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Originality in design is a thorny subject. While direct, intentional rip-offs are rightly condemned by the international creative community – as well as falling foul of trademark law, of course – it's not always that clear cut. As Oscar Wilde reportedly once said, tongue firmly in cheek: “Talent borrows, genius steals." But regardless of whether you steal deliberately, unless your logo design is particularly unusual, the chances are that someone, somewhere will have had a similar basic idea. This is especially true when it comes to simple shapes, monograms, and visual metaphors. When similar logos overlap sectors, however tenuously, that's often when lawyers get involved The skill in creating an original logo design comes in finding that differentiator – from a simple but clever flourish, to building a rich brand world in which the logo is just one small part. The other key consideration is whether the similar logos occupy the same sector – W+K's Formula 1 logo famously fell foul of compression tights manufacturer 3M in 2018 because F1 also produces clothing, and the logos (above) were too similar to ignore. Read on to discover eight more pairs of logos that bear striking similarities to each other... so much so that in some cases, lawyers got involved. 01. Airbnb vs Azuma Drive-In Designed in 1975, the logo for Japanese drive-in Azuma (left) bears remarkable similarities to Airbnb's Bélo When DesignStudio announced its new Bélo symbol for Airbnb in 2014, a symbol of "coming together" and "belonging anywhere", the internet went wild – comparing it to everything from genitalia to Peter Griffin's chin. But it also attracted comparisons with other logos, from Habitat to Monocle magazine and, as Erik Spiekermann pointed out on Twitter at the time, lesser-known brands Automation Anywhere (which has since rebranded) and Network. But look even further back, and you'll find an even more remarkably similar symbol employed by a Japanese drive-in called Azuma, designed in 1975. Did DesignStudio rip off Azuma? We seriously doubt it – the symbol, drawn with a single flowing line, is just too satisfyingly simple not to have been independently created before. 02. National Film Board vs Virtual Global Taskforce How many ways can you draw an eye with legs? Sometimes the same visual metaphor crops up in very different sectors When it comes to visual metaphors, however smart, there's always a chance someone else will have thought of it – albeit with a different meaning in mind. A giant eye, combined with a stick figure so that the pupil doubles as the head, formed the National Film Board of Canada's distinctive 1969 logo. Known as 'Man Seeing', it was intended to symbolise a vision of humanity – and has since been reworked to crop in more tightly for its modern-day logo. Meanwhile, Virtual Global Taskforce – an organisation that tackles online sexual abuse of children – somehow arrived at a remarkably similar visual representation for its rather different line of business, depicting an all-seeing eye roaming the internet and watching over children. Coincidence? Well, yes. It seems so. 03. Starbucks vs Starpreya American coffee giant Starbucks lost a court battle with similar-looking South Korean brand Starpreya Next we come to a David vs Goliath-style clash of similar logos within the same sector: Seattle-born, global coffee giant Starbucks, and Elpreya, a relatively tiny South Korean company that sells coffee under the brand Starpreya – a name derived from the Norse goddess Freja. Elpreya began trading in 1999, the same year Starbucks opened its first South Korean store. Both brands featured the brand name wrapped around a green circle, and a female character in the centre, white on a black background. And more crucially, they both sold coffee. 33 graphic design books every designer should read Starbucks claimed copyright infringement, but the Korean Intellectual Property Tribunal disagreed, arguing that the marks were too dissimilar to be confused. The Tribunal's degree of impartiality is another question – but the underdog won this time. In 2011, with Lippincott's help, Starbucks later ditched its green circle and made the mermaid an even more distinctive, ownable brand asset. 04. Ubuntu vs Human Rights First These stylised depictions of people holding hands in a circle both represent collaboration, but in very different sectors Rather like the eye with legs in our second example, the remarkable similarity between these logos for dramatically different businesses can surely be put down to the universal nature of some visual metaphors. Ubuntu is an open-source software operating system, while Human Rights Foundation (hrf) does as the name suggests. Their common ground is communities working together towards a shared goal, and the simple graphic representation of a circle of people linking hands expresses that equally well in both sectors. 05. Gucci vs Chanel Fashion brands Gucci and Chanel both employ monograms based on interlocking geometric characters Monograms are common in the world of fashion logos, so it's no surprise that two big-hitting high-fashion brands have found some common ground when it comes to interlocking similarly shaped characters together. The fact that Gucci's two 'G's and Chanel's two 'C's are both based on a geometric typeface doesn't help, as you essentially end up with overlapping circles at the core of the logo. But there are notable differences: the Gs face inwards, while the Cs are back to back. Gucci employs a thinner line weight, and the logomark is also used smaller relative to the wordmark than Chanel. Gucci has had bigger concerns than Chanel in recent years, however: its nine-year legal battle with Guess over its own interpretation of interlocking Gs (in this case, four rather than two), as well as other alleged design imitations, finally came to an end in 2018 with an undisclosed agreement. 06. Beats by Dre vs Stadt Brühl Lots of designers will have put a 'b' within a circle to make a logo. It's what you do with it that counts... We'll be brief with this one. If common ground is likely to be found with monogram logos, when a business uses a single letter to represent itself it is inevitable that there'll be a coincidentally similar logo to be found in another sector. Such is the case with the logo for Beats by Dre, which fits a lowercase 'b' in the Bauhaus typeface inside a circle, to resemble headphones. Is it strikingly similar to Anton Stankowski's 1971 identity for the city of Stadt Brühl? Well, yes, but it seems like an unlikely source of inspiration to say the least. 07. Sun Microsystems vs Columbia Sportswear These logos may seem similar in structure, but the smart use of a graphic ambigram takes the Sun logo to the next level Designed by computer science professor Vaughan Pratt in the 1980s, the Sun Microsystems logo is a 'rotationally symmetrical chain ambigram' – which in layman's terms means it reads 'sun' whichever way you rotate it. On a brutally simple level, if you screw up your eyes and ignore that all-important graphic flourish, Columbia Sportswear's logomark is certainly similar. It's formed from interlocking shapes with rounded ends, rotated at the same angle, and is usually locked up with the wordmark on the left-hand-side, at the same scale. Columbia's stylised interlocking shapes symbolise a textile weave pattern, but the logo is missing the smart twist that takes Sun's logo to the next level. That twist also ensured the Sun logo stood the test of time until the company's 2010 acquisition by Oracle. 08. PayPal vs Pandora PayPal customers were confused by the similarities with the new Pandora logo, and these complaints even formed part of the proceeding court case We finish with another battle between similar logos that ended up getting the lawyers involved – and proves that the universal approach of using a single letter to represent your brand isn't necessarily safe territory after all, especially if there is more than one similarity to your logo and another brand's. When music-streaming service Pandora unveiled its logo in 2016, complete with a filled-in counter within its cyan-coloured letter 'P', PayPal wasn't happy. Its two overlapping blue Ps, both sporting filled-in counters, certainly had some striking similarities – particularly when seen small as an app icon. Indeed, as part of its 2017 court case, PayPal submitted over 100 pages worth of social media posts from users who were confused between the two apps. A settlement was agreed, and three months later a new, jazzy, multi-coloured Pandora logo was rolled out – the same outline shape with a filled-in counter, but decorated with wavy lines that added purple, red and orange to the original blue. Read more: Which logo do you wish you'd designed? Where to find logo design inspiration 20 iconic logos drawn hilariously from memory View the full article

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When you think of good ol' Blighty, then perhaps images of Big Ben, red phone boxes and the Union Flag spring to mind. And when your everyday Brit thinks of crisps, chances are they think of Walkers. As part of a rebrand, Walkers has now brought the worlds of British icons and potato snacks together to strengthen its connection with shoppers. Designed in partnership with PepsiCo and Vault49, the Walkers redesign sees the packets of its core range of flavours get a patriotic new look that packs a modern, premium feel. Unveiled yesterday, the packaging design for the crisps sees the distinctive red and yellow Walkers logo drop from the top of its bags to sit squarely in the middle. 38 standout packaging designs Surrounding the logo are playful hand-crafted illustrations that sum up modern Britain in a whimsical way. Look closely and you'll spot a pigeon wearing John Lennon-style sunglasses and a squirrel sporting a bowler hat and scampering around famous British landmarks such as the Angel of the North. Walkers crisps and Britain, together at last Cementing a connection with the British public makes sense when you consider that Walkers sells more than five times as many packs of crisps to people in the UK than its nearest rival. And for a company that makes seven million packs every day, that's a heck of a lot of crisps. "It's one of those rare brands that taps into something deeper than the feelings people usually have for companies," says Jonathan Kenyon, co-founder and executive creative director at Vault49. As if this wasn't a strong enough tie to the public, the new bags also proudly announce that Walkers crisps are made out of 100 per cent great British potatoes. It's a nice little reminder that will help bring the brand even closer to shoppers. See the new design in action below. Featuring a mix of gloss and matte finishes, the new design is intended to stand out on the shelf and outshine pretenders to the throne – including any copycat brands. But with this rebrand, Walkers will stand head and shoulders above the competition. "The eye-catching new design makes it easier for UK consumers to find their favourite crisps and will deepen the already special relationship they have with the Walkers brand," says David Marchant at PepsiCo's UK Design Centre "We feel honoured to have been asked to work with PepsiCo to keep Walkers in this enviable market position," adds Kenyon. "We've had great fun bringing the element of storytelling to life, creating a design that Britain can be proud of and excited to buy, but without losing sight of the importance of communicating the heritage and quality of such an iconic brand." Related articles: Online packaging archive is a design delight 6 times brands temporarily changed their packaging 4 top tips for successful seasonal packaging View the full article

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It's many designers' ultimate goal to become the creative director of a successful agency. Not everyone gets to achieve their dream – you need more than a great creative resume to make it as a great creative director. It takes skill, talent, top-notch management skills and plenty more besides. However, you can put yourself in a better position to achieve your goal if you pay heed to advice from those who have been there and done that. So what kind of qualities do you need to become a creative director? In this article, we've asked creative directors from leading studios for their advice on how to make it. 01. Treat every project like it's your first "My responsibility is to ensure all creative is to the high standard we set here," says Martin Widdowfield, creative director at Robot Food (the studio behind the opening image for this article). For Widdowfield, an easy way to do this is to treat every job like it's your first – with all the excitement and fear that comes with that. "Every job, big or small should be given the same energy. Complacency is the killer of good creative and spreads like wildfire if left to do so." 02. Trust your team As creative director, it's your job to look after your team and encourage them to flourish. And that means one of the most important qualities you need to have is the ability to trust others to do a good job. "It's incredibly hard, as most creative directors are creatives who have worked really hard to get to the position where they are listened to," say the Gary Holt, David Law and Simon Manchipp of SomeOne. They have all this knowledge and skills that they naturally want to pass on to their juniors – but that, the trio say, is not what a creative director is there for. "No hot young designer wants some 45-year-old droning on about photosetting and waxers. They want their ideas approved and published. The client wants the best, most exciting, progressive, and effective idea to create a monopoly for their product, service or organisation. Not something dug up from a 1980s sketchbook. Great creative directors hire really, really good people. Then let them do really, really creative work." 03. Don't run a dictatorship A major part of the creative director role is to do with mentoring your team. "I’m a firm believer that everyone has ideas and my job is to help bring them to fruition," says Widdowfield. "It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior or straight from university, everyone at Robot Food has the opportunity to put their mark on the agency and is encouraged to do so." Robot Food took inspiration from tattoo culture in this project for beauty brand Electronic Ink 04. Give good feedback "Look after your studio family and encourage them to flourish," say the SomeOne CDs. "See the good in everything they do, but be consistent in your advice. Widdowfield agrees, stressing the importance of good feedback in particular. "CDs need to be confident and decisive, yet patient enough to help nurture ideas without stressing the designer. I’ve had too many experiences in my early career, where a CD gets frustrated on an idea and doesn’t offer any form of constructive feedback to help." 05. Get your hands dirty sometimes As is common the further up you move in a design company, becoming a creative director tends to result in less time in front of Photoshop and more time managing and guiding others. "My own role still involves some hands-on design/copywriting, but very often it's about me taking the lead on a project, working with the client on the overall approach and then briefing my team to create something wonderful," says creative director Chris Jones. That means checking in on the project throughout its development, and making sure it's staying true to the brief and providing what the target audience wants. But be careful not to lose touch completely. "I believe creative directors should get their hands dirty sometimes," says Widdowfield. "It's all too easy to dictate some instructions and let the creative struggle to translate that idea on their own." 06. Be happy to be hated As a creative director, you'll be responsible for guiding artistic decisions. And to truly stand out, you'll need to be willing to take some risks. "It is far too easy to be liked; you just have to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions," say SomeOne. "Then you will gravitate towards the centre and be average. That cannot be your role." SomeOne knows the importance of pushing boundaries – such as in this work for the Natural History Museum 07. Stay true to your studio's vision While it's important to keep things fresh and push new ideas, you also need to have a clear understanding of your company's identity. "A good creative director has to have a clear understanding of their agency vision," says Widdowfield. "Without this, work is not going to deliver on the image the agency wants and in turn won’t attract the desired work in the future." 08. Know when to shut up "Whether it's clients or your own team, creative directors should spend a lot of time listening. Really listening," stresses Jones. In order to really get to the bottom of what a client's issues are, he tries to sit back and mainly listen in meetings, only speaking when he has a really good question to ask. "It should be all about the client, not the agency," he adds. "Similarly, in-house you need to take the time to listen to your team and accept that you can learn from them." SomeOne echoes Jones' advice: "Great creative directors may listen to their clients for hours. Because somewhere deep in all those spreadsheets, PowerPoints, briefs and data is the spark that they can pass on to the creative minds that will put pen to paper. They must choose that spark very, very carefully, or risk a fire that can take down the entire ship." 09. Don't let bad things happen to good ideas "The best creative directors do something entirely different," says SomeOne. "They trust talented people to do talented things. Then stop bad things happening to the work, and to the people. Often without the people even knowing it." Gary Holt, David Law and Simon Manchipp have all been creative directors of SomeOne 10. Share the love Share what you know with the wider world. It's helpful for less experienced designers, and helps strengthen the design community as a whole. "Don’t keep it to yourself and don't be paranoid about sharing your expertise, even with competitors," says Jones. "Writing blogs and speaking at conferences are both great ways of getting stuff out there and have the added benefit of helping you meet new people and sparking debate." 11. Create the right environment For creatives, the right studio environment have a big impact on the work created – everything from what's on the walls to the mood in the studio is important. "It's very difficult to define, but the perfect working environment for me is generally relaxed, with occasional bits of Victorian mill owner-style discipline thrown in to keep standards high," shares Jones. "Equally, encouraging creatives to let off a bit of steam by throwing stress balls at each other or flying the office's remote control helicopter around is just as important." 12. Keep your mind open "Be a sponge for as much culture (both high and low) as you can fill your mind with," suggest the SomeOne creative directors. "Then forget about it. It will remind you when it's needed." Many studios will specialise in one particular area, as of course, you'll need to know your particular discipline inside out. However, it's vital to be aware of what's going on in other specialisms, too. Jones works for a digital agency (you can see some of his work in the video above), but still keeps an eye on what's going on in the branding and advertising segments. As well as making sure your work is well rounded and being open to any new developments, this can help keep you inspired within your own specialism. 13. Preach "There's nothing worse than seeing a project presented by someone who doesn't really get it. Doesn't understand it, or really like it. If the person presenting doesn't believe in the work, there is no reason for the audience to care," says SomeOne. "Great creative directors pick their fights very carefully, but once they have committed to a route, they believe that it is the greatest idea on the planet. And they make a stand for that work. They protect it. They enhance its chances, co-ordinate people who could help it, channel it to concentrate it. They become evangelical. They believe. You, as the designer, may never see any of that in the studio – but they will be out there fighting the good fight for a cause they passionately believe in: a great idea." 14. Don't get bogged down While it's pressurised at times, the creative industry can be a wonderful place to work – and many would agree that great ideas can happen when you relax and have fun. "The best creative work comes when the mind isn’t bogged down with stress," says Widdowfield. "Yes, deadlines loom, and that concept can be a struggle to crack, but you’ve got to just put that to the side and enjoy it." Related articles: Careers advice: How to become an art director 18 things they didn't teach you at design school 9 design trends we'd like to see in 2019 View the full article

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Major fashion chain Zara has released a new logo, and incited the wrath of every designer on Twitter, thanks to some over-enthusiastic kerning . The original logo, pictured below, was an all-caps wordmark that was – we'd say – a little too spaced out for our liking. But it seems to have overcorrected the issue for its new look (above), in which the letterforms are so enthusiastically overlapped as to be barely legible. The old Zara logo was rather spaced out In defence of the new logo, we're pleased to see Zara has not joined the hoards of fashion brands stripping away personality and heritage from their logos in favour of classy but bland sans-serif wordmarks. Zara's new logo retains visual links to its original font, but has livened it up further with overlapping characters and serifs, and a new, curvy 'R'. So it's not lacking in personality, and it'll certainly stand out in a sea of increasingly similar-looking high street logos. But there isn't much else positive to say about this new logo design. Erik Spiekermann called it 'the worst piece of type I've seen in years', while others suggested it looked like it was kerned by a robot. Designers have also been quick to point out the logo's similarity to The Met's 2016 rebrand by Wolff Olins, which similarly failed to draw much praise (it was memorably compared to a typographic bus crash). What do you think of the new Zara logo? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or Facebook. Read more: A designer's guide to typography and fonts Typography trends in 2019 to look out for The best new logos of 2018 View the full article

It only feels like yesterday when I was role-playing with high school friends in fantasy worlds full of knights, wizards, barbarians and treasures hidden in dungeons. As teenagers, the most treasured possessions we owned were the RPG handbooks. Among them, the bestiary books were my first contact with the world of concept art and character design, and that’s what made me interested in pursuing a career in art. Almost everything back then was still painted traditionally in acrylics or oils. My preference for clear brush strokes and canvas or paper texture visible in print has stayed with me over the years, and for a long time I looked for a way to create the same effects in my digital paintings. Corel Painter includes a range of features to help you mimic traditional art effects What’s so beautiful about traditional art is its unpredictability. There are so many happy accidents that give traditional painting a soul. The way that every hair in your brush tip leaves an individual mark. How pigments don’t just mix, but 'sing' a magical song together. With Corel Painter 2019, I found the perfect tool to recreate some of these art techniques digitally. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can use Corel's different features to mimic oil paints. Above you can see the final version of the painting we'll be working on. Click the icon in the top right of each image to enlarge it. 01. Establish your concept and composition Consider interesting colour combinations when planning your composition The first thing to do is to work out your composition. My rough initial thumbnails are done in just few minutes – I often think in colours, seeing what combinations creates interesting harmonies. Gather reference pictures while sketching and developing the idea. I use free software PureRef to organise my photographs: I can save my collection and return to it any time. I keep it visible on my secondary monitor. You want to make sure you've fully decided on the composition, colours and details, before you start work on the final piece. Make sure the figure’s anatomy and perspective is correct and the key shapes balance nicely (for advice on this, take a look at our how to draw tutorials). 02. Create a burnt sienna underpainting This is a common step when creating traditional oil paintings This step is taken straight from the traditional oil painting process (learn more about underpainting here). Painters use it to create monochromatic value composition, by setting up a basic environment of light and shadows. I open the Mixer window in Painter and create a gradation of Burnt Sienna to black and white. I make sure that the contrast is interesting and strongest in points of interest (mainly the face). 03. Bring in colour Use Corel's Glazing brush range to add colour In traditional art, the next step would be to create thin layers of paint to colourise the monochromatic picture. This process is called glazing. Corel Painter 2019 has a new family of Glazing brushes for this very step. I set the layer mode to Colorize and apply various colours. I let some of the underpainting show through and avoid having flat shapes of the same hue or colour. This creates a mesmerising mosaic of brushstrokes. 04. Keep an eye on the big picture Having your Navigator window open enables you to keep an eye on how the image is progressing as a whole At this point 80 per cent of the image is completed. The remaining 20 per cent will take five times as long, as I polish all the details. I never stop controlling the whole picture. Even when I’m zoomed on a portion of the painting, I keep the Navigator window open (Window > Navigator or ctrl+7) on my second monitor, and constantly compare my progress across the whole image. 05. Try the Distorto brush Distorto is equivalent to Photoshop's Liquify – and it's incredibly useful In Corel Painter 2019, the Distorto brush is an alternative to Photoshop’s Liquify tool. I use this brush on a low Strength setting (around seven per cent) to correct the position of any elements that feels 'off'. You can use this tool to do anything from moving the nose slightly to the right, to aligning eyes or changing the shape of the face. You can find the Distorto brush within the F-X brush group. 06. Jump around Don't focus too long in one area, or your painting will become uneven I force myself to never work in one spot for too long. I want my picture to develop evenly. My aim is to leave some parts looking quite rough, but I make sure I have full control over the painting’s development. How it graduates from focus points to less-important areas. I use a mix of Artists’ Oils and Sargent brushes for realistic touches. 07. Use the floating colour wheel The floating colour wheel is new to Painter 2019 Painter 2019 now offers a floating colour wheel, which gives me full control over my colour choices while using the stylus. I paint directly with the colour I picked from the canvas, but only when blending. Otherwise I select a colour and suitable alternatives using the colour wheel. I change its temperature to warmer or cooler, make it brighter or darker, more or less saturated, and so on. 08. Correct values Turning the image black and white will show up any areas where it's becoming flat For a readability check, I turn the picture black and white. I notice how flat my value composition becomes when a green background and a warm skin share a similar brightness. Knowing how difficult is to print vibrant greens and cyan, I decide to darken the background. This also makes the character pop. 09. Mimic the glazing process with Multiply Add a Multiply layer to dull down darker colours The magic of digital art is all the shortcuts you can access. I stopped feeling guilty about using them long ago, knowing how much 'cheating' was applied in traditional painting. Maybe the Old Masters didn’t call it a Multiply layer, but glazing darker colours to dim down large areas of a painting is nothing new. That’s what’s I do here: use Multiply mode to darken the background. 10. Make final tweaks Play around with your settings to check you have the best version of your image I correct the contrast and colours to create the most appealing version of the picture. I have a tendency to paint at a very low contrast, so to create more visual interest I play around with different settings. To finish up, I use Equalize and Correct Colors from the Tonal Control option under the Effect tab. This article was originally published in issue 166 of ImagineFX, the world's best-selling magazine for digital artists. Buy issue 166 or subscribe. Read more: Our pick of the best graphics tablets in 2019 Create portrait art in Corel Painter The best software for digital artists in 2019 View the full article

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Performance UX is a perfect solution for those of you who work on websites that are already live. The aim of this article is to provide an introduction to performance UX and help you understand its three core pillars. I’ll delve into a bit of history and let you know where the need for performance UX initially came from and how it can get clients bought into (and understanding) UX. Lastly, I’ll show you how to produce three performance UX tactical deliverables to help map your ongoing strategy. UX (within service delivery) has been at the heart of the most successful customer-centric businesses for many years. A decade or so ago the market started taking UX seriously and the results have been exceptional, with new web design tools popping up all over the place to help measure and implement UX strategies. A study from pointsource.com found that for every $2 spent on UX-related activities, $2 to $100 was yielded in return. Right here, right now, it really doesn’t feel like those of us with a UX cap need to be backwards in coming forwards with new thinking and innovative ways of improving the experience of our clients and our clients’ customers. The digital market figures support UX as a viable solution to achieve ROI. UX has become a bread and butter service offering for agencies.. So being a UX practitioner is brilliant and all of our clients think we’re some kind of digital Dalai Lama, right? No. It certainly wasn’t this way for me, not for a long time. What is performance UX? UX, for me, isn’t something that ever finishes. It is an ongoing process, not a one-off project that has a start and end date. Within an agency, this thinking fits very nicely into a recurring (month-on-month) services model. I had long been an advocate of lean UX – it’s really the most appropriate means of delivery in a fast-paced, multi-client agency environment. My whole digital product approach was already based on iterative cycles using agile sprints, which helps to keep progress moving forward. Lastly, the part of me obsessed with clean code and optimising for search marketing needed to minimise bloat, keep things nice and streamlined as well as being future ready. Blending all these aspects together with UX tactics and strategy, it felt like I was on to something. I put together an initial program of ongoing delivery that I called ‘User Experience Optimisation’. It flopped. The results were good but prospects (more often than not) simply didn’t understand it and didn’t take it on. A month or so passed with slow progress until a wise Texan took me to one side and suggested I changed the name to ‘Performance UX’. He theorised that businesses understood performance and already wanted help in making performance better. He wasn’t wrong. The delivery program didn’t change at all. Just the name. Service growth immediately surged. So how can performance UX build on the already solid foundations established in the UX marketplace? To put it in simple terms, it just requires a slight tweak to the perspective. The three pillars of performance UX When talking about UX, we can sometimes shy away from talking about cold hard cash. In my experience, the client wants to know what UX means in terms of ROI or how long the UX project will take before they see results on their bottom line. Sometimes this can be impossible to quantify until the actual work starts. We need to move the conversation away from money and instead focus on performance, namely: technical, experiential and commercial performance. The three pillars of performance UX. These are tangible areas with the ability to benchmark and demonstrate progress. Technical performance This is all about clearing impediments and enabling your digital product to be the best it can be. You could have the best looking website on the market but if it’s slow or not utilising the latest technologies, it wouldn’t take much for it to be quickly left behind. Experiential performance This means understanding who your users are, what you want them to do on your site and being able to diagnose what they are actually doing. Commercial performance The final pillar requires you to become your client and understand their needs and the needs of the business. Knowing what each conversion, sale or interaction means to your client will help you prioritise your work and ensure you’re reporting on what’s important to them By separating the process into three core areas, you are helping the client understand that improving digital experience can be tangible – but these areas must work together to achieve the best results. Who can do performance UX? I’ve found that the best UX professionals I’ve met have a varied skillset – it’s almost a given if you’ve worked in UX for any length of time. The majority started in different areas and moved into user experience later in life. This varied experience makes an ideal performance UX campaign delivery manager. Performance UX works best when you can cover – by yourself or with a team – design, strategy, data analysis, code, project management and most importantly, excellent communication. How to run a performance UX sprint Your first performance UX sprint is about understanding and benchmarking. Understanding your client should be the first step with every new digital campaign – but that doesn’t mean it should be underrated. Hold a kick-off meeting with your client and conduct a stakeholder interview. You’ll need to interview whoever will be evaluating your work and, if you can, whoever evaluates their work. You need to learn about their business, what’s important to them and what they expect from you (this works whether you’re in-house or from an agency). These interviews are integral when it comes time to plan your strategic UX roadmap later. For those unaware, a sprint is a measure of time, and a key part of the Agile development methodology (read more about Sprints here). You set a list of tasks you believe you can achieve in your sprint and then report to your client at the end. In this example, my client has four days a month of performance UX. In this first sprint, I’ll spread two days’ worth of time over two weeks. As a recurring service this means we have at least three client touch points each month. One at the start of the first sprint, one at the end of the first (and start of the second) and one at the end of the second sprint. In this sprint we’ll deliver a technical diagnostics audit, experiential journey analysis and commercial goal review to our client. These documents will form the backlog for ongoing performance UX work. The technical diagnostics audit Technical performance essentially boils down to speed. How quickly can the user find the site (in search)? How fast is your digital product in giving the user what they want? And how accessible is it? Although speed has been used in search ranking for some time, it was focused on desktop searches. This year, Google announced page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. This now makes technical website performance more important than ever. In order to diagnose the current state of technical performance, we need to gather benchmark data. We’ll use three sources of data that are all free. You’ll want to run your client’s site through: PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix and Lighthouse. For the latter you’ll want to run all reports except the Progressive Web App one. Lighthouse runs in the browser (or in node/command line) and gives an insight into any technical performance issues To compile your findings, you should provide an executive summary of why you are conducting the audit (benchmarking) and show the scores from the three sources up front. You should ideally explain to the client what each source looks at and why you chose it. For the rest of the audit, compile the recommendations from the three tools into chapters with numbered lists of recommendations. Your chapters should be: basic site setup, speed and performance, accessibility and SEO. The chapters form themes you can use in the coming months and the numbers will enable you and the client to refer to line items during discussions. All of these elements directly affect the user and being able to talk about them is absolutely essential to being a user advocate to your client. Experiential journey analysis In order to show how we’ve improved the experience for the user, we record how users are currently using the site. We’ll do this using two industry-standard UX testing tools: Hotjar and Google Analytics. Sign up for Hotjar and get the tracking on your client’s site as soon as possible, ideally before this sprint starts. Once the code is installed, log in to Hotjar and activate Recordings – on the free plan you’ll get 100 sessions, which is more than enough. Make sure you select sessions that include clicking and scrolling and that you ensure it’s only recording sessions of over 30 seconds. Hotjar has a number of tools to help with user behaviour insight Once you’ve amassed a good few sessions, sort by the #pages column (high to low) and review what’s been recorded. You should take notes about the way users navigate through the site and the sequence of pages they take. 10 to 20 videos of three or more pages should give you a good feel of how users are moving through their journey. You should document these journeys, pulling out any information of note (users ignoring CTAs, not using the menu you thought they would, using the site search, etc). Next, within your client’s Google Analytics, navigate to the Behaviour > Site content > All pages table. Set the date range for the last three months and make sure you’re sorting by page views. What we’re going to do now is show our client how users move through the site most of the time. Take the top 10 pages for page views. For each of these click on their URL in the table. This takes you to the page level screen and the graph will only show visits for that one page. Click on the tab that says Navigation Summary, found above the graph in the top-left corner – it’s next to the one already selected that says Explorer. This navigation summary screen shows you which page users were on before the page you selected and usefully, where it was that they went afterwards. You should record this data for each of your client’s top-performing pages (10 is a good number to start with). Collate these findings in a document for your client and be sure to include a section where you note down anything of interest. You will refer to this document a lot in the coming months when justifying hypotheses or demonstrating journey improvements, for example ‘this page used to account for four per cent of visits to the demo sign up; my work on improving messaging/layout has increased this to 8 per cent’. Commercial goal review This task is exactly what it sounds like and can be somewhat painful for some less technical clients. The point of this exercise is to establish trust and to also let the client know you understand what is important to them. Review your stakeholder interviews and distil what is important for your client to measure success. Is it product sales? Brochure downloads? Phone calls? Armed with this information, you should log into your client’s Google Analytics and review their goal tracking (Admin > Goals). Note down which goals relate to what and, more importantly, note any missing goals you will need to add. Next arrange a call or meeting with your client (this is important – an email won’t do) and run through each goal. Once you’ve established what each goal does and if any need replacing or amending, suggest any new goals you need to add. For ease you should document what each goal is recording (in simple terms) for your client and then record the goals you mean to add on their behalf. It’s at this point I’d recommend learning how to deal with regular expressions (RegEx), which will help no end in dealing with complex goal tracking; regular expressions 101 is an excellent debugging tool once you’re up to speed. How to review your progress With your first sprint at an end, you now have three valuable documents ready to present to your client. It’s important to get these right, because these documents will form the basis of how you plan your next three, six or 12 months. Ideally, the whole of the second sprint will be used to produce your performance UX strategy. After the work you’ve already put in, the client will understand the importance of getting this right. Within your strategy document you should record what is important to the client in terms of key metrics. You should then detail, month-on-month, how you will work towards measurable progress. Always justify your tactics using technical, experiential or commercial performance reasoning. Performance UX is unique in that you get to be an advocate for the user and for your client For example, instead of saying ‘I need to do some card sorting to make the navigation easier to understand’, try ‘our experiential user journey research showed a disconnect in the labelling used on the current navigation – card sorting would allow us to find a better solution’. Ideally you should have a way of showing how your work is influencing the benchmarks you have recorded. I’d recommend a tool like Power BI or Google’s Data Studio to make an dashboard with all the metrics updating in real time. How you produce your strategy is ultimately down to you but I would strongly advise a varied strategy. Cover all three pillars whenever possible. Commercial is where users end up, experiential is how they get there and technical is what’s stopping them on their journey. Too much technical work and you will lose your client’s interest, too much experiential work and they might start to question value and too much commercial work just becomes conversion rate optimisation. Performance UX is unique in that you get to be an advocate for the user and for your client. You job is to be an old-fashioned ‘middle man (or woman)’ and make it as easy as possible for both parties to get what they want. So get out there and start greasing those wheels. Performance UX resources The elements that make up performance UX are nothing new and there are already some fantastic books out there that make excellent reading for anyone wanting to start working with performance in mind. Here are some useful resources that will sharpen up your skillset Sprint Jake Knapp's book is all about solving problems and testing ideas in a five-day sprint. I found this book especially useful for moving ideas through a team setting. Designing for Performance If there was a book on web design I wish I’d written, it would be this one by Lara Callender Hogan. The knowledge contained will help you understand and dominate technical website performance. Product Design A neat little field guide from David Pasztor on the product design process. Touching on things like; journey flows, A/B testing and onboarding, it’s a good tool to brush up on some more general skills if you’re missing them. Lean UX The experiential performance element of performance UX owes a lot to lean UX processes. Rather than focusing on deliverables, this book by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seidenwill show you how to directly affect the experience itself. Design is a Job Working in a recurring model means you need to manage your client properly. Make sure you understand what they need from you and be confident in leading them. This book by Mike Monteiro may just straighten your spine. This article was originally published in net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 313 or subscribe. Read more: Controversial predictions for UX in 2019 The 6 pillars of great UX 9 ways to smash UX on a small budget View the full article

In days gone by, if you missed the start of a film on TV then that was it, you just had to sit through the rest and figure it out as you went along. It was a confusing way to watch films, and could often change the meaning of the story. To highlight the importance of catching films from the beginning, Sky has launched a new set of typography-based ads, in a campaign called 'Miss the Start. Miss the Story’. Created for Sky by Serviceplan Campaign X to promote how users can now restart films on linear TV with Sky, these clever poster designs target the German market, where viewers still predominantly watch films when they're on, as opposed to through On Demand services. To point out why it's important to catch all of a film, including the beginning, these ads delete the first letters from familiar titles that rely on eye-catching and recognisable typography. Take the martial arts classic Kill Bill, which becomes the slightly less impressive Ill Bill when you chop off the K (see above). 53 top typography tutorials It's a simple but effective trick that plays with viewer's expectations and invites them to engage with the ads. The posters also underline how effective the right combination of typography and colour can be. Check out the rest of the campaign ads below. Related articles: The good, the bad and the ugly of movie posters How to master colour theory A designer's guide to printing a poster View the full article

Want to download Adobe Photoshop CC? You’re in the right place. Whether you’re looking to download Photoshop for free, or intending to buy Photoshop through Creative Cloud – but you’re not sure how – we’ve got you covered. The best Adobe deals right now Here’s everything you need to know to get hold of Adobe’s advanced image editor quickly and easily, from how to easily download Photoshop CC for PC or Mac, to how to get a free trial of Adobe Photoshop, and the best Photoshop tutorials to follow once you've got the software… Can I download Photoshop for free? The short answer is: yes – in a way. Photoshop is a paid-for image-editing program, but you can download a free trial of Photoshop for both Windows and macOS from Adobe. You’ll get seven days to use the full version of the software, which gives you access to all the latest features and updates. Downloading Photoshop for free in any other way is illegal and definitely not recommended. Not only is it software piracy, it’s also unsafe – you’ll put your machine at risk of viruses and malware. How do I buy Photoshop CC? You have to buy Photoshop as part of a Creative Cloud membership. There are a number of different options: you can choose a single app plan, which will give you just Photoshop CC; or a plan that includes more of Adobe’s creative apps. The Photography Plan, for example, gives you access to Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic; whereas an All Apps plan gives you access to all of Adobe’s apps – plus a range of other benefits too (but is more expensive). There are options for individuals and businesses, and if you’re a student or teacher you can save up to 65% if you buy Photoshop as part of the All Apps plan. What’s the price of Photoshop CC? CS Light Bulbs: Packaging created by Angelina Pischikova The cheapest way to buy Photoshop CC is as part of the Photography plan, which costs $9.99/£9.98 per month and gives you access to Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic, plus 20GB cloud storage. Alternatively, you can choose a Creative Cloud Single App plan, which costs $20.99/£19.97 per month, and will give you just Photoshop, plus 100GB cloud storage, Adobe portfolio, Adobe Fonts and Adobe Spark. On the same page of the Adobe website, there's also an All Apps option, which gives you access to Photoshop as well as Adobe’s entire collection of creative desktop and mobile apps – plus the same additional benefits as the Single App Plan – for $52.9/£49.94 per month. And finally, you can buy Photoshop through an All Apps + Adobe Stock option for £73/month, which (clue’s in the name) gives you Adobe Stock on top of the All Apps benefits. Photoshop discounts for teachers and students Bear in mind that if you’re a student or teacher, you can buy Photoshop as part of a discounted All Apps plan at a much lower rate – so you’ll get the entire collection of creative desktop and mobile apps, plus 100GB cloud storage, Adobe Portfolio and more – for just £16.24/month. The only non-subscription version of Photoshop you can buy is Photoshop Elements, which is an entry-level iteration of the image-editing software. It contains most of Photoshop’s pro features, but has fewer options. You can download Photoshop Elements 2019 for a one-off cost of $99 / £69.96 How can I get started with Photoshop? In this Photoshop tutorial, illustrator Charlie Davis walks through how to use the Pen tool and textures to add depth Once you've downloaded Photoshop, head over to our collection of the best Photoshop tutorials to sharpen your skills. Whether you're a beginner, intermediate-level or a pro, you'll find a wide range of new tips and tricks to work smarter and more creatively in Photoshop. And don't worry if you're pressed for time: we've also got a selection of handy Photoshop Two-Minute Tool School videos that walk through the essential tools in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea. Also, if you need some free Photoshop brushes, we've searched around and found the best ones the internet has to offer. Get involved. Photoshop CC: key info you need to know Photoshop CC is Adobe’s flagship image-editing app. The industry-standard software is the best photo-editing software in the world for a reason: it’s slick, quick and boasts a powerful, extensive tool set to bring your ideas to life. For layered image editing – including typography, 3D modelling, and drawing – it remains the first choice for professional creatives across the planet. And with new AI-powered updates streamlining workflow even further, graphic designers, artists and photographers are becoming increasingly freed from the tyranny of tedious processes, and more able to focus on the fun part of creating. Photoshop CC review As part of your CC subscription plan, you’ll receive all Photoshop updates free. The 2019 version offers improvements to existing features like Content Aware Fill and Home Screen, as well as new tools like the Frame Tool and dynamic Blend Mode previews. That said, if you’re a beginner, you might not want to be tied into a Creative Cloud subscription plan immediately. We’d recommend testing the water with a free Photoshop trial; investing in Photoshop Elements; or looking to one of the many non-subscription Photoshop alternatives, such as Affinity Photo. Photoshop is available for desktop, smartphone or tablet, and supports every file format available. If you’re ready to get started, hit the links above to buy Photoshop or trial the software for free. Also read: The best Adobe deals right now The 10 commandments of Photoshop etiquette 69 incredibly useful Photoshop shortcuts View the full article

Adobe Creative Cloud is jam-packed with helpful software that any content creator should know how to use. You don't need to spend lots of money on classes though, you can just get the The Complete Adobe CC Training Bundle. This $29 bundle will get you up to speed on everything from video editor Premiere Pro to photo editor Photoshop. You'll also learn how to create magazines and newsletters with InDesign, and how to add special effects to your videos with After Effects. Don't have Adobe's software yet? Buy Adobe Creative Cloud here. Get these skills under your belt with The Complete Adobe CC Training Bundle for only $29. Related articles: Kick-start your career with Adobe's Creative Residency 80 best Adobe Illustrator tutorials The 18 best Adobe Illustrator plugins View the full article

Learn how to create surreal character designs with the latest issue of ImagineFX magazine, which goes on sale in the UK today. In the pages of issue 171, you'll discover how to paint character concepts with bright hues and expressive lines that are sure to get noticed. So if your character designs have been feeling a little flat recently, or you just want to try some new creative techniques, this issue is perfect for you! Buy issue 171 of ImagineFX here Elsewhere in issue 171, Patrick J Jones continues his figure drawing masterclass series to teach you how to create depth by using values. With the help of his techniques, you'll be able to create the illusion of the third dimension and really make you art stand out. On top of that, Eeva Nikunen is on hand to show you how to paint a fantasy portrait with oils, and Gina Nelson shares how to work with ink and gold. There's also all the latest news, reviews and reader art that you've come to know and love from ImagineFX. Don't miss out, grab yours today! Never miss an issue: Subscribe to ImagineFX here Explore what's on offer by taking a peek at the lead features, below. Protect yourself from artistic burnout Learn when to whip out the big guns From over-working to not looking after yourself properly, there are plenty of ways artists can find themselves heading towards a creative crash. To protect yourself from burnout, and to hear how to bounce back from it, we spoke to several industry-leading artists who have dealt with a creative crash in various ways. Visit the VR world of Goro Fujita Let us introduce you to Goro Fujita Despite being repeatedly touted as the future of digital art, the potential of VR is still questioned by some creatives. Not Goro Fujita though. We caught up with the Japanese artist to discuss his career so far and hear why he has been fascinated by the unique creative opportunities that VR offers. Explore Loish's sketchbooks Loish has been drawing her whole life, so there's a lot to explore Digital art superstar Lois Van Baarle has opened up her sketchbooks for you to flip through this issue. Here you'll find a variety of sketches that show off her range of artistic talents, as well as notes from the artist herself about how they came to be and how they informed her style. Direct your viewer's attention Grab attention with these composition tips Chances are you'll have heard of the Golden Ratio, the pleasing proportion of details that can harmonise a piece of art. There are plenty of other ways to create a powerful composition with a sense of direction, as comic artist Steve Ellis reveals with these striking suggestions that will draw your viewer's eye. Create an artistic base with VR Discover how VR and other digital art tools can work together VR tools such as Quill can radically speed up the creative process for digital artists. Here, freelance illustrator Martin Nebelong walks us through how he managed to quickly mock up a base for a book cover illustration with virtual reality, before finishing up in Photoshop. Related articles: 25 top character design tips 5 key trends in character design 11 best video game character designs View the full article

Buy animal écorché figures from 3DTotal Most artists will be aware of the array of écorché sculptures that are available these days, mostly male and female human anatomy and in a range of styles from full écorché to planar. Firstly, what is écorché? It simply means ‘skinned’ in French and in this context it refers to an anatomical model or sculpture that has had its skin removed to help an artist understand what’s going on underneath. 3DTotal has a large range of figures available and they have been very popular for some time now. This new range adds to that growing collection with a dog, a horse and a large cat, covering three of the more popular large mammalian families. How to draw a horse Any creature artist whether 2D or 3D will surely tell you how important real-world anatomy is to their workflow. Simply put, if you are designing creatures you will be learning muscle insertion and origins (where they start and end on the skeleton) and how they interact with each other as they flex and extend. These models are done with half of the body flayed and half with their skin on, which makes them perfect for seeing how a muscle group affects the surface form. If you are used to using photographs/videos or references from Google when it comes to modelling creatures for 3D art, you will quickly appreciate how much you can learn by being able to hold a creature in your hands to study it, and having the different mammals (two carnivores and a hoofed mammal) side by side allows you to compare the different families. The models are finished in a flat, grey resin that matches all the other models in the 3DTotal line-up and the detailing is amazing, even showing some of the larger veins. The models come supplied with a rectangular base that is signed by the designer and it’s simply a case of slotting the feet of each animal into the holes. The horse and the dog have their tails attached but the cat comes with a magnetic tail. The scale for the creatures differs between them and that does mean the horse seems a little out of scale. I assume this is simply because to create a horse to match the cat and dog would have made it prohibitively expensive/large, but this really is only a tiny issue. Overall, this is a must-have set of figures for creature designers of all types. An amazing addition to the 3DTotal écorché line-up and one that will almost certainly leave artists asking for more diverse animal families in the future. Great as an individual piece but even better as a set. This article was originally published in 3D World magazine. Read more: How to master creature anatomy. Buy animal écorché figures from 3DTotal View the full article

Design Indaba is Cape Town's premier conference for the creative industries. Kicking off on the 27 Feb, the three-day event will focus on how creativity can create a better world and bring to the stage top creators who are doing just that. Among this year's impressive line up is founder of New York City-based global advertising agency Droga5, David Droga, The Handmaid's Tale costume designer Ane Crabtree and award-winning design critic and author Alice Rawsthorn. And that's not all. Sitting alongside them you'll also find the founder of clothing line movement Orange Culture Adebayo Oke-Lawal, the Principal of Selldorf Architects Annabelle Selldorf and Vice President and Chief Design Officer at 3M Company Eric Quint. The Handmaid's Tale costume designer Ane Crabtree join the impressive Design Indaba 2019 lineup [Image: Nathan Cyprys] Book your ticket to Design Indaba 2019 As well as a plethora of stellar speakers, the Design Indaba programme includes a curated lineup of music – including international acts and a foray into the best of African music right now. There's also the annual Emerging Creatives programme, which puts the spotlight on the up-and-coming design talents to watch, and we'll discover which design will earn the title of Most Beautiful Object in South Africa this year. And if that wasn't enough to keep attendees occupied, there are also various seminars and workshops, including the highly acclaimed Trend Forecast by design doyenne Li Edelkoort. For those in and around South Africa who can't make the event in person, the Design Indaba Simulcast will provide a live screening of the main conference to various venues across the country. This is part of an initiative by Design Indaba to distribute the knowledge shared at the conference with a younger audience and those unable to attend. Tickets for the Simulcast will be available from mid February. If you're outside of South Africa and don't fancy hopping on a plane to Design Indaba, Creative Bloq will be reporting live from the event, bringing you the latest news and views from the world's creative elite. If this all sounds fantastically full on, that’s because it is. And we can't wait to bring you all the action direct from Cape Town. Until then, check out this video round-up from last year's Design Indaba for some insight to this epic event: Read more: What are the best-paid creative jobs in 2019? Hot new vector art app launches in free beta How to transform a design internship into a job View the full article

After producing post-apocalyptic horror comedy Zombieland and crime drama Gangster Squad, filmmaker Ruben Fleischer entered into the realm of superheroes with Venom. The Marvel film tells the story of Venom, a volatile parasitic alien symbiote that inhabits other beings, as it finds a host in investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). This relationship comes to the boil as Brock uncovers the nefarious plans of a survivalist corporation known as the Life Foundation run by Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). Get free admission to VERTEX 2019, the ultimate event for 2D and 3D artists "They’re two sides of a coin," states Fleischer. "Venom is an adulterated Id of Eddie Brock and is an alien that you have to learn how to train and have behave appropriately in our civilisation. It’s a buddy movie in a weird way." Overcoming VFX challenges Spider-Man fans will already be familiar with Venom through previous films and comics, but bringing the villain to life this time round posed unique challenges for the film's visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin. "We realised quite early on that things like camera motion capture, which have been used on other 3D movies to create digital characters, wasn’t going to work for us because one of the key things about Venom is while he’s humanoid in shape, he’s able to move at incredible speeds and can do extraordinary moves." A concept study exploring the tendrils coming off of Venom "He never moves like a human being. The most important thing was to have some sort of positional reference so you could frame up for the shot. We got a tall stunt performer who is 6’10”, and because Venom is actually 7’6” we built him up even higher with a Wiffle ball on a stick sticking out of the top of his helmet." "Then through the suit we had motion-capture reference markers all over it so we could at least track his body movements and get a proper idea of where he was. After that it was down to the character animators to come in there and take the thing over." Bringing the comics to life Whereas comic books have the advantage of being able to draw whatever they want on a frame-by-frame basis, Franklin didn't have the same amount of creative freedom. "Venom distorts quite heavily in the comics depending on what he’s doing," notes Franklin. "We don’t have that luxury in visual effects because we need to make it consistent across all of the shots, so that the audience feels like they’re watching the same character and not completely different versions from shot to shot." "Underneath all of that is what you would usually expect to do for a creature animation, like muscles and skin simulations, plus the stuff that combines it to the skeleton to preserve the volume and give him physical mass and presence." "Venom has this incredibly strong, densely built muscular physique. Working in tandem with that is this extra layer of effects animation that gives him gelatinous gooey qualities, which is what the character is supposed to be from the comic books." A concept study that explores the character’s oily form Venom is one of the most instantly recognisable Spider-Man villains thanks to his distinctive character design, but fans will know that he has two different forms. "The symbiote looks like an oily, gelatinous, slug-like amorphous creature that has no skeleton and is constantly changing shape and swashing around before bonding with the host," explains Franklin. "Then when the bonding takes place, Venom produces this thick rubbery exoskeleton that surrounds the human host who is inside. This stuff emerges out of the skin of Eddie Brock, completely envelops him and transforms him into Venom, which is a large, physically muscular character. Depending on whether Venom is in the fully humanoid form or in the raw symbiotic state, you get various stages of gelatinousness.” Every shot of Venom involved effects animation to create all of the goo, in particular how it moves on his face. "We didn’t want Venom to feel like a guy in a suit. You wanted to always believe that this character could morph into slimy tendrils. We had this constant effect animation pass that created the movement of the edges of the eye and the way that the strains of goo stretch between the jaws as he opens his mouth, which is a characteristic of the comics." Lighting Venom There were many challenges involved with lighting Venom in a night-time environment. “It’s black on black a lot of the time,” observes Franklin. What defines a black-painted metal object is not the direct illumination but the reflections of the environment around it. Venom had to be lighted indirectly to avoid the character reflecting every single element "What we needed to do was to dress the reflections into the surface in order to give us a read on the shape. Initially we were driving it from the HDRI maps that we captured on the locations on set, but Venom came out looking like a highly polished 1950s car driving down the strip in Vegas. He was a glittering galaxy of lights, which didn’t make him appear particularly threatening because he ended up looking like a Christmas tree sometimes!" Franklin continues: "We ended up lighting him in much the same way you would light a car for a commercial, where you’re using big reflection cards and bounce panels to carefully create reflections that sculpt to the shape of the body. Then we added a separate set of low-light reflections from the environment; this gives us the definition on the surface so we’ll be able to see his physique and all of the intricate organic patterning that moves over his surface." Creating expressions with eyes Giant white eyes are a signature of Venom and need to look alive rather than static. "We had to dress the reflections carefully into Venom’s eyes," states Franklin. "He looked best in a complex lighting environment such as the street where he first appears; that gave us a subtle low light and highlight in the eyes." "We also did things like subtle vignetting which we controlled on a shot-by-shot basis to give us some shape so they didn’t look completely flat. Even some subtle surface relief which is quite organic." Venom's eyes aren't quite as smooth as you may think The human eyeball isn’t completely smooth. "It has veining and all sorts of things going on in it that give it a subtle relief," remarks Franklin. "You don't necessarily notice it when you’re looking at a person's face but you notice it when it's not there. You sell the emotion through the shape of the eyes. "Venom has expressive eye shapes. We had to borrow from a cartoon approach to the character where you overdrive those eye shapes in order to get a read on them. Then to finally stop it from feeling static and dead, effects animation added this constantly moving, rippling edge to the eyes so that there's always something going on with them." Giving Venom's teeth some bite Over the years, every kind of tooth shape has been incorporated into the Venom comics. "When he goes into his more extreme emotional poses the teeth can become massive," states Franklin. "You'll never be able to close his mouth. We needed to be able to subtly control the length and shape of his teeth on a shot-by-shot basis. "The teeth were given a slightly unclean texture, because if we made them bright, shiny white he looked like he had just been to the dentist and had veneers put on." No mean feat when you consider that the teeth are always glistening. "There was also a separate layer of goo, slime and saliva that played stronger in some shots than others. We found that if he was constantly drooling it became distracting. We used it as an emphasis." The hanging tongue is a signature characteristic of Venom but had to be used judicially The same approach was taken with the tongue. "We have his tongue coming out but used it judicially," remarks Franklin. "Venom is relishing a moment where he's about to bite someone’s head off or is enjoying himself. Venom delivers quite a lot of dialogue in the film so we eventually had to pull that tongue back in. "We looked at Clint Eastwood and Jack Palance when they’re delivering lines through their teeth in films like Dirty Harry or Shane. If we tried to close his mouth completely over his teeth it looked odd because they’re huge." The challenge has been satisfying the fans' expectations Ruben Fleischer However all of these VFX obstacles pale in comparison to how readers have imagined the character over the years. "For me the challenge has been satisfying the fans' expectations and wanting to deliver a movie that people felt was the Venom they were hoping to see," says Fleischer. "Primarily that was in the look of the character, the way he acts in these action sequences and the way he’s true to the comics. My proudest thing will be if people feel that the Venom on the screen is the one they’ve been wanting to come to the theatres for a long time." This article was originally published in 3D World, the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists. Buy issue 241 here, or subscribe here. Related articles: Top blockbuster VFX you're not meant to see 10 movies that pushed VFX to a new level Artists pay tribute to Marvel legend Stan Lee View the full article

You're reading 7 Websites to Find Free Creative Commons Music and Sounds, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! One of the most significant mistakes many creatives make is the failure to promote their work. You can have the best product in the world, the greatest app ever, or the most beautiful WordPress theme, but if you don’t showcase … View the full article

WordPress is an incredibly popular CMS – and with good reason. You might think that to get the best out of WordPress, you need to need to spend thousands of dollars on coding classes. But with WordPress Build & Host Bundle: Lifetime Subscription, you'll quickly learn how to navigate the platform and build custom WordPress websites without ever having to write a single line of code. Plus, with this bundle, you'll also enjoy hosting for life with cPanel support, email, and a lot of other useful features you'll need if you run your own websites. This bundle can be yours for the low price of just $49.99 – that's a massive 94 per cent off the regular price. Related articles: 40 brilliant WordPress tutorials How to choose the right CMS 10 great WordPress plugins for designers View the full article

Want to live stream the Super Bowl 2019 for free? Follow our easy step-by-step guide below. If you're a fan of the American football, then we hardly need tell you that the Super Bowl 2019 takes place on Sunday, 3 February at the Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Neither will you need reminding that Super Bowl LIII is going to be an epic battle between AFC champions, the New England Patriots, and NFC champions, The Los Angeles Rams, in their first Super Bowl appearance in 17 years. But even if you're not down with American football, from a creative perspective Super Bowl LIII is still a date to put in your diary. As one of the planet's biggest sporting events it's the perfect opportunity for top brands to roll out their most impressive adverts, while the Super Bowl halftime show – this year featuring Maroon 5 as well as Travis Scott and Big Boi from Outkast – is likely to be an impressive display of costume and set design. There are certainly creative lessons to be learned on 3 February, outside the sporting action. So how do you get to watch Super Bowl LIII, especially if you don't live in the US and can't simply tune into CBS? Read on for our tips on how to live stream the 2019 Super Bowl for free, wherever you are in the world. How to watch Super Bowl 2019 online There's an easy way to watch the Super Bowl online from absolutely anywhere in the world; just follow these steps: 01. Download and install a VPN If you can't easily watch the Super Bowl online in your country, then the best way to see it for free is with a VPN service. Our favourite VPN right now is ExpressVPN – it's compatible with practically every device you can think of, supports most streaming services and it's one of the fastest VPN services around. ExpressVPN is also running a 49% discount right now – and there's a handy no-questions-asked 30-day money-back guarantee if you want to give it a test drive. 02. Select your VPN location Once you've set up your VPN, you'll need to connect to a server location. The UK is the best place to find Super Bowl LIII being streamed for free; whereas the US is the best place to catch the commercials. It doesn't matter which area in the country you choose. 03. Choose a stream For no ads: Set your VPN to UK, and go to TVPlayer.com, an online streaming service with hundreds of channels on offer for free, and no need to sign up. Select BBC One if you're not bothered about seeing the sporting event's unofficial competition – the commercials – play out. The channel will be showing the entire Super Bowl live and uninterrupted by ad breaks. Alternatively, if you want to record the Super Bowl to watch later, you can do that too. You'll need to sign up for a paid TVPlayer Premium account, but the site offers a free 14-day trial. For ads: Set your VPN to the US and choose a US stream. Super bowl LIII: Which countries can I watch the Super Bowl 2019 from using a VPN? With a VPN, you can watch the Super Bowl from absolutely anywhere – as long as you have an internet connection. As you'd expect, that includes: US, UK, Israel, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Denmark, India, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Belgium, Romania, Mexico, France, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Ireland, Poland, Kenya, Hungary, South Africa, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan, Egypt and a lot more. US: How to watch Super Bowl 2019 online for free For US viewers with internet access, watching Super Bowl LIII couldn't be simpler. As well as broadcasting the big game on cable, CBS will be streaming it live through its Sports website and mobile apps, and it's even letting users stream the Super Bowl without signing in. If you'd rather watch on your TV rather than your computer or phone, CBS has you covered as well. It'll be streaming Super Bowl 2019 on top platforms including Chromecast, Fire TV, Roku, Samsung Smart TVs, Xbox One, Apple TV and Android TV. Verizon subscribers will also be able to stream the game on their mobile devices through carrier-independent sites such as AOI, Complex and Yahoo. Remember: if you want to watch the Super Bowl in the US without commercials, you'll need to follow the steps above. Besides CBS, there are other streaming options available in the US, such as YouTube TV, Playstation Vue and Sling TV. You can easily pick up a free trial from any of them, and as well as the Super Bowl you'll find that they all have plenty of channels and content to enjoy as a subscriber. Remember, you'll need to be in the US with an American IP address to use these services. If you're not, follow our VPN steps above, log in with a VPN and choose a US server location. UK: How to watch Super Bowl 2019 online for free In the UK, watching the 2019 Super Bowl should be a piece of cake. Providing you have a TV licence, you'll be able to see it on BBC One for free. It'll be showing from 11PM GMT – and if you'd prefer not stay up half the night it'll be repeated the next day. If you'd rather watch the American coverage, you can watch on Sky Sports, although you'll need a subscription for that. If you want to stream Super Bowl LIII for free instead, that's almost as easy. All you need is BBC iPlayer either on desktop or mobile; you'll probably have to register for free to use it, but it's a pretty painless process, and you'll be able to watch anywhere on practically every platform you can think of. Super Bowl 2019: global coverage This year's Super Bowl is available live in seven languages, and 170 countries and territories. Here are the territories and Super Bowl broadcasters you need to know: Canada (Dazn, CTV 2, TSN 1, RDS), Africa (Super Sports, Zuku), Australia (ESPN, 7 Network), France (W9, BeIN Sport), India (Sony Ten, Sony Six), China ( Fox Sports, BesTV ). You'll find a handy guide to the main broadcasters on NFL's website. Super Bowl LIII: essential information When is Super Bowl LIII? Traditionally the Super Bowl takes place on the first Sunday in February. As a result, this year's Super Bowl will happen on Sunday, 3 February. What's the Super Bowl 2019 start time? It hasn't been officially announced yet, but last year's Super Bowl kicked off at 6.30PM ET (3:30pm PT, 11:30pm GMT), and we'd expect the action to start about the same time this year. What's the halftime show going to be? It's taken a while to get sorted, but the Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl 2019 halftime show is going to be headlined by Maroon 5, with guest appearances from Travis Scott and Outkast's Big Boi as well. Where is Super Bowl LIII taking place? The 2019 Super Bowl is kicking off at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the third Super Bowl to take place in Atlanta, but the first to grace the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened in 2017, can hold 71,000 fans and is located right in the heart of downtown Atlanta. Super Bowl XXVIII and Super Bowl XXXIV both took place at the Georgia Dome; don't go looking for it, it been demolished. Can I still get a Super Bowl 2019 ticket? Want to attend the big game and see the ads and halftime show in person, rather than watching the Super Bowl 2019 on TV or online? You can, but you're going to need deep pockets: the very cheapest Super Bowl LIII ticket available now, right at the very back of the stadium, is going to set you back a cool $3,600. And if you'd like to be closer to the action, it's going to cost even more. Seats in the 100 level –(complete with access to the three-hour all-inclusive Premier Party, meet and greet opportunities with NFL stars and Hall of Famers, pre-game hospitality and a post-game celebration) cost $15,075 each. Read more: The best VPN service right now 7 lessons every brand can learn from the Super Bowl 9 inspiring examples of sports imagery in branding View the full article

In this article, we're going to help you pick the best mechanical pencil for you. We'll start by explaining exactly what a mechanical pencil is and what to look for when choosing one, before running through our picks for the best mechanical pencils for drawing and for writing. If you're a traditional artist or a creative who loves nothing more than to take a screen break and spend an afternoon immersed in your sketchbook, then you'll know better than anyone that finding a pencil that's comfortable to use for long periods of time is essential. Mechanical pencils have been around for years, and there are many models that cater specifically to artists and designers who will be holding them all day. For those of you not in the know, a mechanical pencil is one that you don’t have to sharpen. That's because the graphite (aka the 'lead') is not bonded to the outer casing, as in a traditional wooden pencil, but is mechanically extended as you write or draw. Benefits of mechanical pencils When the lead runs out on a mechanical pencil, you just insert a new one. This not only saves you a lot of hassle and mess, it also means mechanical pencils can provide more consistent lines, enabling you to create more precise drawings and neater handwriting. That makes them the obvious choice for technical draftsmanship, of course, but that’s not all they're good for. How to draw: the best drawing tutorials Many artists prefer using a mechanical pencil even for more expressive and imaginative work, as the finer lines produced are usually easier to erase. They may also prefer them from an ergonomic standpoint, because a mechanical pencil's size and weight remains consistent, whereas a wood pencil gets finer the more you sharpen it. Finally, whether you’re using a pencil for writing or drawing, mechanical pencils are cost-effective and convenient, because you only need to replace the lead once it has run out, not the whole pencil. But if you're really not feeling them and are more into wooden pencils, be sure to take a look at our list of the best pencils around right now. How to choose a mechanical pencil There is a wide range of mechanical pencils on the market, and so there are certain things to consider when choosing one. The first is the diameter of the lead you wish to use. If you wish to draw very fine lines, you’ll want to go for a 0.3mm lead. For writing and most drawing, you’ll probably prefer a 0.5mm lead. A thicker, 0.7mm lead, meanwhile, may be better for sketching and non-detailed drawing. Other sizes are also available for specialist uses. Another consideration is the hardness of the lead. A soft lead is darker and more prone to smudging, while a hard lead is better for leaving light, fine lines. Softness is represented by a number followed by ‘B’; the higher the number, the softer the lead. Hardness is represented by a number followed by ‘H’; the higher the number, the harder the lead. Finally, ‘F’ and ‘HB’ leads lie in the middle. Also think about the mechanism you wish to use to advance your lead. The three most common mechanisms are a push-button, which may be on the side or the top; a twist operation, which is more often seen in older models; and a 'shake' advance. Weight is also important, as is grip: some pencils have special features, such as a bumpy texture, to improve this. The best mechanical pencils for drawing Whether you use pencils for quick sketches, technical draftsmanship or completed artworks, mechanical pencils have a lot to offer. Here we present our pick of the best mechanical pencils for drawing purposes. Our pick for the best mechanical pencil for drawing overall is the Uni Kurutoga Pipe Slide, which has a big point of difference over most of its rivals. When you use a regular mechanical pencil, the lead wears down on one side, forming a slanted, wedge-shaped tip. This can potentially cause variations in line thickness as you draw. The Kura Toga avoids this through a clever lead rotation mechanism that continually rotates the pencil lead as you write. A spring-loaded clutch twists the lead a tiny degree every time you lift the pencil from the paper, and this allows for a uniform wearing of the lead, and cleaner and more consistent lines as a result. Cartoonist and designer Jason Li is among the Kurutoga's many fans. "It's been my mechanical pencil of choice for several years running, and most recently I got a Studio Ghibli skinned one," he enthuses. "I use it for drawing, sketching things out, and taking notes. I love the mechanism that sharpens the lead as it turns, the (emergency) eraser hidden under its case, and really, the fact that it's chosen to be the model for official Studio Ghibli merch is also a feature in my book!" You don't have to spend a lot of money to get a good mechanical pencil. There are some excellent models out there that are surprisingly cheap, and our favourite budget-friendly model has to be the Pentel 200. "The Pentel P200 is a good, solid choice," agrees Simon Whittaker, who tends to use them for general sketching. "It's only a couple of quid, they last ages, and they're really nice to hold. They're like the Jotter of mechanical pencils; a good all-rounder. "I remember first using them when I was at school," he adds. "Later, I picked one up again as a cheap spare, and then remembered how nice they are to draw with. Plus, because they’re pretty cheap, if you were to lose one, it’s not the end of the world." Izzy Burton, art director and concept artist at animation studio Blue Zoo, is also a Pentel fan; she favours the 0.7mm version. The brand originally came to her attention, she recalls, because: "I saw a lot of artists on Instagram using Pentel for their drawings and they all recommended it in their FAQs. I use it for precise and finished work, or work that’s on a small scale." We've established that you don't need to spend a fortune to get a decent mechanical pen for drawing. But what if you want to splash out, and buy something really special? In this case, we'd highly recommend the Rotring 800. This top-of-the-range model is infused with high-quality engineering and aimed at the serious artist or draughtsman. With a good weight (almost 91g), the metal body feels solid in the hand. And the non-slip metal grip 'twist and click' retractable mechanism means it's very easy and comfortable to use, even over lengthy sessions. Its hexagonal shape also makes it less like to slide off your desk, or even a slanted surface. In short, if you're working on something special, working for long periods, looking for a gift, or just want a pencil that's super-nice to use, the Rotring 800 ticks our boxes. Featuring a 4mm fixed sleeve for template work and technical drawings, the Pentel Graphgear 500 is the perfect pencil for technical drawing. With its metallic-mesh grip and a barrel weighted at your fingertips, it's designed to help you draw precisely and with a feeling of control. It works with a variety of lead thicknesses, and there's also a built-in lead hardness indicator to help you identify your lead type quickly and easily. The weight feels good in the hand, but light enough to make it comfortable over long sessions. In short, this is the best mechanical pencil for drafting and precision work on the market today, and all at a very affordable price. The best mechanical pencils for writing If you primarily want to use your mechanical pencil for writing, then among your main considerations will be comfort; no one wants an aching hand after a long stretch of writing. But as for drawing, you'll also want your writing to look nice, and that demands a pencil that can produce clean, consistent lines. Here are our four best mechanical pencils for writing. If you want a mechanical pencil for writing, then we would recommend the LAMY 2000. Based on the well-known fountain pen of the same name, designed by Gerd A. Müller in 1996, this is nothing less than a modern classic. It's light enough to be flexible, but solid enough to feel dependable. It's comfortable to hold and use, and produces smooth, consistent handwriting. And its build quality is also noticeably impressive; this is a pen that you can expect to last for years. There's not a huge amount to say beyond that... because rather than use gimmicks, its makers instead focused on doing one thing, and doing it well. The LAMY 2000 is, in short, a delightful pen to use for writing, as well as being supremely reliable and durable. And while it might cost a bit more than rivals, it's certainly a case of getting what you pay for. The Uni Kurutoga Roulette comes in at a surprisingly low price given its high quality, making it the best value mechanical pencil we've found for writing. For one, it's comfortable to hold, with a nicely balanced weight and a knurled metal fingerplate for better grip. And for two, its clever design, matching that of the Uni Kurutoga Pipe Slide (our number one mechanical pencil for drawing, above), means that it sharpens the lead as you write. As with its sibling, that means you get a super-even stroke width that helps make your handwriting neat, polished and attractive. This model from American Classic is a little pricey. But if you want a mechanical pencil for writing you can truly rely on, this has a lot to recommend it. Popular for decades amongst the armed forces and public institutions of the US, the American has a strong reputation for its reliability, durability and clean lines. The thick 0.9mm lead is also super-tough and rarely breaks. And overall, this should last a lifetime should you take care of it, which puts the slightly high cost into perspective. Handcrafted using watchmakers' tools for precision, beauty and accuracy, this is another quite pricey, but very high-end mechanical pencil. The tip of the Pentel Sharp Kerry Mechanical Pencil 0.5mm is solid and well-made, which means that breakage of the lead is a rare occurrence. The removable cap makes it super-portable. But above all, this mechanical pencil has been in production for many years now, for one good reason: its impressive consistency and quality. And that makes it an excellent choice for anyone wishing to produce professional looking writing that's likely to be viewed by customers, colleagues or superiors. Read more: The best children's books of all time How to quickly sketch hands 10 tips for sketching moving subjects View the full article

The latest hashtag craze to sweep the internet is the 10 year challenge. If you're not familiar, allow us to enlighten you. Participants post a photo of themselves today, alongside a snap of them from a decade ago. Designer Arun Venkatesan has given the trend a twist by gathering together some of the biggest websites around and comparing them to their 2009 selves. Let us tell you, if you were shocked to see how bad your friends' eyebrows were in the noughties, it's nothing to what you're about to feel when you see these homepage screengrabs side by side. It's like we'd never even heard of content hierarchy. Or white space. Let's take a look the most impressive glow ups of our time: use the arrow icons to compare these 2019 website layouts to their 2009 equivalent. For a closer look at how interfaces are changing, read our post on the key UI trends for 2019. Take a look at the full set on Arun Venkatesan's 10 year challenge website to see how more of your favourite sites have evolved over the years. Read more: 6 trends that are changing the face of mobile UI design 20 best UI design tools 19 cool CSS animation examples to recreate View the full article