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The software giant also addressed 15 critical flaws and advised on the recently disclosed Linux Kernel "SACK Panic" bug. View the full article

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When you think of street art, chances are you imagine eye-catching images sprayed onto the side of a building. However, an Italian design agency has given the medium a technological twist by using a team of drones to spray-paint a giant mural in Turin. We've seen plenty of stunning murals over the years, but none of the masterpieces on our list of inspirational street art has been created by a swarm of drones. And while this isn't the first ever piece of street art to be painted by drones, it's certainly one of the most impressive. Curated by innovation and design firm Carlo Ratti Associati as part of the brilliantly named Urban Flying Opera (or, to use its acronym, UFO), this project relied on over 1,000 sketches contributed by artists from the local community. These artists were asked to illustrate their hopes and ideas regarding what cities should look like, and their thoughts were whittled down to the 100 drawings that would eventually get spray-painted onto the mural by the flying graffiti machines. Measuring in at 46 feet wide and 39 feet tall, the mural features drawings in three different colours that are layered one on top of the other. The drones, which were supplied by Tsuru Robotics, were carefully controlled by multiple position monitoring systems to ensure that they didn't fly into one another and ruin the mural. As for the sketches, these were uploaded to a central computer before being relayed as controls for the drones to follow. The result is a unique piece of street art that took 12 hours to complete. "The city is an open canvas, where people can inscribe their stories in many ways," Carlo Ratti Associati founder, Professor Carlo Ratti, told New Atlas. "Such processes have always been happening; however, with UFO we tried to accelerate them, using drone technology to allow for a new use of painting as a means of expression." Related articles: 14 incredibly cool office murals The best camera bags and cases in 2019 The best cheap GoPro deals for filmmakers and creatives View the full article

Creating creature designs and art in general is like a sport. You need to practise and train if you want to improve. When you draw every day and have thousands of used sheets of paper and sketchbooks, you learn some tricks to make the process a little easier. Draw everything: you’ll get faster and your brain will become a database full of references. There are also a few basic tips you already may know, but it’s good to go over them again: things like contrast, shapes, lines of action, movement, perspective. Put all of these techniques together and your creatures will look alive and be full of personality. For more on process, see our post on art techniques. Read on for my top 15 tips for creating better creature designs. And if you want to read more about characters in general, check out our character design tips post. 01. Draw quick thumbnails Create simple silhouettes to get started with your creature design Drawing quick and simple thumbnails is a helpful warm-up exercise. There are a few things to bear in mind, though. I always try to keep the design simple; the silhouette needs to be easy to read. I use a solid colour and sometimes I draw over it with a darker colour tone. In this case I’m concentrating on creatures, which means I’m free to create different shapes, combining object, animal and human elements. 02. Don't forget references References are vital to designing creatures If I don’t feel inspired to draw then I’ll look around for some references. In this case, I’ll search for objects that I can either use as part of a creature, or just act as a launch point to galvanise me into action. My main reference sources are mythology, animals and nature and so I’ll draw some objects (African masks, runes, a cauldron…) and some animals. My sketchbooks are full of such doodles and they can easily end up being part of a figure design. Need a new sketchbook? Check out our guide to the best sketchbooks. 03. Use basic shapes Simple shapes can become complex characters What if I start with basic shapes to create my character? All of them can turn into a creature, right? You might think this is a limitation, but it also forces you to be extra creative. This approach can be a good method for designing a squad of characters that work together, like superheroes. These shapes are just one way to start your designs. Sometimes I break the silhouette by adding elements, or I leave some empty spaces. 04. Combine basic shapes How a basic shape design can develop into a creature This approach can lead to interesting results. One of my previous thumbnails is a blend of triangles, circles and a rectangle. When I sketch over this basic form I can see immediately that it’s a one-eyed warrior hare carrying a shield and a candle. I start with a very simple doodle in greyscale and then add some details in the colour drawing. This breaks up the symmetry and make this character more visually appealing. 05. Draw without purpose Put your references away and just start sketching Another useful starting exercise is to simply draw without a specific purpose. And it’s important to me to do this without references. I don’t expect to create my greatest piece of art this way, but this can inspire future projects. Maybe I’ll pay attention to these sketches someday and fresh ideas will come to mind. It’s also a good exercise to banish the dreaded artist’s block. 06. Think about body language Body language can convey a lot about a character If you want your creatures to be expressive then it’s crucial to understand anatomy and body language. Combine these two key topics and your creation will feel more alive. I believe it’s vital to understand how bodies can express an emotion. You can obtain references from plenty of sources: study films, friends and model sessions; look in the mirror; or take some photos of interesting poses. This step is crucial. As a cartoon character designer, I tend to exaggerate these body expressions with more pronounced curves or shapes. For more on anatomy and figures, see our guide to figure drawing. 07. Use lines of action Straight lines can look dull, so experiment with curves and contrast Using simple lines will define the movement of the creature. These are called lines of action. They’ll vary depending on the creature’s mood and activity. Straight lines can make your figure look boring or static, so I often use curved and contrasting lines because they result in more eye-catching body positions. It’s crucial to draw a range of dynamic poses, because they’re a useful way of testing your creature’s proportions and anatomy. 08. Keep experimenting Try a number of different variants of a creature before settling on your final design Maintain your creativity by revisiting older designs and producing variants that will work in that universe. Here I’m keeping the same basic shapes and proportions for the different versions. Colours and materials have an important role to play, too. What if, instead of leaves, he has crystal hair? Or maybe there’s a constant flame on the top of his head? These variations can enrich your original concept. Other options include changing the size, age or sex of the character. 09. Add contrast Contrast is a basic concept that you need to bear in mind when designing a creature. This contrast can be between colours, shapes, objects and more. I make sure that I think about contrast in every stage of my designs. At the sketching stage, when I draw some basic shapes, any contrast between them will be most obvious during this stage. One creature will be curvy, the other straight. This can be very rough – there’s no need for details. Next, I work more on the sketch, adding details like the ropes and plants. You can enhance the personality of your creature by adding contrast to the attitude. In this case, a monster is happy carrying a very serious stone head. I’m also using contrasting colours for them, increasing the visual effect and making them complementary characters. Colour and texture can also enhance contrast The final step is adding additional details such as texture, shadows and a background. It’s time to paint them all. Texture will enhance personality and give the figures the spirit of adventure. The background is part of the story, so I add a path and some mountains inspired by Chinese art. 10. Add an object You can tell a lot about a creature from the objects it's holding An object can be a good way to further strengthen a creature’s design. These props can boost their personality and charisma, and can also enrich their back story. What are they carrying? And why? Maybe they’re carrying luggage, or they’re holding a lantern to light the path into a mysterious forest. Depending on what they have on their back or in their hands you can define their jobs or roles in your narrative. 11. Try different facial expressions Use your own face as a reference when trying out facial expressions on a creature design Body poses are of vital importance when showing a creature’s emotion, but so are their facial expressions. Both work together. Try some basic emotions like happiness or anger, then try less-common ones. By placing a small mirror close to your work area, or using your camera phone, you can use yourself as reference. Study how the facial muscles move. Essentially, eyebrows and mouth will do the most amount of work for basic fantasy creatures. Consider adjusting the ears while squashing or stretching the main shape of the head to accentuate these emotions. 12. Use perspective Avoid symmetry if you can, as it's often dull Another way to improve your creature designs is adding some perspective. Symmetry can be very boring, and a simple pose viewed from the front may fail to resonate with the viewer. So it’s important to work with depth and space, to give your creature a strong feeling of movement. Try different angles when you sketch your characters, and look for references if you’re struggling. With this creature, I’ve increased the stroke width in some areas that are close to the viewer to boost the feeling of depth. 13. Create a point of interest Focus the viewer's attention With some simple lines defining a direction, you can create a point of interest in your drawing where you can focus the viewer’s attention. This visual flow leads the viewer’s eyes in the direction you want. You can even create different entry points and there are a lot of ways to achieve this. Faces and hands are very expressive, so concentrate your efforts here. Colour and lighting can also help. Increase the brightness or ramp up the saturation of the area that you want the viewer to focus on. 14. Tell a story Props and details add context to your creature design Does this creature have a back story? And how can you tell? The attitude and action of the creature will play an important role, even if they’re standing still or looking at something. The environment plays an important role, too. It helps to explain what’s happening to your creature. Adding some props and details in the background will support the story and give context to the figure’s personality. 15. Create an atmosphere The colours in this piece add something extra Lighting and colour are key tools to use when painting creature concepts. You must play with lights and shadows to create interesting and atmospheric environments. This will focus the viewer’s eyes to some areas of the drawing. Selecting a source light and applying the correct shades will enable you to highlight key parts of your design. Keep in mind that colour, lighting and shadows are only part of the story. Make the choices that will enhance rather then detract from your narrative. Carry out colour tests to see which ones work best. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX, the world's leading magazine for digital artists. Subscribe here. Read more: 10 ways to create better character animations Top speed painting tips (that work for speed drawing too) 19 best drawing apps for iPad View the full article

When it first aired, The Simpsons was a groundbreaking piece of subversive pop culture. But even in its heyday the show never went as far as this fan's dark version of the programme's intro, which sees the famous family reimagined as downtrodden citizens in a rather depressing-looking Russia. Thanks to its never-ending repeats, The Simpsons intro is probably one of the most well-known TV title sequences of all time. This makes it a perfect vehicle for parody, as viewers will be able to draw comparisons between imitations and the real deal. This clip though, created by YouTube animator Lazy Square, takes things to a grim new level. Each beat of the title sequence is followed, but everything's off. The contrast can be seen immediately. Gone are the distinctive silhouettes that were Simpsons creator Matt Groening's shortcut to good character design. Instead, Marge's tall beehive is tied down, and the jagged outlines of Lisa and Maggie are replaced with utilitarian, close-cropped haircuts. The vibrant colours of Springfield are also gone, Marge berates the cashier in a dank convenience store, and Lisa is threatened by armed policemen for blowing her sax. Check it out below. There are plenty of little details that will make you re-watch this video. Is that Bart getting beaten up by bullies in the beginning? And just where does Lisa disappear to in the end? As far as fan films go, this one is bleak. Of course, the programme itself never shied away from taking a pop at Russia. Who could forget the scene where Lenin bursts out of his mausoleum growling "must, crush, capitalism"? Or the Eastern European version of Itchy and Scratchy, called Worker and Parasite? However, The Simpsons has also come under fire in recent years for its stereotypical depiction of different ethnicities, such as the Kwik-E-Mart's tireless manager, Apu. Even a fumbled apology didn't get the show off the hook in the eyes of some fans. So does this violent parody also cross the line? It's hard to tell from comments, most of which are written in Cyrillic characters. But if the 'like' bar is anything to go by (currently it stands at 32,000 thumbs up to 2,000 thumbs down), it looks like Lazy Square has hit a home run. Related articles: How fan art can get you paid Understand Disney's 12 principles of animation Top 10 TV logos of all time View the full article

If you need to get serious in your designs, it's good to have a selection of great-looking serif fonts. Serifs are the sensible wing of typography; almost always pulled out for books and newspapers where long tracts of printed text need to be easy to read, they have a look and feel that we automatically associate with authority and class. That doesn't make them boring, though; the variety of serif fonts available is absolutely huge, and while some of them are definitely suited to quietly maintaining readability in lengthy body text, others are a lot more visually arresting with plenty of potential for exciting font pairings. Here are ten of our favourite new serifs; they're all free to use on personal projects, and some can be used in commercial work too. For more fonts of different types, see our post on the best free fonts. 01. Grenze Grenze is a full type system with nine weight plus italics Created by Renata Polastri and Omnibus-Type and with a name that derives from the German for 'frontier', Grenze is a really useful typeface system consisting of nine weights, from Thin through to Black, with matching italics. It's designed as a cross between Roman and blackletter fonts, combining visual impact with classical readability, and while it's envisaged as a font for magazines, it could be put to all manner of creative uses. It's published under the SIL Open Font Licence, so it's free to use in all projects. 02. Isle Headline Isle Headline has a sister font to take care of the body text A clear and sharp serif type family in four weights plus italics, Isle Headline was designed between 2018 and 2019 by Måns Grebäck. It's intended for large-scale use such as headlines and titles; if you want the same look for body text then look no further than its sister font, Isle Body, which uses the same basic structure but with a softer look. Both fonts are free for personal use; head to Måns' site for commercial licences and to see his other fonts. 03. Saonara Just the thing for those classy fashion spreads For those projects that require a luxury look that positively drips class, get a load of Saonara, designed by Maxim and Denis Schepin of MADE Type. Inspired by the world of fashion, it's a gloriously elegant font with strokes that veer between whip-thin and super-chunky, with razor-sharp serifs to finish off the look. It's free for personal use, while a standard licence will cost you just $16. 04. Coachella Coachella's full of contrast and quirky touches Another font from MADE Type that's free for personal use, Coachella is a contrasting serif font family in six weights from Thin to Black. In the heavier weights the contrast between line widths across the font is even more extreme than in Saonara, but the look's a lot more approachable; we love some its quirky touches such as the terminal on the lower-case 'a' and the triangular tail on the upper-case 'Q'. 05. Red Delicious Red Delicious is a tasty, full-bodied font Dan Zadorozny is a designer who's been creating fonts for the past 20 years, all of them free for personal use and available for commercial use in return for a $20 donation. His site's well worth looking through for typographic goodies; a recent offering that caught our eye is Red Delicious, Zadorozny's take on the classic varsity font often used on sweatshirts and the like. It features slightly rounded serifs to give the characters a full-bodied feel and weight, and comes in 25 different versions, each with an extended Latin character set. 06. Melisande Sharp For a less formal serif, try Melisande Sharp's hand-drawn style Serif fonts are often used as a visual shorthand for authority and gravitas, but Melisande Sharp, a hand-drawn serif by Brittney Murphy, is one that's a lot more fun to be around. It has some really eye-catching touches to it, such as the pot belly-shaped bowl on the lower-case 'a' and the incredibly high crossbar on the 'f', all of which combine to give this font a fantastically lively feel. It's free for personal use; for most commercial uses there's a standard licence that'll cost you just $8. 07. Halibut Serif Halibut's serif's look like they might bite There's nothing fishy about Halibut Serif, an open-source display and paragraph font from Colllettivo. It's another lively free serif font that comes in three weights – Regular, Expanded and Condensed – each packing in 234 glyphs. We particularly love Halibut's sharp, toothy serifs, which look like they could bite your hand off. Like all of Colllettivo's fonts, it's free to use on any project. 08. Libertinus Serif Here's a great all-rounder in plenty of styles and weights Linux fans will have doubtless noticed the resemblance between Libertinus Serif and Linux's Libertine and Biolinum fonts, and there's a good reason for that. Libertinus Serif is a fork of those fonts that addresses some of their bugs, and it's a classic-looking serif that comes in 14 styles to suit all manner of uses. Published under the SIL Open Font Licence, it's good for all applications. 09. Adega Serif Adega Serif is beautifully old-style Created by Brazilian designer Anísio Dega, Adega Serif is a print-focused font designed with books, newspapers and magazines in mind, and shaped to give maximum comfort to the reader. Coming on like a softer alternative to something like Book Antiqua, it features wonderfully tall ascenders and some beautifully hand-drawn quirks, and it comes in regular and bold weights with matching italics. It's available as donationware; if you get good use out of it then be sure to send Dega some money. 10. Afterglow Dial the elegance up to 11 with Afterglow To finish our round-up of 2019's best free serif fonts, here's Afterglow, a modern and classic serif typeface by Vintage Voyage. Full of contrast lines and with plenty of stylistic alternates, it's just the thing for retro-looking headlines with a bit of a 1970's feel, and it's free for personal use while a commercial licence is available for $14. Related articles: Font vs typeface: the ultimate guide The 10 commandments of typography 15 top typography resources View the full article

Instead of looking to the future, invoking the feeling of days gone by seems to be many brands' favourite way to engage customers. Brands are looking to associate themselves with the warm, fuzzy feeling that many get when thinking of their childhoods, and of course, capitalising on these feelings to get us to spend money. Nostalgic branding doesn't mean relying on old forms of advertising, such as print campaigns, though (see our favourite print ads here). Brands can use cutting-edge technology to invoke the past. Can nostalgic branding ever go too far? Will customers eventually see through it? While there are many examples of brands who've looked to the past when creating their logos and branding (see our how to reawaken a brand's heritage post). Here, we take a look at five brands that hit nostalgia hard through their adverts, and evaluate their success. 01. Hovis Hovis has taken nostalgia to the next level by re-running a much-loved advert from 1973. The 'Boy on the Bike' advert has been voted Britain's most iconic and much-loved advert, and recently returned to TV screens after 46 years. The advert was directed by Ridley Scott and has been remastered for a 2019 audience. This seems like a smart move from Hovis. If your greatest advert is still so popular and loved almost 50 years later, then why not rerun it? Those who remember it from the first time round will enjoy reliving it, and it'll also reach a new audience. 02. GWR If Enid Blyton's books felt old-fashioned to many 20 years ago, they're arguably now at peak nostalgia. To invoke this spirit, adam&eveDDB created this campaign for Great Western Railway, which shows Blyton's Famous Five having an adventure across the South West's rail network. The campaign won a Graphite Pencil at D&AD Awards 2018. It's beautifully illustrated, and animated. Sadly, it's hard to feel very nostalgic or warm and fuzzy when your train's delayed for the third time in a week. Still, at least the illustrations are nice to look at. 03. Halifax Before Halifax's recent rebrand, the bank had a series of adverts focused on characters from the past, including Scooby-Doo, Ghostbusters, Top Cat, The Wizard of Oz and The Flintstones. These ads were created by adam&eveDDB and showed the characters interacting with people at Halifax bank. The Top Cat ad, in particular, was mocked, as in the ad, the character gets a mortgage in order to live in a slightly bigger bin than before – a pretty odd living situation for a bank to be advocating. It does make sense that a bank would try to tap into feelings of nostalgia, particularly when high-street banks are increasingly being left behind by 'millennial banks' such as Monzo, and the threat of crypto currency looms. Post-rebrand, Halifax is still drawing on nostalgia, albeit in a slightly different way. Its latest ad involves a slinky. So looking to the past is clearly still working for it. 04. Microsoft When your product feels a little outdated, and people associate it with the '90s, it is it best to just roll with it? Microsoft seemed to think so when they released this '90s-tastic advert for Internet Explorer in 2013. It had the tagline: 'You grew up. So did we. Reconnect with the new Internet Explorer,' and invited people to visit thebrowseryoulovedtohate.com (now defunct). The ad above has all the '90s paraphernalia you forgot you loved, including Trolls, tamagotchis and wallets on chains. So far, so nostalgic. The catch? With this sort of association, it's easy to lump IE in the same category as all the other long-gone products. If IE is as grown-up as it says, why does it want to place itself in the same category as pogs? 05. 7UP Another brand bringing back an old character is 7UP. Its latest campaign involves Fido Dido, 'the original chiller', and encourages people to 'put the chill' back in their lives. Fido Dido was created in 1985 and reached popularity in the '90s, and is one of those characters that a lot of people had pretty much forgotten, until now. The ad above shows Fido Dido trying to interact with the modern world, only to find that everyone in it is so busy looking at their phones they don't notice him. This focus on how we've lost real-life interactions is an interesting one for brands to tap into, and we've already seen it subverted by the likes of mobile company Three. Although this 7UP ad is pretty cheesy, it gets the message across well. Read more: Build a better personal brand 5 ads that tried to be cool but failed 5 ad campaigns that changed the world View the full article

Around the start of this decade, a round-up of "best website designs" would have be dominated by big budget creations, full of clever tricks, beautiful animations and wow-factor effects. But the world has moved on since then. With so much of the internet's commercial activity having shifted from websites to social media, innovative web design is less about showing off and more about quietly delivering great user experiences. And this more often to be found in smaller projects, online experiments, and sites built for fun, than in slick and polished corporate work. In this post, we look at six websites, all launched this year, which may have gone under your radar, but which nonetheless showcase some inspired and innovative approaches to web design. Plus we hear from their creators about how they were put together, and what they've learned as a result. 01. Phil Coffman Coffman has redesigned his blog to look more like a traditional journal If we had a pound for every time we’ve heard a web designer say “I really need to get around to redesigning my blog,” we’d be millionaires. So hats off to Phil Coffman, a designer living in Austin, Texas, for actually dong so. But a bonus, he’s done a spectacularly inventive and original job of it too. Combining handwriting and newspaper cutout-style type, with an earthy background that resembles ageing, physical paper, this is one of the best blog designs we’ve seen in years. And that’s partly a testament to the amount of work Coffman put into it. “This design follows many previous failed attempts,” he admits. “Designing for myself is possibly my least favourite thing to do. as I struggle massively from indecision and unrealistic expectations I place on myself. In the end, this concept won out because I wanted to dive back into textures, hand-drawn elements, and an overall art direction that’s more of a personal journal than a polished publication.” "Once I learned Neue Haas Grotesk was available from Adobe, Miller came quickly after as the two fonts pair really well together," says Coffman Putting the concept into action also involved some technical challenges, he adds. “It took a bit of trial and error to get the textured effect looking the way I wanted on the post titles and black lines,” Coffman explains. “I knew CSS had the ability to use text as a clipping mask but I hadn’t spent much time digging into how to properly pull it off.” Once he’d worked through the steps of applying the correct combination of CSS declarations, he faced the challenge of sourcing and prepping the right mix of textures. “This required finding textures with the right amount of wear and personality without causing issues with text legibility," he notes. The image lock-ups were also a "fun challenge" for Coffman. "I landed on using CSS Grid to establish the skeleton for the markup, fiddling with the grid template to give me enough flexibility with positioning the figure and figure caption, while maintaining the same aspect ratio from the mobile layout to desktop.” Coffman chose Professor as the handwriting font. "It's legible but also has great ligatures and looks like it could’ve been written with a blue pen in a journal", he explains. For the typography, he settled on Neue Haas Grotesk for the titles and smaller sans-serif elements, Miller for the body text and Professor for the hand-written script. “The key to this concept is the interplay between the hand-written font and sans and serif fonts,” he explains. “I felt that in order for the hand-written font to work I needed a sans and serif which were more straightforward or familiar, rather than ones which had a lot of personality of their own.” 02. The Boolean Game This fun game teaches you how to use boolean operations in Adobe Illustrator and other vector tools The Boolean Game is a fun browser game that teaches you how to use boolean operations in Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Figma, and other vector editors. Creator Mark MacKay explains how it came about. “I've been building design games for some years now, and I subconsciously collect things which I find challenging to convert into educational games,” he says. “This idea had been floating around for some time, and then I saw paper.js had a library to perform them: mathematically it's well beyond my ability. So I did a quick test and saw that it could be fun.” While paper.js does the heavy lifting of the vector work for the site, MacKay also used anime.js for the animations, growler.js for the sound, and d3-color to manage the colour scheme. MacKay used paper.js, anime.js, growler.js and d3-color to build the site The main technical challenge was making it work on all devices, from phones to desktop, he continues. “This proved to be immensely challenging because you have to resize vectors and change the layout depending on the orientation. If I had chosen a fixed seen size, it would have probably taken me one month instead of three to get the project out the door.” And interestingly, those three months taught him some important lessons about using dev tools. The main challenge was making the game work on all devices “The development ecosystem is optimised for very different things than what a solo creative designer-developer needs,” he explains. “It's as if you had the task of building a bridge and it's just assumed you'll have crane operators, pre-built concrete structures, steamrollers and so on. But if you simply need people to cross a stream, a simple hand build wooden structure will do. “I say this because I used to feel inadequate for not knowing React, NPM, testing, ‘best practices’, etc. Now I understand I must optimise for my own flow and enjoyment. Dev tools and practices tend to be oriented towards reliability, collaboration and modularity, which are very different constraints.” 03. The Gyllenhaal Experiment This site uses Reddit data to visualise how bad we are at spelling celebrity names One of the best examples of data visualisation we’ve seen in some time, The Gyllenhaal Experiment is the brainchild of Russell Goldenberg and Matt Daniels of digital publication The Pudding. “We’d seen this story about Colin Morris' analysis of self-identified Reddit misspelling,” explains Goldenberg. “And thought there was more that could be done with the idea of visualising the flow of how people spell.” “We honed in on using celebrity names such as Jake Gyllenhaal, since they were quite prominent and not something in your typical spelling bee. We also knew we wanted to make something interactive to see real-time feedback of the spelling flows, so we fused those thoughts together to create a spelling bee-esque interactive visualisation." The creators want to make something interactive, that showed real-time feedback of spelling flows The pair relied on JavaScript and primarily the D3.js library for most of the visualisation, as well as using Firebase for the storage of user results. “The biggest challenge by far was rendering the flow diagrams,” says Goldenberg. “Although it is technically a sankey diagram, we had to do a lot of custom stuff to get the paths rendering properly and not overlapping.” There were lots of user flows to consider, from different ways to answer a question, to handling different states In the course of building the site, the biggest surprise was learning quite how many different ways people spell names. “There were over 800 ways people tried to spell Matthew Mcconaughey for instance. "From a development standpoint, there were lots of user flows to consider, from all sorts of variations to how they could answer a question, to handling different states (eg. did they return to the site having already answered?). Knowing all the possible states ahead of time was crucial to the development and design going smoothly.” 04. JSConf 2019 This conference site focuses on the fundamentals, and does them brilliantly It's a real headache for web conference organisers. You don't want to spend your whole time working on your website when you could be focusing your energies on planning your event and making it the best you can be. But stick up a simple cookie cutter site, and people are going to wonder how much you know about the subject your conference is discussing. Somehow, the organisers of JSConf EU seem to have squared that circle. Because not only is their conference universally praised and admired, but their website, which is built on the static site generator wintersmith, is pretty amazing too. Not because it's full of clever tricks - it isn't - but because it focuses on the fundamentals and delivers on every front, from ease of use to the relevance of its content. Malte Ubi has putting everything into making this "the fastest conference website in the world" Plus it's fast – super-fast. As Malte Ubl explains in this blog post: "I’ve spent a completely unreasonable amount of time trying to make it be the fastest conference website in the world." (He's not sure if he's succeeded, but so far no one has invalidated his claim). It helps that Ubi is the creator of AMP, a web component library for making reliably fast websites. He's used the jSConf website as his playground to try out new techniques; and they certainly seem to have worked; the site works beautifully on every device we've tried it on. You can take a deep dive into the clever ways Ubi has achieved this, from optimising font performance to dead code elimation, here. 05. Design Titles This hilarious site parodied nonsense job titles with effortless precision Who says web design can’t be fun? Not Xtian Miller and Boris Crowther, who’ve created this hilarious job title generator, Design Titles, which parodies some of the sillier monickers some web designers seem to go under these days. Design-wise, it’s not a complex site: it does one thing and does it very well, and there’s an awful lot to be said for that. “It really started as an inside joke,” explains Miller. “For better or worse, titles within the creative industry have developed a mercurial nature, causing inconsistency in their definition as they continually evolve. The site was built on a foundation of static HTML, CSS, JS, Gulp and Sass "As a result, many designers have gotten creative with their titles to sound more relevant or to avoid being pigeon-holed. The official titles don’t cut it, so they’ll come up with pseudo ones for their portfolios and social bios. The real goal of the website was to create a visual, fun way of getting this long-standing joke out of our system.” The site was built with static HTML, CSS and JS, with Gulp for development workflow automation and Sass for CSS preprocessing. The generator function and algorithm were made entirely from scratch in Vanilla JavaScript. The biggest technical challenge was getting the algorithm of the shuffle function just right, adds Miller. “We had to continually tweak it to a point where it wasn't too repetitive, and you had as good a chance of getting a perfectly normal title as you did an absurd one. The more you use it, the more ludicrous (or serious) it gets. It may look simple, but it took a lot of testing to finesse the algorithm.” The biggest technical challenge was getting the algorithm of the shuffle function just right Looks-wise, the duo we were inspired by the International Typographic Style, but more specifically Vignelli's NYC subway design system for layout and typography. “When you go all in on that style you're somewhat aware of the influence, authority and objectivity behind it, which we felt was ironic for this whole concept,” says Miller. “We wanted the title to be as obnoxiously large as possible - fitting the viewport - to emphasise its importance, and used modern colour pairings for impact and variety. The colour randomisation was a simple solution to take away the monotony of shuffling, and it sort of goes along nicely with how each title carries its own persona.” 06. Captain Marvel We never realised how much we missed neon colours and cheesy fonts The latest Marvel movie, Captain Marvel, takes place in the 1990s, and so this hilarious promotional site perfectly recreates the look and feel of what the web looked like in that decade. Younger people may be shocked by how basic and clunky it looks, but those of a certain age will get a nostalgic rush to see the neon fonts, cheesy animations, bad photo crops, guestbook and hit counter, which all used to be part and parcel of early website design. There’s even an authentic 'Spot the Skrull' game that asks you to decide whether someone is a human or secretly a shape-shifting alien in disguise. Yes kids, this was what cutting edge movie promotion in the late 20th century was all about. We love that there's a counter and guestbook! Of course, under the hood, the site is not totally authentic. While Marvel's director of software engineering Lori Lombert joked that "We built this in FrontPage and host it Angelfire", it's actually been constructed using modern CSS and JavaScript, so a 1995 browser like Netscape Navigator wouldn't have known what to do with it. Not to mention that its 10MB size would have taken forever to download on dial-up via a screechy AOL modem. That said, for anyone who remembers the thrill of watching their first web page download in the 1990s, this is a real treat. Parody is something that might look easy, but is actually incredibly hard to get right. So for Lombert and her team to absolutely nail the little details in this way is a great achievement, and reminds us in these days of soulless digital utility that the web can still be a fun and anarchic place. Read more: The best web design jobs Web designers create the most annoying UI ever 8 amazing Google APIs (and how to use them) View the full article

The Adobe Creative Suite is and probably always will be ubiquitous in the creative field. Its tools remain the gold standard for graphic design, photo manipulation, video editing, and more. If you want to make the most out of every app, you can rely on the Complete Adobe Mastery Bundle to show you the ropes. Across 11 courses and over 70 hours of premium training, you'll explore and master the functionalities of the top Adobe programs, including: Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Lightroom. Get Adobe Creative Cloud You'll also learn how to transform dull photos into dazzling imagery, create compelling videos, design marketing materials, and lots more. By the time you finish, you'll be able to apply these skills to your own creative endeavours. Normally valued at $2,189, you can get the Complete Adobe Mastery Bundle today for only $39 - that's a saving of 98 percent. Related articles: Get started with Adobe Dimension CC Build prototypes with Adobe XD Adobe updates XD with design systems View the full article

Want to learn to take better photos? Photography skills are important whether you're a blogger, a graphic designer, an entrepreneur, a journalist, or even just someone who wants a better Instagram feed. Luckily, the Canon DSLR Photography A-Z Course can teach you everything you need to know in order to take better snaps. Whether you have zero experience with DSLR cameras, or you've already been a photography enthusiast for years, this technical guide to mastering your Canon DSLR will help take your images to the next level. The course is taught with a Rebel series camera, which is among the most popular cameras for beginners. The best cloud storage 2019 However, you don't need to own a Canon Rebel camera in order to learn something from this course. The course covers everything from exposing your photos properly to mastering the different focus levels and shooting modes. You'll be snapping like a pro in no time at all. Get The Canon DSLR Photography A-Z Course for just $10.99. Related articles: The best camera for creatives in 2019 The 16 best photography websites 15 ways to improve your photography skills View the full article

As Amazon gears up for its biggest event of the year, we're already seeing some of the best Prime Day deals start to surface. But with the main event not kicking off until next Monday, Walmart has decided to get things started a little early with some incredible deals of it's own. And this Apple iPad deal is one of the best we've seen so far. It's not often you see Apple products discounted (especially Apple Pencil deals), so when there's an opportunity to save a whopping $80 on a brand new iPad, you don't want to hang around. You'll find details below on how you can currently get yourself a shiny new 9.7-inch, 6th generation iPad for less than $250. But hurry, these are going to fly off the shelves! If you're visiting the site from outside of the US, here are the best same model iPad prices in your area: View the full article

If you’re looking to become a designer, this course is your one stop shop. That's because The Complete Learn to Design Bundle will help turn you from a beginner designer into a pro with its massive 65 hours of content. With this bundle you’ll learn how to use some of the most important tools of the trade, including Photoshop and InDesign. Plus you'll take master classes in graphic design, as well as courses in graphic design theory. The best cloud storage 2019 And that's not all. You’ll also master the basics of typography, and you’ll even discover the best ways to go about logo design. By the end of this bundle, you’ll have learned graphic design from so many angles that you’ll be ready to embark on your design career. The Complete Learn to Design Bundle can be yours, and best of all, you can pay what you want for it! Related articles: Logo design: everything you need to know The best computer for graphic design in 2019 The best free graphic design software View the full article

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A tablet that you can wear on your wrist and neatly fold away into a screen the size of a watch face might sound like the sort of madcap device you'd expect to find in The Jetsons. But that's exactly what IBM has in mind according to a recently unearthed patent. Of course, foldable screens aren't a new idea. However early efforts include some notable failures. Just take Samsung's Galaxy Fold, which failed to make our list of the best smartphones for creatives. That's because reviewers reported faults with the phone's foldable screen just days after use. Not what you want for a device that sets you back $2,000. IBM clearly isn't deterred though. In a patent discovered by the clever folks over at Let's Go Digital, IBM lays out plans to go a step further than Samsung as it outlines a prospective smartwatch-cum-tablet. You can check out the patent here, and see how IBM refers to a 'variable display size for an electronic display device'. In plain English, this means a display that can be expanded or shrunk down, depending on your needs. There are also diagrams that display how the device could function with one, four, or even eight connected screens. Let's Go Digital used these plans to mock up up how the displays would look, which you can check out by clicking left to right in the gallery below. If you've always wanted to have a phone or tablet-sized screen manacled to your wrist, this could be the device for you. Each screen measures 2 x 3 inches. This means that at its maximum size, the eight-panelled wrist tablet would measure a whopping 12 x 8 inches. It might look a bit absurd to us now, but who knows, if IBM is capable of creating such a device, maybe it'll become the new norm before too long? Alternatively, it might always look a bit naff and obtrusive, like when someone tries to take a photo by holding up an iPad. As is the case with patents, there's no certainty that this device will become a reality. Although it is an intriguing glimpse into where the information technology company could take us. And considering that it's breaking new ground with its quantum computing initiative, IBM Q, if anyone can make a foldable wrist tablet work, it's IBM. Has IBM's patent has got you desperate for a smartwatch? If so, why not head on over to our guide to the best Apple Watch deals. Here you'll find the latest Series 4 Apple Watches at discount prices, alongside Series 1, 2 and 3 models. And if you're after more bargains on creative tech, be sure to check out our page dedicated to the best Prime Day deals. Related articles: The best budget camera phones in 2019 Startup beats Samsung to show the world's first foldable phone 7 huge tech trends in 2019 that designers need to know View the full article

One point perspective is a type of drawing created on a 2D plane that uses one point in the distance from which everything in the drawing is set out. It was first discovered during the Renaissance, and was art’s version of going from acoustic to electric, such was the huge and lasting impact it had on the discipline. Using perspective is a key art technique that allows artists to represent images of rooms, letters, cities or buildings, with depth and volume on a flat surface. The results of a one point perspective drawing can often look impressively complex, but actually, the process is surprisingly simple, provided you follow a few key principles. The basics can be expanded upon easily, so once you have a solid foundation in drawing one point perspectives, the possibilities are endless. All you need to know, from drawing simple shapes to writing your name in 3D, is outlined below. To brush up on other key things you need to know about art, see our posts on how to draw, and the Golden Ratio. What is one point perspective? So, what is perspective? Well, the eye perceives depth in the world all around us because of perspective, but while the world is experienced in three dimensions, it is hard to replicate this on a two dimensional surface, like a piece of paper. This is where the trick of one point perspective comes in. This is a mathematical way of representing a three dimensional image on a two dimensional surface, by using intersecting lines that all go back to the same point in the distance. One point perspective is a pretty fool-proof way of creating a 3D image, where the image recedes away from you, so things get smaller the further back they go, just like in real life. By using just a vanishing point, a horizon line and a series of straight lines, you can create a realistic and complex rendering, which looks like it's 3D, in a number of simple steps. In a one point perspective, the image or scene will be viewed face on, meaning that all of the planes facing the viewer are flat. If you wanted to draw an image that wasn’t being viewed face on, you would use a two or three point perspective, which has the ability to capture multiple angles, but we’re going to keep it simple with just one point here. Why do artists need one point perspective? Look at the way this painting by Canaletto – Grand Canal - Looking South-East from the Campo Santa Sophia to the Rialto Bridge – uses perspective Illustrators, architects and designers of all stripes need to be able to represent their ideas on paper, and often employ perspective to do this. In terms of conveying a potentially complex idea to a client, who might not have any knowledge of the technical processes being employed in any given creative task, it is often useful to be able to show them a rendering of the building, room, object or car so they can get an idea of what to expect from the finished product. One point perspective is an irreplaceable asset in terms of being communicate design ideas to a client. And of course, it's very important in creating art. One point perspective in art One point perspective has been the most central tenet of visual art since its invention by Italian artist, architect and all-round Renaissance man Filippo Brunelleschi in the 15th century. It completely revolutionised painting, and no artist can escape the ubiquity of perspective. Even in the most abstract paintings or drawings, there is often some sort of volumetric reference that will use perspective. One point perspective is seen in paintings by famous artists like Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci and David Hockney, to name but a few. How to draw using one point perspective The easiest way to figure out one point perspective is to make your own diagram Drawing using one point perspective is actually surprisingly easy, once you know what you’re doing. There are few basic elements that you need to understand, namely the vanishing point, the horizon line and the frontal planes. Starting with a piece of paper, a pencil and a ruler, draw a line horizontally across the middle of the page (1). This is your horizon line. Then draw a dot in the middle of the line (2). This is your vanishing point. Now, under the line, draw a square (3). Locating objects above or below the line will determine how the viewer perceives them - below the line, you’re looking down on the object, above the line, you’re looking up at it. This square is your frontal plane. Take your ruler and draw a line from the vanishing point to all of the corners of the square (4). This is how you will construct everything in your one point perspective, by taking lines from certain points in your frontal planes back to the vanishing point. To turn your square into a cube, draw a horizontal line and vertical line as far back as necessary (5), and hey presto! You have completed the first step in your mastery of one point perspective. Notice how the shape gets smaller as it gets closer to the vanishing point. This is perspective! Draw a room using one point perspective Look at the way the lines on this room point towards the vanishing point Drawing a room interior relies heavily on one point perspective, and interior designers and architects produce these kind of drawings all the time. Draw a rectangle on the page which will act as the back wall of the room, and then decide where you want the vanishing point to be. This will determine the angle that the room is being viewed from. Let’s view it at eye level, so put it two thirds up from the bottom middle of the rectangle. Create the volume of the room by bringing lines from the vanishing point through the four corners of the rectangle. Laying out a floor pattern is a good way to practice drawing perspective. Divide the bottom line of the rectangle into even segments and bringing lines through them from the vanishing point to the edge of the page, and you will see a pattern emerge. Repeat the steps used in drawing the cube to create tables, chairs, doorways and windows, and you will begin to see how using a series of simple rectangles and squares will allow you to build up elements in a room. Draw a city with one point perspective Draw a road first and then build your city from there Drawing a cityscape is similar to drawing the inside of a room, in that you will be using simple rectangular volumes to build up your image. Cityscape perspectives can be as simple as a basic sketch, or as complex as a detailed technical drawing, but either way, the rules are the same. It is handy to use infrastructure, such as roads, streets and street lamps, as these are instantly recognisable elements of a city and can act as a base drawing from which everything else is developed. Again, simple squares and rectangles can form windows, balconies, front doors, pavements and road markings, and these drawings are a great way to whet the creative appetite of budding city painters or aspiring architects. Draw letters with one point perspective Drawing letters by hand is a great way to get to grips with one point perspective Ever wanted to draw your name in 3D? Well now, with the one point perspective under your belt, you can! Drawing block letters is actually really straightforward, but involves perhaps a little more preparation because you need to set out the letters first. To do this by hand, which is a great way to learn, get some graph paper and mark out the forms of the letters. Then bring lines from the corner of each letter through the vanishing point, and draw a horizontal line where you’d like the letters to end. Curves should be done by hand using the graph paper to achieve the correct proportion. Using colour can make the letters stand out more, so give this a go once you’re happy with them. You can also try to write your name using one point perspective. This exercise is great for graphic designers wanting to get back to basics with typography, and is often how typographers thrash out designs for fonts. Read more: Top speed painting tips (that work for speed drawing too) 20 free ebooks for designers and artists Lino printmaking: an introduction View the full article

If anyone knows how to promote a product, it's Apple. Nowadays the tech giant's advertising is famous for its stripped back and straightforward aesthetic, but how would its products look if they were released a couple of decades earlier? That's what these spoof ads for the iPhone imagine. These days Apple's personal device is a hit with creatives, thanks in no small part to the best iPhone apps for designers. You might even be waiting to pick up an iPhone discount with the upcoming Prime Day deals. But would the iPhone have made the same impact if it looked more like a calculator than the smartphone we know and love? To give you an idea of what an '80s and '90s iPhone would look like, illustrator and designer Future Punk has created a pair of charmingly retro ads. In them, we see an iPhone with sticky push buttons and an off-white plastic case that will make computer users of a certain age feel overcome with nostalgia. There's also a model that takes the bright and colourful iMac G3 and turns the design into a handheld device. Both iPhones are a tantalising glimpse into an alternative past, and will make you feel wistful for a time that never was. Check them out in action with the video below. We salute the level of detail that Future Punk has snuck into these videos. The VHS warp effects and overdramatic voiceover all come together brilliantly to make these adverts feel like the real deal. If you weren't around for Apple's early adverts, this promotional clip for its personal digital assistant, the Newton, will give you an idea of what might have inspired Future Punk. We couldn't help but chuckle at the monotone narrator, who points out that Newton "sends faxes, and soon, electronic mail". To get a look at the two devices without the video effects, head over to Future Punk's Instagram page, where you'll find nice, clean images of the retro iPhones. Have these iPhone concepts got you thinking that you need a new smartphone? If so, we've rounded up the best smartphones for creatives on the move. With devices in a range of shapes and sizes, you're bound to find a smartphone to suit your needs. Unlike the Newton though, they can't send faxes. Related articles: Famous internet logos get a retro makeover Is Apple ditching its 'i'? Is your design retro… or just dated? View the full article

The zine aesthetic – both visually and conceptually – is the ultimate manifestation of ripping it up and starting again, the idea that formed the core of punk culture, post-punk culture (we have Scottish post-punk purveyors Orange Juice to thank for the popularisation of the phrase), and youth culture more generally. What are zines? The word zine is simply a shortened version of magazine, or more usually, fanzine, but in its snappier, four-letter form it has far more significant connotations. 'Zine' – at least, in its origins – speaks of bedroom activism, of punk, of the dissemination of ideas that otherwise may not be circulated: those around queer sexualities perhaps, or underground music scenes, or simply fandoms so niche there isn't a hope in hell of seeing them in print-titles-proper. If you'd like to explore more examples of innovative design, check out our pick of the experimental design that's pushing boundaries. These original zine covers are a celebration of the '70s slapdash punk aesthetic The aesthetic most of us associate with zines today – a visual chaos of cut-and-paste imagery, deliberately scrappy approaches to layout, maelstroms of numerous different typefaces, strange photographic crops, hand-scrawled notations – exploded in the 1970s with the birth of punk. Vitriol and ebullience alike were expressed in print as hastily put-together pages that indulge in their underground, countercultural status; the most famous of which are Sniffin' Glue, Mark Perry's zine from 1976 to 1977, and its US peer Search and Destroy, published by V Vale between 1977 and 1979. The slapdash punk aesthetics of the 1970s made their way back to the forefront of counterculture in the 1990s – evidence of the adage of the two-decade pendulum swing of certain visual trends, referred to in the fashion industry as the '20-year rule'. As the riot grrrl scene took off, spearheaded by bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, L7 and Babes in Toyland, the trends of their '70s forebears emerged again in zines like Jigsaw, Bikini Kill, (founded by the band of the same name), and Girl Germs. The Spice Girl's successful reunion tour proves the '90s are back Though we're nearing the end of the 20-year cycling back to the '90s, it's safe to say the decade's aesthetics are well and truly back. Consider pool sliders, Ellesse, Kappa, bumbags, bare midriffs. The Spice Girls have embarked on a reunion tour (sans-Posh), and in January, Bikini Kill also announced a reformation tour – the band's first live dates in 22 years. What this '90s resurgence has meant for the world of design is significant. Today, 'authenticity' is king, and that critical youth audience is increasingly hard for agencies and brands to reach. Most of us of working age have little comprehension of the intricacies of design memes, or the nuances of Snapchat. Thus, that which has always been 'cool' – counterculture, punk, anti-establishment – creeps back into the mainstream. Triggs explores the impact of zines in her 2010 book: Fanzines The impact of 'underground' zine culture on commercial branding is nothing new. As Teal Triggs points out in her 2010 book Fanzines, in the 1990s, "it seemed that everywhere you turned faux fanzines were being published by large multinational companies. The fanzine as a graphic form was co-opted – moving from an authentic, edgy, political underground into the world above as an item now imbued with commercial hipness." She cites brands such as the Body Shop, which published the zine Full Voice as part of its 1997 ad campaign, and the Wieden+Kennedy-masterminded U Don't Stop zine for Nike in 1998. Joy in imperfections Dewar lent his DIY aesthetic to the cover art for Jessie Ware's Adore You and Overtime, and to Loyle Carner's album Waving not Drowning Rory Dewar leads the artist content creative team at Virgin EMI Records. Having studied music rather than design, he's largely self-taught and has always gravitated towards the DIY aesthetic of zines. "That's definitely my personal style if I'm given free rein," he says. "Since I wasn't trained as a designer, it was always about what you could do with what was around you. That's why my work has obscene amounts of texture and is scanned five times… I love the imperfections that creates, which you don't get from just sitting on Photoshop." Dewar's lack of formal education in design brings something different to his output, as he doesn't 'follow the rules' a traditional education instills. Aside from its use in actual zines, that DIY aesthetic is most prominent in work for music clients. "There's less having to convince them than with more corporate design projects," says Dewar. What he finds interesting about the resurgence in zine-style aesthetics is that today, it's likely inspired by things we see online rather than physical artefacts. "When I was younger, I was always making my own zines and I loved that we had loads of issues of The Face lying around the house, but I really got into zine culture through Tumblr – a digital thing emulating a printed thing." Part of the resurgence of physical formats, Dewar reckons, is down to social media trickery. "When you have graphic design with crisp edges perfectly aligned, Instagram and Facebook know they're digitally created and lessen the reach. But if I, say, printed off tour dates and photographed it, there's more engagement. That's dictating how some design is being created." The new indie mag scene Mushpit is one of the independent mags that seems undeterred by the struggle of the print industry Where the 'zine' mindset associated with the punkish ideals of the '70s and '90s is most alive and well is in the current, apparently unstoppable rise of independent magazines. Where larger glossies and bigger publishing houses are struggling, independent mag-makers seem undeterred. Through their independence, magazines like Mushpit, Migrant Journal, Voortuin, PC Erotic and so many more share the freedoms zines thrived on: they can take not only the editorial content, direction and political leanings into their own hands, but their own design style. Chaos can reign again: why not use 10 different typefaces? Who cares if the illustrations are those usually relegated to the sort of thing found in the margins of school exercise books? The 'crazy' aesthetic of Mushpit is appealing What's interesting is where that un-design style of design is appropriated by very much pro-designers: DIYas we know it has a new sheen. The production values of yore were simply the consequence of the means available to makers: Letraset, handwriting, photocopying and mimeograph were all readily accessible. Now, even the most basic computers can present far slicker outcomes. "These days, the tools that people are using have become so sophisticated, literally anyone can make something that looks decent – InDesign shows you where to put things for equal spacing and so on," says Steve Watson, founder of magazine subscription service Stack. The ease of making something perfect, he suggests, is partly behind a number of publications emerging that are "a reaction against that; they don't want the perfect evenly spaced thing. They're trying to evoke some friction." Best free fonts for designers Where psychedelia meets punk Designs for The Social, a two-storey bar in central London, by Insect The beauty of zine style is that it can really mean anything that draws together numerous threads to create something visually exciting, and which pushes a message. As such, it's an approach that very much suits graphic designer and illustrator Luke Insect, who describes himself as "a bit of a magpie," inspired by the "original counterculture" magazines he inherited from his dad, such as Oz and International Times. "I've always been into montage and cut and paste," he says, pointing out that while psychedelic mags ostensibly had a vastly different message to their punk descendants, the aesthetic and attitude isn't all that dissimilar. "'Peace and Love' is obviously very different to 'fuck Thatcher', but if you flick through Oz magazine, there's a lot of black and white editorial, anti-establishment stuff, weird little ads, cutups, badly chopped photos. Even in psychedelic zines, that cut-and-paste aesthetic is there, alongside the cheap printing and the technicolour, otherworldly covers." Insect's metallic screenprint, Helter Skelter He's excited by the resurgence in zines as a platform for creatives to get their work out into the world. "When we were setting up [illustration studio] Insect in the '90s, it was more about coffee table books. A couple of years ago we saw the rise of things like Risograph zines; suddenly we could have all these amazing things that cost £8 rather than spending £40 on a book." A callback to the early '80s When Haro Met Sally is Insect's music and art project based on skate culture zines Insect is working on a zine for electronic music artist Damon Baxter [aka Deadly Avenger], which references post-punk and new wave zines of the late '70s. The piece is a follow-up to last year's When Haro Met Sally, a music and art project that comprised posters, cassettes and a record that boasted an aesthetic drawing on "California, hazy skate culture zines," says Insect. The new piece will be "colder and more UK-focused," with an insert in the form of a "fanzine that looks like it's from 1981." Aside from the modern availability of more sophisticated, digital production means, Watson reckons the move towards a more obtuse, self-aware and ultimately fun style is also a reaction to the wave of calm, polished magazines that arrived with the likes of Kinfolk and Cereal in the early 2010s. While these were imbued with a sleek sense of pared-back sophistication, a certain maximalism and devil-may-care attitude to both tone of voice and visual language now abounds. "People are trying to get away from the very minimalist, controlled, perfect independent mag aesthetic," he says. "You see these currents with everything, so maybe that's what people like Mushpit are responding to. That's how trends, and then counter trends, emerge. Now, people don't want that tidiness – they want to introduce more friction and craziness." Is the rebirth of the zine a reaction against the calm, polished vibe of magazines like Cereal? Dewar agrees: "There was a period when everything on social was perfect and Photoshopped. Now we want to see unfiltered messiness – the shit food people eat as well as the nice stuff. We want to know that people are working hard, and doing things themselves when it comes to artwork." Not only are today's designers looking to printed zine cultures, but to a certain, very '90s-looking desktop publishing style: lurid colours, layouts peppered with clip-art-like graphics, and multifarious system typefaces. "We're seeing people deliberately making stuff that looks like it was created on Windows 98 or something, and people are doing that very well," says Watson. "That style is having a bit of a moment." Definition of freedom PC Erotic is a zine exploring the confluence of sex and technology Indeed, the word 'zine' has long transcended its original signifier as a piece of strictly printed matter. For LA-based designer and art director Sam Jayne, the aesthetic is "about freedom within a defined space," he says. "That space could be defined by the limitations in printing, software, technical knowledge, colour, etc, and then freedom to communicate your thoughts in whatever way you, the producer, chooses." One of the main exponents cited as embodying this 'crazier' aesthetic is Mushpit, which is art directed by Ben Freeman. Freeman, who worked at Vice in its early days and is the founder and creative director of Ditto Press (among a ludicrous amount of other projects), published and designed his first zine when he was aged just 12 in 1990. The fonts and clip art used in PC Erotic are the same as would have been used in 2001 Last year, he collaborated with editor Iris Luz on a new publication, PC Erotic. Billed as "the future of sex you never wanted", the magazine explores the confluence of sexuality and technology. It's playful, often hilarious, and somehow rather beautiful – quite a feat considering Freeman and Luz went for a look that directly draws on 2000s and late '90s lads' mags like Nuts. Like many DIY zines from the era, as well as their commercial counterparts, the aesthetic is based around any and every font and piece of clip art you can find on the software you have. Despite the incredibly sophisticated tools we have at our disposal to imitate a time when we didn't, such magazines align perfectly with 'traditional' zine culture, in that they exist purely because their creators wanted to put a message out into the world that wasn't there before. "There often isn't a commercial background, they don't exist for the person making them to make money, but because there's a set of ideas they want to communicate," says Watson. 'Selling out' Counterculture found in zines is often too shocking for the mainstream While the zine design style is undoubtedly one that best lends itself to cultural clients – namely music – Insect points out that aesthetics birthed in counterculture – sound, fashion and editorial – so often "drip feed" as "watered down" versions into more commercial applications, such as advertising campaigns or high-street brand T-shirts. The notion of 'zines' however, is not just a graphic language or aesthetic, but an attitude. Zines are about self-expression, and authenticity of voice – an opportunity to speak openly and frankly about issues that may otherwise be muted or deemed too thorny, such as politics or identity or non-conforming sexuality. As such, zines themselves are analogous to a certain youth cultural spirit: they enable empowerment through dissemination of information. PC Erotic is able to talk about more controversial subjects because its only answerable to one person: founder Iris Luz The fact that zines were often created, edited, written and designed by one person is crucial: there's no one to answer to, opening the floodgates for experimentation away from hovering design directors and editorial censorship. It's that aspect, perhaps, that's lost in zine style's commercial manifestations, where such a voice becomes simply a way to market a brand or product. If a zine's 'authenticity' lies in, as Triggs puts it, an authorial voice "where the personal is political and not beholden to global corporations," then it's interesting to consider that commercial brands or publications (which must pay heed to advertisers, a broad readership, and so on) aping zine style are inherently forgoing these tenets. Zine style, we could say, has since been mimicked to the effect of that ultimate antithesis to all things punk and youth culture – 'selling out'. This article was originally published in issue 292 of Computer Arts, the world's best-selling design magazine. Buy issue 292 or subscribe to Computer Arts. Read more: The best free graphic design software 11 of the biggest graphic design trends for 2019 15 top typography resources View the full article

How companies can identify their own insecure data, remediate data breaches and proactively secure data against future attacks. View the full article

A cross-site scripting vulnerability in WordPress plugin WP Statistics could have enabled full website takeover. View the full article

Web design has come a long way over the years, but this doesn't mean that it's perfect. There are still plenty of user interface issues that bug people when they try to fill out a form or sign up to an agreement. And it's these clunky UI headaches that get brilliantly called out in this parody site, User Inyerface. We've already looked at what you should do when designing an online page with our guide to the perfect website layout. But if you're looking for something a little sillier, User Inyerface is an entertaining alternative that demonstrates the frustrating consequences of bad UI (you can also see our post on painful UI fails). Created by Belgian digital product agency Bagaar, the disgustingly designed User Inyerface challenges visitors to complete a sign up form as quickly as possible. If you've ever filled in your details to get registered on a website, the questions will look familiar. However it's never been more difficult to submit your name, contact email and date of birth. That's because User Inyerface bends over backwards to make the process as irritating and tricky as possible. Data fields require you to delete content before you type in your details, reCAPTCHA tests use vague and confusing language, and an intermittent pop up with a confusing button layout will pester you at every turn. Weirdly, once you've got your head around what it's doing User Inyerface becomes a fun exercise in frustration. Just when you think it can't get any more difficult, it'll pull a confusing button or age slider out of the bag. And for web designers, the site will leave them wondering if they're guilty of any of its UI design sins. If you power through to the end and complete the forms, you'll be greeted by a GIF of Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air doing a dorky dance. There's also a link through to the Bagaar job page, which makes us wonder if User Inyerface is some kind of filtration process for a vacancy. (See our design jobs page if you are looking for a new design role.) Either way, we managed to complete User Inyerface in a tortuous five minutes and fifteen seconds. Can you do any better? Related articles: Top UI trends for 2019 Create cool UI animations with CSS 20 best UI design tools View the full article

Doodling a penis is something lots of people did at school, probably in the margins of an exercise book as they killed time in a boring lesson. But in the latest project from interactive design studio, Moniker, drawing the male member has become a way to rebel against automated censorship systems used by the likes of Google. If you've been amazed by the creations in our round up of the best doodle art and you want to have a sketch, this project is the perfect opportunity for artists of every level to put their skills to good use. Created by Amsterdam-based studio Moniker with support from Mozilla, Do Not Draw A Penis is a witty drawing tool that kicks back against Google's open-sourced Quickdraw data set. That's because while the search engine's self-described "world's largest doodling data set" contains lots of family friendly sketches, there's not a single penis to be found. "This made us at Moniker think about the moral reality big tech companies are imposing on our global community and that most people willingly accept this," says the studio on the Do Not Draw A Penis project page. To combat this censorship, Do Not Draw A Penis has been collecting phallic doodles from rebellious users. When you head over to site, you'll be presented with a blank canvas just waiting for you to doodle a masterpiece with the pencil tool. A soothing HAL 9000-sounding AI moderator will narrate your sketches and provide motivational support. If you draw, say, a house, the voice might encourage you by saying it's full of character. But when you decide to ignore the site's name and draw a penis, a warning alert will flash up on screen and the eraser tool will automatically leap into action to scrub out the offending doodle. The AI moderator even becomes more stern and chillingly observes, "we assume this was a mistake, sorry," as it rubs out your sketch. It's a funny and effective way to highlight how site's can control what they deem to be inappropriate, and so far the Do Not Draw A Penis project has collected more than ten thousand penis doodles. Perfect for cleaning up spillages Moniker has even compiled the drawings in a data set that's formatted in the same way as Google's Quickdraw. If you want to take a look at this sketchy sausage fest, you can download it from this Github repository. And if you want to support this project even further, you can order a tea towel decorated with 5,000 unique penis doodles from Moniker's webshop. Related articles: Google launches free drawing app 8 Google Chrome extensions to make your life easier 5 ways to improve your digital art skills View the full article

Design that resonates with an audience is about more than clever copy and well-crafted photography. An intuitive website goes deeper than thoughtful information architecture guiding users toward their destination. Peeling back the layers will bring you to a core principle in design education: the decisive selection of colour. The validity of colour psychology and colour theory as a marketing strategy is an often-debated topic because we each have different preferences. Your favourite colour may be blue. Or it may be orange. Or purple. Red? You get the point. But couldn’t that suggestion also relate to any design methodology? When designing a website, are you trying to design it for one person or are you trying to connect with a generalised audience that is representative of your ideal customer? The base of successful design requires you to remove the bias of an individual and step back to see how it affects a larger audience. Design around audience expectations When it comes to selecting the 'best' colour for a brand, research has found that predicting consumer sentiment toward the relevance of a colour and a brand is more important than the colour selection itself. For example, when thinking of health, many people correlate that to the colour green. If a new health initiative for a large organisation or food product decided to brand themselves with bright red, something would feel off about that choice. We may not always consciously realise why it feels that way but behind the scenes that feeling is our brain's way of filtering through what aligns with past experiences that were learned or conditioned. This is even more apparent in colour choices. Much like in UX, it's important to consider how jarring things that don't match user expectations can be. In 2003, Joe Hallock wrote an undergraduate paper on colour assignment. He surveyed a sample size of 232 people and was able to distil core colour associations by gender and age. For example, he was able to determine that the emotional resonance of trust correlated mostly to blue (34 per cent of all survey participants). Joe Hallock's research was launched on a website Again, whether you personally feel blue best represents trust or not isn't the focus. There were plenty of others that felt white (21 per cent) or green (11 per cent) conveyed trust. When designing for larger audiences or market segments, we want to assess the ideal customer over anyone else's personal bias. If you are Microsoft and you'd like to position Bing in the marketplace to imply trust, you look at it as a numbers game. Internet Live Stats suggests there are over 3.5 billion searches per day on Google; it has a market share of about 93 per cent of all searches. If Microsoft is looking to gain more of a market share, a focal point of that effort may be establishing trust through design and branding. According to a recent survey facilitated by SurveyMonkey, 65 per cent of all participants said that trust influences either a lot or a great deal in their decision making when supporting a brand. If blue represents trust in 34 per cent of that (1.19 billion) audience, that’s a large segment of people over white (735 million) or green (385 million). Percentages on a graph can be misleading until you apply the context of what they really represent. Building trust with the colour blue is often used with businesses that carry out transactions using personal or financial information. It’s why you see banks and social media rely on blue as a primary colour in their branding. Leveraging small subconscious triggers, like using blue in branding, can help new customers connect quickly. It's not magic but meeting the expectation of an audience will prevent their brain from firing off a warning signal that something isn’t quite right. Buying a few extra seconds to solidify sentiment toward your brand is highly valuable. Know the financial power of a single colour Bing’s three top colours are white, grey and blue. The top two are neutral, meaning anything blue pulls the user’s primary attention toward it Did you know that 84.7 per cent of a customer's purchasing decision is influenced by colour usage? Selecting the right colour can have a large impact in revenue and conversions. When Microsoft was designing what would eventually become Bing, its design team explored a large variation of colours to represent links. In 2010, Bing's user experience manager Paul Ray gave a presentation at MIX10, a long-gone Microsoft conference. He discussed the level of multivariate testing done on the factors of colours and typography – among others – and the impact they had on revenue, return rate, time to first click and more. Microsoft's testing was so granular that it included multiple shades of blue for the link colour. It found that a specific colour blue (#0044CC) drove an estimated $80m to $100m dollars a year more than the lighter blue that was originally used. This shade of blue is special. It goes beyond the colour psychology 101 understanding of blue being a representation of trust. What's fascinating is that this particular shade of blue uses the golden ratio mathematically. The testing done by Microsoft for Bing is a masterclass in colour psychology The golden ratio – closely tied to the Fibonacci sequence – is best known as the rule of thirds. It's used in photography to frame a composition by dividing the image into three equal vertical rectangles and three equal horizontal rectangles. This is something designers do innately as our brains are conditioned to perceive value in compositions that align to that ratio. So how does this golden rule of thirds factor into a website Hex code for Bing’s blue? Hold on. We’re almost there. Hex codes represent the red, green and blue markers of a pixel. The first two numbers of a hex code determine the value of red, the second two the green, and the final two blue. Bing's blue is #0044CC. Converting that to a standard RGB colour spectrum results in: Red: 0, Green: 68, Blue: 204. Still with me? What do you get when you divide the blue value by the green? Exactly three. Paul Ray’s presentation defined Bing’s shade of blue as a perfect mathematical blue. Keep in mind your design context It’s important to note that the perfect blue doesn’t increase conversions by itself, much in the way that having a red button doesn't magically generate more sales. Selecting a single colour for an element of your design is a portion of the collective design psychology. As with user experience, colour theory is best understood in context. Bing's blue stands out because it's paired with a large percentage of neutral colours. Eighty-six per cent of the 'above the fold' search results on Bing are neutral according to a study done by UX Triggers (UXT). UXT is a colour psychology analysis tool that breaks down each pixel of an image to determine the percentage of colour use in relation to other colours and how that context impacts the perception of different genders and age groups in terms of factors such as trust and quality. Using a tool such as UX Triggers will help you break down the colour psychology of your product In the study, neutral colours (predominantly white with 67 per cent of the image) intensifies the focus on secondary non-neutral colours. In this case, blue was the most prevalent colour used at 5 per cent of the screen. The overall design focuses heavily on cool colours (91 per cent). Cool colours tend to evoke a more calm or tranquil mood. Which is important when looking at the context of the design itself. Search results pages contain a massive amount of information. Each page only has ten total results but includes hundreds of words describing each page, the website URL, the page title and additional sidebar callout information that may be pertinent to the user. It’s a lot to consume when most users only spend between 4.39s and 8.64s on the first page of a search engine. This is why colour selection plays such a crucial role in user experience and design overall. It’s not about the colour blue or red: it’s actually about all of the colours surrounding it. Bing’s three top colours are white (67 per cent), grey (19 per cent) and blue (5 per cent). The top two are neutral, as already discussed. Because of this, anything blue pulls the user’s primary attention toward it. When you factor in that the blue text links are also larger than the secondary description text (20px for the enlarged links versus 13px for body copy), it creates tunnel vision and enables users to focus on the page titles, which provide the most value on the page. Our brains quantify what we perceive as ideal subconsciously All other content becomes secondary by design. Oh, and guess what: the size of the enlarged blue link text (20px) is mathematically perfect in relation to the body text (13px). The blue text is 65 per cent the size of the body copy – which is only 1 per cent away from a perfect golden ratio. That’s not to say that designers purposely create mathematical fractions or equations to drive their design. The takeaway from this is that our brains quantify what we perceive as ideal subconsciously. It just so happens that we can define that with some maths after the fact. It’s like design science. Just because we can add comprehension to something that exists with maths doesn’t mean that it exists purely because someone used maths to make it that way. Maths is a language and it’s often overlooked in design or colour theory because some designers can innately make those connections. Influence customers with colour and texture It’s important to understand the purpose of design before doing any actual design work. Strange, right? You need to ask questions like: how does it relate to the business goals? How does it relate to the customer’s expectations? From a website perspective, colour choice won’t necessarily slow down a visitor and encourage them to spend more time on the page. That’s more of a user experience, product value and market messaging topic. What colour can do is help establish your place in the ecosystem. Last year Slack redesigned its website and featured wonderfully textured illustrations and thoughtful colour usage. It helped it stand out in a sea of overly corporate-style SaaS websites vying for attention. The result was professional yet playful, which spoke to its core market. When Slack overhauled its brand identity, it did such a good job that other companies soon copied its look But then everyone copied it. The same font style. The same illustration style. The same colour scheme. Slack’s brand style became a template for everyone else. No one stood out any more. Not because the product was the same but because the overall collective design experience was the same. That works well for organisations looking to establish themselves but it’s counterproductive for industry leaders because these are two different business models with two different use cases. You may be asking: how do business goals relate to colour usage and design decisions? Did you know that the dining areas of fast food restaurants were traditionally painted in bright colours, like red and yellow, because it created a sense of action or unrest in patrons? Fast food generates revenue from being fast and convenient. If patrons take their time while eating, it impedes the table turnover and slows the amount of product the restaurant can sell in a day. They were focused on the potential revenue and not the customer experience. This trend has begun to shift in the last few years. They’ve started using neutral colours, natural design elements like wood and softer lighting. It’s less abrasive and more comforting. Market expectation has dictated that families want to sit down and enjoy a meal, even if done on a budget and relatively quickly. Working with your customer is necessary for long-term success. Influencing behaviour should be done with restraint and care. It’s not always about driving customers into a sales funnel. Sometimes the most proactive design decision is slowing down. This article was originally published in net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. You can subscribe to net here. Related articles: Top UI trends for 2019 5 tips for understanding colour theory A short lesson on colour theory View the full article

After hours of debate from the world-class judging panel, we can now reveal the full list of shortlisted projects for 2019's Brand Impact Awards. Scroll down to see the 60 projects, from 27 different agencies. Brought to you by Computer Arts and Creative Bloq, the Brand Impact Awards reward the very best branding from around the world, and the scheme's rich heritage of past winners represents the cream of the global branding industry. This year, the Brand Impact Awards received a record number of entries – a grand total of 195 projects. The winning and highly commended projects will be revealed at the sixth annual Brand Impact Awards ceremony at the Ham Yard Hotel, London, on Wednesday 11 September. Early bird prices are valid until 19 July, so book your tickets now to join the world's top agencies and discover this year's winners. Book your Brand Impact Awards tickets Being shortlisted for the Brand Impact Awards is an accolade in itself. Standards are unfalteringly high, and if judges felt that none of the projects submitted in a category met the criteria, that category was cut altogether. Those criteria are: A strong, compelling concept that's appropriate for the client Beautiful and consistent execution across two or more brand touchpoints Branding that stands head and shoulders above the rest of its market sector Even being the only agency shortlisted in a category does not necessarily mean taking home a coveted BIA trophy on the night. So without further ado, in alphabetical order, here are the 27 agencies that have made the shortlist in the Brand Impact Awards 2019... Alphabetical Foyers Lodge by Alphabetical Project: Foyers Lodge Shortlisted: Transport & Travel B&W Studio Mandela and Me by B&W Studio Project: Mandela and Me Shortlisted: Culture Bond & Coyne No Fuss Fundraising by Bond & Coyne Project: No Fuss Fundraising Shortlisted: Not-for-profit DixonBaxi All 4 by DixonBaxi Project: All 4 Shortlisted: Entertainment FOX Sports Netherlands by DixonBaxi Project: FOX Sports Netherlands Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure GBH. London Le Collectionneur by GBH. London Project: Le Collectionneur Shortlisted: Bars & Restaurants Brach Hotel by GBH. London Project: Brach Hotel Shortlisted: Transport & Travel The_Modern Hotel by GBH. London Project: The_Modern Hotel Shortlisted: Transport & Travel Hat-trick Design The Great War Centenary by Hat-trick Design Project: The Great War Centenary Shortlisted: Public Sector Here Design Deliciously Ella by Here Design Project: Deliciously Ella Shortlisted: FMCG An Anarchy of Chillies by Here Design Project: An Anarchy of Chillies Shortlisted: Publishing Simple by Here Design Project: Simple Shortlisted: Publishing The Fife Arms by Here Design Project: The Fife Arms Shortlisted: Transport & Travel Jack Renwick Studio Monument by Jack Renwick Studio Project: Monument Shortlisted: Professional Services Johnson Banks Picture The News by Johnson Banks Project: Picture The News Shortlisted: Self-Branding Landor Kellogg's by Landor Project: Kellogg's Shortlisted: FMCG Magpie Studio Super Lyan by Magpie Studio Project: Super Lyan Shortlisted: Bars & Restaurants MOO Print Ltd MOO Handshake Don'ts by MOO Print Ltd Project: MOO Handshake Don'ts Shortlisted: Professional Services Mr B & Friends Bristol City Football Club by Mr B & Friends Project: Bristol City Football Club Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure Music Christie Proton Beam Therapy Centre by Music Project: Christie Proton Beam Therapy Centre Shortlisted: Not-for-profit NB Studio Petit Pli by NB Studio Project: Petit Pli Shortlisted: Fashion ANNA by NB Studio Project: ANNA Shortlisted: Financial Services A Flag for Bankside by NB Studio Project: A Flag for Bankside Shortlisted: Not-for-profit The Drum by NB Studio Project: The Drum Shortlisted: Publishing Journeysmiths by NB Studio Project: Journeysmiths Shortlisted: Transport & Travel Nude Brand Creation The Surrey Copper Distillery by Nude Brand Creation Project: The Surrey Copper Distillery Shortlisted: Wine, Beer & Spirits Onwards Agency Manual by Onwards Agency Project: Manual Shortlisted: Pharmaceuticals & Toiletries Pearlfisher Jacob's by Pearlfisher Project: Jacob's Shortlisted: FMCG YQ by Yoplait by Pearlfisher Project: YQ by Yoplait Shortlisted: FMCG Rose Fresh Awards by Rose Project: Fresh Awards Shortlisted: Artisan Remembering D-Day at Bletchley Park by Rose Project: Remembering D-Day at Bletchley Park Shortlisted: Culture 10bet by Rose Project: 10bet Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure Sennep Alphaputt by Sennep Project: Alphaputt Shortlisted: Self-Branding SomeOne The Pack Is Back by SomeOne Project: The Pack Is Back Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure Studio Sutherl& St Albans Museum + Gallery by Studio Sutherl& Project: St Albans Museum + Gallery Shortlisted: Culture Superunion Not Coffee Co. by Superunion Project: Not Coffee Co. Shortlisted: Bars & Restaurants BBC Two by Superunion Project: BBC Two Shortlisted: for Culture, Entertainment and Public Sector London Symphony Orchestra 2019/20 by Superunion Project: London Symphony Orchestra 2019/20 Shortlisted: both Culture and Entertainment ESL by Superunion Project: ESL Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure Level destination posters by Superunion Project: Level destination posters Shortlisted: Transport & Travel Equinor by Superunion Project: Equinor Shortlisted: Utilities The Hangry Duck by Superunion Project: The Hangry Duck Shortlisted: Wine, Beer & Spirits Taxi Studio Carlsberg by Taxi Studio Project: Carlsberg Shortlisted: FMCG and Wine, Beer & Spirits Creative Discomforts by Taxi Studio Project: Creative Discomforts Shortlisted: Self-Branding Texture Combat Stress magazine by Texture Project: Combat Stress magazine Shortlisted: Not-for-profit Parkinson's UK by Texture Project: Parkinson's UK Shortlisted: Not-for-profit Trademark.com by Texture Project: Trademark.com Shortlisted: Professional Services The Clearing Celebrity Fitness by The Clearing Project: Celebrity Fitness Shortlisted: Sports & Leisure Turner Duckworth McDonald's by Turner Duckworth Project: McDonald's Shortlisted: Bars & Restaurants Tim Hortons by Turner Duckworth Project: Tim Hortons Shortlisted: Bars & Restaurants Medivet by Turner Duckworth Project: Medivet Shortlisted: Professional Services Tillamook by Turner Duckworth Project: Tillamook Shortlisted: FMCG Equal Justice Initiative by Turner Duckworth Project: Equal Justice Initiative Shortlisted: Not-for-profit VBAT/Superunion Amsteldok by VBAT/Superunion Project: Amsteldok Shortlisted: Property Buy your Brand Impact Awards tickets now! Tickets include drinks reception, canapés and bowl food, and of course a chance to toast your success or drown your sorrows at the BIA after-party. Buy early-bird tickets (until 19 July) Seats: £105 + VAT Standard tickets Seats: £115 + VAT A group discount of 10% per ticket is available for five or more tickets purchased at the same time. Good luck to all the shortlisted agencies! Related articles: 10 logos we never want to see change Top 10 fictional brands from film and TV Killer examples of illustrated ad campaigns View the full article

Launched just a few short weeks ago with a fresh new format, Generate CSS is a concentrated conference offering attendees talks and tuition from some of the brightest names in CSS. While we’ve so far kept the details under wraps, we’re excited to be able to finally share some of the fantastic speakers joining us at Generate CSS at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, London on 26 September 2019. Natalie Weizenbaum Having worked on Sass since before its first release in 2006, Natalie Weizenbaum is something of a CSS superstar. Not only has she lead the development of the language and its reference implementation since its inception, but in her current role at Google, she divides her time between working on Sass and leading the company’s CSS infrastructure team. Sass has now become one of the most widely recognised and used tools in CSS developers’ repertoires. But with many of its initial functions – such as selector nesting, browser prefixing and variables – increasingly picked up by PostCSS or even rendered unnecessary by developments in browser capabilities, why is Sass still a mainstay for CSS devs? And why is Google embracing it for an increasing number of its products? In her keynote ‘Sass in a PostCSS World’, Weizenbaum will explore the new role Sass is playing in CSS development and how you can integrate it with PostCSS to take care of all of your styling needs. Additionally, she’ll be covering the new Sass module system that makes sharing styles a breeze. Michelle Barker A front end developer with a love for CSS, Michelle Barker spends her days polishing UX for mobile-ordering startup Ordoo and her nights tinkering with CSS and documenting her experiments on her blog CSS {In Real Life}. She also writes for publications such as CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine and is a Mozilla Tech Speaker. In her talk, 'A Guide to Debugging CSS Grid’, Barker will run you through how to handle the powerful layout tool when things go wrong. Talking through examples of some common issues people face and breaking down the CSS Grid specs into more manageable chunks, she will help you understand what’s happening when Grid goes wrong. You'll be able to get your grids working in unison with other layout techniques and build flexible but foolproof designs. With such fantastic speakers already confirmed and the remaining lineup to be announced imminently, demand for Generate CSS is building. So if you want to secure your place at the London conference on 26 September 2019 – particularly at our wallet-friendly super-early bird price of £149 + VAT – make sure you buy your ticket now. Generate CSS, the conference for web designers, takes place at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, London on 26 September 2019. SAVE £100 with a Super Early Bird Pass! Only £149+VAT when you book before 5pm on 15 July 2019. Related articles: Generate CSS is coming to London! How to code smart text effects with CSS Has CSS finally come of age? View the full article

Planning a wedding should be one of the happiest times of your life. But let’s be honest, it can also be pretty challenging. There are so many hundreds of tasks that need doing, preferably yesterday, and you don’t want to rush any one of them. After all, it’s not any wedding: it’s your wedding, and you want it to be perfect. When it comes to wedding stationery, for example, you want to create original designs that are as unique as your relationship, which you can look back on fondly in your scrapbook for years to come. But how do you find time to craft the perfect visuals when you’re knee-deep in sorting out everything from the venue to the transport, the gift list to hotel bookings for out-of-towners? Well here’s a great way to jump-start your creativity and save a ton of time. Adobe Stock has an amazing range of top quality templates for your wedding designs that are fully customisable within Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC. So rather than spend time reinventing the wheel, why not let these professionally designed templates take the strain, and get you started with your invites, menu designs and more? Easy to use Because Adobe Stock is fully integrated into the Creative Cloud, you can access these templates directly within Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Premiere Pro, making them super-easy to use. If you love the template as it is, you can just edit the text and you’re done. Alternatively, if you’d rather use it as a building block for your own bespoke design, you can customise everything from fonts to colours until it’s exactly what you’re looking for. You can also pull other Adobe Stock assets, such as photos, illustrations and graphics, into your designs, all without ever leaving Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Experiment with watermarked versions of all of these for free until you're happy. (You’ll find a full guide to using Adobe Stock with CC here.) In short, it’s crazy to waste time crafted your wedding designs from scratch when Adobe Stock makes it so easy to get started! Read on to discover five ways Adobe Stock could be the secret sauce in your wedding planning... 01. Wedding invitation templates By Roverto Castillo The most important item in your wedding stationery is the invitation, and every couple wants it to be special. So you’ll be pleased to know there are a ton of beautiful, professionally designed wedding invitation templates available from Adobe Stock. Covering a wide range of styles, from vintage and ornate to modern and funky, you’re sure to find a template that’s right for you, whether you’re working in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. To see a large version of each one, just hover over the image and click on the ‘eye’ icon that pops up. Once you've chosen your favourite, you can select any of the individual layers within your Adobe CC app, and customise it to your heart's content. It's a great way to create your perfect invitation in a way that's quick, easy and fuss-free. 02. Save the date templates by rawpixel At the very start of your wedding planning, when you’re still waiting to confirm details such as the venue and the start time, you still want to get the word out to your guests before they get booked up. Okay, so you could text or email them, but let’s face it, not everyone’s as organised as you. And a beautifully designed ‘Save the Date’ message, which they can place on their mantelpiece or stick to the fridge, is going to be more effective in reminding them not to make other plans for that day. Happily, there are some gorgeous ‘Save the Date’ template designs on Adobe Stock, some available on their own and others as part of a broader wedding invite set. So don’t wait around! Find the one that’s right for you, customise it accordingly, and get your designs printed and mailed out pronto. Then sit back, safe in the knowledge that none of your loved ones will miss out on your special day. 03. Thank-you templates By Wavebreak Media It takes a lot of people to put on the perfect wedding, and those people need thanking properly, whether they're volunteer helpers, service providers or just each and every guest who come. Hence the well-established tradition of the post-wedding thank-you card... and Adobe Stock has you covered here as well. There's a great selection of colourful and attractive thank-you template designs to choose from, for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. And like all Adobe Stock templates, each is fully customisable, so you can really make your thank-you card personal and unique. 04. Menu design templates By Wavebreak Media For a standard wedding, the venue will usually provide menus as part of your catering package. But you might find them a little, well, boring. So if you prefer the notion of accenting each place setting with a special, personalised touch, why not consider crafting your own menu designs? After all, Adobe Stock has a number of inspired wedding menu design templates to get you started. Some are provided as single templates, others as part of a set, and there are templates for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. As with all Adobe Stock assets, you can experiment with watermarked versions for free; so there's nothing stopping you from checking out the menu templates, seeing what visual ideas they spark, and having a play around with them. 05. Motion design templates by Wavebreak Media Nowadays, in the runup to their wedding, many couples like to craft a personalised video or slideshow of their history together. It's a great way of adding a special touch to the big day when, for example, projected against the wall of the dancefloor during the evening do,. And these days, you don't have to be hire a trained professional to make it. It's perfectly possible to create something pretty slick yourself using a tool like Adobe Premiere Pro. You may need some help, however, when it comes to giving your video or slideshow some nice looking titles and captions. That's something Adobe Stock can help you with too. There are well over a hundred motion design templates that are specially themed for wedding-related videos. These are easy to access, directly within Premiere Pro, and are fully customisable too. Featuring everything from traditional script to modern hipster styles, there's an amazing choice of titles to help bring your video to the next level and make it a real talking point on the big day. View the full article