can help you make the same impact with a lot less work. "If you start with an icon pack, that set will usually have a specified theme such as finance or e-commerce," says Braga. "So, if you use those icons for an infographic, it will help to lend that piece consistency and a clear message." 04. Video and motion graphics For eye-catching motion, take an illustration into Photoshop and make a simple animation Moving imagery can be a brilliant way to create content that stands out, but the cost of shooting video – not to mention post-production – can be prohibitive, especially if it's just for a single Instagram post. However, taking a creative approach to illustration can provide you with great-looking animation at a fraction of the cost. "Recently, I've been playing around with making animated GIF-style pieces by taking illustrations into Photoshop and animating them frame by frame," says Posnick. "It gives a little life to Instagram posts, I find." Not only does turning illustration into motion graphics save you money, it also gives you a lot more creative latitude and enables you to much better serve your video's needs. "You have a lot more freedom to animate and customize an illustration than you would a photograph," says Braga. "You could change the size, colour, or even shape of the item to match your brand look and feel. That's something that's much more difficult to do effectively with a photo, especially if you're trying to make videos or GIFs" 05. Giving your brand a human touch Avoid stock photography clichés and try illustration as a way of humanising your brand Photography is the go-to tool for giving a flavour of what a company or brand is about, but what does another boardroom shot of a group of handsome executives pointing at a laptop really tell anyone? With illustration, though, you can bring a whole new feel to a project. "Photos have their place, they are used to show real things," says Jolicoeur. "Illustrations…can show things that don't exist, things that are beyond the physical world. They can also emphasise mood and emotion in interesting ways." While the serious photographic look will always be the choice for many businesses, a lot of other companies can benefit from the more organic and welcoming aesthetic that you get from hand-drawn illustration. "I think the hand-drawn look can often serve to warm something up that otherwise appears too chilly or ultra-modern," Posnick says. "It also can serve as a way to transition people towards a new look for a brand." Looking for somewhere to start your image search? Check out a few of our favourite images on iStock. View the full article

As we move from the 2010s to the 2020s, the demand for high-quality video has never been higher. With multiple streaming services launching against each other, the phrase ‘Content is king’ is heard everywhere, and the numbers of video professionals working in the TV and movie industries is growing steadily. There’s also been a parallel explosion in high-quality, shortform video for popular YouTube and Vimeo channels, and to help brands to get their message across on social media. Not to mention the rise of new video technologies like VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) mixed reality, and beyond. So whether you're editing spots, shorts, or feature-length movies, your services are going to be increasingly in demand in the coming years. But at the same time, no one’s expecting the tight deadlines and time pressures to slack off: quite the reverse. And with picture resolution and video file sixes growing all the time, you’re going to need a powerful system that can store, manage and process all your video within a tight timeframe. But don’t worry: HP has your back. It’s developed an extensive line of powerhouse devices to help you edit, render and more in less time, so you can hit your deadlines effortlessly. Not surprising, then, that HP laptops and computers are now the industry standard for both shortform and feature length video content. Read on, as we look at two killer combinations of HP kit, that will set you up to meet both current needs, and future demands to come. 01. HP Z4 + HP DreamColor Studio Display The HP Z4 is a video editing beast, with high-performance processor options and dual extreme graphics support allowing you to create, render, and visualise video at breakneck speeds. HP's best-selling performance workstation, it features the newest generation Intel Xeon processors with up to 18 cores for powerful performance and productivity, along with 256GB memory and a massive 16TB storage. And it can be configured with up to two NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 48GB 4DP graphics cards. So what does this all mean in practice? Basically, even if you’re working on raw 4K or 8K footage and running the most demanding and resource-hungry software, you’ll be able to playback and edit content smoothly, and meet your tightest deadlines. Its next-generation acoustic design is also super-quiet, which can help enormously when it comes to working on your audio tracks. All this leaves you more time to focus on telling your story, in the most creative and imaginative ways possible. The HP Z4 and HP DreamColor Studio Display offer an irresistible mix of power, performance and colour accuracy With all that power speeding up your workflow, the other thing every video professional needs is a monitor that displays what you’re working on at the highest degree of accuracy. And HP has you covered here, too. The perfect companion to the HP Z4, the HP DreamColor Studio Display features award-winning HP DreamColor Technology, which displays precise, rich colours and intense shadow detail. Its extensive colour spectrum offers more than one billion colours (yes, you read that right; one billion!) with 100% of Adobe sRGB, 99% of Adobe RGB 100% of BT.709 and 98% of DCI-P3 coverage. Plus a pop-up sensor calibrates your display, either on demand or on a regular schedule, ensuring that you always achieve accurate colour. You can choose from eight factory-calibrated color presets or configure your own. For video work in the studio, the HP Z4 with DreamColor display is the perfect set-up, allowing you to work faster and more creatively, without your equipment slowing you down. But maybe you need something lighter, that you can use to work on the move? Then we’d recommend... 02. HP ZBook Studio x360 + HP Dreamcolor Displays The HP Zbook Studio x360 is super-powerful and fantastically flexible HP’s most powerful convertible PC, the ZBook Studio x360 is a workstation laptop for the serious video professional. For starters it’s impressively flexible, coming with a clever 360-degree hinge that allows you to configure it either a laptop or a tablet, to better showcase, review or collaborate on footage. And when it comes to performance, it packs a real punch too. Its six-core Intel Xeon processors allow you to run multiple apps with speed and responsiveness and tackle heavy workloads with aplomb, while NVIDIA Quadro P2000 graphics allow you to edit video and render multi-layered files seamlessly. The x360 also offers blazing fast storage, with up to 4TB local PCIe NVMe storage: that's up to 21 times faster than standard HDD storage and six times faster than SATA SSD2. Experience a billion vibrant colours on the HP DreamColor 4K display And what of the display? Well, you’re in for a real treat here. The HP DreamColor 4K display not only allows you to experience one billion vibrant colours, it’s also HP’s brightest 4K laptop. With an incredible 600 nits brightness, you can see and discern different vivid colours, regardless of the lighting conditions you’re working under. It also comes with anti-glare technology, improving your viewing experience, while the ambient light sensor automatically dims or brightens based on your surroundings, so you can take your work indoors or outdoors. Conclusion Your career is something that’s worth investing in, and superior equipment will help you get your work completed more quickly, keeping clients happy and leaving you with a better work-life balance. So videographers everywhere should consider HP’s kit, as any savings you make on lower powered devices will be the very definition of a false economy. The desktop HP Z4 and the HP ZBook Studio x360, together with the HP DreamColor studio Display, are the perfect combination for the modern-day videographer. Offering a mixture of versatility and pro-grade performance, they allow you to get your work done quickly and efficiently, without the delays and interruptions caused by slow-running kit. However large your files and heavy-duty your software, you’ll have a better experience editing and rendering video, and be able to complete colour accurate work quickly and consistently. View the full article

We've all been there. As you slowly open up the styles.css file of your latest CSS spectacular, you see that it’s 2,000 lines long and the class you need to change is smack in the middle. You’re alone, scared and have no idea if it’s okay to edit that class because it could topple something on a completely different page. As a last resort you go to the end of the file and create a new class to tack onto the element that already has seven other classes on it. This is a common experience for any developer who’s been working with CSS long enough (see our favourite examples of CSS animation for some CSS inspiration). So, let’s talk about what the goal should be when writing good CSS. The goal isn’t to create clever and complex rules. It’s not to engineer a selector string so that it’s as broadly applicable as possible. The goal of good CSS should be to write simple, modular and, most importantly, easily maintainable rules. Here we give you some simple and smart rules to help you create and maintain a healthy codebase. If you're after more web design advice, don't miss our pages on website layout and the best web design tools around. 01. Add order and structure to files Structure files by page for quicker and easier access First, consider breaking up styles into their own CSS files based on an agreed upon structure between developers and then stick to it. Opening a poorly organised styles folder is a horrible experience. You have no idea what styles are in which files and how changing one style will affect another. Remember that your server couldn’t care less if you gave every single style its own file and then linked them all or minified them into one at the end. Your site would load very slowly but the server would handle reading them just fine. File structure is for humans only and if your file structure isn’t providing any value then it should be rethought. One of the least confusing ways to structure files is by page. If you're working on an about page and something needs fixing, you go to the about.css file. This avoids the issue of affecting styles outside the about.css. Then all you need to do is check for changes in the about.css file. This doesn’t fix the problem of file length though. A significantly long page might easily have over 1,000 lines of CSS. Structuring your files internally is a way to mitigate this. Sorting alphabetically inside a file means if you are searching for something beginning with C and it's not there, then you know it's not included. This also works for styles that already exist. By grouping everything alphabetically you can see if a style has been written three or four times throughout a file. 02. Build a base CSS file Not all styles will belong to only a single page and it’s common to have styles that exist on multiple pages. It’s also common to have styles that apply to the business overall and not just the website. This is where you will write very general styles that don’t really belong to anything. For example the different colours you’ll use, fonts, typography, as well as any resets that are specific to your site. You may also want to include basic component-like styles in this section, such as buttons, form elements and alert styles. Think of this section as the style guide for your site. Not only will this give your site an easier way to maintain CSS, it will also ensure that styles are applied uniformly. This is a place where you may want to include styles that belong to sections of the site that repeat themselves on multiple pages, such as a header or a footer. If you have a significant amount of styles in these sections, it can help to break them out into their own files such as header.css and footer.css. Just be careful that you don’t start including styles in those files that don’t actually belong. Remember a messy folder structure is a great way to make maintaining CSS difficult. 03. Separate your layout from other CSS Separate layout styles to make it easier to focus on other CSS Those of you familiar with SMACSS may be familiar with the idea that layout styles can be separated from the more general styles you’ll apply to your site. By separating these styles from the rest of your CSS, it means you can more easily focus on how different sections should look and less on how they should behave relative to sections close to them. This can be accomplished by adding a grid system such as the popular Bootstrap library or by implementing one yourself. It’s a good idea to speak with the designer of the site at this point, as many designers will use a grid system when they’re creating a site and you’ll want to get as close to that as possible. 04. Write your CSS modularly Creating modular CSS is about identifying when something belongs to a group Separating your layout CSS reveals another way of simplifying your CSS. There are many different methodologies related to CSS. There’s SMACSS, BEM, OOCSS to name a few but whether you’re calling them sections, parts, modules, components or blocks they all have one thing in common. That is they attempt to add reusable and specialised parts to your style sheet. In doing so we keep our styles as DRY (don’t repeat yourself) as possible and create encapsulation. Side effects in CSS are a big deal. The browser applies CSS in a true or false manner: if a style matches it’s applied, if not then it’s skipped. This allows for a style that wasn’t meant to be applied by the writer to still match and change how a page looks. When we write CSS more modularly, we reduce these side effects by encapsulating the styles. A component or module is a section of HTML that is grouped together and whose styles affect each other. Creating modular CSS is all about identifying when something belongs to a group and then separating it from its surroundings. It means that there is no need to worry about the outside and likely don’t need to worry about any modules inside it as well. We may write the classes that create this as follows: What actually goes in these styles is unimportant but what it does do is allow for control of what happens in the whole header, the top line of the header and the bottom line. By namespacing them with the .aboutHeader class ensures that no other styles will be applied to them. 05. Avoid long selector chains When you write components it’s easy to keep them relatively shallow, going no more than two to three layers deep in class selectors. However, some components may have you reaching five, six or even more layers down before reaching the element you wish to target. Remember that CSS does not have the ability to abstract problems away like JavaScript; it has no control flow or functional ability. That’s a good thing though, so don’t try to mimic it by creating long selector chains, deeply nested styles or highly generalised styles. Here's an example of how not to do it: Here's how you should write it: Rename subheader classes to be their own component A selector chain like the 'how not to do it' example above indicates you’re targeting the wrong style. It’s not often a chain like that is actually necessary. Instead it likely means you have a component inside of a component and that you should target it directly. Modular CSS encapsulation breaks down if you try to encapsulate too much inside of it, meaning you’ll start seeing side effects again. 06. Don't forget your principles There are many ways to create CSS and each project you work on will be slightly different. Although it’s almost inevitable that any codebase will eventually need an overhaul, you can use these principles in order to slow that from happening. At all times you should be focusing on making sure your styles are dry, encapsulated, readable and searchable. Initiating the principles discussed will help make sure things can be more easily maintained and changed in the future. So remember to keep some order to your file system and your files. Namespace and modularise your styles. Separate basic styles, layout styles and general styles to keep separate concerns. Finally, keep your styles as simple and shallow as possible. The first time you write a new style it shouldn’t be difficult and, if you find it is, consider whether you’re making that section too complicated. Because if it’s hard the first time, just imagine what a headache revisions will be. This article was originally published in issue 323 of net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 323 or subscribe to net today. Read more: Create animated CSS art CSS art gets brilliantly ruined by old browsers 10 best CSS frameworks in 2019 View the full article

Looking for a way to get loads of people talking about a campaign? If all that matters is awareness, then you could probably do worse than to follow the example of South Dakota's new meth awareness campaign – as long as you don't mind the inevitable backlash. The US state has a meth problem, and its latest approach is, at least, getting people talking, thanks to a campaign centred around a logo featuring the message, 'Meth. We're on it.' It's a clever slogan that's all about the double meaning – you can read it as a statement that it's tackling the meth problem, or an admission that everyone's on meth – and inevitably it's rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way (see our guide to logo design for ideas on getting people's attention without necessarily making them cross). 5 ad campaigns that changed the world The campaign's the work of Minneapolis agency, Broadhead, which has come up with a hard-hitting logo, featuring the outline of South Dakota overlaid with the troublesome slogan, plus a number of ads featuring photos of various ordinary people combined with the same slogan; again, working that double meaning hard. Over on the campaign's Facebook page it's already drawing plenty of ire, with commenters making it very clear that they don't approve, in the strongest possible terms. And of course there's a similar volume of outrage over on Twitter, with many commenters furious at reports that Broadhead was paid just under half a million dollars for the campaign. Given just how much it's got people talking about it, though, it seems to have been money well spent, and South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, has been quick to point out the campaign's effectiveness; at least from an awareness point of view. This isn't the first time that South Dakota's come up with an awareness campaign that's used a double-meaning to stir up controversy, either. Back in 2014 it ran a road safety campaign with the unforgettable slogan, 'Don't jerk and drive'. Stop sniggering at the back; clearly it was aimed at the widespread problem of people jerking the steering wheel on icy roads and crashing their cars. Wise words, mate Sadly that campaign didn't quite have the impact that South Dakota hoped for, and it was withdrawn a few months later. You can learn more about the more successful meth campaign here. Related articles: Problematic chicken box campaign angers just about everyone The best boozy Christmas ad campaigns 10 killer examples of illustrated ad campaigns View the full article

The recent launch of the new bigger, better 16-inch MacBook Pro brought with it a collection of features that make it look like the ideal choice for designers and creatives. What makes it even better is the fact that the slim and shiny MacBook Pro also supports up to two external 6K monitors simultaneously. More screens provide the ideal opportunity to have more than one program open at a time, and in clear view. This means no time-consuming window swapping to get access to the desired workspace. See our best monitors post to find the right one for you. Or for more creative tech bargains, see our MacBook Black Friday deals or Apple Black Friday deals. So how can the external displays be used? An official Apple support document for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro reveals that the laptop can be used in a number of external display configurations including several 6K and 5K options. You can link up two 6K displays with resolutions of 6016 x 3384 at 60Hz. Or, there is the option to link up two 5K displays with resolutions of 5120 x 2880 at 60Hz. 4K monitor owners haven't been forgotten, they get to double up and can connect up to four 4K displays with resolutions of 4096 x 2304 at 60Hz. An alternative configuration on the four screen option is to connect up one 5K display at 5120 x 2880 at 60Hz and up to three 4K displays at 4096 x 2304 at 60Hz. The new MacBook Pro 16-inch looks pretty sweet too If you're already the owner of an LG UltraFine 4K or 5K display, there are different connection options available. No 6K here, but you can still connect up two LG UltraFine 5K displays configured at 5120 x 2880 10bpc at 60Hz, or four LG UltraFine 4K displays configured at 4096 x 2304 8bpc at 60Hz. That's an impressive set of configurations, but take heed. If you want to avoid any hair-pulling or loud profanities you need to connect the external displays the right way. The official Apple document tells users, "Whenever possible, connect your displays to different busses to maximise performance." Effectively, this means if you are connecting two monitors, connect one on the left and one the right. If you are connecting four monitors connect two each side. Not three on one side and one on the other side. You might do this with a cable splitter if you need to keep a Thunderbolt 3 port free, but don't. You've been warned. Read more: How to avoid the MacBook Pro flight ban 18 creative MacBook decals The best cheap 4K monitor deals in 2019 View the full article

As designers, there's always room to learn new skills and techniques. Right now you can add another string to your creative bow without breaking the bank thanks to this special offer on design bundles. These three design bundles will take your creative techniques to greater heights, all at an additional 15% off already reduced prices. Looking for more top savings on creative kit? Right now there's a great Adobe Black Friday deal on Creative Cloud subscriptions. Alternatively, check out our guide to the best Surface Pro explore our guide to the biggest Surface Pro Black Friday offers. 01. Explore animation It's no secret that motion is quickly becoming a vital medium in the digital realm. Viddyoze is an easy-to-use, animated video cloud-based platform that will add some extra oomph to your projects. With a vast selection of templates designed by a dedicated team of professionals, the Viddyoze Animation Templates: Lifetime Subscription will allow you to customise your animations to reflect your brand in minutes. The best part? Zero experience is needed, making this tool stress-free and handy for last-minute projects. MSRP: $2,000 / Sale Price: $89 (95% OFF) Take an additional 15% off with code BFSAVE15: Buy Now: $75.65 02. Tackle typography Are you spending enough time crafting your copy's look and feel in your design projects? Typography is a lot more than just text. In this six-hour Typography From A to Z masterclass, you'll explore the philosophy behind typography, learn proper font classifications, examine how fonts impact a message, and so much more. The lifetime subscription is catered to all levels, allowing you to come back and get inspired no matter the size of the project, and will allow you to bring a new element into your designs. MSRP: $119 / Sale Price: $26 (78% OFF) Take an additional 15% off with code BFSAVE15: Buy Now: $22.10 03. Improve your lighting For 3D artists, being able to create believable lighting is a vital skill. Learn Photorealistic Lighting & Editing professional photo lighting bundle will help you edit with ease. With 16 lessons and eight hours of content, you'll learn how to create photorealistic edits and master techniques such as how to light an interior daylight scene with V-Ray and 3Ds Max, and how to tweak shaders realistically and beautifully. You'll learn the methodologies that are widely implemented by award-winning visualisation companies and famous film studios worldwide and soon be able to implement them into your work. MSRP: $600 / Sale Price: $19 (96% OFF) Take an additional 15% off with code BFSAVE15 : Buy Now: $16.15 *Prices subject to change Read more: The best running headphones in 2019 Design jobs: find your dream role with Creative Bloq Wacom Black Friday 2019: All the best deals as they go live View the full article