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Earlier this month, we jetted off to New York to watch the culmination of Wix Design Playground. If you’re not familiar with it, this three-month programme sees lucky participants tasked with creating a non-profit site, developing an online marketing campaign, and building their own portfolio. In other words, it’s a fantastic way for budding designers to expand their design skill set, get familiar with web design tools, and kick-start their careers. Now in its second year, the Wix Design Playground continues to deliver. During the programme’s final presentation, we saw how multidisciplinary designers had worked together to revolutionise the websites of non-profit organisations. This inspiring demonstration was the result of months of workshops, and sessions taught by industry-leading designers. Seeing the finished sites, and the looks of amazement on the faces of the website owners, was a proud moment for all involved. We already spoke to Wix head of design and branding, Hagit Kaufman, to hear about how the company is helping designers and clients to create better sites. But what about the designers themselves? What have they got out of the Design Playground? We caught up with creators from this year’s programme, as well as the inaugural course, to hear how it aided their development. 01. Participants learn how to tell a story Mentors helped Trisnadi to refine the photographic assets of the HERoines,inc. site One of the fundamental things to keep in mind when creating a brand is its story. And nowhere is this more true than when it comes to non-profits. A story is a way to put a company’s values front and centre, which was one of the biggest realisations for Wix Design Playground 2019 student Valerie Trisnadi. “It was important not to focus on just the aesthetics of the website, like making it look nice or just cleaner,” explains Trisnadi, who worked with Qiuyu Guo to reimagine Jolaubi Osho’s organisation, HERoines,inc.. “Portraying the values of the site was something huge. It was fundamental to making sure that its message would get across, and that would lead to getting more membership for the organisation.” 02. Creators are paired to promote growth By working with other designers, creators are able to share their skills and learn something new. This is because they are carefully paired so that everyone is in a position to be exposed to new techniques. Take illustrator and designer Kristina Filler, who took part in the 2018 Wix Design Playground to design the ARTE website. “The Wix team did a really good job of pairing artists together,” she reveals. “I have very strong illustration skills and client relations skills, but I don't have very strong typographic skills. So they paired me with typographers who were really great at developing the structure of the website, and I interspersed some illustrations into it.” 03. Designers are encouraged to play Filler and her team created a fresh and powerful colour scheme for ARTE This mingling of skills and personalities means that the Wix Design Playground lives up to its name. “The whole theme of the programme was to encourage play,” adds Filler, who tends to usually work with small teams. While this allows her to have a hand in all parts of the process, it comes at a cost. “The downside is that you don't have a big budget to mess around and experiment,” she says. “And if you do that, it's kind of on your own time.” With the Design Playground though, she had more opportunities to try out new tools and approaches. “It reminded me of the value of that, and how I need to do more of it.” 04. It reinforces the value of design One recurring theme at the Design Playground presentation was that non-profits can overlook the importance of good design. However this programme does an amazing job of demonstrating how valuable it is, and why non-profits and other businesses should invest in design. “A lot of companies undermine the importance of design,” says Trisnadi. “For them, as long as there’s a logo and some information, they’re good. They don’t realise how visuals can impact a person and make them reach out or donate. And if there’s no interest, that pro-activism won’t continue. And that’s what design does, and organisations can undermine that.” 05. The course isn't the end Wix Design Playground is an invaluable networking opportunity Graduating can be a scary moment, suddenly you find yourself adrift in the ‘real world’. This isn’t the case for the Design Playground attendees though. “It didn’t end when the Playground ended,” says Filler, “I really feel like they are genuinely interested in seeing us grow.” It’s more than Wix just wanting to create something that reflects well on them, too. For Filler, the connections that she made at the Design Playground resulted in the sponsorship of her social good and feminist podcast, Women Crush Weekly. If you want to get involved with the Wix Design Playground 2020, click here to be taken to the application page. Good luck! Related articles: Who are the unsung heroes of web design? 8 steps to inclusive web design The hottest web design trends of 2019 View the full article

It’s coming up to five years since Affinity Designer launched Serif’s brand new graphics suite. The vector drawing app was joined in 2015 by Affinity Photo, and this year by Affinity Publisher. Now in version 1.7, Affinity Designer remains one of very few rivals to the 32-year-old Adobe Illustrator. And, as a £48.99 purchase for Windows or Mac, costs less to buy outright than three months of a Creative Cloud single-app subscription. Affinity Designer's attractions are enhanced by a surprisingly complete iPad edition (see our Affinity Designer for iPad review), and the ability to roundtrip Designer documents to Affinity Photo or edit them directly within page layouts in Affinity Publisher. Adobe’s apps, with their diverse histories, can’t match this integration. But just how good is Affinity Designer as a drawing app, and is anything still missing? Read on for our verdict. Affinity Designer 1.7 review: Multiple fills and strokes You can now apply multiple strokes and fills to each object, with their own stacking order and blending modes Anyone who draws complex artwork will habitually duplicate objects to build up effects. It’s the oldest workaround in the book, but makes editing the shape later impractical. Why can’t you just apply multiple strokes and fills to the same path? Well, with the 1.7 update, you can. Fills and strokes for an object are listed in the Appearance panel, where you can re-order them and change their blending modes (Multiply, Overlay and so on). You can’t add fills or strokes to more than one object at once, or to live text, and the feature is isolated from the Layers panel with its effects and styles, but it’s a good start. Affinity Designer 1.7 review: The Isometric panel The Isometric panel builds on Designer’s comprehensive grid and smart snapping options Designer has excellent grids, guides and smart snapping, further improved in this update with edge and centre alignment, and the new Isometric panel builds on these to help you draw axonometrics. Grid options include more exotic projections as well as the all-important choice of traditional 30° isometric or a pixel-friendly 26.565°, described here as 2:1. (A decade ago, I proposed ‘tetarto-orthometric’ as a term for this projection. It didn’t catch on, but feel free to throw it into conversation.) Click Edit in plane, and you can flick between Front, Side and Top to skew objects to the grid as you draw them. Combined with Snap to Grid, this makes it quick to construct pseudo-3D scenes. Some 3D primitives and intersections would be a welcome addition. Affinity Designer 1.7 review: Brush tools Designer’s vector brushes respond to stylus input and can also be fully edited and reapplied to strokes For more expressive artwork, Affinity Designer is no Corel Painter, but includes a variety of vector brushes. Once you get used to the way strokes wriggle as you paint, there’s a lot of power in being able to select previous strokes, tweak them and apply different brushes. A graphics tablet or the iPad version (with Apple Pencil) is best here, but the ability to use velocity as a proxy for pressure, or even manually edit the pressure graph for a stroke, enables gestural results with any input method, and stabiliser options flatter your drawing skills. (For more iPad apps that work with Apple pencil, see our best iPad Pro apps post.) Affinity Designer’s Pixel persona includes a whole other set of bitmap brushes as well as basic retouch tools. Complemented by the option to add raster noise (grain) to fills and effects, this makes it easy to ‘dirty up’ vector artwork, which can sometimes look antiseptic. Affinity Designer 1.7 review: Performance and usability Designer’s core tools will feel familiar to anyone with vector experience, and drawing is responsive Speed has always been a strong point of Affinity – unencumbered by legacy code – and the 1.7 update brings more optimisations, especially for Apple’s latest Metal API, although the Windows version gains too. Even on less capable hardware, Designer suffers nothing worse than slightly choppy redraw when you get ambitious with its combination of vector and pixel tools. Zooming in and out is refreshingly immediate. Affinity Designer hasn’t always been free of small glitches, but we saw few issues during testing, and if it does crash, open documents are automatically recovered. Other new features in Affinity Designer 1.7 include: Arrowheads for strokes Bézier drawing aids including ‘rubber band’ preview More options for path transformations Transform multiple selected objects individually Column guides for text and other objects What’s missing from Affinity Designer 1.7? Gradient fills are extensively customisable, but Illustrator’s object blends and mesh options are missed With a full set of vector tools and effects, multiple artboards per document, decent typesetting and the raster features too, all underpinned by prepress-ready colour management, Affinity Designer feels pretty complete. There are gaps, though. While rival indie vector app Sketch supports a plugin architecture that’s seen it widely integrated into workflows, Affinity Designer has none, which also limits its appeal for jobs like cutter output. There’s no scripting or any data-driven tools to compare with Illustrator’s graphing. Nor is animation supported, although you could onion-skin in layers and extract frames as slices for assembly in a motion graphics app using the Export persona, which also facilitates batch asset generation. In Illustrator CC, complex shading is achieved using either mesh gradients or object blends, which tween one shape to another. Affinity Designer currently offers neither of these, nor object warping. How good is Affinity Designer 1.7? It’s hard to overstate what Serif has achieved with the Affinity suite, and Affinity Designer stands out in a sector that still has little competition. Yes, there are other alternatives to Illustrator and its subscription pricing, notably Inkscape, Sketch and CorelDRAW. But Inkscape’s open source scaffolding is the antithesis of Designer’s elegant code and UI; Sketch, though popular in digital, is a less comprehensive drawing app exclusive to the Mac; and the expensive, sprawling CorelDRAW is, well, an acquired taste. For more on an array of software options, see our digital art software post. For general users, Designer is a vector app that’s no more daunting than others, very affordable and hard to grow out of. Pros can have confidence in the Affinity brand, but it would be good to see some attention to Affinity Designer’s remaining limitations. Read more: The best iPad apps for designers View the full article

Ever wondered how a McDonald's Egg McMuffin is made? To help answer this burning question, and promote its popular breakfast sandwich, McDonald's worked with its advertising partner TBWA\Paris and 3D animator Matthieu Braccini to produce a series of 15 oddly satisfying animated GIFs. And it's one of the most addictive pieces of 3D art we've seen. In the GIFs, which have now been compiled into a supercut (below), we see how the core ingredients of an Egg McMuffin are prepared in a surreal production line. Watch as dozens of muffins roll themselves into toasters, an infinite block of bacon gets peeled, and endless cheese slices get fanned into place. While this isn't an accurate look at how Egg McMuffins are made (we assume), the supercut's vibrant colours and whacky assembly line make for a bizarrely hypnotic viewing experience. It's also won over the judges at Cannes Lions, who awarded it a Bronze Lion. This isn't the first time McDonald's has transformed its food in bizarre ways as part of a promotion. Earlier this year, French fries became a wayfinding tool in a series of beautifully minimalist posters. To take a look at how Braccini created his GIFs, head on over to his Behance page for a more detailed breakdown. You'll also find GIFs from the supercut that loop endlessly, which are sure to make you peckish. Related articles: McDonald's McFails with accidentally smutty cups McDonald's coffee chain gets a (very) subtle makeover World's smallest McDonald's opens for bees – and it's amazing! View the full article

Beyond session times and bounce rates, the core purpose of user interface design is to make things as effortless and enjoyable as possible for the user. And like most areas of design, having the right tools can help (see our list of web design tools). If you're looking to break into the world of UI, then take a look at our design jobs board to see what opportunities are out there. For now, though, here are 21 UI design tips and tricks based on 10 years of experience in the field. 01. Know who you're designing for Tasks like user research, wireframing, testing and information architecture design are often seen as the responsibility of a UX designer, but we’re starting to see a growing blend of the UX/UI designer role emerging. According to Invision, “66% of UX designer job postings request UI skills” , so if it has become important for UX designers to understand visual design, branding and typography, it’s only right that UI designers should get involved, or at least have a base understanding of the aforementioned UX skills. A UI designer who gets involved in the creation of, or at minimum, pays heed to, the personas, wireframes and information architecture developed in the UX workstream, will make interaction, colour and type choices that are influenced by the people using the product or service, rather than their own stylistic preferences. By taking the time to understand the users they are designing for, UI designers will create interfaces that are more likely to suit users’ needs, both visually and functionally. 02. Overcome choice paralysis Reducing the top level options in the Nike mega menu will help limit choice paralysis for users Mark Zuckerberg has a pretty simple wardrobe; it’s all grey t-shirts. In his own words: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible”. This principle maps across to interface design, as providing users with too many options makes them overwhelmed, causes them to over-analyse, and ultimately makes them less likely to complete an action or process. Where possible, we should limit the options available, or alternatively hide the options that are less relevant at that stage in the journey. 02. Help direct with default states Skyscanner opt for default states allow users to customise options Our default states can do more than just ask users to 'please select'. Websites like Skyscanner find the closest departure airport to the user, suggest dates that correlate to upcoming holidays, and preselect the amount of passengers flying. Designing default states based on what is commonly chosen reduces the amount of effort required by users, allowing them to customise preselected options. 03. Prompt action with empty states Tidal’s empty states prompt discovery of music you may have never heard before Unfilled baskets, uninhabited playlists and default search interfaces can often leave users with a sense of emptiness. Take heed from Tidal, who direct users that “don’t have any albums” towards their top recommendations. Rather than creating dead-ends within our interfaces, we should use empty states as an opportunity for discovery of new features and functions that will be of benefit to our users. 04. Fail flatteringly with error states Kitchen Stories error states apologise for not finding what the user wants In the realm of digital, things sometimes go wrong, and not designing for this can lead to the user feeling disgruntled. As UI designers, create error states that encourage positive action and sentiment rather than throwing unintelligible messages. The Kitchen Stories app handles this brilliantly, apologising when they return a blank result for a kitchen recipe, and providing a call to action that allows users to submit new requests. See our favourite 404 pages for more examples. 05. Break choices down Apple break down the process of choosing an iPhone into clear and concise steps As well as limiting and grouping choices, we can make them less complex by breaking them down into processes. One can imagine that Apple’s back end inventory of iPhone XRs is a big matrix list of hundreds of products with a variety of colours, sizes and networks. But to the user selecting a new Apple iPhone XR via its website, a simple step-by-step interface allows them to narrow down their options one selection at a time. If we are presenting a lot of configuration options, the interface should do the heavy lifting rather than the user. 06. Reduce resistance Slack’s interface does the hard work, rather than the user The interfaces we design should make it as easy as possible for users to complete the tasks within them. When signing into their mobile app, Slack leans on a 'magic' verification link that gets sent to the user’s email address to beautifully skip the odious task of remembering and typing out their complicated password. Putting the burden on the interface, rather than the user, makes them far less resistant to get to the end of any process within your website or application. If we have the technology available to speed up the interactions within our interfaces, we should design with this in mind. 07. Take only what you need Allow users to sign up with minimal information, and let them add once on board To create a path of least resistance, we should ask the user for as little information as possible at any given stage within our interfaces. The less data a user has to input, the more likely they are to complete an exercise. Sites like LinkedIn ask for the bare minimum data (First name, Last name, Email and Password) when signing up to their platform, then gamify the profile creation process by letting them fill out one piece of personal information at a time once they’re onboarded. There’s no way anyone would sign up to LinkedIn if they had to input their entire professional history just to get through the door. 08. Give a sense of progression Pinterest show progress towards the end goal of signing up with a simple visual indicator There are some instances where lengthy forms and processes are a necessity. For example, many financial applications require extensive data input and time to complete. When signing up to the Pinterest app, there is an indicator within the interface to show what step (of 4) the user is at in the journey, providing assurance that they are making progress towards their end goal. This sense of momentum makes users less likely to become frustrated about not knowing when a process will end, and therefore less likely to abandon it altogether. 09. Pay heed to conventions As UI designers, we naturally want to push our creative juices to the limit, and devise new and exciting ways for users to interact with and experience our digital products. That said, we need to strike a balance between originality and familiarity in order to ensure that our users don’t have to spend too much time learning how to use our interfaces. Apps like Snapchat – which got a new logo lately – have alienated many older users with radical navigation options, so much so that the New York Times wrote a guide to Snapchat for people who don’t get Snapchat. Given that “you can swipe in every direction and even pinch in and out to access different screens” (see more on Medium), there is an amount of time that needs to be invested in order to learn the interactions before you can effectively use the application. Younger users have embraced the discoverability of Snapchat, but adults who understand the conventions of tapping and clicking as means of navigation have adopted the app in fewer numbers. As the web has grown, a number of conventions for element positioning (like baskets in the top right and hamburger menus in the top left) have emerged and should be considered. Our interfaces should excite and delight users, but should also be predictable enough to use if we want to keep up conversions and limit bounce rates. 10. Provide visual feedback Timely feedback from Google’s Snackbars Feedback is a gift, and should be treated as such within our interface designs. Google’s Snackbars are a smart little micro-interaction that live in its Material Design system. Snackbars appear temporarily on the screen of an app or website interface to provide brief contextual instructions, errors or acknowledgements that keep the user informed of any consequences of the actions they have taken, be it saving a photo, sending an email or prompting a 'retry' when the app has an error. As UI designers, we should provide visual feedback for each of the key interactions within our interfaces. If an item has been added to the user’s basket, let them know. If their payment has gone through successfully, inform them with a thank you message and direct them where to go if they have any queries about delivery or returns. Visual cues and animations can help users to acknowledge the completion of tasks, big and small, within your website or application, giving a sense of accomplishment and helping to reduce anxiety by acknowledging that an action has been taken. 11. Utilise user-generated content People buy based on what other people say, not just the whimsical copywriting from brands. It’s the reason why so many ecommerce sites make a big thing of customer reviews. Sunglasses brand Meller increased its conversion rate by 13% by featuring images of enjoying their products on their product pages, alongside the more traditional ecommerce photo gallery. If you have user-generated content (UGC) available for the brand or company you're designing for, weaving it into the pages of our website or application UI can help increase conversions, especially if the audience are millennials. 12. Treat users as advocates GoPro’s homepage hero uses video shot by its users to demonstrate the power of the product Delighting users with products and services is one thing, but they can also be our advocates, or even form part of our marketing team. GoPro’s main hero video on its homepage features footage shot entirely by customers who have used its HERO7 camera (see the best GoPro deals to get your own GoPro). Using film shot by users of the product demonstrates the capabilities of the camera to prospective buyers in a relatable context, and also rewards the 25,000 people who submitted their videos with a bit of exposure to the GoPro community. If we have a loyal audience, there are myriad ways we can utilise their voices and content, so this should be factored in when designing our next interface. 13. Use imagery to guide users Line of vision prompting email sign up vs models looking off into the distance Beautiful imagery has the power to enhance an interface visually, but can also be used to direct attention to specific places within a page or screen. If an image contains a person, users subconsciously follow that person’s line of vision, providing UI designers with an opportunity to subtly direct them towards calls to action or useful information. The Sunglasses Hut website utilises this concept in its website footer, with the eye line of two people pointing users towards their email sign up. If you flip the image horizontally, they’re just models staring off into the distance. 14. Use negative space in clever ways There's plenty of room to breathe on the Dropbox Business site It’s a common mistake for UI designers to want to cram as much information as possible into each and every interface, but this can lead to visual overload, and will ultimately overwhelm users whose attention is being drawn to too many different areas on a page or screen. The Dropbox Business landing page uses negative space to great effect, giving each and every element enough room to breathe, whilst providing a concise overview of the product’s benefits. Strategically maximising the space around key information and calls to action will draw users towards them, without other elements fighting for their attention. 15. Start with mobile Given that in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, it’s ever more important to craft digital interfaces that are optimised for users of the mobile web. The desktop view has often been the canvas of choice for UI designers, starting with video-led banners and interactions like rollovers and hovers, then having to strip these out or devise workarounds as we scale these down to mobile. As an alternative, designing the mobile view first forces us to strip out all of the unnecessary noise and focus on the elements that are crucial for users to perform the tasks within the interface. Scaling up allows us to add enhancements to the desktop view, adding features that are more suited to that experience once we have the key components in place. 16. Get the right type licence There’s nothing worse than polishing off a beautiful interface, preparing the assets for the development team, then realising that our font choices come with a whacking great licensing fee – or even worse, aren’t optimised for web. There are a number of different types of font licence, some of which charge per user, some per time used, and others that charge a one-off fee. Branding agency Blue Egg give a great breakdown of this. When making font choices, it’s vital that we consider the financial implications that will result, as well as the capability of the font to render on the web. If budgets are tight, open source solutions like Google Fonts offer hundreds of fonts that are free to use. Also see the best free fonts for designers. 17. Write your interfaces When we strip back an interface down to the bare bones, remove the colours, fonts, images and animations, we’re ultimately left with one thing; copy. It’s tempting to jump straight to the visual aspect of interface design, dropping in lorem ipsum and placeholder text, but taking the time to write out our interfaces first can enable us to better develop the overall tone and reflect on the messages and stories we’re verbally communicating to our audiences. We can really understand the flow of our pages when we read the copy in isolation, giving us the opportunity to accompany our words with visual assets that truly support and enforce the core of what we’re trying to say. 18. Onboard as appropriate DuoLingo's app has a neat onboarding process Onboarding is “the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product,” according to UserOnboard, and as UI designers we play a key role in deciding how best to introduce our digital products and services to those users. Language learning app Duolingo utilises an onboarding flow that drops users straight into the task-based interface, allowing them to familiarise themselves with the product’s features and sample how it works, all before prompting sign up. The user has the chance to test the product before committing to creating an account. When our interfaces contain unavoidable, complicated or unfamiliar interactions, we need to teach people how to use them, whether this is done through slideshows, explanatory videos or tutorial overlays. Giving users a sample of 'how it works' as part of the onboarding or introduction will result in less confusion once they are fully immersed within the experience, and encourage adoption from those who see value in the offering up front. 19. Involve your developers As the people who will end up building our designs, it pays to involve our developers at the earliest stage possible in a project. Designers create the things that users see, but developers enhance the experience of the interface by maximising performance, speeding up page load times and optimising what happens under the hood. Involving developers continuously throughout the design process allows them to have input into the way the interface behaves beyond the visual aspect, giving them a chance to offer more input as to how tech like the Slack magic link can be utilised to make our interfaces as effortless to use as possible. 20. Utilise a design system IBM’s comprehensive Carbon Design System Ensuring consistency across our website or application interfaces can be something of a mission when multiple designers are involved, and we can often end up with countless variations of the same UI components, meaning replicated work across the project as a whole. According to InVision, a design system is “a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications”. IBM’s Carbon Design System for example, provides a comprehensive repository of assets, code snippets and documentation for both designers and developers to access when working on UI projects, ensuring that the design team can work faster and smarter with one another. Some manner of design system, or at minimum a pattern library with all of the UI components within a specific project, should be utilised to make our interfaces consistent, assets reusable and maintenance easier. 21. Clean up design files Love it or hate it, some designers just work messy, and while this makes sense during the creative process, it can be frustrating to pick up a design file for the first time and discover that we need to invest a considerable amount of time working out which layer each element lives on. Monzo has found that “from the first .sketch file we created at Monzo, we’ve taken care to organise our design files very neatly. And as we’ve grown from a single designer to a team of 13, maintaining a sensible design environment has really paid off.” Taking the time to clean up our design files by naming our layers, artboards and folders will make it much easier for any designer (including our future selves) to pick up and work on. Your developers will thank you too! This article was originally published in issue 288 of Web Designer. Buy issue 288 or subscribe here. Read more: The best code editors 12 magically meticulous style guides 9 great UI designs View the full article

We were as surprised as anyone to learn this morning about the launch of a brand new apple logo and visual identity, especially one that's a radical departure from the previous version. But that's just what's been announced by the U.S. Apple Association this week, and this minimal redesign has left a pretty sweet taste in our mouths. The U.S. Apple Association represents America's apple growers, apple associations and apple-related companies, and its previous logo design was a strong piece of work – a stylised red-and-green apple with stars-and-stripes detailing – but was looking a little dated. Where to find logo design inspiration USApple's new logo is bold, minimal and forward-looking The new visual identity is the work of branding agency Mekanic, and features an abstract and minimal design; it's still red and green, albeit in much brighter, more saturated shades than the old logo's autumnal tones, and it's still clearly an apple, but it's drawn with just a pair of bold, curved and weighty strokes. USApple explains that the new logo evokes the idea of seasonality, cycles and new growth, and also points out that the leaf and stem point forward, representing the association's commitment to advancing the industry through advocacy and leadership. Getting to this new logo design has been a fairly long process for both USApple and Mekanic. USApple's director of communications, Tracy Gondine, says that the process, and Mekanic's vision for the brand, has been informed by two years of discovery work, including interviews with growers, suppliers, leadership and Young Apple Leaders. The old USApple logo had a distinctly autumnal look to it The result of all this work is a logo that really gets to the core of the association and provides it with an exciting new visual direction. And while a radical new design such as this is normally the sort of thing that provokes howls of outrage online, so far we haven't seem any adverse reaction to this at all, which is an encouraging sign. Alongside the new logo and visual identity, USApple is also working on updating its website in order to provide better functionality and the most informative user experience, as well as following current best practices. The new USApple site will be unveiled within the next few weeks. Related articles: 8 of the best free logo design tools 5 logo design fails (and what you can learn from them) 18 controversial moments in logo design and branding View the full article

If you want your website to be on-trend, bringing in some illustration is the perfect way to keep things looking bang up-to-date. It pays to do things properly, though, and to remember that illustration's more than just decoration. Adding some flat cartoon figures might make your website layout look nice, but it'll also make your site look the same as about a million others out there; for a site that stands out you'll need to go the extra mile. The best use of illustration online can be seen when the designers have clearly put a lot of thought into how it can work with – and even enhance – the site's content or a brand's message. Here are six recent examples that have wowed us with their effective use of illustration. The hottest web design trends of 2019 01. Otis Studios This 3D illustration looks amazing in the browser Otis Studios makes music – for adverts, films, games and dance floors – and also specialises in sound design. The studio prides itself on writing, recording and re-recording until everybody's stoked, and its passion for music and sound comes across in the very first thing you see when you hit its site. Created by Feral, it opens with an illustrated splash screen stating in rough brush strokes that OTIS MAKES MUSIC, accompanied by scratchy ink sketches of music gear that we're not going to even attempt to name. The real kicker is how the elements in the composition are arranged in 3D and move in response to the mouse, bringing the page to life and making it near-impossible not to scroll down to find out more. 02. The Food Dispensary The mix of visual assets works really well here Canberra's Food Dispensary produces a tiny range of ready-made meals that are a cut above the rest. It describes itself as a kitchen of real people working with real ingredients, and goes to great pains to point out that everything it produces is handmade, from its pasta to its ricotta and pancetta. The Food Dispensary's site, built by Swell, reflects that handmade ethos; a swish parallax site peppered with mouth-watering photography, it's grounded with simple pencil sketches of ingredients on a background reminiscent of rough, recycled paper. The restrained use of illustration provides a feel of tradition and authenticity, all wrapped up in a thoroughly modern site. 03. USELESS This site will make you think about all the disposable plastic you use Judicious use of illustration can really help get your message across quickly, and USELESS, built by Nice and Serious, does an excellent job in that regard. It uses illustration to highlight the problem of single-use plastic, opening with a torrent of plastic cups, bottles and carrier bags that pile up at the bottom of the page (and that you can try to shift with your cursor), accompanied by horrifying stats on the amount of disposable plastic thrown away in the UK every year. Got the idea? Great, because USELESS has a map of London's zero-waste shops, as well as a guide to cutting down on your daily waste, with plenty more illustrations to show you the way. 04. A Map of Myth, Legend & Folklore Why use a Google map if you can commission a fine artist? In an online world where it's all too easy to just bang in a boring Google map, we love this beautiful illustrated map of myth, legend and folklore from English Heritage. It's an engrossing guide to some of England's historic sites and the fascinating stories behind them, showcasing a small sample of the 400 sites in English Heritage's care, and also featuring local myths and legends as well as upcoming events across the country. The map was illustrated by fine artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and the whole site was put together by Gravitywell. 05. Sparky Here the illustrations really help get the message across Sparky is a marketing agency that promises to provide a fresh set of eyes for powerful brands to help them maximise moments, elevate experiences and ignite innovation, and its new site by Angle2 uses illustration to really drive that point home. The opening page is scattered with pairs of adorable cartoon eyes in various styles that animate when you mouse over them; a neat gimmick that doesn't feel forced, and which should encourage visitors to scroll down and discover how Sparky can help their brands. 06. Finding ctrl: Commissioned illustrations mix with particle shapes on this thoughtful site With the World Wide Web having celebrated its 30th birthday in March, and the internet itself coming up for its 50th in October, Nesta has put together Finding ctrl:, an 'online visions' book for the European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative. It's a collection of essays, short stories, poetry and artworks from over 30 contributors, addressing the questions of where did we come from, and where do we go next? It's a weighty subject, and it's made more inviting thanks to a site built by ToyFight that brings in illustrations and particle-based 3D objects to set the tone for each article and provide visual interest. Related articles: 2019's rising stars of illustration How to tell a story with your illustrations 2019's illustration trends to know about View the full article

Welcome to our pick of the best books for photographers. One of the real pleasures of being a photography enthusiast is that there are so many books out there to get stuck into. Whether you’re just starting your journey and need a guide to the basics, or you have a handle on exposure and want to start learning advanced techniques, or you’re a bona fide expert and you just want to see some fantastic imagery, there will be a book out there for you. There will be several, in fact. There’s no shortage of choice in all areas of photo publishing, including the best photo editing software, which begs the question – which are the best books for photographers? We’ve compiled a list of the photography books we feel stand out above the crowd and offer something truly exceptional. We’ve included a range of books from across the board, from practical guides to inspirational photo collections. So, if you’ve picked up one of the best cameras around and are looking for guidance and inspiration, read on as we take you through the best books for photographers... The best books for photographers: Beginners There’s a reason that experts and beginners alike will recommend Bryan Peterson to you. He has considerable talent for breaking down the key concepts of photography and communicating them in a way that’s easy to understand. I’ve spoken to multiple amateur photographers who said that reading this book was the moment when things started to “click” and they began to get what this was all about. Understanding Exposure is an excellent primer to the fundamentals of light, teaching you how to get the best results in all situations, how to freeze action and more, covering both film and digital shooting. All the technical knowledge in the world is worthless if you don’t have any ideas for how to put it to use. One of the best books for photographers, Lee Frost’s 50 Photo Projects is just the thing, full to the brim with suggestions for breaking out of your comfort zone and creating some exciting new images. With impressive verve and energy, Frost leaps from topic-to-topic – one minute he’s full of ideas for architecture, the next he’s discussing ways to freeze fast-moving action. He also discusses scanning techniques, black and white conversion and many other aspects of photography you may not have given much thought to. By the time you finish, you’ll be bursting with ideas and eager to get shooting. Photography isn’t just about going to incredible places and clicking the shutter button – no matter where you live, there’s a world of incredible imagery to be created on your doorstep. Extraordinary Everyday Photography teaches you to see the potential wherever you are, and no matter what you’re using. There are tips and exercises in the book that work just as well whether you’re on a DSLR or an iPhone, and the authors supply plenty of their own imagery taken on all sorts of different devices just to make the point. If you’re the type to spend time in large bookshops, you’ve likely spotted this one shelved along with its sequels, with their immediately identifiable typography. For a primer, you can’t beat this general overview of the art of photography, a jargon-free whistlestop tour through the main concepts of taking pictures that does a great job of both educating and inspiring. The book is generously illustrated and a breeze to read – it’s entirely possible you’ll dash through it in an afternoon then head straight out with your camera. It can be picked up for a great price nowadays too, so you’ve really no excuse. This remarkable volume is in its 10th edition for a reason. Since the 1960s, Langford’s work has been one of the foremost authorities on the art and practice of photography, and this latest edition brings it all bang up to date. Practically everything you could wish for is covered here, and while this does mean the tome is a hefty one and you won’t be carrying it in your backpack for quick inspiration, it makes for an engaging read and an invaluable point of reference. Expertise positively bleeds from each page as the authors take you through all of photography’s core concepts. When it comes to the best books for photographers, you'd be hard pushed to find better than this. The best books for photographers: Advanced skills and industry insights Learning to control light, and flash in particular, is the moment for many photographers when they take the step up and become serious about their craft. This field guide to using flash and controlling it to achieve the effects you want is a useful tool and worth picking up even if you’re already familiar with the basics, as Duckworth provides examples and guidance for all sorts of different shooting situations. It’s a very small book – with text perhaps a little too small if you struggle with your eyesight – but this does mean it’s easy to bring on a shoot with you as a handy reference point. Michael Freeman is the author of many photography books and is well-regarded in the community for his formidable expertise. This book on the art of composition is one of his seminal works – it assumes a level of familiarity with core concepts and gets right into the good stuff, pulling apart photographic compositions to analyse how and why they work. It gets into theory too, discussing more philosophical approaches to composition, as well as famous schools like the Bauhaus movement. Freeman’s knowledgeable and accessible style makes this a book that even highly experienced photographers should find space for on their bookshelves. If you’re much more comfortable behind a camera than you are behind a computer, this book from Adobe’s own publishing arm will help you get to grips with the most powerful photo-editing tool in the world. The authors do a good job of working up from the basics to more advanced concepts, and there are plenty of hands-on exercises to allow you to put what you’ve learned into practice (though be aware that some of these require file downloads, which can be a bit fiddly). Get stuck in and add another string to your professional bow – you’ll be glad you did. Need to download Photoshop? Sign up to Creative Cloud here. Going it alone is tough, and the unfortunate truth is that simply being a good or even great photographer isn’t necessarily enough. You have to know the business, and this book is the perfect way to shore up your knowledge. Harrington covers everything from paperwork to tax audits, using his own extensive knowledge to prepare you for the realities of running your own photography business. He’s got absolutely loads of experience running his own photography business, and always seems to have just the right example for every major point. If you go for it in the photography business, you’ll find yourself returning to this book again and again. Professional photographers need a head for business, but it’s important not to neglect the artistic side either. Bruce Barnbaum’s book is a wonder – an exploration of the life of a photographer and artist, and a blueprint for finding the art in your own work. Covering colour and black and white (with a shade more of the latter, reflecting Barnbaum’s own interests), it ranges in focus from the “why” of taking pictures to the practical “how” of making prints, and is all the better for all of it. If you feel you’re in danger of falling out of love with photography, this is the book to reignite your passion. The best books for photographers: Inspiration The great critic John Berger produced some of the twentieth century’s most enduring and considered photographic criticism. This collection brings together more than 20 of his essays, in which Berger turns his critical lens to images of Che Guevara, the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, August Sander's image of three peasants going to a dance, and much more. Deeply political, and shot through with Berger’s signature laconic wit, it should be considered essential reading for anyone who considers themselves interested in photography. It’s a book you’ll find yourself dipping in and out of, again and again. Out of print and all-but-unobtainable for many years, The Decisive Moment was recently reprinted and is an essential buy for anyone with any interest at all in street photography, or indeed just good photography. Cartier-Bresson’s unfailing eye for, well, the decisive moment gave his images practically unparalleled cultural endurance and longevity, and this book reproduces them in glorious quality. They are images you don’t so much see as experience, and having words of introduction from Cartier-Bresson himself immediately bumps the book up from desirable to essential. Originally published serially in the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a collection of essays that may make you want to pick up your camera right away – or make you want to never touch it again. It’s a passionate, outspoken and forthright book, aggressively interrogating the meaning and purpose of a photograph. If you like to keep your books pristine, don’t read this while you’re anywhere near a pencil, because you won’t be able to stop yourself from underlining practically half the sentences as Sontag makes insight after insight. Every photographer should read this. Though she’s now revered as one of street photography’s all-time greats, when Vivian Maier died in 2009, no one had any idea of the archive she had amassed containing more than 150,000 photographs. They’ve since been discovered of course, and Maier has taken her deserved place in the canon, with exhibitions of her work showing regularly and books like this fabulous tome being published. Focusing on her work in colour, this gorgeous collection sheds just a little light on one of photography’s most fascinating mysteries. Like it or not, Maier can now only speak to us through her work – it’s worth listening to what she has to say. And finally, here’s an efficient way to fill your bookshelves with great photography. Spanning hundreds of years of photography, all the way from the first photographic milestones right up to the present day, this collection will no doubt include many images your recognise as well as a fair few you don’t. It’s endlessly enjoyable to leaf through, and makes an irrefutable case for how much photography has shaped the world we live in. Inspire yourself in the company of the greats – there’s no better way to do it. Also read: The best camera phones in 2019 62 Photoshop shortcuts you need to know Street photography: 11 expert tips View the full article

Technology has come on leaps and bounds in terms of web and mobile apps in the last decade. It seems almost every day a creative idea is being transformed into a powerful new tool to aid a designer's workflow. And while the huge variety of apps is fantastic, finding the best ones among them, which suit your creative workflow, can be tricky. In this article, we take a look at 42 powerful web tools, including everything from invoicing apps and Google Analytics plugins to WordPress themes and website builders. No matter what your creative discipline, you'll find something here to make your daily life just that little bit easier. 01. Bonsai Bonsai is a professional suite of products dedicated to creative freelancers. The all-in-one platform offers various features, all with the aim of making freelance life more simple. Manage your invoices and payments with ease, auto-generate documents for new projects, protect your business with contract templates and stay organised with its project management tools. Bonsai also offers auto-create professional invoices, which can be generated from any proposal or contract or time sheet; use it to track activity and payments, to automate your reminders and much more. 02. 24x7 WP Support 24x7 WP Support is, as the name suggest, a non-stop support service for WordPress users, with its professional team able to fix almost any WordPress issue you can think of. Imagine never having another WordPress headache and a website running perfectly. So what exactly can it help you with? When you have Issues with WordPress themes and plugins, migrating a WordPress from a host to another, when looking for WordPress hosting with staging area, for web development and much more. The service also covers Woo-commerce, SSL and hosting problems. An excellent service for the WordPress community, 24x7 WP Support are ready to help you with everything you need for your WordPress website. 03. MonsterInsights MonsterInsights is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, which makes setting up Google Analytics tracking and getting actionable data in your WordPress dashboard a cinch. With MonsterInsights, you can make informed decisions to help grow your business. Key features include: Quick and easy setup of Google Analytics on your WordPress website Real-time stats and detailed reports available on your dashboard Ecommerce tracking with no coding required Enhanced link tracking for affiliate marketers Ads tracking to optimize your ad revenue Popular post, author, category and tag tracking Google AMP tracking for the most accurate data possible 04. Polypane.rocks Polypane is a browser dedicated to anyone who works on the web. Offering the ability to design and develop responsive websites and apps on all viewports and devices at once, with all actions synced. It's the only browser with built-in features like CSS breakpoint detection, CSS layout debugging and multi-pane screen shots. Polypane offers a free 14-day trial period if you want to give it a go before committing to buy. 05. FireCheckout Looking for an effective way to increase your store conversion rate? FireCheckout offers a solution, providing customers with only one checkout step instead of default Magento 6. This extension is one of the most feature-rich checkout modules on the market. With built-in Ajax functionality you will navigate visitors through the checkout lane faster without page reloads. 06. Codester Codester is a huge marketplace dedicated to designers and developers, offering thousands of premium PHP scripts, app templates, themes, plugins and much more. Be sure to check the flash sale section, where items are often discounted by up to half price. 07. MobiLoud MobiLoud is a solution that takes your existing WordPress site and converts it into custom state-of-the-art native apps, which are packed with features – push notifications, subscriptions, ad integrations etc – to help you grow your brand. 08. Total Theme Total Theme is a multipurpose WordPress theme, loaded with a bundled page builder and simple settings to help you create an eye-catching WordPress-powered website. It has drag-and-drop page building, live customisations, unlimited colour options, premium sliders, and much more to help your site really stand out. 09. Mobirise Mobirise is a website builder for Windows and Mac, which allows the easy creation of small/medium websites, landing pages, online resumes and portfolios. Perfect for those not familiar with the web, the Mobirise library includes 2,000 websites templates, 7,000 icons, 850 Google fonts and access to 500,000 free images to help give your online home the look you desire. 10. Astra Theme Astra is offers you over 100 free and premium Elementor themes, which aim to make your life easier and your website look great. 11. Rank Math SEO Whether you're new to SEO or a veteran, RankMath can help you take your SEO game to the next level by making your content SEO-friendly and worthy of a featured position. Installation is easy and quick, then simply customise the app for your site and you're good to go. 12. WP Review Plugin WP Review plugin is an easy way to review content without affecting the speed of your site. A customisable and lightweight way to create reviews, using stars, percentage or point rating, the service includes support for translation, WPMU, Google rich snippets and unlimited colours. Just install it and follow the simple configuration instructions to place it in your desired location. 13. Designmodo Designmodo is an important player in the web industry, with several products created with the aim of making the life of a web designer all the more streamlined. Postcards is a brilliant email template builder for your next WordPress marketing campaign that you can use with 0 coding skills or previous experience. Another product is Slides, which will help you generate static website templates in a matter of minutes with your creative direction. 14. Landing Landing is a free Bootstrap 4 website template, suitable for any type of landing pages. It is a one-page template with features such as smooth scroll, slick slider, slant sections, table pricing, smooth accordion for frequently ask questions, and many more. 15. AdminLTE Bootstrap Admin Dashboard Template AdminLTE is an open-source admin dashboard and control panel theme. Built on top of Bootstrap, AdminLTE provides a range of responsive, reusable, and commonly used components. 16. ServicesLanding - Bootstrap landing page template ServicesLanding is a landing page template created with Bootstrap. The design is neat and clean to help make your site more attractive. Fully responsive, the template can be used on all kinds of mobile devices. 17. WhatFontIs Using WhatFontIs, anybody can identify a font from any image in 40 seconds and three simple steps. WhatFontIs has a database of over 550,000 fonts (commercial and free) and an automatic artificial intelligence system that identifies the font you're searching for. 18. EasyHTML5Video HTML5 is a fairly new but very popular way to show video online. But converting video files can be tricky. EasyHTML5Video creates videos for your website in three simple steps. Simply drag and drop, customise your settings, press start and voila! 19. WordPresstoWIX.Pro WordPressToWix.Pro makes it possible to transfer your WordPress website to Wix with almost no effort and time investment. A trusted service, this service eliminates the need to struggle with tons of complex plugins and simplifies the process of website migration. 20. Wrappixel WrapPixel is a supplier of free and premium Bootstrap, Angular and React admin templates and UI Kits. And don’t forget the Mega Bundle, which includes over 45 unique dashboards, 11 admin templates, 130 customised plugins, 6,500 UI components and pages, 3,000 font icons and much more. 21. Fortune Creations FortuneCreations is a WordPress theme developer, with both free and premium templates. Themes include all the features you need to build a responsive, gorgeous and fully functional website in a no time at all. 22. MailMunch MailMunch will help you create beautiful email newsletters, using a powerful drag-and-drop builder, and advanced features like Template Blocks and Media Library help to make the workflow even smoother. No coding required, improve your conversion rate with this very effective solution. 23. Unlayer Unlayer is an email template builder for SaaS and CRMs. It seamlessly embeds in your web applications and lets your customers create beautiful mobile-ready emails or landing pages right from your app. 24. Fotor Online Photo Editor Fotor is an all-in-one visual content tool to help you edit photos and create designs. Accent your ideas with many preset templates, ranging from social media designs including Facebook covers, posters, photo cards, YouTube banner ads, and much more. 25. Content Snare Content Snare collects content and files on time from your customers, saving you precious time. Organise content with the drag-and-drop editor, highlight what you need using text, images and wireframes and set limits so you only get back necessary information. 26. Mockuuups Studio Mockuuups is a super-easy and professional mockup generator for macOS and Windows, with more than 300 high-quality scenes. No Photoshop skills are needed here. Simply drag and drop your screenshot in to the app and you're good to go. 27. Taskade Taskade aims to simplify the way you work, managing tasks and conversations all in one place. Designed as a remote workspace for distributed teams. Taskade is a great solution to help capture ideas, work to team goals and fulfil weekly tasks. To collaborate with your team, simply share the project or invite your teammates into a workspace. 28. Helpjet HelpJet is a knowledge base software that will automate your customer support. Let customers find answers to their questions with an easy-to-use knowledge base. If you’re selling products or services, you can use HelpJet to educate and inform customers about your products, increasing awareness of your business, improve SEO and provide documentation. 29. WikiPress WordPress Theme WikiPress is a powerful, popular WordPress theme. A clean, professional design, the interface is intuitive and easy to use, and the theme is loaded with all the features you need to create a beautiful looking WordPress website. 30. Wokiee Shopify Theme Wokiee is more than a theme, it is a powerful design tool that comes loaded with unlimited layouts for the homepage, various layouts options for shop and product pages, multiple headers options, different custom pages and much more. Any website you need can be designed with Wokiee. 31. Shella Shopify Theme Shella is a premium, responsive fashion Shopify theme. The team behind the design have years of expertise in web development, so you can expect lots of features to help make your fashion website stand out among the crowds. 32. InvoiceBerry InvoiceBerry simplifies invoices and expense tracking, helping you save time and money. This platform will also help you track expenses and payments, create reports, manage clients, and much more. Sign up for a free trial today. 33. Goodie Goodie is a professional web development service aimed at small and local business owners who want to amplify their online presence and for designers looking for a reliable web development partner. Chat with Goodie, these friendly professionals will help you right away. 34. RumbleTalk RumbleTalk is an online group chat platform for websites and live events, used to create over 600,000 chats so far. Get a fully hosted online group chat on your website – it takes just a few minutes to create your own group chat. 35. Opinion Stage Quiz Maker Create engaging quizzes that people love to complete and share with this top-notch quiz maker. No experience is necessary, just bring some great quiz ideas and this handy tool will do the rest. 36. SteadyWP: WordPress Page Speed Optimization Service SteadyWP is a popular WordPress page speed optimisation service, used by many companies and freelancers. This is a great way to cut loading times in half and heavily improve your website visitors experience. 37. uLanding Creating your first one-page website is easy with uLanding builder. A simple way to launch your products or services, sell them, undertake a targeted promotion, and more, you can give it a go with a free trial period and enjoy all the opportunities the service gives. 38. Gorgias: Shopify Live Chat App Gorgias will add a live chat to your Shopify store, with no coding skills required. Provide customer support and close more deals with this all-in-one Shopify live chat app and helpdesk software. 39. uCoz uCoz is a free website builder with a huge amount of functionality. Want to create an online store? No problem. Need a forum or a blog? Go ahead. uCoz has all the tools you need, just activate the necessary modules and away you go. 40. WebDataStats WebDataStats is an up-to-date service that detects more than 1000 CMS, website builders and frameworks. The program also gives contact details collected from sites and shows domain names' CMS migration history. The platform is useful both for users who want to know what CMS a site is made with and for professionals who need detailed information about their rivals. 41. MMThomas Blog MMThomas Blog provides a detailed guide on website builders to help users pick a service that covers the entire spectrum of their web building needs. The website comes with informative reviews, comparisons and useful articles that deliver the required information about the most popular web building tools, their features, major specifications and distinctions. 42. Jacqueline – Spa & Massage Salon Theme Jacqueline WordPress theme is a stylish and trendy web solution to create a spa and beauty online project. A fully responsive layout of the theme is enhanced with a bunch of functional elements that let you deliver the right functionality to your spa salon, hair and makeup studio, manual therapy or any other kind of beauty-related project. The theme is integrated with Spa Salon Booking Appointments plugin, which welcomes your clients to schedule their visits in advance. View the full article

Are you spending too much time on the boring aspects of design work, and not enough on the fun, creative and inventive side? Then stop reinventing the wheel, and start checking out templates that can take the strain. Design templates are sometimes mistakenly cast in a bad light, misrepresented as ‘not proper design’. But frankly, that’s nonsense. A well designed template, created by a fellow professional, is simply a great way to save yourself reinventing the wheel, every time you start a new design, and help you skip ahead to the part where you truly make it your own. Stock templates save you a lot of time and money, so it can be a worthwhile investment to spend a bit of money on them. But here’s the best news: there are a ton of high-quality templates available through Adobe Stock that are absolutely free, no strings attached. So whether you’re a graphic design, motion designer, web designer, animator or film-maker, free templates from Adobe Stock may be the productivity boost you’ve been looking for. In this post, we bring you 10 great examples to show you just what’s on offer. If you've not used Adobe Stock before then don't worry: all you have to do is register for an Adobe ID, and that's free too! 01. Photoshop template: Handmade Halftone Textures By Design Spoon Handmade Halftone Textures By Design Spoon Download the template here. Halftone textures are super-hip right now, and perfect for a variety of projects, including hand-made, vintage, retro, letterpress and screen printing-themed designs. This free Photoshop template from Design Spoon features superb set of 15 handmade halftone textures and comes with editable colours. 02. Illustrator template: Abstract Illustrations By Radoman Durkovic Abstract Illustrations By Radoman Durkovic Download the template here. A set of modern illustrations with abstract shape and colour combinations, this Adobe Illustrator template from 10 Radoman Durkovic includes 10 brilliant compositions for you to use in your designs. Featuring global colours for quick customization and fully editable vector shapes, this is one super-flexible template. 03. Premier Pro template: Falling Orbs Background By Wavebreak Media Abstract Illustrations By Radoman Durkovic Download the template here. Motion graphics is one of the best arenas to take advantage of templates, as they can save you serious amounts of time laboriously putting together functional little animations. Here’s a great example from Wavebreak Media: a full frame background of glowing, falling spheres that truly looks the business. Including four styles, this beautiful template is a must-have for your toolkit. 04. Photoshop template: Vanilla Mobile UI Kit By Pixelbuddha Vanilla Mobile UI Kit By Pixelbuddha Download the template here. UI design is another discipline that’s just crying out for ways to speed up what can be a long and laborious design process. And so UI design kits like this one, which has been specially crafted for product and shopping applications, can be a great boon. Vanilla Mobile UI Kit By Pixelbuddha includes 25 screens and smart objects for quick customization. Note, though, that the photos shown in the preview are for display only and are not included in the downloaded file. 05. Illustrator template: Neon Overlay Graphics By Motionworks Neon Overlay Graphics By Motionworks Download the template here. Here's an eye-catching set of neon overlay graphics from Motionworks that you can use to add a touch of pizzazz to your projects. This superb Adobe Illustrator template comes with three overlay options, five colour options, global colours for quick customisation, editable accent elements and text areas... and all for free! 06. Premier Rush and Premier Pro template: Large Casual Quote By Jonas Hummelstrand Large Casual Quote By Jonas Hummelstrand Download the template here. Most of the free motion graphics templates available from Adobe Stock are for Premiere Pro, but some are available for its (free) cousin Premiere Rush too. Here’s a superb example, which is actually optimised for Premiere Rush. Large Casual Quote By Jonas Hummelstrand features a customisable four-line quote that fills the screen in dramatic fashion. 07. Photoshop template: Vertigo Collection By RuleByArt Vertigo Collection By RuleByArt Download the template here. This eye-popping Photoshop template features a set of layered kaleidoscope compositions that let you create your own unique, layered overlay effects. Vertigo Collection By RuleByArt includes eight striking and eye-catching compositions overall. 08. Illustrator template: Social Media Sale Banner Layout Set By GrafVishenka Social Media Sale Banner Layout Set By GrafVishenka Download the template here. Producing visual assets for social media can be a repetitive, boring and frustrating time-suck on your work day, so here’s a great set of templates to the rescue. This social media layout set by GrafVishenka let you add your own text and create cool looking sales banners, quickly and easily. 09. Photoshop template: Professional Trifold Brochures By Mischa G Professional Trifold Brochures By Mischa G Download the template here. This set of three trifold layout, based on US Letter page sizes, is a great way to get started with designing a brochure. Please note, though, that the photos shown in the preview are for display only and not included in the downloaded file. 10. Photoshop template: Elegant Responsive Page Layout By Mischa G Elegant Responsive Page Layout By Mischa G Download the template here. Whether you’re working on a website mockup for a client or a production-ready website, sometimes you need to nail the visual design of a website fast. Here’s a great example of a free template for a responsive web layout from Mischa G, specially designed for a product or services site. The template includes desktop and mobile views of 10 different sections. Note that photos shown in the preview are for display only and are not included in the downloaded file. How to get MORE free templates Inspired by our selection, and want to go hunting for your own free templates on Adobe Stock? Just do a search such as 'free templates', 'free Photoshop templates', 'free brochure templates' etc, in the normal search box. Be warned: some of the images this search returns may actually be paid-for templates that include the word 'free', so do check in the listings that the word 'FREE' appears in the bottom-right hand corner. View the full article

As creatives, we tend to notice a lot of things other people simply just don’t register. The poor kerning on that advert. The cool use of motion graphics on that app loading screen. The weird font choice on that shop sign. And the list goes on. But we probably shouldn’t get too smug. There are many iconic examples of logo design that you’ve probably looked at a millions of times, and yet still not spotted the hidden meanings contained within them. Yes, we all know about the FedEx arrow, and the Amazon smile. But there are plenty more besides those. In this post, we pick 10 of our favourites. How many of these logos’ hidden secrets had you already spotted…? 01. Beats by Dr Dre Launched in 2006 by rapper and music producer Dr Dre - the founding member of N.W.A. and the Svengali behind stars like 2Pac, Eminem and Snoop Dogg - Beats by Dr Dre remains the world’s hippest headphone brand. The company’s logo was produced in collaboration with Californian creative studio Ammunition, and on the face of it, its design is pretty straightforward: a simple white ‘b’ in a red circle. Look at it another way, though, and it also represents the head of a person (the red circle) wearing one of the headphones (the white ‘b’). An excellent use of minimalist abstraction that provides a nice little Easter egg for those who spot it, while the logo still works perfectly for those who don’t. 02. Goodwill Founded in 1902, Goodwill Industries International Inc is an American nonprofit providing employment, training and other community programs for people finding it difficult to get a job, such as veterans or those without an education. It’s best known for its massive network of thrift stores, as well as operating sister organisations across Canada, South America and Asia. Goodwill’s is upbeat, positive and optimistic, and its logo fits right into that category. Legendary graphic designer Joseph Selame produced it in 1968, and you can learn more about its creation in this video. What many don’t notice, though, is that th is logo cleverly incorporates a smile in two places: both the main icon above the wordmark, and one within the wordmark itself. (Still can’t see it? Take a closer look at that first ‘g’.) 03. Tour de France First held in 1903, the Tour de France is the most prestigious cycle race in the world. Consisting of multiple stages, it mainly takes place in France, but since the 1950s it has held sections in nearby European nations too. The Tour’s modern logo was created by French designer Joel Guenoun in 2002, with its symbolic yellow-and-black palette and frenetic, cartoonish lettering. The latest iteration of this design (shown above) was released this summer, simplifying the wording and making subtle changes to improve legibility. Our favourite element of this iconic logo is easy to miss: a neat little typographic sketch of a cyclist. If you still can’t spot it, take a look again at the ‘r’, the adjacent black dot and the bright yellow sun, and all will become clear. 04. Continental Founded in 1871 as a rubber manufacturer, German company Continental is today one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of automative parts. It operates in more than 60 countries and produces a wide range of components, but it’s probably still best known for its tyres. The current Continental logo - an update of a wordmark dating back to the 1920s - was created in 2013 by Peter Schmidt Group. It’s a very smart, quite formal wordmark, but what you might not have noticed is how the ‘C’ and ‘O’ form the shape of a tyre. Easy to intially miss, but difficult to ignore once you’ve spotted it. 05. BMW Another German multinational, BMW stands for “Bayerische Motoren Werke”, or “Bavarian Motor Works”. Founded in 1916 to manufacture aircraft engines, the company now produces cars and motorcycles, and is a byword for class and quality around the world. There’s a longstanding myth that BMW’s logo, originally designed in-house in 1927, represents a spinning aircraft propeller. But as this article explains, it’s in fact a mix of the logo of the Rapp Motorenwerke, from which the company grew, and the colours of the Bavarian flag. That’s significant, because at the time of BMW's formation there was a popular movement for Bavarian independence from Germany, which was much like the Scottish and Catalonian nationalist movements in the UK and Spain today. This phenomenon hasn’t gone away, either: in a 2017 YouGov poll, more than 32 percent of Bavarians supported independence. So now you know. 06. Cisco Founded in 1984, Cisco Systems is a US technology conglomerate based in Silicon Valley. Most famously pioneering the idea of a local area network (LAN), it has recently started to focus on the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, and currently has a $221.3 billion market cap. The name ‘Cisco’ is taken from the firm’s home city of San Francisco, and its original logo was a fairly literal depiction of the famous Golden Gate bridge. In contrast, the current logo, designed in 2013 by local creative agency Tolleson, features short lines that appear to represent digital signals, similar to the ubiquitous WiFi icon. However, if you examine the steady evolution of the original logo across the decades, you can see these contemporary blue lines still actually represent the Golden Gate bridge, albeit in a much more minimal and subtle way. 07. Baskin Robbins Founded in 1945, Baskin-Robbins is an American chain of ice cream and cake specialty restaurants with more than 7,500 locations in 50 countries. The company is best known for its slogan "31 flavors", the idea being that you can have a different flavour of ice cream for every day of any month. The slogan originated from the ad agency Carson-Roberts, which later became part of Ogilvy & Mather, and remains in place today, even though the company has now introduced more than 1,000 flavours to its range. If you look closely, you’ll see that the brand’s classic slogan has even been subtly included in the logo design, which was last updated in 2007 by Cliff Freeman & Partners. In case, you’re drawing a blank, the pink parts of the ‘B’ and the ‘R’ form the number ‘31’. 08. Subway Known for its made-to-measure, salad-packed sandwiches, Subway has more than 42,000 locations in more than 100 countries. Founded way back in 1965 as Pete’s Super Submarines, the American restaurant franchise has recently capitalised on a consumer trend towards healthier fast-food options, and has expanded rapidly around the globe as a resuit. Subway’s current logo was designed in-house in 2016, and a spokeswoman explained that the yellow and green colours are "a reflection of the colorful array of fresh vegetables and other ingredients" one of its restaurants. More subtly, meanwhile, the arrows appearing out of the first and last letters of the wordmark (which also appeared in the previous logo) apparently represent the entrances and exits of a Subway. The underlying message here is that you don’t have to sit down at eat your sandwich at the restaurant; you can just grab it and eat on the go. 09. Unilever One of the oldest and biggest multinational companies, consumer products giant Unilever owns over 400 brands, ranging from Dove to Hellman’s. Founded in 1929 by the merger of a Dutch margarine producer and British soapmaker Lever Brothers, for many years it did little to promote its own corporate identity to the public, and its own logo was a fairly uninspiring text-based wordmark. That all changed, though in 2004, when Wolff Olins created the beautiful Unilever logo shown above. And while the pictogram it contains may look random, each one of them actually representing one of the company's sub-brands (such as a lock of hair symbolising Unilever’s shampoo brands) or its corporate values (such as a bird representing freedom). 10. Vaio Launched in 1996 as part of Sony, Vaoi is now an independent Japanese manufacturer of PCs and smartphones. Originally standing for ‘Video Audio Integrated Operation’, the acronym was updated to represent ‘Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer’ in 2008. To the untrained eye its logo, designed by Timothy Hanley, looks simply like a stylised representation of the company name. In fact, it quite cleverly represents a fusion of analogue and digital technologies. The left half of the icon is a wave signal, representing analogue tech, while the right half is a ‘1’ and a zero, representing the binary basis for digital tech. It’s all a bit of a geek fest, admittedly. But hey, if you can’t geek out with a logo for a high-tech company, when can you? View the full article

Get ready to pay close attention, because these typographic designs aren't quite what they seem. Created by designer Mustafa Ömerli, this clever typography series contains both hidden and obvious messages in order to give literal sense to the word being spelt. Shared on Ömerli's Instagram page, each word features a design that reflects its meaning. Just take the word 'hidden' (above). Did you notice that some subtle sharp serifs on the 'H' and 'D' create the letter 'I'? It's a brilliant use of negative space. Take a look at a selection of Ömerli's typography designs below, and head over to his Instagram page to see dozens more. Be warned though, scrolling through his feed and deciphering each design is really addictive. If you think that these designs are fun but nothing like this would be used in the real world, you're wrong. Only recently Canada Jetlines launched a logo with a hidden meaning. So, who knows, maybe we'll be see one of Ömerli's designs picked up by a big brand too? Related articles: The ultimate typography cheat sheet The best new typography books of 2019 15 top typography resources View the full article

Microsoft is building up the anticipation for its Surface hardware event, which will take place in New York on 2 October. Invitations to the press event feature a sleek logo that has prompted speculation as to whether we can expect the launch of new Surface laptops and computers. The team over at The Verge wonder if the event could see the launch of Microsoft's first dual-screen Surface device. According to the site, Microsoft has been busy developing such a device, codenamed Centaurus, for over two years. We're not surprised by this enthusiastic curiosity. A dual-screen device could be a game-changer in terms of portable devices, especially for the creative community. Microsoft Surface devices have become a popular choice among creatives looking for an alternative to Apple and its iPad apps for designers. If you want to check out these devices, we're always working hard to bring you the best Microsoft Surface deals. Will you be there? If Microsoft does reveal new Surface devices, it'll be staying true to form. Last year it announced the Surface Pro 6 laptop/tablet hybrid, plus the Surface Laptop 2 notebook, among other releases. Microsoft usually gives its Surface Pro and Surface Laptops an annual refresh, so we can probably expect them to get an update at least. But just like The Verge, we've got our fingers crossed for some special surprises. View the full article

An analysis of threat techniques used by Silence Group, Goblin Panda and Zegost, which can help construct effective defenses. View the full article

German car manufacturer, BMW, has released a one-off version of its X6 coupé, which has been spray-painted with a version of Surrey NanoSystems self-described "blackest black in the world", Vantablack. The pigment, which absorbs over 99 per cent of light, looks stunning on the car and appears to flatten its body into a two-dimensional shape. In our guide to colour theory we looked at how pigments can affect our perception, and this car is a perfect example of that. Because it reflects so little light, the BMW Vantablack X6 looks almost void-like. Creative agency Levitation 29 collaborated with the inventors of the Vantabalck technology, Surrey NanoSystems, to develop a version of the paint, called VBx2, that could be sprayed onto the car. According to BMW, this car is the "first and only vehicle in the world" to be spray painted with a coating of Vantablack. If you've been following some of the controversy surrounding Vantablack, you'll know that artist Anish Kapoor owns exclusive rights to the pigment. However VBx2 skirts around this issue by using slightly different materials. "We realised that it wouldn't have worked if we'd put on the original Vantablack material, as the viewer would have lost all sense of three-dimensionality," said Vantablack inventor and founder of Surrey NanoSystems, Ben Jensen, in a statement. "It worked really well because of the size of the car, its distinctive shape, and how imposing it is," he adds. "VBx2 with its one-per-cent reflectance provides just enough of a hint of shape." The BMW Vantablack X6 will be unveiled at September's Frankfurt Motor Show, where attendees will also be able to see the launch of VW's new flat logo. Related articles: A short lesson on colour theory 12 colours and the emotions they evoke The essential guide to colour correction View the full article

Mainly motorsports and luxury apparel sites, all of them were running outdated versions of the Magento eCommerce platform. View the full article

In Denmark, IKEA's popular catalogue has moved entirely online. And to make sure that customers get the message, the Swedish furniture group has rolled out a clever campaign that sees items cut out of its ads. We've seen some genius print ads in our time, but nothing quite like these ones, created in partnership with IKEA and Danish agency Hjaltelin Stahl. In the campaign, products are cut out from the posters, leaving a see-through silhouette that is sure to pique the interest of passers by. It's a brilliant way of advertising the furniture and the catalogue without actually showing anything. To complete the ads, a headline on each one shows curious shoppers know where to go: "Find all the new furniture at Ikea.dk". IKEA is having its cake and eating it with these ads Smart, simple, and effective, we'd expect nothing less from IKEA. The company has a track record of witty advertising, just take its hilarious cheese grater ad, which made a joke at Apple's expense. "For us at Ikea and for the many Ikea fans we have in Denmark, the decision to digitise the printed catalog is really a big thing," the marketing manager of IKEA Denmark, Elefteria Cromlidou, told Adweek in a statement. "2019 marks a new chapter in Ikea Denmark's history, where in the future we will inspire the many people through the digital platforms they already use, with relevant content that meets their style, wishes and needs." Related articles: 5 ads that tried to be cool, but failed IKEA's free typeface is the 'comfiest font ever' IKEA's new logo is... different View the full article

Character sheets are the order of the day in this tutorial, which covers how to create one for a 3D modeller-friendly character. By 3D modeller friendly, I mean a very clear and accurate detailing of the character’s clothes and accessories, and a body proportions guide to help with setting modelling boundaries. The full sheet will include close-ups on the character’s items, some expressions to get a full idea of how the face should be rigged for animation, texture presentation, front, back and side views, colour options, functionality, and 2D modelling wireframes. These are considerations that underpin some of the most amazing 3D art we've seen. Harajuku shapes and colours will be the main inspiration for our character design, in order to make it more eye-catching in any game or animation. We will be working with Procreate and Photoshop (some of the best software for digital artists), learning how to use suitable brushes and the editing tools in both software. This tutorial will give you an insight into creating character sheets, which you will be able to use in your own work. Get Adobe Creative Cloud here 01. Start by using shapes Shapes are a great way to communicate character Shapes are an integral part of sketching any of your character designs and they can help you set the personality and attitude. Big shapes can give off the sense of a kind or firm and strong presence, while small and thin shapes might show speed, flexibility or timid uncertainty! Shapes and psychology are connected, so for this concept of an underground street racer, we will be going for a strong but slow character. Choosing big circles and wide shoulder formations will help to portray an impactful personality. 02. Connect shapes to make a basic form Contrasting shapes create an interesting character Once we have decided on the shapes, we move on to setting the smaller shapes connecting to the main body. Here we can see how the arms and feet are going to look. To make your character more whimsical, try to work with juxtaposing the limbs and extremities. Here we will go for a big body, but very thin legs and small hands. This contrast will add a funnier spirit to your character. 03. Build a 2D body wireframe Drawing wireframe lines will give you a better understanding of the character's form A common overlooked step is presenting the body in the character sheet with no details or clothing. Drawing the original body shape provides a good base for any future 3D sculpt, without the distraction of form and outlines caused by the layering of several clothing pieces or accessories. Using the circles and body sketch as a base, we start to draw the anatomy of the character in raw form. This will allow the modellers to add the outfit as separate layers on top of the basic sculpt. Another tip is to draw the wireframe lines wrapping around the model in 2D form; this will give you a better understanding of how the clothes will fall around the character’s body. 04. Detail then finalise line art It's time to pin down the look and feel of the character Once the basic shape of the character is set, you can start with detailing the character. As mentioned, Harajuku fashion wear was chosen to create the outfit for this character. The character will be called ‘Torch’, so we can choose fire to be the striking element of his design. Drawing fire on his outfit will be a classic thing to do, so for that, we are going to add a gas-powered helmet igniting fire all the time. The helmet design is based on the kabuto samurai helmet with gas tubes instead of the classic ‘maedate’ piece. 05. Reveal character through accessories Texture details will be useful for a 3D modeller Torch is a racer who plays dirty so he can win. For that, we are going to give him a weak weapon to show his deteriorated sportsmanship. A classic bat pimped up to his style will be a perfect weapon. Since Japanese accessories are the inspiration, we will go for a katana-style handle. The textures are also presented in the sheet so the 3D modeller can visualise the end result. 06. Personalise your designs Feel free to give your designs a personal twist that make sense to the character When designing a character accessory, choose a known item and give it your own personal twist. Here, the classic kabuto helmet includes several parts we can change to fit our character. The gas tubes that replace the classic ‘maedate’ will be a perfect addition to reflect his fiery character. The design needs to still be functional, so the gas tubes placement needs to make sense. 07. Specify texture details Texture thumbnails are useful for modellers Providing the modeller with your preferred textures is always a plus. Torch will be wearing a leopard-print fur jacket with a simple shirt and fire shorts. It is preferable to paint the textures in squares in the full sheet to get the desired look. Some designs require custom-made textures, so this will be the job of the development team to change the 2D texture into one fitting for the model. 08. Explore different character angles Guide lines make it easier for modellers to understand your character Next we will work on the side and back view of the character. A tip to drawing the different views is to draw guides positioned on the joints. For example, we have a line that shows how tall the head is, or where the elbows are located, or even the body height. Once the lines are drawn over the main character, you can use the guides to paint him in all the angles, like front, side, three quarter and back. The poses should be drawn in the classic T-pose, excluding the arms, to make it easier for the modellers to identify the anatomy. 09. Detail limbs separately Drawing limbs separately is a common and useful approach When drawing the character in side view T-pose, you exclude the arms so the side seams will show and won’t be hidden by the limbs. In that case, we’ll draw the arm in a separate piece; this is a good way to present, especially if the limbs of your character include complex seams and folds. The hand is even drawn in a flat perspective as an easier guide. 10. Play with colour variations A mood board is useful for settling on a colour scheme Your chosen colours will not always be the final decision, especially when working in a team. For that, you need to present several colouring options and discuss what would be best to give both visual impact and memorable combinations. In a character sheet, you can get help from your mood board (see mood board tips here) and choose several colour designs. If you want your character to look visually stronger, you can choose to combine flat colours with a pattern or an animal print. This always looks more rich and aesthetically pleasing. 11. Include multiple facial expressions Personality is reflected in the equipment We will be drawing Torch in the three basic vital expressions: happy, sad and angry. Here we can play with how the gas tubes ignite the fire depending on how he feels: when he is happy, the flame will appear a pink colour; anger can be a sharp fire shape with sparks igniting from the tubes; sadness can be shown as a small and timid blue fire. 12. Present ambient occlusion layers AO layers are another way for modellers to better understand your character Ambient occlusion, or AO, is a rendering method to determine the darkest shadowed areas in a neutral diffused light setting. For example, AO could be added underneath his chin, between his fingers, above his knees, etc, any area where there would be no light casting on the surface. It is a good idea to present the AO as a separate layer on your character sheet. Even if your character will be transformed into a 3D model later, adding AO to the 2D sheet is a great way to pitch the idea to your client or team members. 13. Consider colour psychology Pick colours and textures that fit your character This plays an important role in determining the personality and attitude of your character. Torch is a very egoistic character and will do anything for the win, even if it means playing dirty. So we will be choosing purple to reflect vanity along with yellow (the leopard print) to show vitality and energy. You can experiment with other colours that fit the personality of your character. 14. Include lots of different poses Poses help to communicate a character's attitude Posing your character into the basic body movements allows people to learn more about your character’s attitude. To draw your character in different poses, always keep in mind the basic shapes that form your design. Drawing circles reacting to movement will help us with filling in the details. Remember the squish and squash techniques in animation and apply it directly to the pose. Another tip is making use of the spine as a simple line. When you draw this line, the rest of the limbs will be easier to fill in. 15. Extend the character into related items This rough and dirty car links into the character perfectly The final step in our character sheet is to create his prized car, the Totchi! Designing vehicles revolves around the same concept as character design. First we draw the main shape of the car after lots of research, then add the details that should be relatable to the character. In this case, the car should include the fire and the leopard print to show ownership. You can also exaggerate with the car shape and increase the sizes, so here we make the cockpit very wide and big to fit Torch in his one-person seat. This article originally appeared in issue 248 of 3D World, the best-selling magazine for 3D artists. Buy issue 248 or subscribe to 3D World. Related articles: 3D sculpting: How to sculpt with style These 3D portraits are unbelievably realistic 10 ways to improve your 3D anatomy View the full article

Summer isn't over yet! There's still time to go out and capture beautiful photographs. What's more, you can turn your HDR photos into works of art with a little help from the easyHDR Image Processing Software v3.13 Home Plan. HDR images cover more extensive dynamic ranges than regular digital cameras, resulting in a variety of different exposure levels. If you're on the hunt for a new camera, check out our guide to the best cameras for creatives. And speaking of exposure levels, this easyHDR software simplifies the task of polishing them thanks to straightforward tone mapping and LDR enhancement techniques. Compatible with both PC and Mac platforms, the easyHDR software allows you to transform raw and pale images into vivid photos. Lens correction, alignment, ghost removal, freehand transform, colour grading, and preset layer features are all included in this handy home plan. The software even allows for the importing of several image formats, including those that were previously generated with other HDR image processing software. Usually $39, the easyHDR Image Processing Software v3.13 Home Plan has been cut in price for a limited time to only $9.99 - that's a saving of 74%. Improve your photo editing workflow and start processing stunning images from the comfort of your home when you buy it now. Related articles: The best cameras for beginners in 2019 The best memory cards for your camera The best camera bags and cases in 2019 View the full article

Samsung's Note line has been a favourite with creatives for years, given its size, power and fantastic pen support. The new Note 10 Plus set the internet on fire when it was announced. Not because it made a top spot in our list of the best camera phones around, or its maxed-out specs, gyroscopic S Pen or even its stunning display, but because of its colour and lack of a headphone jack. The new Aura Glow colour, which makes the phone look like a unicorn has the back panel shimmering a different hue depending on how it grabs the light. Despite being a £999/$1,099 phone, Samsung took a gamble, and it paid off. The second headline-grabber – the death of the headphone jack, has been less well-received. How much you care about either of these will be entirely down to you; do you use an opaque case? You won’t see that ethereal shimmer. Already happy with a headphone jack-free phone or don't mind the idea of Bluetooth cans? Great, get ready for some excellent penning. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Design and display With a 6.8-inch screen, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus is a giant canvas for that S Pen, stretching the limits of being pocketable, but it isn't quite as big as we thought it would be. If you’ve seen an iPhone Xs Max, it has a 6.5-inch screen, and that’s probably the upper limit of what you’d want to be carrying around with you. Samsung has managed to squeeze a much bigger display into a similar-sized chassis, which is lighter than the Xs Max, by zapping the phone’s bezels, creating an all-screen, notch-free experience. Taking centre stage is that curved AMOLED panel – it’s huge, punchy, vibrant and fills 91% of the phone's fascia, framed by a tiny border and interrupted only by a small, punch-hold front camera centred at the top of the phone. At the bottom is a USB-C port, speaker grille, that retractable, spring-loaded S Pen, and on the left are all the buttons. The top is where you’ll find the dual-SIM card tray, while around the back is the quad-camera setup. With a 6.8-inch screen, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus is a giant canvas The Galaxy Note 10 Plus’ design isn’t just the pinnacle of Samsung’s smartphone legacy; it’s the best we’ve seen to date, with the polished aluminium frame melding beautifully into the Gorilla Glass curved back and front. While there isn’t a case in the box, the Note 10 Plus is protected with IP68 water and dust resistance, and thanks to the pre-fitted screen protector, out of the box, you’ll have something safeguarding that screen. As for the tech behind the display, the Note 10 Plus features a Dynamic AMOLED panel with a 19:9 aspect ratio and QHD+ resolution (1440 x 3040). Featuring HDR10+ support, it gets very, very bright, and very, very dark. Blacks showcased by the Note 10 Plus look incredibly inky, deep and rich, making it perfect for watching content in low light with its 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and thanks to its supremely high brightness levels (up to 1200 nits), it’s easy to see what’s going on outdoors when using it. Viewing angles are also stellar, and while it hasn’t got the highest refresh-rate around – 60Hz vs 90Hz on the OnePlus 7 Pro and 120Hz on the new iPad Pro (see our full iPad Pro 12.9-inch review for full specs), it's still a class-leading canvas for your creativity in terms of size and colour reproduction. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: S Pen The S Pen supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity As with the last few generations of Samsung Galaxy Note, and the Tab S, the Note 10 Plus features a Wacom digitiser under the display, which, when coupled with the phone’s S Pen, supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. This is combined with deep software integration with the phone itself. Pull out the S Pen from the bottom right of the phone, and a menu cascades up with shortcuts to S Pen functions like creating a new note, writing on a screenshot, translating on-screen text and more. You can supplement this menu with shortcuts to other S Pen apps, which can be downloaded through the Google Play Store. The Notes app is handy, and thanks to excellent optical character recognition (OCR), the phone can index notes based on your handwriting, making them searchable. Taking this handwriting recognition a step further, the Note 10 Plus also features the best handwriting keyboard available on any smartphone. The S Pen's precision wipes the floor with that of its main competition While there are some new gimmicks like air gestures – you can wave the Note pen around to zoom in and out within the camera app, none of these add to the experience. The only handy feature in our experience was using the S Pen button as a shutter release when taking pictures, perfect for capturing group shots with your phone on a tripod or propped up on a surface. What really sets the S Pen apart for us is how good it is for digital artists and illustrators. Its precision wipes the floor with that of its main competition, the Huawei Mate 20 X and its M Pen, latency is low, and you can work on much larger files than ever before without slowdown. We exported a multi-layered PSD file that was around 12.8MP and 90MB, working on it with virtually no lag over four hours. If you’re happy with Sketchbook for starting off projects and Samsung Notes for casual doodles, therefore, the Note 10 Plus is like having a pin-sharp Wacom Cintiq in your pocket. You can see an example illustration below: As with the Note 9, you can tilt the S Pen for intuitive shading, provided you’re working within an app that supports the feature. And if you want a more traditional drawing experience, the Staedtler Noris Digital is a compatible stylus that looks and feels just like a pencil, and can be had for around £20-30. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Software The nuts and bolts of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus user experience is powered by Android 9 with Samsung’s One UI over the top. That means excellent app support, though not quite as good as the iPad from a pen point-of-view. The core UI is comprised of home screens that can be customised, along with a Bixby Home display to the left, which serves up a feed of things Samsung thinks you should care about – local highlights, fun gifs etc. It’s a familiar, highly customisable and high-quality UI, and you can scale back things you don’t care for, like Bixby, for example, or even overlay a new interface over the top - 'a launcher' - Android is flexible like that. With smart features like Samsung DeX to play about with too, the phone can be hooked up to a big screen to deliver a desktop interface on a TV or monitor with an HDMI adapter. This feature also extends to computers, so you can now create a window within your computer that gives you access to the phone. Neither are particularly fantastic for actual productivity, especially creative work, and we ignored them after testing them out. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Camera Take control of your shooting experience with the Galaxy Note 10 Plus The Note 10-series carries forward the 12MP dual-aperture main camera introduced on the Galaxy S9 and combines it with a 2x zoom 12MP camera and an 0.5x zoom, ultrawide 16MP camera. Finally, the time of flight (ToF) camera helps with depth sensing to create better effects when blurring out the background of portraits and Live Focus photos and videos. Results across lighting conditions are very good, with detail consistently high and images looking poppy and saturated out of the camera. There are plenty of shooting modes, including Pro mode, so you can take control of your shooting experience, and the phone shoots RAW photos too. While low light photography isn’t quite as well handled as on the Huawei P30 Pro or Pixel 3, and there’s no 5x periscope zoom as found on the Oppo Reno 10X's camera, the Note 10 Plus still manages to deliver an excellent, multi-purpose imaging experience across lighting conditions. Thanks to the combination of optical and electronic image stabilisation, it also shoots brilliant videos at up to 4K resolution, 60fps, as well as up to 960fps slow motion at Full HD resolution. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Performance, storage and connections A considerable amount of power and storage sit inside the Note 10 Plus' elegant frame, making it about as future-proofed as you can get right now. Specs include an Exynos 9825 processor combined with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. That’s more space for your files, photos and games than found in some premium laptops, and you can boost it with up to 1TB thanks to microSD card expansion. If you opt for the 5G version, you can even pick it up with as much as 512GB storage, though the maxed-out model will set you back £1,199. The phone’s 4300mAh battery easily gets it through a full day, and with its supplied 25W charger, the Note 10 Plus powers up from 0-100% in just over an hour, which is fast, especially when compared to the three hours 30 minutes charging time of the iPhone Xs Max when using the in-the-box charger. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Should you buy it? If you’re a creative who draws, there’s no competition; the Note-series is the only real choices when it comes to phones with excellent pen-input out of the box. Compared to the standard Note 10, the Note 10 Plus is significantly bigger, has a sharper screen, better battery life, more optional storage and RAM, as well as a ToF depth camera. The main selling point of the Plus for us is the larger screen to draw on and its extra resolution. There’s no getting around the fact the Note 10 Plus is costly, but it’s also very, very good. In a world in which the iPhone Xs Max (256GB) is £1,249, the Note 10 Plus (256GB) costs £999, delivering significantly better bang for buck. That said, if you’re not looking for pen-input, then there are plenty of excellent Android phones that undercut it, not least of all the Huawei P30 Pro (£799), OnePlus 7 Pro (£649) and the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus (£799), and if you're happy with last season's model, the Note 9 is still a fantastic choice. View the full article

Three-letter logos are everywhere. From JFK to J-Lo, media personalities love having a simple and instantly recognisable moniker, and their fans love using them. In the world of identity design, companies spend millions on research and go through lengthy and highly complex design processes to come up with something that communicates their essence in one, extremely simple mark (read more about the art of logo design here). Sometimes, all they need is in their name – and if it can be expressed in three little letters, all the better. No special symbol, no balancing of logotype and logomark, no distractions. Just a tidy three-letter logo. What makes a good 3-letter logo? Achieving a three-letter logo that makes a lasting impression on people isn’t as easy as it sounds. Though each letter can be crafted in various ways to communicate something about the brand and what it does, bringing them together to form a balanced yet distinctive piece is challenging. Many designers opt for a solid, structured form. But there are a lot of these around – making it difficult to stand out from the crowd. For others, the curves and intricacies of a script-based monogram are the way forward. But the intricacy of a monogram can make it indistinct – hard to recognise in an instant. What’s usually needed is a touch of inspiration, and a touch of genius. Focusing only on logotypes – we haven’t included anything that relies on a mark – we reckon the selection below constitutes the best three-letter logos ever made, in reverse order... For our favourite logos in general, see our post on 10 of the best logos ever. 10. MTV MTV’s 2011 brand update tweaked the original 1981 design logo, but only slightly MTV’s powerful, structural logo was actually created by a start-up design studio called Manhattan Design back in 1981. Its heavy, three-dimensional 'M' establishes its solid form, with the spray-painted TV dropping in as a creative highlight to lend the identity some street cred. Made old-school style by Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman and Patti Rogoff, the TV element was actually sprayed onto acetate in a stairwell in Greenwich Village. Even then, the designers envisaged the 'M' being used as a canvas for different colours, patterns, images and possibly moving footage too, giving the world one of its first adaptive logos. 09. CNN The clean, clear form of the CNN logo means it worked well on screen and its aesthetic and conceptual immediacy has made it an enduring winner As with MTV, it was a case of needs must in the early 1980s as cable television took off in the US. While the music station was to broadcast videos 24 hours a day, CNN’s concept was non-stop news. At the last minute, founder Ted Turner and his board realised they needed a logo and ad agency Communication Trends in Atlanta obliged. Turner ‘got’ the concept immediately – a cable running in-line through a smoothly curving, modernist formation of the three letters. The logo was designed in 48 hours and has been on air ever since the station’s launch on 1 June 1980. 08. Yves Saint Laurent Slim, elegant, well-proportioned, the YSL monogram was originally designed to represent the modern man Although the French fashion house rebranded as Saint Laurent Paris a few years ago, its beautiful monogram logo is still seen on fragrances, bags, jewellery and in various secondary applications. And why would the brand rid itself of a classic monogram, which stands out against the heavy structure of most other three letter logos thanks to the way the letters intertwine without becoming too indistinct and decorative? Designed by Cassandre – the pseudonym of Adolphe Jean Marie Mouron – the logo was drafted by hand in 1961. It has a touch of the art deco about it, perhaps tracing back to Cassandre’s own background as a leading poster designer of the 1930s. 07. NYC By deliberately choosing massive letter forms, Wolff Olins gave the city the option to use imagery within nearly every message it put out Could this be the biggest example of location-based identity design yet? Produced in 2007, its huge, blocky type makes it the epitome of a structural three-letter logo. The forms are designed to work vertically and horizontally, and just as the huge 'M' in the MTV logo was used as a canvas for music-related imagery, the chunky NYC is meant to provide a window into a multicultural city. Like the city’s layout, it has been designed on a grid of blocks, but in application it has proven itself adaptive and flexible. Designed by Wolff Olins, the logo has become a lynchpin of tourism marketing – following on from Milton Glaser’s I Love New York logo, of course – and the peg for a range of initiatives such as greenNYC. 06. SAS Designed by Bold, this livery celebrates the 70th anniversary of SAS. The airline’s iconic three-letter logo has been around since 1983 Designers love doing identity work for airlines. From sick bags to aircraft livery, there’s so much to play with. The core logo for Scandinavian Airline Systems had its origins with Landor Associates, which came up with the basic letter forms in 1983; was placed in a blue box by Stockholm Design Lab in 1998; and was released to fly free by Bold in 2016. 78.9 degrees is the sweet spot as far as leaning letters goes, according to this diagram by Stockholm Design Lab Essentially, the slant of the letters and the contrast between bold and thin strokes enables the type to look solid and yet light enough to fly at the same time. Bold’s addition of gradients to the brand colour palette have helped modernise the identity but it’s the expertly handled geometry in the lettering that chimes most with the straightforward Scandi functionality. 05. The BBC Today the BBC considers its brand to be its most valuable asset ABC, NBC, CBS, CBC… Broadcasting companies tend to have three-letter identities and great logos, but this clear, solid, globally recognised mark which the BBC has used since 1997 just has the edge on other contenders. You could argue that its grounded feel matches the corporation’s impartial editorial approach, or that the blocks look almost like keys on the keyboard at which a diligent correspondent is beavering away. However, Lambie-Nairn’s design really aimed to deal with the issues of the digital age. At the time, various BBC entities were using different logos, but its main mark – slanting letters with blue, red and green lines underneath them – didn’t render well at small sizes or on digital displays. Since the 1950s, the lettering has been in blocks, and Lambie-Nairn refined this tradition, using Gill Sans in hopes of giving the logo a timeless quality. 04. Caterpillar Caterpillar’s three-letter logo with its distinctive triangle establishes the reliability of the company’s equipment As a manufacturer of earthmoving and construction equipment, the strong and structured feel of its current logo looks just right. But the insertion of the yellow triangle adds a little mystery. What does it represent? A mound of rubble that needs to be moved? A hillside someone wearing CAT branded boots is about to conquer? Well, according to the internal design team that created it, the triangle actually conveys optimism, support and energy. It was introduced in 1989 and since 1996 the company has extended its reputation for rugged, high traction products into the clothing and footwear sectors. The three-letter CAT logo makes for an ideal tag for this gear. 03. The V&A The V&A’s logo works much in the same way a monogram would, establishing a classic yet modern identity Designed by Pentagram founder Alan Fletcher in 1989, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s logo is an object lesson in exclusion. By leaving out left-hand stroke of the capital 'A' and tightening the 'V' and the rest of the 'A' in to house the ampersand, a unique but very recognisable form is established. The thin, Bodoni-like serifs and strong contrast in the strokes speak of the V&A’s timeless elegance. In 2002, branding agency Wolff Olins helped give the identity more a dramatic and vibrant presence by demanding that it always be used in colour. Black was banned. Strictly speaking, it’s three characters rather than three letters, but to this day the V&A marketing department considers the logo to be as valuable as any piece in the museum’s collection. 02. IBM IBM shares the metrics of its 8-bar logo on its website, along with all the brand guidelines Just like a good piece of music needs to connect with the listener in the first eight bars, Paul Rand made an unforgettable impression on the nascent tech industry with his eight-bar logo for IBM. Redesigning his earlier identity from 1956, in 1972 Rand split the slab serif type horizontally using seven gaps, which seem to allude to the scan lines that were visibly present on early computer monitors (and televisions for that matter). The black bars – or positive space – are ever so slightly thicker than the white ones to overcome the optical effect of the negative space surrounding the logo. In a fast-moving business, it has stood the test of time. Like the modernist ethos Rand promoted, IBM’s logo stands for honesty and integrity. 01. The London Symphony Orchestra True genius expressed in three letters, as one. The London Symphony Orchestra logo by The Partners (now Superunion) Not as well-known as IBM, Yves Saint Laurent or, indeed, MTV, the LSO might be an unexpected choice in top position. However, this design isn’t just a three-letter representation of an organisation, it’s a mark that captures the very essence of an orchestra in a way that defies expectation. These letters appear as though they’ve been drawn in the air by the tip of the conductor’s baton. Designed by The Partners (now Superunion) in 2004, the logo is centered around the notion of motion. Two years ago, the agency returned to motion capture conductor Simon Rattle, taking the angles of his movements into custom lettering for the orchestra’s poster campaigns. If there was ever a way to use an identity to make classical music feel relevant and exciting, this is it. Read more: 5 logo design apps for beginners 6 famous textless logos and why they work 12 meticulous style guides View the full article

Earlier this month Apple launched its much-anticipated Apple Card in the US. We fell in love with the Apple Card when we first saw its sleek design, then we laughed at its fastidious care instructions. As if that wasn't enough, you can now buy skins and wraps to keep the high-maintenance Apple Card looking pristine. Initially the need for skins and wraps seemed bizarre to us. Although when you consider that this is Apple, and the card's design is on the same level as the best iPad accessories, maybe it isn't so unusual. But hold on, these skins and wraps aren't made by Apple. Instead, they're the creation of DBrand, and you can buy them now from just $4.95. Claiming to be made from premium materials that can withstand frequent use, these skins and wraps also boast unlimited customisation. Apple recommends that users clean their cards with isopropyl alcohol If anything, we have to ask why Apple didn't predict the demand for Apple Card skins. Earlier this year Apple decided to release a $999 stand for its new Mac Pro, so it clearly isn't adverse to charging a premium price for a useful product. The Apple Card Sleeve could've been a nice little earner. And if that stand's price tag sounds too much for you, don't forget to check out our roundup of cheaper monitor stands. If these skins aren't what you're after and you want to clean your card the Apple way, check out the full care instructions. Just make sure you have your lint-free microfibre cloth and some isopropyl alcohol at the ready, because the Apple Card is a precious thing. Related articles: The 100 greatest Apple creations Is Apple about to bring back its rainbow logo? Has Apple ripped off Elon Musk's company logo? View the full article

This tutorial is for people who have heard of static site generators and have decided they want to have a go at building their own site using one. Here's we'll be showing you how to start a blog using Jekyll. A basic knowledge of Terminal is good, although you should be able to follow along as the commands are all fairly simple. Sites on GitHub Pages are powered by Jekyll behind the scenes, so when used along with GitHub Pages, it creates a way to host and manage your website for free (see our list of the best web hosting services for other options). This tutorial assumes you are on a Mac; as Jekyll is a Ruby program, it is possible to run it on Windows but it is not officially supported. If you are following along on Windows, hop over here for help getting Ruby set up. After completing this tutorial, you will have created a Jekyll blog and learnt how its features and templating language can build a personal blog. This is a great starting point to develop your own site. Find the files for this tutorial here. 10 best static site generators 01. Getting set up On a Mac you should have Ruby installed by default but let's check by typing ruby -v in your Terminal. Now we can actually get Jekyll running in the site, make sure you are in the directory you want to build your site in and simply type gem install jekyll bundler; your computer will then go and grab all the dependencies needed to run a site. 02. Serve locally or build There are two main commands you will use with Jekyll – serve and build. To run your site locally type jekyll serve in your command line. This will run a version on http://127.0.0.1:4000 that you can preview your changes on. If you already have gem and other dependencies installed on your machine, this command may fail due to a mismatch in dependency versions; in this case, try bundle exec jekyll serve instead. Running the same but with the word build just compiles the site. 03. Get the starter files Copy the files supplied with this tutorial at this point to give you a basis to work from. This will give us a homepage, blog list, detail page and the assets structure for the site. Refresh your page at http://127.0.0.1:4000 and you will see we now have some basic pages to build from. Let's have a quick overview of how a Jekyll site works. A Jekyll site is structured in an easy to follow way. Any collections (types of posts) are held in their own folder, as are layouts and includes. You will notice a '_site' folder – this is the folder that Jekyll uses when you run a jekyll build command. Join us in London on 26 September for Generate CSS – click the image to book your ticket 04. Configuration Jekyll gives you a great structure to work with and an easy-to-manage config file Open _config.yml in your text editor and add your own details; one key area to check is to set your base URL. This is the folder that your site is loading in. The config file is similar to using Global Options combined with your wp-config file if you were building out a WordPress theme. You can control core information such as titles and meta descriptions, your email and social accounts and then all the information the site needs to compile such as collections and any plugins used. You can use a mixture of HTML and Markdown for pages, depending on what it is that you want to achieve. However, custom pages such as your homepage and list pages will generally be HTML, whereas posts and other general pages that use a set template will be Markdown. 05. Front matter Front matter is a snippet of YAML at the top of a file. Jekyll uses it to hold variables. Look in the about.md file and you can see we set the title, which layout to use, the author and any related images. 06. Liquid tags Liquid tags offer an easy way to work with templates and are also used in Shopify themes Jekyll uses Liquid – a templating language that uses objects, tags and filters. We use the object tag surrounded by double braces {{ }} to output front matter variables and a brace and percentage sign for logic {% %}. 07. Build your navigation Rather than a static navigation, we use the power of config files to separate the content from the template. We will hold out navigation items in the 'data' folder as a config file and then loop through them in navigation.html. We can just enter whatever pages and links we want going forward without going back to the template. Make sure you are really careful with whitespace when editing your config files such as navigation.yml or front matter at the start of a post because a stray space will cause an error. The config file is already set so enter the following code in your 'navigation.html' include file: We are using Liquid logic tags to look in the navigation config file and loop out a link and name for each entry, basically just a standard for loop. 08. Create the home page On our homepage we are going to list our latest blog post as a hero and then have a snippet from our about page with a link through. Let's start with the hero block. Open index.html and then add the following code: You will see that we first assign the latest post and then reference the thumbnail image set in the post's front matter. The post intro uses a Liquid filter markdownify to convert the Markdown to HTML. With that in place, let's add a teaser from the about page too. Add the following: This time we are using a for loop to check through the pages in the site. We are using page.url to filter out the about page and then we use a similar templating style to the hero in order to output the pages' information. 09. Blog list A simple card layout for the rest of the posts in the site that uses CSS Grid and Flexbox With the homepage created we can move onto the blog list page. To create the list page, we again use Liquid tags to give us the logic to loop through all the files in the 'posts' folder. The hero is done for you because it follows the same process as the homepage. Underneath the hero in 'blog.html', add the following: Again we use a for loop to go through the posts collection. But as we have already looped out the latest in the hero we offset this loop to start on post two. A Liquid filter is used to convert the date to a format of our choosing. 10. Blog detail page Not long to go now: we nearly have all the basic elements together. One important aspect left to address is navigation. When you are reading a blog post you need a way to cycle through and read more. We can add some nice pagination to our site using a page variable. Open post.html in the layouts folder and add the following: We use the page.previous and page.next variables to check if there is a post to click on to. If there is then we can output a block and include the title and link of the post. 11. Build and publish GitHub Pages renders the Sass files for us, so when you run jekyll build the compiled files are created in the _site folder. No gulp files or webpack here, just nice lean styles! You can even minify the Sass output as a setting in the main config.yml file for the site. The contents of this directory can be transferred to your chosen hosting. One thing to be aware of is that GitHub Pages actually supports Jekyll so you can build and host a site using your master branch as the source. You can find more information on this here. This article was originally published in issue 320 of net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 320 here or subscribe here. Related articles: Build a blog with Grid and flexbox The best free blogging sites How to build a blogging site with Gatsby View the full article

Twitter was buzzing with theories over the weekend after Japanese developer, Yuichiro Kitao, pointed out that video games company Sega uses a different version of its famous text-based logo in Japan. And what's more, it appears that nobody really knows for sure why Sega has two versions of its logo. So how does its logo look different? Simple: the Japanese version uses a lighter blue, while the logo for other territories is darker. Cue rampant speculation as to whether this decision is motivated by colour theory. In his tweet, Kitao posts an image comparing the two different logos. The Japanese one appears first, followed by the darker alternative. For a passing thought about logo colours, this status appears to have captured Twitter's imagination. Hundreds of users have given it a like and have commented with their thoughts on why Sega has two logos. Sega of America’s director of production, Sam Mullen, even got in on the action by confirming that, yes, the video games developer does in fact operate two logos, each with a different colour. But the important question is why does Sega have two different coloured logos? Sadly, we don't know for sure. Mullen has his theories, including the idea that it's the result of a printing mix-up, or that the Japanese colour could be seen as more kid friendly. Either way, it's a curious detail that adds to the Sega brand. And considering that Sega's startup sound ranks alongside the best audio logos, it looks like the company knows how to use its branding to excite interest. Related articles: A short lesson on colour theory 12 colours and the emotions they evoke The essential guide to colour correction View the full article

Researchers warn users of several plugins to update as vulnerabilities are being actively exploited to redirect website visitor traffic. View the full article

From a backdoor placed in the Webmin utility to vulnerability disclosure drama around zero-days in Valve's Steam gaming clients, Threatpost breaks down this week's top stories. View the full article