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There are a lot of interesting effects that can be added to a page to increase engagement, but it is important to pick effects that combine well with the overall aesthetic of a site. Here we demonstrate how to introduce displacement ripples with JavaScript. Check out MustafaCelik for a great example of the effect in action. 1. Create ripples In order to create ripple effects PixiJS will be used since this provides simple displacement effects. Here the JavaScript code sets up the variables needed and loads the images to create the effect. Once the images are loaded the ‘setup’ function is called. 2. Create the displacement In the ‘setup’ function the displacement sprite is created that will create the ripple effect and this is added to a displacement filter. It’s then set to move its anchor point to the centre of the image and positioned on the screen. 3. Finish the setup To finish off the ‘setup’ function, the displacement filter scale is set and the background positioned. Notice the scale is ‘0’ for the displacement, that’s because it will be set to a height as soon as the mouse moves. 4. Get the mouse The next code just grabs the position of the mouse on the x-axis whenever the mouse moves. This will be used to trigger the amount of ripple displacement effect when the user moves their mouse. More movement will make the ripple bigger. 5. Make it move The ‘loop’ function continually updates the screen. A velocity for the x-axis is worked out using the position of the mouse and the ripple. This is then mapped onto the filter to give a value between 0 and 120. 6. Finish the code At the end of the ‘loop’ function the sprite is scaled to the amount of displacement and filter scaled to the amount of depth it should have. Finally, the map function is declared that maps value ranges to new values. Find the full code for this tutorial on FileSilo. This article originally appeared in Web Designer magazine. Subscribe here. Learn more at Generate London 2018 Get to see Sarah Parmenter, Bruce Lawson, Richard Rutter and more talk at Generate London 2018 Special effects and beyond is where the web is heading and Generate speaker Marpi Marcinowski’s creative work revolves around building 3D worlds, creating immersive AR, VR experiences and storytelling in style with a difference. His talk will take you on a journey through all interactive media and technologies and look at it from the perspective of the user. Don't miss out, get your ticket now Related articles: Is it okay to build sites that rely on JavaScript? Perfect JavaScript in 1,000 projects How to manage CSS classes with JavaScript View the full article

Attackers use the approach to look like legitimate traffic and hide data exfiltration in plain sight. View the full article

Attackers use the approach to look like legitimate traffic and hide data exfiltration in plain sight. View the full article

No matter how experienced or talented you are as an artist, there’s always room to improve your skills, push yourself forward creatively, and get inspired by new perspectives. There are many excellent how to draw and art tutorials on this very site. But if you’re looking for ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, then YouTube videos by artists are a great way to reboot your mojo. 18 best iPad art apps for painting and sketching With so much varying quality on YouTube, though, it can be difficult to know where to start. To help you out, we’ve selected the 10 best YouTube art channels to inspire you and improve your skills. 01. Proko Founded in 2012, Proko, the YouTube art channel of fine art painter Stan Prokopenko, is on a mission to teach you the basics of drawing and anatomy. A teacher at the Watts Atelier of the Arts, California, Prokopenko clearly knows his subject inside out, and his short videos are detailed, comprehensive and full of useful tips and information. While some ‘instructional’ art videos on the web are more about showcasing the artist’s own technique, Proko’s lessons are practically focused and often include tasks for the viewer to complete in their own time, making it all seem very lesson-like. That said, they’re also a lot of fun, with the artist’s lively and loud sense of humour shining through throughout. 02. Draw with Jazza Draw with Jazza is the YouTube channel of Josiah Brooks, an Australian artist who has a clear passion for teaching people how to draw, animate and paint, using both analogue and traditional media. With a strong focus on cartoon and animation styles, this channel is updated weekly, with new content including tutorials, speed paintings, streams, art challenges and competitions. Brooks’ presentational style is upbeat, friendly and personable, and while you won’t find the most comprehensive, step-by-step lessons here, you will find short, fun videos packed with tips, tricks and inspiration. 03. Aaron Blaise If you watch a lot of Disney videos with your kids, the name Aaron Blaise may seem familiar. That’s because he spent 21 years of his life as an animator on such films as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan and Brother Bear, which he also co-directed. He’s now left the movie business, but Disney’s loss is the art world’s gain, as more recently he’s turned his hand to teaching. And it turns out he’s very good at it. As well as writing books and offering paid-for courses, the animator, director, illustrator and fine artist uses his YouTube channel to share his art, techniques and tips. Videos include walkthroughs on everything from how to draw wolves to plein air painting with goauche, along with time-lapse paintings, live-streamed chats with fellow artists, and traditional animation tutorials. Most of his videos are very long; Blaise likes to take his time and show you everything he’s doing at a natural pace, which makes for an immersive and insightful viewing experience. 04. Sarah Tepes Sarah Tepes may be only 19 years old and still a student, but she’s attracted more than 200,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, and for good reason. Self-taught in digital art herself, she has a great ability to pass on knowledge to newbies in a way that’s both slickly professional and easy to follow. Alongside instructional art lessons, there are also some great time-lapse, speed painting and process videos in the mix too, and the tone is consistently encouraging and thoughtful; providing great motivation for young and beginner artists everywhere. 05. Mark Crilley Mark Crilley is an American artist, illustrator, author, and graphic novelist who’s also written instructional books about how to draw manga. His YouTube channel features how-to-draw videos on a wide range of topics, mainly around manga and anime styles. Crilley’s narrated, step-by-step drawing tutorials break everything down to fundamentals, so even if you can’t match the high quality of his artwork, you can easily see the principles behind how it’s made. His channel also features a ton of inspiring time-lapse videos, speed challenges and tips on things like different ways to begin a story. Most importantly, Crilley makes a big effort to get his audience involved, so there’s a real community feel to the channel. 06. Bayley Jae Bayley Jae is a young Canadian illustrator who worked in the animation industry for a while after graduating before going freelance. Her art is mainly traditional, with some digital, and she shares her process with enthusiasm and passion on her YouTube channel, which features speedpainting, product reviews, tutorials, and more. Jae’s videos are far from formal lessons, but her fresh, raw and energetic approach can be a real shot in the arm when you’re looking to be more creative and motivated about your art. She’s also honest and open about where her strengths lie, and often shares the process of taking on new challenges in videos such as ‘I tried hand lettering’ and ‘I tried a 3D pen’, which is a lovely touch. 07. Bobby Chiu Canadian artist Bobby Chiu works in concept and character design and has won a number of awards for his creative work, including an Emmy. He also teaches digital painting online at Schoolism.com, publishes art books, and has a YouTube channel that’s full of inspiration for those who wish to follow in his footsteps. Chui doesn’t do tutorials as such on his channel, but his lengthy, live-streamed discussions, demos and interviews with fellow artists are packed full of insight and detail. In fact, whatever a particular video is about, you won’t want to miss a moment spent in the company of this super-talented artist. 08. Emmy Kalia Emmy Kalia is a self-taught pencil artist from the Netherlands with some serious talent at creating photorealistic images using graphite. Her YouTube channel contains a mixture of tutorials and time-lapse videos that showcase and demonstrate her technique. Her results may look intimidating, but she explains the process that gets her there in a clear and straightforward manner. If you're interested in making realistic pencil art, or just curious about how she does it, then this is one YouTube art channel that's definitely worth checking out. 09. Sophie Chan Sophie Chan is a self-taught manga artist from Canada who’s best known as the author of The Ocean of Secrets series. As well as using her YouTube channel to promote this series, she also shares time-lapse videos and some excellent tutorials on the fundamental of drawing manga characters. Manga tutorials can often be overly prescriptive and grid-based, leading to everyone creating very similar-looking characters. So it's to Chan's credit that she strikes a nice balance on her channel between 'How to draw' videos, 'How I draw' videos, and encouragement to break the rules once you know them, the above video being a prime example. 10. ImagineFX No list of YouTube art channels would be complete without the channel of our sister title, ImagineFX, the world’s number one digital art magazine. Here you’ll find video tutorials by dozens of world-class artists, working in a range of styles, both traditional and digital. The emphasis in the main is on sci-fi and fantasy, game design, manga and film art, and contributors include some of the biggest names in these industries. And if you like what you see, why not take out a subscription to the print magazine and get a beautifully packaged blast of new digital art inspiration every month? Related articles: 5 sure-fire ways to develop your creative career Pencil drawing techniques: 7 tips to improve your skills 10 amazing podcasts for digital artists View the full article

Wondering how to draw a cat? You've come to the right place. Drawing animals is not an easy task but it can be lots of fun too. In this tutorial I will show you how to draw a cat so that, even in a sketch form, it can look realistic and convincing. I'll walk you through all the stages of observation, quick sketching, recognising the structure and refining your image so that it looks as lifelike as possible. For more tips, take a look at our guide to how to draw animals. The mistake many artists make is to assume that since animals are so flexible and very often furry, not much attention has to be paid to their structure and anatomy. I believe that the best recipe for drawing an animal is to maintain a good understanding of the structure underneath the fur. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the steps you need to follow to learn how to draw a cat that looks believable. 01. Collect reference photos Cats all move in predominantly the same ways The best way to familiarise yourself with a cat's anatomy is to find a number of photos of cats in random positions – the more positions you can find the better. This helps you form a better understanding of how cats move, sit, jump, and so on. You can also observe your own pets. The important thing to understand is that no matter their shape or size all cats move in pretty much the same manner. 02. Start with quick sketches You learn better by sketching than just looking Try quickly sketching some of the poses from your references. By that I mean: don't focus on the precision of the lines, try to quickly capture the essence of the moves. These initial sketches will give you a better idea of the cat's structure because we learn quicker by drawing rather that just observing. To benefit from this exercise even further you may want to slightly exaggerate the movement of the cat similar to the way it's done in cartoons. This can help you better understand the movements of the animal and the way their bodies work. 03. Pick a pose Choose what you want your cat to be doing When you've done some sketched, it's time to choose a pose. I decided to go for both a walking pose and a side view. This will show off the anatomy of the animal and make for a nice clearer demonstration of the drawing process. 04. Draw the skeleton Simplify the skeletal structure Finding the structure starts with drawing a proper cat skeleton. You can find many drawings of an anatomically correct skeleton online, but these will include much more information than you really need. Observe the proportions between skull, ribcage and pelvis as well as the distances between them. Notice how many joints cat's front and back legs have and which way they bend. Observe the tarsus bone in the back leg, protruding backwards – this plays a big role in how this part of a leg is shaped. Now draw out a simplified version of the skeleton. If you work digitally, draw your skeleton sketch on a separate layer. If you work in pencil, draw lines very lightly so that they don't overpower the final drawing, you can always erase them later. 05. Add some muscles Work to establish your cat's proportions The next step is to add some muscles to your skeleton. As before, I'm not suggesting drawing all of the muscles – this stage is about capturing the shape of the cat and establishing its proportions. Use broader strokes to find shapes of the legs and pay attention to how the flow of lines changes around joints. Make sure the shapes feel full and vigorous and avoid wobbly or uncertain lines. Under all their fur, cats are very muscular and sturdy. 06. Focus on distribution of weight Details like this will help your cat appear more lifelike Since we're drawing our cat in motion, each leg is performing a different task and carries a different load of weight. The back left and the front right leg are carrying most of the weight and help the cat with its balance. The other two opposing legs are more relaxed. The front left paw – while it still carries a bit of weight – is reaching out forwards to establish another step. The back right paw is finishing the previous step and is about to be lifted off the ground completely. Paying attention to details like this is key to creating a lifelike drawing. 07. Draw the face Don't fall into the trap of drawing what you think a cat's face looks like Getting your cat’s head in proportion is very important. Make sure you pay attention to proportions between ears, eyes, nose and mouth – it’s easy to fall into a cliched approach, and give your cat a really big nose, large eyes and cute small ears. Depending on the species of cat the size of the ears can vary. In this case the ears are bigger than one may think, so make sure to compare them with the rest of the head. Also notice how the head connects to the neck, and how the neck extends into the chest. 08. Get the eyes right Cats' eyes can appear bigger than they really are Cat's eyes often seem bigger because of the colour or patterns of the fur around them. In addition, the irises extend over the whole visible part of the eye, which also creates the feeling that the eyes are very prominent. 09. Refine the facial features Time to start using more defined lines Now is the time to draw with thicker, darker and more defined lines. If you’re working traditionally, swap to a thicker pencil and use more pressure. If you’re working digitally, switch to a new layer while keeping previous layers on a lower opacity. Refine the shapes of the eyes, mouth and nose (notice how this resembles the letter ‘T’). Add pupils to the eyes. Depending on the cat you may choose to sketch the eyes more narrow or more open. Don't forget about the whiskers – they make a huge difference! 10. Add some fur Thickness of fur will vary over the cat's body Now you have the anatomy in place all you need to do is add a layer of skin and fur to the body and refine the shapes of the head. Remember that, except for a couple of species, most cats have fur all over their bodies. Cats’ fur tends to vary in thickness depending on the body part it’s covering: it's shorter around the head and paws and gets thicker and longer in the body, especially on the belly and tail. Use small strokes to indicate texture. Also notice how the skin behaves on the animal depending on the position it’s in. In this pose, on the front left and back right leg the skin gets stretched, while behind the right front leg it wrinkles. 11. Make some final touches Remember any patterns will wrap around the body If the cat you're drawing has characteristic patterns on their fur, add these on top. Erase the more prominent sketch lines (if working in pencil) or turn off the sketch layers (for digital artists). In this case I decided to draw stripes on my cat. Be careful how dark you draw features like stripes, as they can quickly overpower the whole drawing. Use subtle shading lines, and make sure to follow the forms of the cat's body. Drawing fur patterns – especially stripes – can add a lot of depth to your sketch. However, if done incorrectly, it may unintentionally flatten the image. Try to vary the length, width and shapes of your cat’s stripes. They usually get thicker on the tail, body and upper limbs and thinner around the head and lower paws. Last but not least add a little shadow under your cat's paws to indicate the ground and voila! Read more: The best pencils Infographic: Keep your hands in shape 10 tips for sketching moving subjects View the full article

When learning how to draw people, one of the areas beginner artists often struggle with is the nose. Perhaps it is the diversity of shapes that we see every day that makes knowing how to draw a nose all the more difficult. In this tutorial, I will offer a quick step by step guide to how to draw a nose. I'll be using oil paints here, but I'm focusing on the core drawing techniques you need to know how to draw a nose in any medium. 01. Start with basic shapes Use the icon in the top right to enlarge the image First, try to establish the very basic anatomical shapes of the nose. At this point, don’t think about all the intricacies of the shades and highlights. Just focus on basic shapes: triangles, trapezoids and circles. If you're painting, it's helpful to start by tinting your canvas with burnt umber thinned with odourless thinner – this will help you judge the values of the painting better. Then use a small brush to add in your basic shapes. 02. Make the shapes more realistic Use the icon in the top right to enlarge the image You can now make use of the basic shapes you’ve sketched and build on top of them. Looking at your reference, sketch in the tip of the nose and nostril wings. Keep in mind that the nose is predominantly made of skin resting upon cartilages or is made of dense connective tissue – therefore it has a very firm structure. 03. Introduce the main colour values Use the icon in the top right to enlarge the image Block in the main values of the nose – I'm using titanium white and burnt umber. Try and think back to the initial shapes you drew in step one and observe the direction of the light and placement of the shadows. Again, don’t get lost in details. In this step, focus on the basic shapes and values. Remember, however, that the nose openings are not just dark round holes – they have a structure. 04. Move on to the details Use the icon in the top right to enlarge the image Once the block-in is done, move on to adding details. Now is a good time to observe all the things you have deliberately omitted. Look at the details that are a part of the nose’s shadows, as well as the highlights, and make sure you don’t make the nose 'too perfect'. Pay particular attention to the cartilage below the tip of the nose as this can easily be overlooked. Read more: Pencil drawing in 6 simple steps Draw a figure in under five minutes How to draw hands View the full article

Amazon Prime Day 2018 is set for Tuesday 17 July, with deals due to start rolling at midday on Monday 16 July. That’s according to our sister site TechRadar, which discovered an Amazon Prime Day 2018 banner published on the UK site “presumably in error” this morning. At 36 hours, it’ll be the longest Prime Day Amazon has run so far. Last year’s event launched at 9pm, with Amazon Prime Day deals coming thick and fast for 30 hours. If these dates are correct, Amazon Prime Day in the US is likely to follow a similar timeframe. TechRadar predicts a midday start on the 16th July EST, with a midnight close on the 17th PST – putting Prime Day 2018 at a whopping 39 hours in the US. What is Amazon Prime Day? Amazon Prime Day is the retail giant’s summer version of Black Friday, the difference being that the event is for Prime subscribers. If you’re not a subscriber though, fear not: you can still take advantage of Amazon Prime Day 2018 – and other membership benefits – by signing up for a free 30-day trial. You’re able to cancel the trial at any time before the end of the 30-day period. What Amazon Prime Day deals can we expect? Amazon Prime Day 2018 will be on the 16th July It’s highly likely that Amazon’s own devices will take centre stage this year: expect to see Amazon Prime Day deals on its Echo smart speakers – the Echo Dot and Echo Spot – as well as cheaper Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, Fire Tablets and maybe the upcoming Amazon Fire TV Cube too. For designers and artists, we’d like to see some 4K monitor deals alongside the cheap 4K TVs that normally feature highly in Amazon events like these. It’s a safe bet that a host of laptop and tablet deals will appear too, and if you’re into gaming, we anticipate a lot of console deals if last year’s Prime Day is anything to go by –especially around the Xbox One X and PS4 pro. We'll be curating the best Amazon Prime Day deals for designers, artists and creatives on this page throughout the event, so bookmark this page and check in on the 16th July... Also read: The best laptops for video editing in 2018 The best drawing tablet 8 best external hard drives and SSDs for Mac and PC View the full article

Lighting is one of those things that can make or break an illustration. It can set the mood, establish a sense of photorealism, tell a story, and even guide the viewer towards certain areas in your work. To fully understand how light works, you have to study it in detail, and a great way of doing this is by creating your own lighting reference. Because I tend to paint a lot of warriors, both for clients and personal work, I always end up having my fellow HEMA (historical European martial arts) friends pose for me. The references you see here come from those photo sessions. Whatever your photography skills, you can do this yourself with pretty much any camera – in most lighting situations even your smartphone camera will do. Find the perfect lighting conditions for your reference folder and start snapping those photos with your friends. Once at home you can use the Eyedropper tool to sample a colour palette. While doing so, try to capture every angle possible. Parts of the body that are exposed to the sky can have wildly different shadow colours than those areas facing down. Even in the tiny curves and wrinkles of the face you’ll find that light scatters, reflects and bounces around. I’ll be showing you my process and point you towards the right direction. Work with it or adapt it to your own process – the choice is entirely yours! 01. Prepare your lines Line art can be rough because it won't be seen Create a line art sketch in a style that works best for you. I like outlining areas that indicate which parts will come forward or get pushed back. This helps me determine how to shade the character later on. None of this line art will be seen in the finished image, so there’s no need to make it pretty or clean. 02. Create your own reference Time to call in a favour from your photogenic friends Have one of your friends pose for you. I’m lucky to have a group of very photogenic friends who enjoy posing for me. I often go out and do photoshoots with them for my Gumroad reference packs. When taking these photos it’s good to have a plan about what you’d like to paint. If your character is in a forest, go on a trip to the forest for the correct lighting conditions. 03. Understand your reference Your photo will set the tone for a colour palette I study my reference and create a colour palette based upon the colours and lighting. Consider the bounce light in the shadows. A shadow under the chin will have a different colour than one on the forehead or cheekbone. 04. Use flat colours as a guide to painting Flat colours provide a good starting point to build on As an intermediate stage, I usually create a flat colour version of my work before applying the lighting. This means that I simply give everything its neutral object colour. This might come in handy later on, when you might have to blend colours together. 05. Tackle the most prominent shapes Paint in broad lighting details with a big brush I begin by using a big brush to roughly paint the most important shadows and lights. Don’t get stuck on the small details like tiny hairs, eyelids or wrinkles just yet. Keep it simple. In addition, make sure to paint while zoomed out. Have your whole illustration visible on screen at all times during this early stage. 06. Check the likeness Working under line art can maintain a good likeness Keep an eye on your character reference (if you’re using one), to ensure the likeness is on track. Sometimes while applying light and colour to a line sketch, the essence of your character can become lost. This is why I begin by working underneath the line art. For this stage you can start working on a new layer, above your line art. 07. Check your values Switching to black and white helps identify mistakes Go to Image > Adjustments > Black & White. Make sure this effects layer is above all the layers. This black and white or greyscale view enables you to compare the values in your painting with that of your reference photo. If there’s a big difference in a particular area where it shouldn’t be, you should be able to spot it. 08. Bounce light on white Light and white have a unique relationship White, and other light colours, react differently to a light source compared with dark colours. In the highlights they usually maintain the original object’s colour. 09. Bear in mind the qualities of hair Make your hair shine – because you're worth it Hair is always interesting to paint. Whether it be dark or light, healthy hair is shiny and also has a translucent quality to it. The darker the hair, the more pigment it possesses and this usually means it’s less translucent, too. Yet when light hits someone’s hair, it’ll scatter through it. So whenever you paint hair, think about its translucency, shine and possible bounce light. 10. Create realistic eyes The eyes should lack defining dark lines Unless make-up’s involved, the eyes will lack defining dark lines. Even dark lashes will more likely be painted with some interrupted brushstrokes. Look at your photo reference and take note of the gradients that shape the curves and wrinkles of the eyelids. The eyeball itself has a glossy texture to it, so it won’t be made up of just a singular colour. Light-coloured eyes can even appear quite dark under certain lighting conditions. 11. Balance the look of the lips Blend edges to avoid a lipstick look Depicting lips can be tricky, especially when painting ones with a natural skin tone. They can easily end up looking like the person is wearing lipstick! That’s why gradients play a vital role. With either the bottom, or top lip, or even both, blend the edges with the skin tone. Start from the corner of the mouth and paint towards the centre. 12. Apply a mix of approaches to edge work Play with a contrast of soft and hard edges I always make a conscious effort to place sharp edges and soft edges correctly in my paintings. My usual strategy is that strong, brightly lit edges receive a soft bloom, whereas very dark edges are gently blended in with the background colour. Anything between dark or light can either be soft or hard, depending on the mood that I’m in. 13. The finer details Save fine details for important areas This is where I commit to painting the textures of the skin, the eyeballs, the clothing and any other material that may be included in the image. I keep in mind that a smart painter keeps the highest detail ratio and the tiniest brushstrokes in the area of most importance (the focal area) and leaves the more unimportant parts loose and free from causing a distraction. 14. Carry out one final check Time for a quick once-over Before calling a painting finished, go through all these steps. Is the likeness correct? The contrast? The bounce light coming from the environment? The colour gradients? The material expression? The detail ratio? These days we’re often too eager to share our newest piece with the world. Keep it to yourself for a week and trust me, you’ll find some elements to improve before you’re ready to show it off. This article was originally published in issue 159 of ImagineFX, the world's best-selling magazine for digital artists. Buy issue 159 here or subscribe to ImagineFX here. Related articles: Octane Lighting Essentials review 12 tips for realistic 3D lighting Capture natural light in your paintings View the full article

You've probably taken online courses before, but it's unlikely you'll have done one like those offered at Shaw Academy. This online course database is comprised of more than 740 hours of interactive content in all kinds of subjects, from photography and technology to health and wellness to finance and business. With a Premium Lifetime Membership, you get access to all existing content, as well as all future courses that are yet to be released. Whether you want to brush up on your current skills or build new ones for your creative resume, Shaw Academy can get you up to speed and help you reach your goals, while also helping you earn important certifications in the process. A Premium Lifetime Membership is only $99. Related articles: The 10 best free graphic design courses online 16 top online coding courses 10 incredible online art schools View the full article

If you find yourself frustrated by the short time limit of Instagram Stories and videos, then you'll be pleased by Instagram's latest announcement: the launch of IGTV. That's right, Instagram TV. This exciting new tool lets you watch and share videos of up to an hour in length. Using IGTV, you can watch longform vertical video either within the Instagram app or on the dedicated new IGTV app. As a tool for graphic designers, we think it could prove interesting... How does IGTV work? The new feature starts playing as soon as you open the app – just like when you turn on the TV – and you can watch videos from those you already follow on Instagram on their 'channel' (sound familiar?) or choose channels or videos from sections such as Popular or For You. You can also send and receive videos via direct message, and like and comment as you would on your usual Instagram feed. The interface for IGTV, with the video playing full-screen and suggestions below How can creatives use IGTV? This feature offers another way for designers on Instagram to reach their followers, and could end up being another way for creatives to make money on the platform. Like with YouTube, users could use it to showcase step-by-step tutorials, make promotional videos of their work or create video diaries of life as a designer. At the moment, it isn't clear whether there will be ads within the platform, but as Instagram now has over a billion users, it seems likely that creatives will be able to monetise content on IGTV in future. Users will also be able to link out to other content in the description of their videos, a feature that many will likely find useful (the ban on live links within photo captions has long been a frustration for Insta-fans). Note that smaller accounts or those new to Instagram won't be able to use IGTV just yet, but Instagram says there are plans to change this in future. The full-screen video of early adopter of the platform, Stefan Kunz Should I start using IGTV? If you've already got a lot of followers on Instagram, we think it's worth becoming an early adopter of IGTV. You never know where it might lead you. If you're a prolific YouTuber with a loyal following on YouTube, you'll probably want to wait a bit longer to see how IGTV pans out, and what features are added, before you decide if it's worth switching over. Overall, it seems that the vertical orientation of videos and the potential for highly curated content for each user may be the main pull over YouTube, but as with any new feature, we'll just have to wait and see if IGTV takes off. We have a feeling that it will. Read more: 20 illustrators to follow on Instagram How to break the rules on Instagram How to use Instagram as a digital sketchbook View the full article

In an ever-evolving digital world, it’s easy to overlook the power of print. But the medium is far from dead, as many a designer will tell you and these amazing print ads prove. Here, freelance designers Clementine Carriere and Caterina Bianchini, reveal the best ways to get the most out of your next print-based project. 01. Befriend your printer “Sometimes the client wants something very specific, but it might not be possible physically or in terms of budget,” admits Carriere. “Being able to talk freely with your printer is fantastic. Ask as many questions as you can – if they can’t do it for a certain price, they might be able to help you find a better option.” 02. Test finishes and paper stocks “It’s a question of budget,” adds Carriere. “Can you afford it? If you can, which option is going to best serve the final project? Depending on the topic and design itself, the most appropriate finish or stock may quickly become clear, but if you don’t know, test.” Caterina Bianchini’s posters for Sub Club in Glasgow 03. Understand the print process “You need to understand how certain stocks will take ink. Sometimes if you have a cream stock, a light colour will sink in and actually become a lot darker,” points out Bianchini. “Understand texture and the printing processes – embossing, debossing, painted sides, whatever – and how that stock will hold ink, or a deboss.” 04. Match stock to the product “A stock should have the same feel and aesthetic as the product,” says Bianchini. “If it’s a premium brand, it should be heavier. You could use a sandwich stock, such as a gold fill within a three-layered paper. For a music company, you might use something more interesting, like a textured stock with, say, glitter or a holographic aspect to add an element of surprise.” 05. Limitations can be helpful “Limitations can push you to be more creative,” argues Carriere. “If you can only use one type of paper, maybe you could go crazy with colours inside. Maybe not. If you’re using risograph printing, you’re limited in terms of colours. You can go more crazy with stock, but this technique tends to be quite specific as to what goes into the mesh and what doesn’t. Limits push you to constantly rethink your project, and question why you’re doing something one way and not another.” Watch the video: Designers Caterina Bianchini, Clementine Carriere and Filip Pomykalo share their enduring love of print and give some top advice for making the most of the medium, from choosing the right materials to building a relationship with your printer. Presented in association with Route 1 Print. This article originally appeared in Computer Arts, the world's leading design magazine. Subscribe here. Read more: How to prepare a file for print 3 tips for crafting stunning print promotional material 30 eye-catching flyer templates View the full article

More and more frequently, designers and developers are acknowledging the importance of motion design in the context of user experience. Animation on the web is no longer a way to delight and wow the user but a functional tool that makes experiences easy, fun and memorable. Animation in the context of user interfaces is still a very new field. There aren’t many resources out there that teach best practice or show common patterns of UI animation that we can follow. Most of the time, it’s about experimentation, user testing and perhaps a bit of trial and error. 15 responsive web design tutorials So in this tutorial, we will create something that doesn’t confuse, follows common patterns and is stylish. This will be the team profile section that you often see on company websites. The idea is to show a little more information on the team/staff member when each one is hovered over. Throughout the tutorial we will be using CodePen, but of course you can use your own favourite editor and development environment instead. 01. Get set up Begin by opening up CodePen and creating a new pen. We’re going to be using Bootstrap 4 and Sass (.scss), so make sure that within the settings you include the Bootstrap CSS and JS as your resource links and also set the CSS to SCSS. Another resource link you will need to add is Font Awesome, which we will use for our social icons. 02. Create containers, rows and columns Containers are what Bootstrap uses as its basic 
layout element and they are required when you’re using the default grid system. Within containers, you need to add in a row. Rows are wrappers for columns and you can specify the number of columns that you want out of a possible 12 and what the breakpoint will be. In our case, we want an element that has a medium-sized breakpoint and fills three columns in width. 03. Set profile image and colour The first profile UI element we will start with will be for a female team member and she will be part of the blue team. The colour will be specified using a class called blue and the actual colour will eventually be defined using Sass variables, which we will do in a later step. Then we will need to add in a photo and give it a class called photo. 04. Add profile name and title One final piece of HTML will add a name, title and social icons The last bit of HTML to be added will be for the name, title and social icons, which will be added underneath the last div tag we just added in the last step. For the social icons, we will be using Font Awesome and these will be placed within an unordered list. 05. Set Sass variables If you are following along using CodePen, then you will already have Sass installed and ready to go. You just need to click on the pen settings icon/button and choose SCSS as your CSS preprocessor. Then we can go ahead and add in some variables that will store all of our colours. We’ve used rgba as the colour values to allow us more meaningful control of all the colours’ opacity. 06. Upload a background image To make things look more appealing, we will place a nice background image on the body. Here we can use our first set of variables and give the background image a pleasing gradient overlay that goes from light green to blue. Then to make our background image fully responsive, we will set the view height to 100vh. 07. Pick a profile background and image Each team profile will be given the same styles and the class team will be used for this. The background will be white, all content centred and we need to make sure the position is set to relative. Then we can include the CSS for the profile image. For best results, make sure the original image you use has dimensions no bigger than 200px square. However, we will change the height and width of these within the photo CSS rule. 08. Add the animations We can control how much of the blue circle can be seen by setting a bottom percentage for its position The first piece of animation we will add will be at the top of our profile element. The idea is that when we hover over the whole element, a blue circular shape will animate down. We can control how much of the blue we can see by specifying the position of this to have a bottom percentage. So play around with this percentage and you’ll get a better idea of how this works. You never know: you might even discover a better effect! 09. Animate the team photo The team photo is our focal point in this UI and is probably the most obvious element that you would expect to animate in some shape or form. The CSS we will add in this step will first turn the photo into a smaller circle, then when hovered over there will be a light blue border added to it and the photo will scale down together with the border. With the transitions added, we get a nice fluid animation. 10. Tweak the profile name and position When hovered over, a light blue border will be added to the photo The profile name and position need a little bit of tidying up. These won’t be animated but that shouldn’t stop you from adding your own animation to these if you’d like. Perhaps scale them up slightly on hover, as you’ll have enough space due to the resizing of the photo. 11. Add social icons The social icons will first be positioned off the bottom of the page by -100px. Then when we hover over it, the bottom position will be set to zero and with a transition added, this will give us a nice smooth animation as it moves back up into view. The icons will be given their own hover state, setting their background to white and the icon to blue. 12. Make the green team member To mix things up a bit, we can begin to add more members to our team. The colour we’ll use for this next one will be green. But first go back into the HTML section/file and all we need to do is copy the col-md-3 class – not the row – down to the last div tag under the social icons and paste it in. Once you have changed the blue class to green, we can finally add in all the CSS that will give us the same animation. And the beauty of this approach is that you can repeat as required for many different colour classes, enabling you to subtly theme your UI animations as is required. This article was originally published in issue 307 of net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 307 or subscribe to net. Want to learn more about the ins and outs of UI animation? Steven Roberts is giving his talk CSS Animation: Beyond Transitions at Generate London If you're interested in learning more about how you can make your sites pop and sparkle using sleek UI animation, make sure you've picked up your ticket for Generate London. A front-end designer and developer currently working as creative developer for Asemblr.com, Steven Roberts will be delivering his talk – CSS Animation: Beyond Transitions – in which he will show you the best tools for the job and recreate some of the best animations the web has to offer, while discovering the possibilities and limitations of animating with just CSS. Generate London takes place from 19-21 September 2018. Get your ticket now. Related articles: How to use animation in mobile apps The pro's guide to UI design A beginner's guide to designing interface animations View the full article

Depending on where you're reading this, Pride parades are probably either already happening or about to take place. Designed to celebrate all aspects of LGBT+ culture, pride events tend to take place in June to commemorate a landmark moment in the community's history, the Stonewall riots. Pride festivals are conventionally more of a celebratory event, where people take the opportunity to let their flag fly, literally. If you've ever been to a Pride event, chances are you've seen attendees proudly flying flags that represent them, many of which incorporate colour theory and symbols important to their cause. Perhaps the most well-known Pride flag is the rainbow flag, which recently made the headlines thanks to a prospective Kickstarter redesign, which aimed to make it even more inclusive. There are dozens of other flags you're likely to spot if you go to a Pride event. To help you identify some of the most commonly seen designs, and maybe spot a flag that best represents you, we've rounded them up in this handy guide. Quick disclaimer – this list is by no means covers every niche! There are many, many flags catering to everything from rubber to bear brotherhood pride. But we hope this round up acts as a handy jumping-off point. Rainbow pride flag The original rainbow flag had more colours than it often has today As mentioned above, the rainbow flag is probably the most famous LGBT+ movement flag. Not surprising really, considering that it's designed to be as open and inclusive as possible. In fact it's such a recognisable shorthand for all things Pride that you'll often see the spectrum of colours used by brands in the run-up to festivities, with Skittles temporary rebrand being a notable exception. Designed by Gilbert Baker, the original gay pride flag first flew at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration on 25 June 1978. Whereas today's rainbow flag often has six colours, the original design had eight thanks to the inclusion of pink and turquoise stripes. Baker even assigned a meaning to each colour. Pink stood for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic/art, indigo for serenity, and violet for spirit. It's these meanings which have lead to artists creating variations that celebrate a specific audience or minority. If you're going to a Pride parade, you're certain to see the rainbow flag. Bisexual pride flag The bisexual pride flag is 20 years old While the rainbow flag serves for the LGBT+ community as a whole, designer Michael Page decided that the bisexual community deserved its own flag to increase its visibility. And so it was that on 5 December 1998, the bisexual pride flag was launched at the BiCafe's first anniversary party. Taking inspiration from his work with nonprofit bisexual community organisation BiNet USA, Page's flag sees pink and blue bands overlap, with a purple stripe forming in between them. Many people have interpreted these colours in terms of their traditional masculine and feminine associations. However, when speaking about the history of the bisexual flag, Page revealed his intended meaning. "The pink colour represents sexual attraction to the same sex only (gay and lesbian). The blue represents sexual attraction to the opposite sex only (straight) and the resultant overlap colour purple represents sexual attraction to both sexes (bi)." Pansexual pride flag Pansexuality challenges societal prejudices Continuing the band of colours approach, the pansexual pride flag has been around since 2010. As well as increasing the visibility and recognition of the pansexual community, the pride flag also helps to distinguish it from bisexuality. This can be seen in the use of colours on the flag. Instead of a purple band sandwiched between blue and pink stripes, the pansexual pride flag opts for a bright yellow. The choice of colour in this case symbolises that pansexuals have romantic attractions and relationships with people of different genders and sexualities, including androgynous, agender, bigender, and genderfluid people. Yellow can be read as more of an ambiguous colour, which makes it perfect for representing non-binary attractions. The pink stripe stands for those who identify within the female spectrum, while blue represents the male spectrum. Intersex pride flag No stripes or traditional 'gender colours' here Not all Pride flags are based around striped designs. This flag represents the intersex community – defined as people who "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies," according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Created in July 2013 by Organisation Intersex International Australia, the Intersex flag cleverly eschews colours with loaded gender meanings. Relying on yellow in a similar way to the pansexual pride flag, this design also uses purple as these colours were seen as appropriately hermaphrodite colours by the creators. Free for use by any intersex person or organisation who wishes to use it in a human rights affirming context, the flag has been picked up by multiple media outlets and groups. Asexual pride flag The asexual flag was fairly chosen by members of the community Since 2010, the asexual flag has come to represent individuals with a low or absent desire for sexual activity. Since the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) first participated in an American pride parade in 2009, members consulted as many people in the community as possible to create a flag. The chosen design can trace its roots back to visuals found on online forums outside of AVEN. This flag was also settled upon via a survey, making it one of the truly most democratic flags we've ever heard of. Lesbian pride flag This bold design has ancient origins There are a variety of flags for lesbian members of the LGBT+ community, but this one jumped out at us thanks to its bold design. Gone are the multicoloured stripes so often associated with Pride flags, they've been replaced instead with a labrys. The labrys, or double-bladed battle axe, used to be a symbol found in the ancient, fairly matriarchal civilisation of Minoan Crete. It makes sense then that over the years the axe has come to represent lesbian and feminist strength and self-sufficiency, as well as appearing on flags since the 1970s. Transgender pride flag There is no wrong way to fly this flag Individuals with a personal identity and gender that does not correspond with their birth sex have had a flag to call their own since 1999. Designed by transgender woman Monica Helms, the transgender pride flag was first flown as part of a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona in 2000. Once again we see pink and blue stripes used to represent females and males. In between these colours is a white stripe that stands for people who are intersex, transitioning, or have a neutral or undefined gender. Thanks to the way the flag is designed, there is no incorrect way to fly it, which Helms says signifies finding correctness in our lives. Read more: How to encourage diversity in the design industry Rainbow flag designer commemorated with free font family Cheeky Arse Vase supports HIV charity View the full article

This month’s round up of the best new graphic design tools introduces a new keyboard for creatives that aims to dramatically speed up your workflow. We’ve also picked our favourite new free fonts, Illustrator brushes, Procreate brushes, iPhone apps and graphic design books. And there’s a new laptop for graphic designers on the block, too, which squares up to the MacBook Pro. Read on for the best tools for graphic designers in June… Designed to make your shortcuts even shorter, the Delux Designer keyboard claims to increase productivity by a whopping (and perhaps wild) 80 per cent. While we can’t vouch for the figures, the mechanical keyboard itself – which you can now preorder – does look promising. You can program complex multi-step command sequences into a single keycap, or use the multi-functional dial to take precise control of your artwork. It’s compatible with Wacom and other graphics tablets, as well as most major creative software. And at half the size of a normal keyboard, it sits a lot more comfortably on your desk with your drawing tablet. Preorder the Delux Designer for $69 While we're on the subject of new hardware for designers and artists, Dell released the Precision 5530 at the end of May – a MacBook Pro rival aimed at professional creatives who need power, portability and reliability. Replacing the Precision 5520, it's Dell’s thinnest, lightest and smallest 15-inch mobile workstation, and it's more powerful than ever with the top-line model boasting an Intel Core i9 processor and 32GB RAM. Available in platinum silver or brushed Onyx, the pro laptop comes with either a 4K, 100 per cent Adobe RGB touchscreen, or a Full HD display, with Nvidia Quadro P2000 graphics. The best 4K monitors for designers If you’re looking for a new graphic design laptop that balances power and portability, the Precision 5530 is worth a look. That said, we’re still holding out for Dell’s backflipping – but less powerful – new Precision 5530 2-in-1, due out in August... US: Buy the Dell Precision 5530 from $1,529 UK: Buy the Dell Precision 5530 from £1,484.39 The Procreate Pocket iPhone app has received a major update, taking it to version 2.0 – and adding almost every Procreate feature from the iPad app, including 3D Touch, 136 brushes, more time-lapse options, a revamped interface and more. Powered by Silica-M – the same graphics engine that powers Procreate for iPad – Procreate Pocket v2 makes it easier than ever to create detailed art on an iPhone. If you already own the app you’ll get the update for free; otherwise it’ll cost you $4.99 new. US: Buy Procreate Pocket for $4.99 UK: Buy Procrate Pocket for £4.99 Add depth, grain and gritty accents to your vector artwork with the Grain Shader Brsuhes for Illustrator – 25 texture Illustrator brushes created by True Grit Texture Supply. This high-res brush set comes with bonus grainy overlay textures, is compatible with Illustrator CS6 and above, and will set you back $19. There’s also a Grain Shader Brush set for Photoshop, and one for Procreate too. Buy the Grain Shader Brushes For Illustrator for $19 The Curiosities bundle of 40 early 20th century-inspired fonts is bursting with stunning scripts, sans-serifs, serifs, hand-drawn fonts and more, designed by Hustle Supply Co’s Jeremy Vessey. Perfect for adding a timeless feel to logos, beer labels, posters and more, this pack has a font for everything – plus three bonus free fonts from RetroSupply Co, including popular Palm Canyon Drive script, Authority, and modular type system SOLID70. That’s over 40 quality fonts for $49. Buy the The Curiosities Font Collection for $49 In On Color, authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing investigate colour from numerous perspectives – literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political and scientific – in this fascinating mediation on colour. Sometimes provocative, sometimes playful, each of the 10 chapters is a devoted to a different colour, with the authors looking at the various ways each has – and continues to – shape our social and moral imaginations. This is a lively, intelligent and well-written book that anyone with an interest in colour will enjoy. US: Buy On Color from Amazon for $20.58 UK: Buy On Color from Amazon for £19.54 2D artist Rodd Lopes created the Procreate Character Design Brush Set. Inside this pack of 22 Procreate brushes you'll find everything you need to draw and paint characters, from soft and hard brushes to textured, line-art, oils, blend brushes and more. There’s a wide variety of different effects here – all you need is an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to get started. Buy the Procreate Character Design Brushes for $8 Read more: The 21 best free cursive fonts iMac Pro review XP-Pen Artist 15.6 graphics tablet review View the full article

Black Panther has become the fifth Marvel Studios movie to cross the $1 billion global box office mark. “It’s unbelievable that the world has such a huge reaction to a film and I can’t help but feel proud to be part of it,” says Method Studios associate VFX supervisor Todd Perry. The 10 best 3D movies of 2018 “It was clear that Black Panther was going to be different just by reading the screenplay. You have the African side of things but also the component of strong women. There are no women on the sidelines who are strictly love interests. We knew that it was going to affect certain demographics harder than others but when the first trailer came out the world went bonkers; that was the first indication of how big this thing was going to be.” Serving as one of the main vendors for Black Panther, Method Studios was responsible for 410 shots with the bulk of work taking place during the third-act battle as well as creating digital doubles for the title character and Erik Killmonger. Making vibranium The Border Tribe that protects Wakanda wear blankets that have vibranium threads in them and can generate holograms A reference bible was assembled by the film production team and presented to the visual effects companies. “We used that as a go-to manual,” says Method Studios VFX supervisor Andy Brown. “It gave us an overview of Wakandan culture, from architecture to a map of the country to the history of the vibranium mine, how Mount Bashenga was created and what vibranium would look like in its different states.” Neither director Ryan Coogler nor cinematographer Rachel Morrison had dealt with extensive visual effects shots before. “Geoffrey Baumann, our production visual effects supervisor, focused on the previs in the early days and showed Rachel plates versus the final shot from previous Marvel movies. The previs continued throughout the show because there were changes to the design and story. We had quite a big reshoot for part of the third act as they wanted to amp up the action for the battle sequence.” The rhinos of the Border Tribe each have a different structure, size, colouring and horn design At one point in the film, Black Panther tackles Erik Killmonger, causing them to fall into a mineshaft. “It couldn’t be dark, dank and grimy,” says Perry. “It had to look like somewhere people would work because Wakanda is an advanced civilisation. The animators went for an approach where the cameraman skydives at the same time as they are falling.” Vibranium in its raw form is a dark colour like the outfits of the two adversaries. “We were playing with silhouettes of Black Panther and Killmonger a lot so had this vibranium river seam at the bottom of the mine that emitted a blue light, and used the idea of another shaft that daylight would come through from the top,” explains Brown. “Then we had more localised light sources from this vibranium train station which gave us the opportunity to put in some bright, warm tungsten lights to give it a bit of contrast. We used a lot of atmospherics to pick out the silhouettes as well.” Creating digital doubles and suits Based on nanotechnology, the Black Panther suit creates itself from the necklace that T’Challa wears around his neck Digital doubles were created from a daily routine. “When an actor wrapped he or she went to the photogrammetry booth and got scanned,” notes Perry. “We had all of this reference for different outfits in various states such as Okoye, W’Kabi and Shuri. Marvel sent us the costumes so that we could take more photography and it also gave the modellers something tangible to work with.” The suits of Black Panther and Killmonger were built by Method Studios and shared with the key vendors. “They did shoot the Black Panther suit with the new design on set but it had to be replaced because of wear and tear,” remarks Brown. “Some design components changed as well.” The nanotechnology transformation effect was created within Houdini with the primary directive being to follow the design patterns in the suit. “The suit creates itself from the necklace that T’Challa wears around his neck,” states Brown. “Every time Black Panther gets hit energy is absorbed into the suit. You see all of this purple energy from every impact of a spear, bullet or sword; he can then release that energy as a big spherical pulse.” A silver suit was also worn underneath the costume which shows through, allowing for muscle definition. Preparing for battle B-reel was referenced by animators to create fight vignettes in the midground that showcase the different fighting styles of the Wakandan tribes For the third-act battle an effort was made to correct one master rather than art direct per shot. “We had different levels of detail because we had high, wide aerial shots and also had super close-ups with plate in the foreground and rhinos running toward us,” says Brown. “We got down to the grass and shrub-level detail in some shots which required tweaks.” The big rethink came later on when the decision was made to amplify the fighting. “We had to triple the amount of characters on the battlefield and introduce another two rhinos.” The background confrontations consisted of crowd simulations while fight vignettes were put together by the animators for the midground. “We asked for a bunch of b-roll footage and animators used it as a guideline, because each tribe had a different style of fighting that was all worked out by the stunt team,” states Perry. “It was generally broken up between what was happening before Black Panther tackles Killmonger and what happens afterwards.” Taking part in the battle are the protectors of Wakanda known as the Border Tribe, which uses super-strong blankets made out of vibranium threads that can generate holograms. Every Border Tribesman is given a baby rhino and grows up with them. “W’Kabi’s rhino is a big one,” notes Perry. “Then there’s a couple of other rhinos that are running through. They’re a bit bigger. The facial features are like a white rhino which have these wide lips, while the black rhino has a beaked lip structure that they use to eat leaves, so ours became a hybrid.” Each rhino has distinct characteristics. “They are different in their structure, size, colouring and horn design.“We took a lot of guidance from Rachel Morrison’s photography and she likes a shallow depth of field. There was a lot of, ‘What is the story of this shot?’ Anything that is a distraction from it would usually go or would need to be pushed to the background.” Constructing the Dragon Flyer The Dragon Flyer has an x-wing pattern like a dragonfly A lot of dust was generated by the combatants. “You have to make sure that you clear out the areas that you want to be seen. When the Dragon Flyer is firing and creating explosions we were timing those with the animation of Black Panther running through them. All of that is choreographed down to the beat so that you don’t lose the audience in what you’re trying to do.” Method Studios created the Talon Fighters and Dragon Flyers. “There’s a section in the Wakandan bible which talks about incorporating designs from nature into the vibranium technology,” states Perry. “The Dragon Flyer has an x-wing pattern like a dragonfly. If you [stand] the Talon Fighter up and spread the wings out, it resembles an African tribal mask. Everything fit into place appropriately and things would move out of the way to make clearance for other things that were articulated. There was a lot of attention put into the functionality of these models.” Problem solving A problem emerged when the final battle was being assembled in editorial which required a fix late into post-production. “Agent Ross helps out by remotely piloting the Royal Talon Fighter to try to stop the vibranium weapons from getting out of the country,” explains Perry. “In order to provide a sense of danger to him, they came up with an idea of a Dragon Flyer starting to blast its way to the lab as he is piloting. That shot didn’t get conceived until December and our first animation pass was in mid-December, so we had four weeks to put that whole sequence, and it wasn’t just us. It was shared between us, ILM, Cantina Creative, Ghost and RISE because we all had different components that contributed to the shot.” A practical seat was built for Martin Freeman who portrays Agent Ross. “Everything else was made up in the sequence. We already had the lab built, the mineshaft and Dragon Flyer were also ours but the heads-up display of Ross flying through Golden City was ILM. ILM had to render the cameras and provide them to Ghost which put them inside this hologram of the ship. That ship would be put in our environment and Creative Cantina created the heads-up display graphics. RISE did a number of the shots too. All of that had to come together to deliver the final shot. That being said it makes the movie better and more exciting.” This article was originally published in 3D World, the world's leading 3D and VFX magazine. Buy issue 234 or subscribe here. Read more: Big VFX on a budget On board Star Trek: Discovery 30 examples of 3D art View the full article

Don't be fooled by the Nix Mini Color Sensor's small size. It will revolutionise the way you work with colour, whether you're an interior designer, a fashion designer, or a website builder. Using the Nix Mini, you can scan any surface, and the sensor will match it to a database filled with more 31,000 different paint colours, from brands such as Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams. Never again will you have to buy a large jar of paint and simply cross your fingers that the colour is a match. The sensor can effectively scan any surface, whether it's vinyl, leather, plastic, or an already painted wall. The colours are saved on your smartphone or tablet, so you can pull them up whenever you need them, or even share them with family, friends, or colleagues. Plus, it doesn't hurt that the sensor is so tiny it can fit straight into your pocket. Get it now for only $69. Related articles: Generate endless colour palettes with Khroma 5 tips for understanding colour theory The best colour tools for web designers View the full article

There’s a few cities in the UK known for their buzzing creative scene - and Manchester is one of them. It’s also the home of Shillington Manchester, the education facility Noe Baba attended a full-time graphic design course last year. Now a fully fledged graphic designer, Baba graduated from Shillington in April 2017, and quickly landed herself a job at full-service creative agency Holdens. Here she reflects on life at Shillington and at a design agency, and also offers some top advice to designers in need of a little social media boost. What was your background before enrolling at Shillington? Fine art (and a bit of architecture). There are obvious connections there, but I recognised that design was a completely different process from what I was used to and that I had a lot to learn. Would you recommend the Shillington experience to other aspiring designers? Yes. At the time it felt like a massive gamble. Having already done a degree and a half, I didn’t want to do another three years at uni. I wanted to learn quickly and get to work. Your portfolio is packed full of amazing projects. Do you have a favourite? Thanks! I loved the project for the event and conference centre, Futuro (pictured). We had to immerse ourselves in a given city, and mine was Lisbon. I loved doing all the research and feeding this into the ideas for the project – really giving it legs. Tell us a bit about your current role at Holdens. Since I’ve been working there as a designer, I’ve worked on lots of different projects – from doing the branding and interior design for a new barbershop to working on websites, illustrations and retail design. It’s safe to say it’s been a steep learning curve but I’m loving it! They’ve been great at just letting me get stuck in. You’re super active on Twitter. Any tips for anyone hoping to up their social media game? I think it’s quite a personal thing, but if you’re looking to get your work out in the open, it’s free so you may as well give it a try. I like Twitter for the conversational element, and it’s taken me a while to get onto Instagram but now have I love it. Don’t take it too seriously – you don’t want to make it a chore so just have fun with it! Read the full interview with Noe Baba over on the Shillington blog. View the full article

Style guides are now firmly established as a key part of the modern web design workflow. Their use in web projects has been steadily rising for some time now, thanks to heightened community awareness, with various industry professionals demonstrating their use and effectiveness. The rise of style guides was partly linked to the development of responsive web design, but they're now helping designers and devs deal with the demands of a more capable web and increasingly ambitious web projects. They will help you design and build faster, with more accurate and consistent results. In this article we'll go through everything you need to know about what a style guide is, how to put one together, and how to use one. Use the quick links on the right to jump to the section you want. What is a style guide? In contrast to a traditional static website layout composition produced in Sketch, Photoshop CC or similar, a style guide is a set of elements and components that when used together can form a complete layout or parts of that layout. When produced correctly, they are scalable and flexible, making them the perfect tool for building responsive designs. Take a look at styleguide.io for lots of examples of great style guides, and resources for learning more. In this article, I'll use the terms ‘style guide' and ‘design system' interchangeably, as I believe style guides are most effective when they form a system for managing existing designs and allowing the production of new ones with ease. So why would you want to switch from a traditional workflow? For a start, introducing a style guide means you will be able to get into the browser quicker and spend less time in desktop web design tools. At their most useful, style guides enable you to work up all your design concepts in the browser, demoting the likes of Photoshop and Sketch to asset creation tools, rather than what you use to envision layouts. Where do style guides fit into a project? Whilst style guides are primarily a tool for web designers and/or developers, they can be a deliverable for clients too. Style guides give clients an insight into the design system being established, and the palette that will form their product. Samantha Warren explores this idea in detail with her Style Tiles; a method for demonstrating a visual language to clients in the form of fonts, colours and interface elements. The US federal government website has a clear, thorough style guide The problem with the traditional approach of asking clients to sign off on static layouts is that these are essentially photographs of what the website might look like. Of course, we'll try our best to make the final product look like the promise we've made in this photo, but we're creating an idealistic render, without having to contend with all the living parts of the web. Many small nuances – such as type rendering and spacing – may change. This can amount to the client feeling like they have been misled by the Photoshop render. Using style guides as a design deliverable eradicates these difficult discussions with a client. They make design changes easier to complete without much hassle, and get you in the modular mindset from an early stage in the project workflow. What do you include in a good style guide? Ideally your style guide should give you everything you need to design and build a page at a moment's notice, without having to open up Photoshop or Sketch. In regards to the format, a style guide should be live HTML, categorised in a manner that is easily maintainable for you and any other designers that might come into contact with it. Starting with the basics, let's look at the ingredients of what makes a good style guide. I find the headings I've covered here help as a base to get started with, but feel free to add sub-headings and get more specific. Take a look at Brad Frost's Atomic Design as a potential methodology for organising this part of a design system. Type MailChimp's typography rules (click to see the full guide) This includes the whole typographic hierarchy, covering headings, lists, block quotes and paragraph text. It should also cover any variations within these categories, such as captions, drop caps and any other special typographic treatments, and UI contexts like buttons, navigation and form fields. Grids and spacing This should include both horizontal and vertical layout grid systems. Grid guidelines enable you to rapidly prototype and build layouts without having to make time-consuming adjustments to spacing and margins. Colour Include primary and secondary palettes here (click to see the full guide) Your primary colour palette, including the main link colours, actions and element colours (for example, buttons, labels and icons). In this section you'll also need to include any colours outside of this palette that occur for circumstances outside of the ideal design state, like error and system messages, and validation. Modules Modules comprise elements such as buttons, form fields, tabs and navigation, as well as collections of elements such as captioned images and blog post meta data. They also include combinations of elements working together – for example an article heading, date and introduction paragraph, a tooltip with a small heading and text, and so on. How do you create a style guide? How exactly do you put together a style guide? Here, I'll walk you through the process I use. Start with wireframes Wireframes can help you establish the elements you'll need Before you code a single line of your design system, you need to know roughly what parts you're going to need for it. Early on in the project, when a client has provided the initial content and assets you'll be working with, you should aim to establish the foundation of your design system with a set of wireframe sketches. Wireframes are a style guide's secret weapon. Take time to sketch out all the screens in your product, either with a pen and paper, or using a wireframe tool. Include any specific UI design components you'll likely need in the final product. Look for patterns It's at this point I recommend finding a large physical work area where you can spread out your wireframe sketches so they are all visible at once and you can get a broad view of the system you're about to establish. Look over your sketches and notice patterns emerging. Perhaps a combination of elements appears together frequently, and could become a reusable module? Different coloured markers can help you differentiate between type, modules and grids Also look for patterns that are trying to emerge. For example, a list of blog articles might take a similar format to a list of search results, but let's say the elements are arranged in a different order. Perhaps changing one of the two to match the other will help the user read a pattern they have subconsciously learned elsewhere in your product. Catalogue everything I like to use a set of Post-It Note page markers to label all of the elements in my wireframe pages for reference. For example, a module like a breadcrumb that occurs throughout the sketches could be labelled ‘M01'. ‘M' indicates it's a module. The number indicates which module it happens to be in my system – the next module would be M02, M03 and so on. The element itself could be repeated elsewhere, so this breadcrumb pattern might appear on a product page as well as a blog article, both labelled M01, so I don't end up designing and building multiple versions of the same element when it comes to prototyping the wireframes. Move into HTML After you've finished cataloguing and labelling the wireframes, it's simply a matter of taking that catalogue of elements and modules and building them as a live HTML style guide. Think of it like an Airfix model. You have an instruction sheet (your wireframe sketches) and a set of labelled parts (your style guide) corresponding to the instruction sheet. Once you have a concept of what you want to create, you will know what parts you are going to need, and at that point you're ready to start building your design system. The best part of approaching design systems in this manner is that it enables you to rapidly produce new screens and components – each scenario is only a wireframe sketch away. The style guide reminds you of your existing components and patterns when drawing your next sketch. Once the sketch is complete, you are ready to build quickly with the wireframes as your instruction sheet, using the ready made elements in your style guide. How do you use a style guide? Technically speaking, a style guide is never really complete; it's an ever-evolving document that grows with your project. It's impossible to know in advance every combination of elements, patterns and modules that will need to exist, beyond what you currently have planned. But that's okay. True to the ever-changing nature of our web, a style guide can only be as complete as the current state of your product. In its (mostly) complete state, a style guide is a reference for the over-arching visual language of the product you are building. It means you can visualise how new features might take shape, and the look and feel they adopt. It's also a living library of tested elements and components that can be used to quickly construct new screens or parts of a product, making it the most efficient way to rapidly build projects on any scale. Label your living style guide so you can cross-reference wireframes and your component kit It is essential a style guide is maintained beyond its initial conception. It must remain current, rather than being a snapshot of what the product's design system looked like at a particular time. It should be the visual lexicon of your project – the entity you consult whenever a design decision is made after sketching. All new components and modules are made from its DNA, so from a user experience perspective, any new pieces will look consistent as part of the complete brand picture. If you have never used a style guide in a web project before, try it on your next project and see the difference it makes in helping you design, build and prototype quicker. With practice, they'll become easier to create, and you'll even find patterns within your style guide that can be reused to speed up the process of creating the next style guide. A useful style guide goes beyond the capabilities of a visual reference. It becomes your product's DNA, from which every piece of current and future design originates to produce the consistent style and characteristics of the rest of the product. This article originally appeared in net magazine. Subscribe here. Read more: 4 different ways to create a website mockup 5 sensational new websites to be inspired by 16 top CSS animation examples View the full article

Recruitment can be one of the toughest parts of running a successful design agency. There are so many factors involved, and it's a big responsibility – especially when you're still a relatively small, new business. You'd think it would be easy to recognise when more staff members are required for your agency. It's when you have more work than your existing team can handle, right? Not necessarily. Growing a team has a little to do with capacity, and everything to do with capability. Success hinges on finding the right people. You don't want more of the same skills; you want to be able to expand the amount of work you can handle, while at the same time developing the type of work you do – and the way to do that is through smart management and team building. Read on for six gems of advice to help you attract the best talent for your design agency – and keep it. 01. Consider people who can expand your offer Don't just think about capacity when hiring new staff – consider your agency's capabilities too The first few people you hire should be for the skills your current setup lacks; not just more hands. If you and your existing team have the creative design skills nailed, then bring in someone to handle things like new business development and client relationships, leaving you to direct the creative. If your need is purely capacity-based and is immediate – in that you need more people to do the same work – then consider hiring freelance staff. More hands means freeing up the creative directors in your team, enabling them to focus on bigger ideas, pitching and new projects. But hang on to those who make themselves indispensable. Freelancers might cost more to get in full-time, but if they bring the necessary skills, complement your team's existing skill sets and fit with the general studio vibe, then try to get them on a contract. It'll be far cheaper than recruiting. 02. Always try to hire people better than you Hire people better than you, and they can help pull the whole agency up to their level Employ people who are better than you and your existing team. Why? Because they will share their skills, bring others up to their level, benefit the entire studio culture and drive your business forward. It may seem obvious, but it's surprising how many employers allow a superiority complex get in the way. But you need to swallow your ego for the greater good. Watch out for their ego too, though. This might be hard to spot in an interview scenario, but be sure to avoid hiring the type of person who will look to dominate and dictate to your existing team, or throw a creative strop when asked to create artwork for a relatively lowly piece of signage. Always have new starters on a trial period for this reason. Talent spotting isn't as easy as it seems, and a portfolio ultimately proves little more than execution. Assess character and look out for people who display the 'three Es': education, energy and a degree of eclecticism. 03. Master the art of interviewing properly It takes skill and experience to pick out the best talent from a crowd of other creatives Finding candidates and carrying out interviews can be stressful on both sides of the table, but turn it into a rewarding process and your whole studio will benefit. The crucial first step is to get the job description spot-on: outline the role, the key challenges and skills required, and the employee's position in the studio before inviting anyone in for interview. This will weed out anyone vastly unsuitable, as well as making sure the candidate know they're letting themselves in for. Portfolios are crucial when hiring for creative roles, of course – but they can only teach you about an applicant's skills in execution and finishing. An in-depth discussion about the work will provide insight, and give you a chance to understand how they think. Many designers baulk at the idea of a 'design task', seeing it as working for free or worrying about the legal implications if they are under an exclusive contract. However, getting a designer to narrate their process gives a strong idea of their working methods and helps you pick out talent from the crowd. 04. Pay your team fairly and transparently Equality and transparency is key to maintaining a happy workforce in any business – design included Once you've found the perfect person for the job, the next challenge is keeping hold of them. All design agencies have some degree of staff turnover – it's inevitable – but there are things you can to to encourage loyalty. Any employee who is any good will be offered opportunities and reasons to leave. But there are ways to reduce the risk of losing key people. Financial reward is the number one reason for staff members becoming disillusioned and looking for new opportunities. If you're not paying market rate, then you won't be able to keep good creatives. Review your salary bands at regular intervals throughout the year. Be transparent with your salary banding as well. That means paying similar salaries to those undertaking similar roles. If you have two account managers with varying income levels, chances are you'll lose one very quickly. Be honest and open about how you pay your staff. 05. Invest in your team's development With proper investment in training and development, you can foster a team of creative superheroes Show commitment to staff through training and development. That means conducting appraisals and pay reviews, and encouraging people to progress professionally wherever possible. Offer at least one paid-for training opportunity a year. Remember that if you invest in the skill sets of your staff, it's the studio that benefits in the short term. Foster time for your staff to take on creative challenges and become a sponsor. These could be local art events, self-initiated projects, or work for community or charity projects. Encourage your studio members to conduct their own projects and give them time to work on them. 06. Create a fun, inclusive studio culture Okay, maybe not *that* fun... but if you do have some spare cardboard lying around... Make sure your studio is talked about as a fun and rewarding place to work. Take your staff for away days, Christmas excursions and summer holidays. Invite in guest speakers and interesting creatives to inspire them. Make competing studios envy your reputation for having a fun, creative and competitive culture. Studios with a great atmosphere also have the highest levels of creativity – it's a fact. Whether your studio is big or small, and no matter what media you work with, the most successful teams are those that share a sense of purpose and drive. There are lots of ways to foster a great studio culture. One is to make sure there are places where your team can get away from the computers – a lounge area, or a kitchen. This isn't just for taking quick breaks: places where people can have a quiet meeting, quick chat or just share a joke are important too. Music can transform a studio's atmosphere, too. Make sure everyone who wants to can contribute to the playlist, so music never becomes a point of conflict. And try to have quiet areas of the studio too, where people can go to concentrate. Related articles: The design agency survival guide 5 inspired self-promo ideas for design agencies 7 ways to make your design studio a better place to work View the full article

If in the past, you've struggled with how to network, this is one event that will definitely help hone your skills. With ping pong, video games, street food and art markets, Us By Night is a design festival with a difference. After two successful editions, the unique nocturnal experience returns for its third instalment this November – and it looks set to be the best one yet. Tipping the traditional design conference very much on its head, this year's three-night festival has an inspiring lineup, including Mr Bingo, Mirko Borsche and Emily Forgot – with more to be announced soon – and an endless night market guaranteed to make the event one to remember. We caught up with Belgian-born designer and Us By Night founder Rizon Parein to find out why designers should put the date in their diaries now... How did Us By Night come about? In 2016 I was asked by the city of Antwerp to curate a year of design. The initial plan was to organise an OFFF-on-tour franchise, so I started immediately inviting colleagues, friends and clients. It all happened in a very naive and enthusiastic way, and in just two weeks I had a stellar lineup confirmed. I started thinking about how we could reinterpret the classic design conference format – make it new, fresh and different. The first thing that came to mind was why not do it at night? We’re a creative bunch so why not make it a bit wilder, approach it more as a nightlife gig? What's in store this year? What's great this year is lots of interesting profiles reached out to be involved, which is making for an absolutely stellar lineup of speakers. This year we will also add some photography, architecture and fashion, all with clear ties to our graphical language. We have some impressive names in these categories so we're really looking forward seeing what kind of dynamics this will provoke. Our night market is a theme park for creatives Rizon Parein, Us By Night founder For lots of friends and myself the thing that drives us the most to attend design conferences is not the lineup, in all honesty, it's the community. You know, hanging out with friends and colleagues and just having a beer in a relaxed inspiring atmosphere. That's what I wanted to facilitate and encourage at Us By Night – and so our night market was born. We built it from scratch next to our main conference room. It’s a theme park for creatives. Massive LED walls, ping pong tables, arcade games, quality food stands, life art, tattoo shops, etc. Also at the night market we have two more stages that organically blend in, the Living Room is a more intimate setting, where we encourage more contact between the attendees and the speaker, and the Tutorial stage, where we shed more light on the technical side of design. Ping pong, anyone? UBN was a success from the start – what exactly did it offer that was so lacking in the creative festival scene? I think community and no ego is key. For the rest, I let loose the ‘goonies kid’ in me and just want to have fun and not taking everything too seriously, but at the same time the whole curation, production and hospitality has to be spotless. The trip for speakers and attendees has to be flawless with a warm heart. What's the idea behind attracting 'curious minds outside the sector'? I like to cross-feed inspiration, why be inspired only by the scene you are working in? We need diversity, and to let the new kids see there’s inspiration everywhere. I often think that a creative who excels in one discipline could easily do that in another. We see too much of the same these days and we need to break that up. The whole creative process should be a sparkling fest, an adventure, being inspired by a broader world than your immediate environment. If Us By Night can challenge and trigger the creative mind, build bridges between various disciplines and contributes to making new friendships, we'll be very happy. Us By Night will take over Parkloods in Antwerp, Belgium from 22–24 November 2018. Don't miss out: buy your tickets now! Related articles: Nail the art of networking: how to get more from events 12 tips to turbocharge your design career How my kids ruined my design career View the full article

The onus behind IoT security has become so muddled that no one knows who to point fingers at. View the full article

The onus behind IoT security has become so muddled that no one knows who to point fingers at. View the full article

Almost 30 years ago, Wallace and Gromit went to the moon on a Grand Day Out that would launch Aardman Animations into global fame, and earn the company and its art director Nick Park a place in the hearts of the nation. A string of hits later, and Bristol’s best-loved animation studio is still going strong. The 27 greatest animated music videos And for the past decade, its interactive department – which was founded off the back of a Channel 4 online animation project, 4mations – has grown in tandem. Aardman Interactive’s first official employee, group creative director Daniel Efergan, shares how it happened… Did you help build the concept of the department? There was a seed that started it. A guy, Paul Deane, who now works at the BBC – he’s like the grandfather of interactive – pulled us all together around the 4mations project. We delivered it, and then it was like, ‘Okay, if we’re going to keep doing this, what should we be?’ Even that didn’t go quickly. It felt like a startup company in the middle of Aardman; we were just surviving for the first year. Did you get much support from the rest of the Aardman network? Everyone was supportive, but one of our journeys was helping everyone understand what interactivity means, and the potential of it. Ten years ago, we were marketers. There wasn’t a structured funding model, or ways to make money outside of being a form of advertising for other stuff. As the industry has grown up, we have grown up with it to transfer into a tangible product that has value in itself. How do you develop a strategy for a project? For us, it’s always about the idea. We try and ensure that the love and care and passion comes with it, so we fight against splitting apart the idea creators and the people that produce the project. Over time, you end up with people over here going, ‘Oh, I’ve got this great idea,’ and throwing it over this virtual fence to a load of production people, who are then like, ‘I’ve got to make this, and I don’t necessarily love it.’ So we make sure that the creative directors and the producers really care about what they’re doing. Pitch it, believe in it and deliver it all the way through to the end. The idea itself depends on a project-by-project basis. We are very hand-built, which suits the culture of Aardman. We don’t tend to lean on technical engines or previously supplied processes over and over again, potentially against our own benefits of efficiency, but it means we consider each individual idea as its own thing. Sometimes that means getting lots of people in a room and shaving ideas off everyone’s heads to work out what the best thing is. Sometimes it involves two people sat in a quiet, dark room by themselves, talking through something until you get the right thing. Sometimes if it’s more open, we’ll ask lots of people to come up with ideas, then fan the flames of the ones that seem most interesting, and then we’ll try to get the person that believes in that idea to become the leader of it. How do you maintain such a passionate and driven team? Trying to keep our team enthralled and excited is something I hope we do quite well. Part of that is establishing a culture for people to step into, which sets up how you feel as you walk in the door in the morning, and that’s quite complex. I have experienced cultures that feel great, and then can pop so quickly. One of my biggest jobs is spending time to get the most out of people, and that’s a lot to do with setting up a correct culture. Choosing people to bring into it is the second part, and that’s hard to get right. In all honesty, I am useless in job interviews. I think people will be a certain way, and after 10 years I’m always wrong. So, I lean on other people’s insights. We bring people in, work out their skills and whether they can do the job, and then bring them back in to work out what they’re like, and if they will fit into the culture. You used to be a programming lecturer. Any advice for designers who want to learn coding? First, you need to understand what we mean by programming. There’s the sort where you type commands into a blank text file, and for a visually-led person it can be really bloody frustrating when because it’s a comma rather than a semi-colon, the whole thing doesn’t work. But before any of that is understanding algorithmic thinking. Breaking down problems in a way that a computer would think about it. That skillset – thinking about how things can be constructed in that way – is most important, because it allows you to design in a way that translates nicely into programmatic systems. Do designers from a more traditional background struggle with that? Sometimes trying to get people to think in that way is a skill, but you’ve got different kinds of minds. I’ve found my creative directors fall into one of two types. The metaphor I use to communicate this, both to clients and myself, is the puppets that we have here at Aardman. There is usually a metal skeleton underneath, and then there’s the flesh – the plasticine – that makes it look like what it is. For an interactive project to work, you need an inner structure that is quite programmatic and pragmatic in the way it’s constructed, and then you need the flesh, the character and the way it looks to the world. Some creative directors see the outside and go, ‘I really want it to feel like that’, then work out what skeleton they need to hold it together. Some see straight through to the skeleton, then work out how to colour it in later. Both get to the same end result, but they approach it differently. Which one are you? I’m the skeleton. I see patterns and structures and interconnecting ways that things work, then translate them into the way people feel. What advice would you give a smaller digital agency? It’s about caring. Find something you desperately want to bring into the world, and do that. Now, that and money is where sometimes the conflicts come. Most people don’t pay you just to do things for yourself, but trying to juggle that line so that the things you’re making, you really, really want to exist – that’s what makes you passionate and successful, and should see you through. This article was originally published in issue 278 of Computer Arts, the world's best-selling design magazine. Buy issue 278 here or subscribe to Computer Arts here. Related articles: Inside Aardman Animations Top animation tools for digital artists The best software for digital artists View the full article

Sometimes, design is about creating work that's familiar and reassuring to both clients and customers alike. But every now and again, you get the opportunity to break from the norm and pursue a project that's exciting, innovative and based on fresh ways of thinking. 20 pro tips for creating inspirational mood boards These are the kind of projects that most of us live for. But there’s one problem. When you are asked to be brave and experimental, there’s a chance that your no-holds-barred, imaginative muscles have atrophied through lack of use. So if you’re struggle to find your creative mojo, get inspired by these 10 amazing projects, which all harness experimental design to push boundaries like never before. 01. Interactive dancing robots Public art is often criticised and, perhaps worse, ignored by the pubic it’s meant to serve. So to celebrate the final month of Hull 2017 UK City of Culture, Jason Bruges Studio created four large-scale art installations that nobody could walk past and not notice. The work entitled Where Do We Go From Here? featured 6m-tall robots that interacted with passers-by and performed a sound and light show. Off-the-shelf 3D software was adapted to make the robots do their own unique dance, explains 3D visualiser Adam Heslop. “We regularly build plug-ins for Cinema 4D that allow us to directly control and manipulate real-world hardware,” he says. “Normally, we build a real-time link so that we can scrub the slider and see how the hardware behaves. But these robots are a lot more complex and potentially hazardous so we decided to design choreographies in C4D. “We built our own inverse kinematics plug-in so that we could apply all the motion graphics tools to design each robot’s choreography. We were then able to press a button, which would export a robot program from Cinema 4D, which we could then load into the robot’s system, press Go and watch it unfold.” 02. Microscopic typography The typography used for this poster was 3D-printed at microscopic size When The Beautiful Meme was asked to advertise a new exhibition held at London’s Francis Crick Institute, Europe’s largest biomedical research facility under a single roof, the team wanted to do something in keeping with the institution’s essence. So they woked with its scientists to create a microscopic headline, which was 3D printed with a 100 micron depth. The headline template was flooded with fluorescent beads. The letterforms were then studied and photographed under a microscope before introducing the colours used to map patterns in cell dynamics. “The processes that the Crick Institute used to create the microscopic type were all new to us as an agency,” says creative director Tom Sharp. “So we had to be very adaptive to the results of the process, and allow them to define our approach to some extent. “Our agency is as enraptured by science as much as we are by art – they are both quests to enrich life and deepen consciousness – and so this was a delicious project for us.” 03. Branding with built-in asset generation Last year, Pentagram was asked to create the branding for Graphcore, a machine learning hardware start-up based in Bristol, England and Palo Alto, USA. Intriguingly, as part of the identity, Pentagram built a shape generator the internal team could use to create assets themselves. This carefully balances a degree of randomness with some solid design principles. “There’s a lot of things that are very considered about it, like shapes and colour and how small the grid can get and how big the grid can get,” says Pentagram partner Jody Hudson-Powell. “But within that very prescribed set of parameters there’s a nice texture that comes from random; there’s a kind of unconsidered consideredness. The other thing is when it doesn’t work the user just doesn’t save it. There’s still a human at the end of the process who’s gauging whether it feels right or wrong.” Handing over this degree of control of the identity to the client may seem unusual. But Hudson-Powell felt it fitted the project perfectly. “Graphcore didn’t have any internal design resource – they’re a bunch of engineers trying to do something really f**king complicated,” he explains. “So it’s necessary to create useful things they can work with and they can generate themselves. If you don’t do that, they end up not knowing how to use this expensive thing they’ve just bought from a design company, and finding Creative Commons imagery to use in its place.” 04. Adaptive typeface FS Industries’ Fontsmith is an ultra-adaptive typeface In the rapidly expanding digital space of 2018, fonts are having to do more and more things and more and more devices. With FS Industrie, Fontsmith set out to create a utilitarian typeface with its own unique character that works no matter your message or medium. The adaptive font is basically a stop-gap until variable font technology has caught up with the needs of designers. “One of the key challenges we set ourselves was coming up with a type design that could adapt to a broad range of widths and weights without compromising its tone of voice,” explains type design director Phil Garnham. “It had to be clear in all its guises, whether it was being used for interface menus or variable data advertising, and it needed to reflect the ‘now’ in every sense. What we set out to create was not just a typeface, but a type system with five widths and seven weights. With italics, that makes for 70 variants for each character.” “It is the spirit of variable design and flexibility that drove us to create FS Industrie,” he adds. “A response to the changing nature of type, for brands that are responding to the changing nature of work”. 05. Magazine with 8000 covers Creative Bloq’s sister magazine Computer Arts has made an artform out of the ‘split-run’, where an issue has four or more collectable covers. But that’s nothing to the astonishing 8,000 variations Eye magazine produced for its 94th edition last year. The graphic design and typography publication generated the thousands of individual covers using a variable data program called HP Mosaic. “To make ten seed files, Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir produced a file in which the letters of the word ‘eye’ are repeated in fixed increments and in three layers, each set in a different font of their TwoPoint or TwoPlus typefaces,” explained editor John Walters in the magazine. “They are shifted laterally in distances proportionate to the letter spacing.” 06. Indie publishing meets AR An artsy take on AR comes from Danish indie mag The Exposed Another magazine taking advantage of new technology is indie magazine The Exposed. Well okay, augmented reality itself is not that new. But this Copenhagen-based contemporary arts publication pushes it forward by integrating AR into the storytelling itself. The opening story of issue 2, for example, reported from Masdar City, the ambitious development in Abu Dhabi that is seeking to become the world’s most sustainable eco-city. Point your phone at the pages and an audio narration begins, giving more context and personal recollections on his trip and the strange world he found there. The experience is something like listening to a podcast while also browsing through a collection of associated photographs, and draws the reader/listener deeper into the story. Elsewhere in the mag, video is used to similar effect. It’s an innovative approach that we’d like to see more publications experiment with. See our post on top indie mags to see more magazines breaking boundaries. 07. Coding meets quilting The fashion world has always been proudly elitist, but could new technologies make it more democratic? Based in Salford’s Islington Mill studios, the artist collective known as > thread {}, aka Sally Gilford, Cheryl O’Meara and Vicky Clarke experimented with an innovative quilting processes that uses coding to digitise human data drawn from a group of local youngsters, and used them to create an immersive installation at the studios. “It was like a love-hate relationship with fashion in liking the creativity but not liking the machine behind it,” explains O’Meara. Adds Clarke: “I’ve been interested in the hack space and the maker movement, and the idea of creating one-off products that you’ve really involved in personally. So the idea of working with the code and the data, but also the analogue and digital processes, means you can create quite small runs and one-off works. So it’s the anti-mass consumerism of the development of artworks, really.” You can learn the details of how the technical process in the video above. 08. Sustainable fashion Algiknit is finding ways to make fashion design more sustainable Another thing about fashion that many designers would like to change is that it’s one of the world’s most polluting industries. So there’s been a big movement lately towards developing the use of more sustainable materials. One company in the forefront is the wonderfully named AlgiKnit, which has prouduced a rapidly renewing biodegradable yarn made from kelp, as well as a biodegradable sneaker. “If clothing is going to continue to be disposable, why not make it disposable in a way that makes sense – that actually benefits the earth, in a way that has a positive impact instead of a negative impact?” says Aleksandra Gosiewski. “It takes longer to create a mind shift, so why not first create an alternative that already fits into the same mindset? This is a first step to something else.” 09. Animated graffiti What do you get when you cross animation with AR with graffiti? ‘GIF-iti’ of course. That’s the phrase coined by London-based creative Insa, a member of our Illustrator Hotlist for 2018, when he started creating his unique animated paintings. Yes, that’s “street art” that paradoxically is only viewable online. GIF-ITI is made via a laborious physical process involving numerous layers of painting and meticulous planning. Insa then photographs each hand-painted layer then uploads and overlays them to create the final piece, a looping GIF file. This comes to live when viewed through a mobile app. 10. Messy magazine design Richard Turley’s art-directed designs for Mushpit reflect its “scattered” aesthetic To round up our feature, we thought it important to note that experimental design doesn’t have to involve technical innovation. You can just experiment with new approaches using nothing but your own imagination and a bit of gumption. And that’s exactly what the makers of Mushpit, one of the most visual exciting print publications on the market right now, have done. For the 10th edition of the satirical fashion, political and feminist magazine, co-founders Bertie Brandes and Charlotte Roberts brought designer Richard Turley on as art director. With the theme of ‘courage’, the issue’s three-way split-run cover placed an ironic image centrally, with typewritten coverlines and handwritten details on a white background. Says Brandes: “We worked with Richard Turley to find a coherent aesthetic to match our tone of voice; messy, scattered and at times sort of brutal.” Related articles: 5 sensational new websites to be inspired by Infographic: How the world of work is changing 10 indie mags you should read this summer View the full article

The C programming language has truly passed the test of time. There are very few environments where it does not thrive. This is mainly due to its high execution performance, which, unfortunately, comes at a price: C does not support many of the features expected in a modern programming language. Mozilla unveils radical new brand identity Mozilla Research's Rust is an attempt to create a better mousetrap. Its language design remains focused on high performance and being close to hardware. However, its syntax and compiler also take advantage of the various benefits offered by modern programming language research. Given that Mozilla's mission is the creation of an 'open web', it should not be surprising that the company is working tirelessly to bring its latest brainchild to the web. While Rust can, in theory, run on the client via systems such as Emscripten, its real power lies in the creation of efficient backend services. How to start using Rust The Rust installer provides a semi-graphic installation environment While package managers such as 'apt-get' surely made developer's life easier, package list maintainers are, by and large, known to be no friends of excessive speed. Because of that, many, if not most, distributions' package caches are heavily outdated. The Rust team has solved this problem by providing a dedicated installation script, which sets up the system it is run on efficiently. Deployment, then, is a two-step process: first, make sure that the CURL downloader/parser is available: Then, in the second step, download the installer and pass it on to 'sh' using the pipe operator. 'Sh' is a shorthand for the default shell interpreter of your workstation, which will then proceed to run the code at hand: During the installation, the Rust installer will display a variety of prompts similar in appearance to the ones shown in the picture on the right. Simply follow them to achieve a default installation. In some cases, the Rust deployment will fail with an error which is similar to "error: could not write rcfile file: '/home/tamhan/.bash_profile' ". If this happens during installation, use 'sudo -s' to get a root shell, and then rinse and repeat to proceed. Run a sample With that out of the way, it is time to run our first small program. Rust files, by default, have the file extension '.rs'. Create a file called 'firsttest.rs', and then provide it with the following piece of code: C and C++ programmers often wonder why invocations of the 'println' method require the use of an exclamation mark. The answer is simple: Rust implements 'println' as a macro, which gets invoked in a different way. Given that Rust is a compiled language, our example must be processed before it can be run from the command line: Advanced decay Describing a complete programming language, such as Rust, in the limited space we have available here is impossible. So let's start by formally pointing you to Mozilla Research's comprehensive documentation. One feature which is sure to impress C programmers involves the use of the 'match' command: in addition to direct comparisons, it also enables the use of range operators to greatly simplify the design of advanced programs: Garbage-at-hand Classic garbage collection has its weaknesses: most implementations bring the program to a screeching halt from time to time. To get around that Rust uses a set of so-called 'zero-cost abstractions' to emulate a similar behaviour in a less annoying fashion. In principle, every resource is created with an owner in a fashion similar to Qt's parent-child subsystem. However, a feature called 'borrowing' enables the programmer to transfer ownership between resources temporarily, thereby passing them around the system. Unfortunately, a complete discussion of the possibilities of Rust's memory manager would break the limits of this article – let it suffice to declare that Rust provides a very unorthodox, but workable form of memory management. Create a new project Similarities to NPM are purely coincidental... While C and C++ code can be broken down into libraries, doing so is an annoying and somewhat uncomfortable task. Furthermore, making sure that all the required libraries are where they are needed is something even seasoned developers like to avoid. The JavaScript community has long solved this problem via products such as NPM. Projects are described via a project structure file, which – among other things – contains references to libraries and other elements needed during the actual compilation run. In the case of Rust, a package manager called Cargo does a similar job. Creating a new project can be accomplished through the use of the 'cargo new' command in a fashion similar to the following: When the creation process is complete, a folder structure similar to the one shown in the picture at the bottom of this page will be generated. .toml files act as 'controllers' – in the case of our newly-generated project, the file contains the following structure: Similarities to the .ini files of lore are not purely coincidential: in a fashion not dissimilar to NPM, the ancient configuration file format is also used to describe the configuration files used for Rust projects. The '[dependencies]' block is of special interest for us – it contains a list of all external libraries, which need to be present for the compilation to succeed. Add a packet Creating a web server by hand is an annoying job best left to masochists. We will, instead, opt for a framework. Sadly, finding the right one is not easy – as visiting AWWY's list of web development frameworks reveals, there are a lot of candidates. We will pick Rocket, if only because it seems to be quite popular and has seen an update released in May 2018. Sadly, Rocket's developers tend to take a liking to newly introduced language features, which is why frequent updating of your Rust installation using the following commands is required: The next step largely is a question of taste. Most libraries come with pre-provisioned starter projects, which developers can simply siphon from GitHub. Doing so for your 'prime' library is not necessarily a bad idea – although once more than one library is involved, a manual approach tends to be more fruitful. Next, open the .toml file, then modify the 'dependencies' section as per the following in order to include a recent version of the Rocket framework: Rocket is unique in that it requires the inclusion of a total of two packages: in addition to the main framework, a separate code generator file is also required. Either way, our version includes a specific version of the two libraries – Cargo can also accept wildcards, which enable the program to 'pick its poison' without any help from us. With that out of the way, one problem remains: enter 'cargo run' in the folder containing the .toml file in order to perform an assisted compile, which will – among other things – download the relevant code libraries from the repository and compile the whole enchilada for you. Next page: scaffolding and in-depth analysis Create some scaffolding Rust's package manager can also run compiled programs Simply including and downloading a library is no fun: we want to see Rust in action. To achieve that, a sample program must be written – the scaffolding for which is the topic of the following steps. Before we can really get coding, however, a small problem must be fixed. Rust's compiler does not allow for the use of advanced language features by default – if your application cannot be compiled due to feature use, you will need to fix the problem via the following command sequence: Applying the 'set nightly' command in a folder containing a .toml file modifies it to mark its contents to be run using the latest version of rustc – with the flag set, the compile process should succeed. Next, open 'main.rs' and replace its contents with the following code: Invoke 'cargo run' after saving the changes to see the output shown in the figure below. The package manager isn't limited to loading code, but can act as an advanced build tool. 3, 2, 1, lift off! Rocket's developers, obviously, were inspired by the work of missile teams: make of this what you will. Like most other web frameworks, the actual applications are created as a collection of 'routes', which are assigned to a web server class. In this case, but one route is created – a 'get' call against '/' will yield the returning of the string 'Hello World'. Incidentially, the main issue faced by developers coming to Rust from other languages is the somewhat odd syntax. Function return types are declared via an arrow following the header: Careful onlookers will determine that the snippet above generates a function returning a Boolean value: Rust knows about a few dozen data types, which must be formally specified at declaration to prevent the passing of invalid types in a fashion similar to TypeScript. While the 'return' statement is supported by Rust; a special case occurs whenever the last line of a function is an expression. It is considered the 'return' value – a good example for this would look as per the following code: With that now out of the way, our next step involves the creation of a brand new route: Rust's language design advocates the use of attributes: the elements inside the '#[]' construct are additional properties, which get applied to any element standing nearby. In our particular case, the affected element is a function going by the name of 'world()'. The next problem involves adding the new route to the above-mentioned web server element. This is easily accomplished as per the following: This code is interesting mainly because of the use of the code generator: 'mount' takes the 'routes!' macro, which generates code on the fly. With that out of the way, you can now perform another recompile, which will enable you to convince yourself of the correctness of our code – the Rocket handler will now detect a total of two routes. In-depth analysis Rocket’s Runner is extremely talkative Providing resources on request might make for a nice demo, but is lacking in practicability. A more interesting test involves accepting parameters from the client, and using them to modify the system behaviour as a whole. The first step involves modifying the declaration of the route so it includes one or more parameters. Passing in a numeric and a string variable can be accomplished via a folder structure: During compilation, the program will reveal a folder structure. Prove the correctness of the product by invoking http://localhost:8000/world/world/tam/40. The product also takes care of malformed requests – invoke http://localhost:8000/world/world/tam/tam to see a 404 error. Understanding this behaviour requires a look at the routing infrastructure: like most other web frameworks, Rocket 'throws' incoming requests from route to route until one matches. Developers can also specify route rank via a numeric value: Do the JSON Another aspect involves the creation of well-formed JSON. To use it, a set of supporting libraries must be added to the .toml file – a lot of advanced features are not domiciled in Rocket, but in 'rocket_contrib': Using the 'features' array lets us fine-tune the inclusion: you don't need to include all parts of the library. We furthermore load a group of helper libraries, which simplify serialisation. Now we've edited the .toml file, it is time to return to the main Rust code. The newly-added elements must first be imported into the namespace: A structure must be declared, which describes the format of the generated JSON object. We will limit ourselves to a numeric and a string value – be sure not to forget the attribute by mistake: One problem remains: a JSON object must be built and returned in response to an incoming query: Invoke the route we declared above, and feast your eyes on the output! To learn more about Rocket, check out this seriously useful guide This article was originally published in issue 273 of creative web design magazine Web Designer. Buy issue 273 here or subscribe to Web Designer here. Related articles: 5 future web design job titles An introduction to frontend testing 4 tips to develop your developer skills View the full article