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So, you've decided to start your own blog? It might be to share your expert drawing tips or just to drum up a bit of interest in your design portfolio, but before you rush into anything, consider this: the web (and in particular the blogosphere) is a crowded place. With so many blogs out there, it's important to make sure you know how to start a blog that stands out from the crowd. Your blog needs to be attractive, creative and clever. But more than that, your blog design needs to speak to your readers. It needs to tell them why you're different, what you're offering, and why they should take the time to read on. So, do you need to know how to start a blog that will attract and enthral? Here are 10 tips that will get you started and help you take your offering from interesting to inspirational... 01. Choose a blogging platform You're spoiled for choice when it comes to platforms, and most are freeThere are several blogging platforms out there, from Blogger and WordPress to Tumblr, Squarespace and Ghost. Or if you're feeling bold and know your code, you can create your blog from scratch. Which platform you choose will very much depend on what you're most comfortable using, how involved you want to be with the creation process, and what you plan to put on it. The good news is that most of these are either free blog platforms or offer a trial session so you can give it a whirl and see if it suits you. 02. Decide on the blog's content Sort out your content plan or you'll be heading for yet another abandoned blog of shameYou want to learn how to start a blog, but do you know what you want a blog for in the first place? Blogging for the sake of blogging is pointless – you'll soon get bored and your carefully crafted site will soon be home to nothing but tumbleweed. Sometimes it is a good idea to grab a notepad and pen before you even start. Jot down the types of blog posts you'd like to publish so you always have a reference point you can come back to if the ideas seem to have dried up. Only then should you move on – you know how to start a blog, now it's time to design and populate it... 03. Keep your blog design simple Free Wordpress themes such as InterStellar offer simple design When creating a design blog, it can be tempting to go crazy. After all, you want your blog to stand out and for people to remember you. How harmful can a rainbow of colours and a plethora of fonts be? The answer is: Very. Keep your blog design simple. Stick to no more than three colours, and three fonts. With fonts; you need a heading, subheading and body copy font. Your main text font can then be enhanced by different weights or attributes, but keep these to a minimum. 04. Use contrasting colours The design of The Fox is Black is based on a simple black and fluoro yellow colour scheme Don't go crazy, and keep to a simple colour scheme. Contrasting colours can work well in the right design. It's a good rule of thumb that your blog features a main primary colour, a shade of grey, and a colour for your call-to-action. 05. Embrace white space The Entyce site isn't afraid to make use of white space When finding inspiration before you create a design blog, don't be afraid of white space – it can really enhance your design and keep it looking professional. Don't be afraid to leave some parts of the design empty where it warrants it. You should also use white space as borders to help highlight key parts of the blog. Remember, sometimes less really is more. 06. Keep your design goal-driven Web design resource Treehouse uses its blog to promote its courses If the purpose of your blog is to get conversions – whether that's sales, signups, or enquires – then everything else comes second. This means you should create a design blog that is designed with three things in mind: Topic: What is your blog about? Value proposition: What makes it unique? Audience: Who is your main target audience? To get conversions, your design blog needs a strong call-to-action in its design, be that headlines, prominent buttons, or even arrows. A goal-driven design will help your blog convert, and keep visitors coming back time and time again. 07. Follow conventions Superdream makes its posts easy to navigate It can be easy to forget about the important features of a blog when getting creative with the design. Whatever your blog ends up looking like, make sure you keep the main conventions of a blog in place. These include: Sidebars Headers Subscription options Author attribution Search bars These all make your design blog easy to navigate, which is a highly important feature. Keeping these elements in place will make your content easy to find, and keep your visitors on the blog for longer. Together, all this adds up to a goal-driven design. 08. Experiment For Print Only uses bold graphics and grids Although for the most part it's important to follow conventions, that doesn't mean you shouldn't break the rules from time to time! Try a few new elements, and experiment with colours, fonts, and placement. By mixing things up, you create a visually exciting experience for your audience. Just make sure that your readers can always find your posts, and exactly what they're looking for. 09. Make it responsive Test your design with a tool like Google's Resizer Nowadays, responsive web design is a prerequisite for any respectable design blog. Work closely with a designer and developer to help produce a design that is both eye-catching and functional. 10. Promote it! WIth a tool such as Hootsuite you can easily do most of your social shizzle in one go There is no point in knowing how to start a blog without learning how to promote it too... This is where social media comes into its own. Create Facebook and Twitter pages for your blog, or use existing accounts to shout about it. If you are involving a lot of images in your blog, why not set up Pinterest and Instagram accounts, too? Most modern blogging platforms such as Squarespace provide integration for everything from Twitter and Instagram to Tumblr and Dribbble, so you can spread the message quickly and effectively. Related articles: The 14 best free blogging platforms 12 must-have code testing tools The 34 best free WordPress themes View the full article

Great collaboration means pulling together everybody's different areas of expertise to develop great ideas, and sharing workloads to get much more done in less time. Here we talk to Alison Coward – founder of creative teamwork facilitator Bracket and author of Effective Workshops – about how to improve teamwork. What can people do to improve communication and teamwork? AC: Firstly, you can make a big impact by having better meetings. All teams have to meet, but often there are too many meetings, and most of them are unproductive. Each time you call a meeting, ask the question: what is the purpose? Then choose the most appropriate format for it – a quick check-in, feedback meeting, ideation session or something else – so that you can make the best use of everyone’s time. Secondly, make time to have conversations about how your team works together. This includes the types of meetings you have, but also how people will stay up-to-date throughout a project. What tools will you use? How will you share new ideas? What do you expect from each other? Understand how and when everyone does their best work, then use this to design processes that will make for productive working. Finally, encourage everyone to be as transparent as possible in their work so that, at any one time, everyone can see tasks and timelines and what the project status is. That way the team can identify bottlenecks and feel a shared sense of responsibility. Coward says that meetings need focus to be effectiveAnd what are the biggest obstacles to better teamwork? AC: Avoiding conflict is a big one. When teams feel that they have to agree on everything to keep the peace, it leads to groupthink, which then leads to mediocre ideas. The fact is, the best teams are diverse in their ways of thinking, skills and expertise. This will naturally lead to tension, but this conflict is necessary to challenge and improve ideas. It can be uncomfortable, but if managed in the right way (like Pixar’s Braintrust), it can create a great environment for outstanding work. I also see teams struggle to make the switch between ideation (divergent thinking) and decision-making (convergent thinking). Ideas need enough space to breathe, incubate and develop. But then to make progress you need to select ideas and critically evaluate them. Teams get stuck when there isn’t clarity between the two. My tip is to clearly separate divergent and convergent thinking, especially in workshops. How can workshops (rather than meetings) transform projects? AC: People love the energy of a great workshop, and providing there is good follow-up, it creates momentum that continues after the event itself. It can give people the confidence in their creativity, and show the benefits of effective collaboration. Workshops are dynamic, with people standing up, moving around, using the walls to display and work through ideas. A typical meeting format is more static and, without facilitation, a few voices will dominate. Workshops are better for problem solving because more than one person can get involved at the same time. How do you help creative teams work better and more effectively? AC: The majority, although not all, of my work takes place through workshops – either facilitated, training or a combination of both. Sometimes I’ll work with a team on something specific – to kick off a project, brainstorm ideas or develop a strategy. This involves figuring out what they need to achieve, designing and running a workshop that achieves that, and then doing what I can to help them put it into practice. It could even be as specific as helping a client to design a workshop for a session they want to run themselves. But essentially I’m designing a process for a productive discussion, and to be an objective outsider. Or it may be that I’ll work with a team to help them improve the way that they work. This involves a bit of training on the principles of great teams, bringing in examples and research. Then I’ll work with them to identify an aspect of their work that they’d like to improve and design a new method or habit that they can try. I love these sessions because it’s a great opportunity for a team to turn their creativity and design skills on themselves. Different companies are developing 'team habits' to promote teamworkLooking at companies that get teamwork right, what do they do well? AC: I really love finding innovative examples of teamwork, and it’s great because more teams are sharing aspects of how they are trying to work better together. I like to call these 'team habits'. For example, Asana set up No Meeting Wednesdays across the whole company, so that everyone has a day where they can get their heads down and focus. It’s not mandatory, but workers are encouraged not to have any internal meetings on that day. I liked the way that the Nordnet Design Studio decided the best format for each of their meetings, and then set up a weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythm for when each meeting would run. Buffer recently shared the ten agreements they’ve created for using Slack, which can easily become overwhelming. By creating these simple rules, they’ve helped their colleagues to be as productive as possible. The thing about all these examples is that they’re ever-evolving. These teams will keep experimenting, reviewing and updating processes as they need to. It’s like they’ve developed a skill for it, and see it as a problem-solving and creative exercise. Can you talk us through a recent project you worked on and how you’ve helped the client? AC: I ran a series of workshops with the senior management team at a fast-growing creative company. They were starting a big recruitment drive and wanted to package up their values and systems so that they could create a good onboarding experience. When we ran the first workshop, the first thing we realised was that they were all so busy they hadn’t had the time to properly explore their strategy. They all had different ideas of the company’s potential! So we looked at aspects of branding, culture, competitive advantage and their business model. They told me that the workshops were a pivotal moment for them, as they led to a series of breakthroughs that really helped them to boost their growth. Coward will share her tips for finding a good balance between creativity and productivity at Generate London What can people expect to take away from your talk at Generate London?AC: My talk is about designing teamwork, so I’ll look at the ways teams can take a proactive approach to better collaboration. People will get practical tips about making small changes that will have a big impact, whatever their role in a team. I’ll reveal how to run great workshops, creating a good balance between creativity and productivity and building good team habits that stick. Generate London, taking place on 21 and 22 September in the Royal Institution, will feature 15 other great presentations for web and UX designers and is preceded by a full day of workshops on 20 September. Don't miss the opportunity to learn from the likes of Steve Fisher, Leonie Watson, Anton & Irene, Zell Liew, Aaron Gustafson and many more. Reserve your spot today! Related articles: Learn to run design and content sprints Why you should embrace design thinking How to be truly customer-centric View the full article

Whatever design discipline you work in, a decent knowledge and understanding of typography is one of the most important things you need to develop. Luckily, the web is packed with free, quality resources for learning about typography – if you know where to look. Whether you’re a newbie starting from scratch, or want to build on your existing typography skills, you’re sure to find plenty to sink your teeth into with the following offerings. 01. Typography rules and terms every designer must know Learn the basic terms and rules with this comprehensive introduction to typographyTypography is, quite simply, the art and technique of arranging type. It's central to the skills of a designer and is about much more than making the words legible. This comprehensive glossary sets out the fundamental concepts and terminology of typography in words you can understand. 02. Butterick’s Practical Typography This free online book by Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers, is a great introduction to everything you need to know about typography. The book begins with the five key rules of typography (which should only take 10 minutes to read and digest), followed by chapters on why typography matters, type composition, text formatting, font recommendations, page layout, and sample documents. With a comprehensive appendix, there’s everything here to help raise your typography knowledge from newbie to intermediate. 03. Infographic: a designer's guide to typography and fonts The Logo Company's stylish infographic clearly explains the alphabet of typography termsThere's a lot more to typography design than meets the eye. In fact there are a range of rules and technical terms relating to the construction and make up of fonts that most people simply don't know about. To help demystify things, The Logo Company has put together this stylish infographic that clearly explains an alphabet’s worth of typography terms. 04. Typography cheatsheet Typewolf’s cheatsheet will help you use typographic characters properlyTypewolf is an invaluable blog for keeping up with the latest in fonts and typography. And here it's supplied a handy cheatsheet to help you use typographic characters properly, including quotes and apostrophes, dashes and hyphens, and correct grammatical usage. 05. Master the finer points of typography Typography is an essential part of the communication process, whether it’s used in print, on screen or in any other media. It’s used to attract attention, engage the reader and convey meaning, and this article explores the aesthetic dimension of type to see how it serves and enhances design. 06. How to choose the right typeface When it comes to picking a typeface, you can't rely on gut alone. Making the right choice depends on function, context and a whole host of other factors. These quick tips will help ensure you go about it the right way. 07. Guide to font pairing This article explains the basics of choosing great font combinationsPicking great fonts can seem like an impossible dark art for most people. This article explains the basics of choosing great font combinations and then offers the author’s favourite combinations to try out in your own designs. 08. Four techniques for combining fonts Building a palette is an intuitive process, and expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here, Hoefler & Co explains its approach for mixing font families, by keeping one quality consistent, and letting the others vary. 09. Expert tips to improve your kerning Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between letters to achieve a visually pleasing result. Some designers find it easy, others a tricky process where success is achieved more by luck than real judgement. This article brings together 10 tips to put you on the right track. 10. Guide to typography on your homepage These top tips will help you nail the typography on your homepageTypography can often make the difference between a good and a great website. This article brings together five tips to nail the typography of your homepage. Next page: 10 more great resources for learning typography 11. Understanding typographic hierarchy Typographic hierarchy is a system for organising type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and to navigate the content. This article offers a simple example and explains how you can achieve typographic hierarchy in your own designs. 12. How to achieve better typographic hierarchy in web design If you can’t put your finger on why a web design isn’t working, the odds are good that it’s an issue with your visual or typographic hierarchy. This article offers six tips for designing online content that people will actually want to read. 13. The rules of responsive web typography This article takes the mystery out of responsive web typographyResponsive web typography is tough – you need to have both design chops and technical know-how. This article explains all the principles and systems you need to know to take the mystery out of responsive web typography. 14. Control web typography with CSS font The way a browser loads your fonts has a big impact on the performance of your website. This article explains the different ways to tell the browser do it, and which to use when. 15. Master accessible web typography Readability of content is probably the main goal for almost every website. To this end, Fontsmith has worked with Mencap to research, test and design accessible typefaces for those with disabilities. In this article, we present some of their findings. 16. How accessible is your typeface? This infographic explains how to gauge the accessibility of your typefacesAccessible typography gets your message across smoothly, and makes it more legible for people with learning difficulties. This infographic from Fontsmith explains how designers can gauge the accessibility of their typefaces. 17. How to create your own font Where exactly do you begin if you want to make your own font? If you're a designer or illustrator new to this discipline, this article explains the first practical steps, the common software you can use and the early considerations to get you going. 18. The 10 commandments of typography Learning typography is as much about what you shouldn’t do as what you should. This article looks at common type mistakes, how you can avoid them and some suggestions for further reading along the way. 19. Typography tricks every designer should know Pro designers share their top typography tipsWant to push your typography skills further? This article shares 10 typography tips and tricks from professional designers that you can use to boost your design skills and impress friends and colleagues. 20. Top-quality typography tutorials This post brings together the web's best typography tutorials, all in one place. You'll find typography tutorials on adding colour to your type, designing text effects, making a typography poster, illustrative typography, and more. View the full article

Router manufacturer TP-Link recently fixed a vulnerability in a discontinued line of routers that if exploited could have been used to execute code on the device. View the full article

Researchers find flaws in an internet-connected drill, but say minimal, hard-to-find bugs indicate there is hope for IoT security. View the full article

Whenever you create vector art in Illustrator, simple tasks can become a hindrance to your workflow. So instead of becoming frustrated, take a look at our list of Illustrator shortcuts right here. They're guaranteed to speed up your workflow once you get the hang of them. Whether you want to change the size of your text, deselect a layer or merge a series of layers, we've got it covered! There are also some handy hints for brushes, saving and closing, and viewing options. Introduce the shortcuts slowly into your practice so you're not overwhelmed by the sheer amount to remember. Handy Photoshop shortcuts to speed up your workflow 01. Select all items on layer Mac: Option+Click layer Windows: Alt+Click layer Quickly select all the items on one particular layer – including those that are locked and not visible (to select only the visible, unlocked objects, click the select circle in the layers palette). 02. Hand Tool Mac: Spacebar Windows: Spacebar Move around your artboard without disturbing the content. This shortcut can't be used while editing typography. 03. Hand Tool (Editing type) Mac: Cmd+Spacebar Windows: Ctrl+Spacebar Move around your artboard without disturbing the content. This can be used while editing type, but you have to start moving the cursor around very quickly after releasing the Cmd/Ctrl key, otherwise Illustrator will start adding spaces to your text. 04. Activate Zoom In tool Mac: Cmd+Spacebar Windows: Ctrl+Spacebar Zoom closer into the artboard. 05. Activate Zoom Out tool Mac: Cmd+Option+Spacebar Windows: Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar Zoom out of the artboard. 06. Access Selection or Direction Selection tool Mac: Cmd Windows: Ctrl Switch between the Selection or Direction Selection tool – a big time saver. 07. Move Selection 10 pts Mac: Shift+arrow direction Windows: Shift+arrow direction Shift your imagery and/or typography accurately and quickly. 08. Add to a selection Mac: Shift-click Windows: Shift-click Create multiple selections, with the ability to add more if needed. 09. Lock selected artwork Mac: Cmd+2 Windows: Ctrl+2 This is a handy way to lock down those layers that keep getting in the way. 10. Unlock all artwork Mac: Cmd+Option+2 Windows: Ctrl+Alt+2 Unlock previously locked layers all at once. 11. Duplicate Mac: Option+drag Windows: Alt+drag Just drag your selection while holding Option to duplicate the file. 12. Scale proportionally with Selection tool Mac: Shift+drag bounding box Windows: Shift+drag bounding box Never distort your images again: scale them proportionally with this method. 13. Sample colour Mac: I Windows: I Sample colour from a vector, gradient or image with the eyedropper tool. 14. Show/hide artboards Mac: Cmd+Shift+H Windows: Ctrl+Shift+H Each artboard is bound by solid lines that represent the maximum printable area, with a canvas area beyond these boundaries. This shortcut shows/hides the artboard boundaries. 15. Show/hide artboard rulers Mac: Cmd+R Windows: Ctrl+R Make sure everything lines up by toggling rulers on. 16. View all artboards in window Mac: Cmd+Option+O Windows: Ctrl+Alt+O Shows you multiple artboards at once. 17. Decrease/increase type size Mac: Cmd+Shift+< or > Windows: Ctrl+Shift+< or > An effective way of changing your font size directly in front of your eyes. 18. Decrease/Increase leading Mac: Option+up/down Windows: Alt+up/down Quickly adjust the kerning without having to keep clicking in the character tab. 19. Decrease/Increase kerning or tracking Mac: Option+arrow L/R Windows: Alt+arrow L/R Adjust the space between your text in Illustrator with this handy command. 20. Align text left/centre/right Mac: Cmd-Shift-L/C/R Windows: Ctrl+Shift+L/C/R A great way to experiment with the alignment of your text, this shortcut will enable you to do it quickly. 21. Save for Web and Devices Mac: Cmd+Shift+Opt+S Windows: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S If you prefer not to drag your mouse around a number of options, use this shortcut. Related articles: Review: Adobe Illustrator CC 2017 Make a logo in Illustrator 100 amazing Adobe Illustrator tutorials View the full article

Last month saw the release of the poster for Spider-Man: Homecoming. The design was – well – pretty crowded to say the least. Featuring Peter Parker, Tony Stark as himself, Tony Stark as Iron Man, new baddie Adrian Toomes and the Vulture twice, plus both fireworks and lasers, and the Manhattan skyline and the Washington Monument squished in for good measure. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the internet to react, with fans and critics offering a unanimously negative response. Some even took the time to mock up their own versions, arguing that there was no way to make the poster worse than it already was. And while some called it a bad Photoshop job and others branded it plain amateurish, the collage-style it evokes is nothing new. Click the icon in the top right to enlarge the image The likes of Drew Struzan and John Alvin became iconic for their illustrated, collage-style, ‘floating-head’ poster designs, so why is it that posters of a similar style now seem lazy and inauthentic? Is it all down to lazy Photoshop work? Or is it simply that mainstream movie posters are mimicking the apathetic movie industry – producing sequel after sequel, remake after remake – that despite what the poster looks like, the movie will sell well anyway. Illustrator Sam Gilbey, who has produced pop culture artwork for properties including Marvel's Avengers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Karate Kid and Flash Gordon, argues that the introduction of Photoshop may have harmed the industry by making it easier for inexperienced designers to put together collage-style posters without the design skills to back them up. “Obviously you think of the masters like Richard Amsel, working pre-Photoshop, and you can see how marketing departments have often thought they can now produce something similar internally,” he explains. “If you’re simply moving photos around though, you’re not going to get that cohesiveness that an illustration can bring you. A skilled artist can take all those disparate elements and weave them together into a beautiful composition, whilst capturing the aspirational ‘feel’ of a movie at the same time. Of course now the fantastic thing is that as an artist you can use Photoshop to aid the process. The ‘problem’ is that you don’t need to be an artist to give it a try, or to understand how good compositions and colour palettes really work.” Out of context It seems that colour palette and composition is where this Spider-Man poster begins to go wrong, as illustrator Graham Humphreys explains. “My first impression is an issue with colour balance and the obvious cut-outs – the images don't appear to exist in the same context,” he says. “Even though we are used to seeing unrealistic scale and smaller elements alongside larger ones, effects of colour and light should allow the suspension of physics and scale. In this poster, it would appear that no such consideration has been applied. It looks more like a page in a scrapbook – a concept in itself perhaps, but not one clearly intended (or relevant) here.” This recent Transformers poster is another casualty of the scrapbook-style approach The participants gaze in all directions without having any idea there might be someone else in the same poster Graham Humphreys He adds that when the poster composition needs to be of the floaty-head variety, there still needs to be a form of narrative. This is usually achieved through eyelines, emotional expressions and reactions, which can add a layer of interest and insight into the film’s storyline and characters. “Here, the participants gaze in all directions without having any idea there might be someone else in the same poster! In addition, they are all closed-mouthed, neutral gazes – with the bizarre exception of a curiously happy young lady in the bottom right,” he continues. “The angle from which the heads are viewed are also numerous and without order. There is no narrative of threat, romance, fear, good, evil... in fact none of the theatrical tropes that are recognisable human traits and cinematic emblems. Unless boredom is the intended threat.” Marketing casualty Sadly, BLT – the agency that produced this poster – was unable to discuss any specifics of the poster due to the client relationship. However, this particular design is jarringly different to the posters the agency initially released, which saw Spider-Man hanging out in various NYC spots. Initial designs feature Spider-Man hanging out in NYCBLT is also responsible for some of the best poster designs and campaigns in recent months – its fantastic Baby Driver campaign and the brilliant rom-com Deadpool ad for example. So why such a break from form? “One thing that I can recognise is client intervention,” explains Humphreys. "Endless changes that will please executives, accountants and marketing needs, but changes made in ignorance of the visual cohesion that might have made a good poster. Most designers and illustrators will attest to this endless mortal combat." Perhaps the cult of celebrity and the selfie have crushed the soul out of mainstream cinema posters Graham Humphreys “Mainstream posters, by and large, are marketing tools intended to appeal to a wide base that it is assumed has no interest in lasting design or creative integrity. A quick look at the work of Saul Bass will tell us that this wasn't always so. His amazing work on mainstream releases shows us that a cloud of disengaged headshots isn't the only way a poster can communicate the core of a film. "With access to so much imagery and visual stimuli now (more than ever), how have we become so visually illiterate that only a roughly assembled photograph of the cast reassures us we are going to be entertained? Perhaps the cult of celebrity and the selfie have crushed the soul out of mainstream cinema posters. I hope not.” Alternative routes Gibley argues that it’s not all bad though. With an increase in alternative movie poster design (see the likes of Olly Moss and Mondo), studios have clocked on to the fact that this type of aesthetic can give their movie an edge (and allow them to sell a bunch of prints). Moonlight, The Lobster and Green Room are all examples of studios producing interesting, timeless pieces, giving hope that there are still decent mainstream movie posters out there. "It feels like overall, decent movie posters are actually becoming more common, even if they’re being done in parallel to the main campaigns,” Gibley says. Alternative approaches stand out even more in the current marketHe points out that, although it's a shame not many actual campaign posters are being assigned to individual artists and designers, it's exciting to see alternative interpretations being shared on social media or given away at IMAX screenings. On top of that, many older movies are getting new artwork when they are re-released on Blu-ray. "Whilst that Spider-man one stands out for being particularly terrible, hopefully the negative reaction will actually keep moving us onwards,” he adds. Related articles: 5 outrageous product placements in movies Are these vintage concept movie posters better than the originals? The top 25 movie posters of all time View the full article

This month Brad Frost unveils his guide to making a successful style guide, presentation tool LiveSlides is getting a lot of attention, and Google releases Material Components, which make it easier to implement Material Design. 01. Style Guide Guide Brad Frost’s advice on building great style guidesThere are lots of reasons why creating a style guide will make your site easier to maintain, but lots of organisations get it wrong and the style guide turns out to be more of a hindrance than a help. Style Guide Guide is a boilerplate by Brad Frost combined with some great advice that will help you build a guide that will aid designers without restricting their creativity. 02. LiveSlides If you make presentations, definitely give LiveSlides a lookJazz up your presentations with LiveSlides, which enables you to embed websites in PowerPoint and Keynote slides so you can include things like YouTube videos and live Twitter feeds, as well as your own sites. 03. Mini.css An ultra-lightweight yet capable frameworkAs the name suggests, file size is one of the main selling points of this framework, which weighs in at under 7MB gzipped. It’s just one CSS file, and packs more functionality into that space than you might expect, with modules that will support a fairly complex site design. The documentation is detailed, and it is designed to work well on both mobile and desktop platforms. 04. Mirr.io Get your Sketch prototypes up and running with easeThis handy Mac app enables you to make working prototypes out of your Sketch designs without needing to leave the program or fiddle around with exporting things to external tools. It’s a smooth process that’s quick to learn, so you can get your prototype online and ready to share without any fuss. 05. Gradient Buttons Satisfying gradient hover effectsHere’s a large free collection of gradient buttons that have cool hover effects. You can try them out on the site and copy the CSS code to use on your own site. 06. Learn CSS Grid Get working with CSS Grid the easy wayIt’s well worth your time and effort to get to grips with Grid as it’s a much more efficient way to do layouts. This resource lays out the principles simply and clearly so you can jam them into your brain swiftly and with minimal resistance. 07. Fontjoy Interesting font pairings for your inspirationThis tool uses machine learning to generate font pairings that adhere to various criteria that ought to make them look good. It’s a great way to brainstorm if you’re stuck as it’s sure to throw some interesting ideas your way. 08. Material Components Pixel-perfect, modular components maintained by GoogleMaterial Components is a set of customisable UI components for Android, iOS and the web that makes it easy for you to implement Material Design on any platform. They’re maintained by Google engineers and designed to play well with the big frameworks such as React and Angular. 09. Fuse A UX design toolkit that improves workflow and collaborationFuse is a UX toolkit designed to make it much quicker and easier for you to build iOS and Android interfaces, especially for more complex applications, and to do so in a way that enables you to collaborate more efficiently with the dev team. Your Android and iOS interfaces appear side-by-side so you can adjust them together, and they’re generated from a shared codebase. 10. Ambiance colour palettes Randomly generated colour palettesAmbiance presents a curated collection of colour palettes for you to browse through when you’re stuck for ideas or inspiration, with fun names such as Token Movie Vixen and Nice Ice. You can save palettes to your Ambience Box for later, and copy colours' HEX, RGB and HSL information. Liked this? Then read these: 23 top Sketch plugins 7 tips to manage colour better on the web 12 must-have code testing tools View the full article

The SMBv1 file-sharing protocol abused by the NSA’s EternalBlue exploit to spread WannaCry ransomware is being disabled in the upcoming Windows Fall Creators Update, or Redstone 3. View the full article

Building apps can be difficult, especially if you're not familiar with the coding languages that make those apps tick. Learn how to build great apps, even if you haven't mastered the technical side, with the Code-Free App Building Suite. It's on sale now for 95% off the retail price. With the Code-Free App Bundle, you can learn how to bring your apps to life quickly and easily. This three-course bundle is aimed at those who don't know how to code but still love the idea of building services for mobile. You'll learn how to craft: marketplaces to sell products; referral systems to get more visitors and users; and payment systems so you can monetise it all. Start building the apps you've always dreamed of with the Code-Free App Building Suite. You can get it right now for 95% off the retail price. That's a massive saving for a bundle that will get your apps to the top of the App Store, so grab this deal today! View the full article

The fun thing about drawing ghosts is getting to play with supernatural light sources and ambiance in your scene. This is particularly true of any painting set in a tomb, cave or other dark environment. When considering how to draw a ghost rising from a tomb, you want to try to light the tomb or effigy as if it's the ghost itself that's illuminating the stone. Follow these simple steps to draw a convincing ghost. 01. Sketch your composition Posture can help express your character's personalityFirst I sketch out my composition. The posture of your figure helps to express their personality or intentions. One trick to creating undead characters is to make them lumbering or hunched, but here I decided to show my ghost pulling a ghostly sword from its effigy. Storytelling can be key to selling a character. 02. Use a limited palette A dark tomb with a cool colour palette will give a ghostly vibe Try to light the tomb or effigy as if it's the ghost itself that's illuminating the stone. With this in mind, choose a cool colour such as green or aqua for your source light. The dark tomb will accentuate the spectral glow of your ghost. When blocking in your painting, use a limited palette, focusing on saturation and value to define your shapes. This will help tie your picture together and make it look like your character is the solitary glowing light source in the scene. 03. Use brushes to create atmosphere The next stage is to add tendrils of colour trailing from your ghostly figure to the stone effigy on top of the tomb, paying careful attention to the way that you place your brushstrokes. Try to always use your brush in the same direction that your ghost or object is moving, because this will make the motion in your image much more convincing. I'd advise selecting a Soft brush or the Smudge tool to gently soften the edges of your ghostly figure to make them appear incorporeal. Careful use of the Motion Blur filter can also enhance this supernatural effect. 04. Direct your viewer's eye Control your brushstrokes to direct the viewer's eye Use contrast and control the direction of your brushstrokes to direct your viewer's eye. This will aid storytelling and create a focal point. I push the hues of the image further towards blue to identify 
the sword as the key point in the story. As a final touch you can use a large cloud brush to add an ambient fog to your scene. If you set your layer mode to Color Dodge it'll immediately become more ethereal. I recommend playing with the Layer Opacity to find the best blend. Like this? Read these! How to get started with ink drawing Get the best free vector art for your projects Want print perfection? Get these InDesign tutorials View the full article

Anton & Irene will be at Generate London on 20-22 September, where they will share their experience on how to successfully have a good work/life balance while producing creative work for both. Anton Repponen and Irene Pereyra first met while working as agency directors at Fantasy. Soon, it became clear they weren’t doing as much design work as they’d like, so in 2014 they took the plunge and founded Anton & Irene. The studio immediately started making waves in the industry, snagging Karim Rashid as its first client and picking up net’s New Agency of the Year award (watch their awesome acceptance video). We chatted to the duo about their extraordinary pitching success rate, and why there’s really no need for user research. Anton & Irene say working together is almost like a marriageYou went from being agency directors to designers. Why the move? AR: We became directors quite quickly at the very beginning of our careers, and it was definitely not something we had planned on. After a couple of years ‘on the job’ we realised the things we enjoyed doing most were the things that had nothing to do with being directors. There are a lot of things that start to eat up your time, like the performance reviews of your designers, and discussions about finances and business strategies, and you end up doing less and less actual design work. IP: We definitely learned a lot from all of these extra-curricular director activities, but we wanted to make sure we kept designing and didn’t become the kind of directors that just point at other people to do stuff. That works really well for some people, of course, but for us it was like dying a slow death. We like making things. We like working on stuff ourselves, and the only way to keep doing that was to start our own studio. At larger agencies you get promoted away from the things you are best at, but as an independent design studio, we could ensure we would always be the primary designers. Anton & Irene will present a talk and also run a full-day workshop at Generate London in September What was your experience like when you launched Anton & Irene? AR: We were very lucky that it was quite easy. By the time we started our studio we were already known as designers and were associated with some pretty successful projects. We’ve worked with a ton of people over the past seven years at companies like Google and Microsoft, and a lot of designers who worked for us in the past are now at places like Apple, Spotify and Facebook. Our network is quite large – it wasn’t like we just came out of nowhere. If we had started our own agency earlier, we would have had a very different experience I think. It was good timing. What advice would you give to others setting up an agency? IP: You have to be very sure about who you go into business with, because at the end of the day, a business is basically the same as a marriage. It’s very important to be aligned on very many different levels because there is a high chance for irritations to build up if you aren’t. Anton and I both have a similar outlook about to what extent we will let money make decisions for us (as little as possible), how many hours we want to work (from 9am to 6pm every day, and never on the weekends), and what kinds of work we want to take on (interesting work that will challenge our skillsets). You might think that these things go without saying, but you’d be surprised by how often that can go wrong. Anton & Irene's first ever client project was to redesign the website for iconic product designer Karim RashidCan you tell us about your process working with Karim Rashid? IP: Believe it or not, the Karim Rashid project was quite possibly the easiest one in our careers. Initially we were actually quite apprehensive about taking on the project, since we thought it would be impossible to design for a designer. Especially for one as prolific and influential as Karim Rashid. We were worried that he would end up ‘directing’ the project, which would have been a total nightmare. The only reason we decided to move forward with the project was because we had worked with Alexander Wang on the redesign of Balenciaga.com the year before, and he respected our expertise as digital designers and never crossed into our domain. As soon as we met with Karim and his team we knew it was going to be a good working relationship. We liked them right away. Anton and Irene's incredibly beautiful, sunny loft studio space in BrooklynYou’ve said that you ‘don’t do user research’. Is this still the case? IP: Yes, that’s true. It’s just not part of our process. Although we sometimes get vilified by other UX designers for not doing it, we refuse to do research just because other people feel that it’s something you have to do. Everyone has their own way of coming to a solution, and user research is just one way. Does this ever cause difficulties with your clients? IP: It’s actually never affected any of our pitches or work with clients, and very rarely have clients insisted on user research. In those cases we asked them to hire an outside company to conduct the user research, and then together with the client we’d decide on what we wanted to action from it. Though in reality nothing surprising ever came out of it. It’s funny how dogmatic the UX field has become, with so many rules on process and things. I really dislike that. How important is UX to you? What makes a good user experience? IP: Wow, this is a massive topic we could discuss for hours. A good user experience is everything, of course. Everything. You want things to make sense and to be designed around the person who will be using it. However, I do find it interesting how so many things have become boring and visually uninteresting under the flag of ‘good user experience’. Maybe it’s OK for some products to be hard to use, or difficult to figure out. Maybe your mom shouldn’t always be able to use it. Think of Snapchat. Good UX still means many different things to many different people, and even people within the UX community are still arguing about UX versus UI and what it all means. I find these discussions kind of uninteresting to be very honest. Stuff is either good or it’s not. You can call it whatever you want and get there with whichever means you need to. Anton & Irene did this portrait for the book celebrating the 15th anniversary of the OFF festival. It's also on their site's 404 page Can you tell us about some work which initially didn’t go down well with the client, and how you bounced back? IP: When we were working on the redesign of USAToday.com back in 2012, we almost got fired when the client didn’t like the creative work that came out of the three-month discovery phase. They basically threatened to fire us if we didn’t come up with something better by Monday. It was Thursday. We had three days to come up with a totally new and different framework, and through some sort of miracle we managed to get something that was really, really good. By the time they saw it on Monday we had won back all the respect needed to keep the job, and to maintain a good relationship with the client. We realised our mistake was that we did not include them enough in our working process, and that they would have been able to pull the handbrake much earlier on if we had shown them stuff sooner. Ever since then, we’ve stopped doing ‘grand reveal’ presentations and show our work-in-progress almost on a daily basis. Better safe than sorry! You state you’ve won 84 per cent of your pitches – what’s your secret? AR: We learned by making mistakes. Every time we lost a pitch, we would request a call with the client to ask where we went wrong and why they didn’t choose us. It’s amazing what you can learn from that. It’s important to be 100 per cent dedicated to the pitch for the entirety of the time that you are working on it. It’s also important to show the client at least two different concepts, and you should always present in person. Most importantly, you have to sell yourself and your process. They basically have to look at your presentation and if your concept doesn’t match their needs, they should think to themselves ‘but we can work with these guys if we let them know what we’re thinking’. It’s all about building that trust and understanding right from the beginning. Every item in Anton & Irene's studio was hand-picked and has some kind of story behind itHow do you stay excited about design, and beat creative block? IP: To be very honest, I am really unaware of trends and what is happening in our field currently, and I kind of like it that way. I think I am afraid that if I get too wrapped up in what is happening out there I will inadvertently start copying stuff. The things that inspire me are kind of random. I like good stories. I like weird facts. I like stats. I like history. I like finding things that other people walk past. I like unusual people and unusual situations. I like making things make sense. I like taking a massive amount of stuff or information and sifting through it to see categories and similarities. I like fixing things that are broken. I like putting things in order. I like things to be neat and organised... AR: I somehow stopped looking at other things that happen in digital a long time ago. Most of the books I read aren’t industry books, I read both fiction and non-fiction – that inspires me much more. If I read blogs or any other online publications they tend to be about photography, video, industrial design, art, fashion or architecture. I am trying to get inspired by other industries and borrow something from there to bring into my work. Creative block is a myth. Anton & Irene will also run their popular Concept, Create, and Sell! workshop at Generate London, in which you'll learn how to quickly come up with a concept and solution to a client brief and create a convincing presentation that sells your idea either to your internal team or the client within just a couple of hours. Reserve your spot today and save £95 with a combined conference and workshop pass. Generate London will feature 15 other presentation from the likes of Steve Fisher, Zell Liew, Leonie Watson, Jaime Levy and many others. Topics covered include UX strategy, performance, web animations, conversational UIs, responsive CSS components and much, much more. Don't miss it! The article originally appeared in issue 274 of net magazine. Related articles: 10 great examples of web design portfolios for 2017 13 great tools for pitching to clients 20 ways to overcome creative block View the full article

"For a character design position, I look at their drawing, painting, and design skills, and for a variety of styles," says Aaron BlaiseIt doesn't matter how talented an animator you are. If you don't have a killer portfolio to showcase your skills, that job you've dreamed of is unlikely to materialise. So what's the secret to success? We asked leading animators to share their pro tips on portfolio strategy. Whether you want your digital portfolio to work harder or to make your showreel sing, there are some best practice tips that can be applied, whatever field you're targeting. 01. Target your audience Golden rule one: know your audience. Who is your portfolio or showreel aimed at, and what do prospective employers, viewers or visitors want to see? "Whether you're applying to a games studio, effects studio or a character animation studio, you have to tailor your portfolio to the studio you're applying to and the type of work you aspire to do," says Andrew Gordon, a directing animator at Pixar, who's worked on everything from A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 3 to Pixar's Academy Award-nominated short film Presto. Oscar-nominated animator Aaron Blaise agrees: "Know who you're interviewing with," he advises. "If I were looking to get hired at Disney, I wouldn't show them a reel of Simpsons animation, and vice versa. And if you don't have the type of work you think a studio is looking for, then it would be in your best interest to do a shot or two in that studio's particular style." 02. Hook your viewer Park City (Wasatch) is one of a number of images in Ty Carter's portfolio that shows his understanding of design and colour"Keep in mind that we have seconds to evaluate your work," explains Disney in its exceptionally helpful portfolio and showreel application guidelines. That means putting your best work first and closing strong, as Pixar's Gordon explains: "Realise that people will fast-forward through your work. If they don't see something really quickly, they'll turn off." It also means being original. How? By injecting personality into your portfolio. "Good character animation is the art of bringing characters to life – not moving them around," points out Blaise. He's currently working on an original 2D animated short film, Snow Bear, with business partner Nick Burch, and urges animators not to sacrifice personality by focusing solely on movement and mechanics. "Often a shot requires little to no movement to get an emotion across," he says. "It can be just a look, an eye movement, a blink. I also advise animators to include performances where there's a change of emotion or idea: angry to happy or fearful to brave. That's when it becomes real and the viewer is pulled in." 03. Show your skillset "Game animation is competitive," says Jonathan Cooper, who worked on Uncharted 4. "Even veterans need to keep pushing the quality bar to get that ideal job."When it comes to specific skill sets, different disciplines require different portfolios. For Gordon, who specialises in character animation, this means showing an understanding of the 12 principles of animation – squash, stretch and so on. For Naughty Dog video games animator Jonathan Cooper, however, this means showing actions and a relevant style. Cooper is the brains behind video animation website Game Anim. He's currently working on Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and says that for the games he makes, he wants to see navigation around a complex environment, including jumping, climbing and vaulting, one-on-one-combat, walk and run cycles, and so on. "Dialogue and acting scenes are a huge bonus as we're always blurring the lines between gameplay and cinematic storytelling, and game animators are typically expected to at least have a hand in both aspects on the job," he says, adding that camera work also helps you stand out. 04. Present a fresh demo reel As Cooper explains, it's essential to have an up-to-date demo reel to keep up with the fast-paced games industry. "A personal website is the easiest to share with the studio involved in hiring, but a link to your latest reel in your resume is enough," he says. "I prefer Vimeo to YouTube, because of the final render quality and overall cleanliness of the site," he continues. "And ArtStation is fast becoming the standard for pre-made portfolios. But I recommend adding your reel everywhere – even LinkedIn. As for a physical portfolio, I don't think I've seen one in years." Lisa Allen, an animator at Blue Sky Studios and recent portfolio reviewer at November's CTN animation expo, echoes the sentiment: "Your showreel is really the only part of your portfolio that matters for getting a job as an animator. "Ideally, the pieces in your showreel demonstrate your eye for acting, posing, design and composition. If you've done work in any other categories like life drawing, or illustration, that's great – but keep them in a separate part of your portfolio website instead. Also, less is more. For me, the perfect reel is between three and five clips and around a minute long." 05. Create one major focus "At Blue Sky we look for animation with entertainment through character and personality," says Lisa Allen, who worked on The Peanuts MovieAnother golden rule for a successful portfolio is to create a clear focus. If you're showcasing a number of core abilities, make sure the direction in which you want to take your career is clearly presented. "Successful portfolios are specific, organised and contain original ideas," says Blue Sky Studios visual development artist Ty Carter. His film credits include Ice Age 4: Continental Drift, Epic, and The Peanuts Movie, and he shares all kinds of useful tutorials and teachings on his Patreon page. "It's good to see one major focus like character design, set design or colour. If you do each of these at a high level it doesn't hurt to show them all, but be careful not to include too much. What's most important is showing you're a creative problem solver. Ask yourself, what do you bring to the table that nobody else can do? Is your own life experience reflected in your art? If not, how can you do that?" 06. Entertain your audience Most importantly, it's about storytelling. "Don't fall into the trap of being a shot animator," warns Gordon. "People don't just want to see great animation: they want to see if you can tell a story. You have to put together the pieces so that you're showing you understand cutting, continuity and staging. You don't need complex rigs to get noticed. Just great ideas." "At Disney we would talk about portfolios that stuck out," agrees Blaise, "and they stuck out because the work was consistently entertaining throughout. We are in the business of entertainment," he smiles. "I want your portfolio to entertain me." This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 145; buy it here! Related articles: 8 big portfolio trends for 2017 Create a killer online portfolio in 10 steps 6 free resources to improve your portfolio View the full article

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Patches are available for a newly discovered Linux, BSD and Solaris vulnerability called Stack Clash that bypasses stack guard-page mitigations and enables root access. View the full article

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian expressionist painter, best known for his masterpiece The Scream. Now digital creatives can get a taste of his genius with seven specially created Photoshop brushes based on Munch’s own paintbrushes. The free Photoshop brushes are based on those used centuries ago by Munch himselfThe project, part of the Hidden Treasures of Creativity initiative, saw Adobe collaborating with The Munch Museum in Oslo and award-winning Photoshop brush maker Kyle T Webster to bring Munch’s original, century-old brushes to a completely new generation of creatives. Creative Cloud users can download them for free here. To give you a taste of what you can create, Adobe has also put together a series of video masterclasses to help you hone your expert brush skills. Take a look at the first one below. Watch the rest on the Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel or join in with Adobe’s livestreaming event – part of its Adobelive series – to paint along with Photoshop professionals. There will be sessions taking place daily on 20, 21 and 22 June at 3pm (BST), and you can sign up here. View the full article

Sometimes you just need to know how to sell people on an idea. Marketing skills are applicable to just about any industry, and you can learn how to apply them to the online world with the Digital Marketing Guru Bundle, on sale now for 98% off the retail price. Being successful requires some luck, but even more know-how. In order to optimise everything about your website and grow your online presence bigger than you could have ever imagined, you need the Digital Marketing Guru Bundle. This four-course collection will show you how the technical side of web design – from programming to analytics – can help you monetise your site, land more customers, and make more money. You can improve your website and brand with the Digital Marketing Guru Bundle right now for 98% off the retail price. That's a huge saving for a bundle that will help make you money, so grab this deal today! View the full article

Has it really been 10 years since the iPhone was launched? Today it seems difficult to think of life without the smartphone, but when the device was first unveiled back in 2007, few could have predicted how it would shape our lives. Thanks to a revolutionary touchscreen interface, the iPhone immediately took off. In fact six out of 10 Americans knew the iPhone was on its way before it was officially available to purchase. We have the iPhone to thank (or curse) for blessing us with selfies, image-based communications (that's emojis to you and me) and many more technological innovations. To guide you through the ways in which the iPhone has changed visual communication, Shutterstock has put together this infographic that rounds up the phone's most significant achievements. Click the icon in the top right to see the full size infographic Related articles: iOS 11 brings augmented reality to iPhone and iPad The 33 best photo apps The 21 best photo collage maker tools View the full article

The many advantages of SVG – including infinitely scalable vector images, small file sizes and direct integration with the DOM – make it a natural fit for responsive web design. Despite the SVG specification being a decade old, it's relatively recent support in many browsers and tools means there are still a number of tricks, loopholes and gotchas that catch out even experienced web designers and developers. Here, I've summarised the most important of these as 10 golden rules. 01. Set up your tools correctly Just as a craftsman sharpens his tools before beginning work, anyone working with SVG must set their applications up to deliver vector format in the most efficient and optimised method possible. There are a number of settings to implement. First, unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, set measurements to 'pixels' in your vector tool. While it doesn't matter to SVG (which will measure the viewBox and elements happily in almost any measurement system) it makes sense to develop the SVG drawing using common CSS units, rather than the print default of inches; and it also makes it much easier to add @media queries and other interventions later. Don't make the canvas area any larger than it needs to be. Like bitmap images, any 'blank space' in the SVG won't be used, and is best substituted with CSS margins. Note that many vector tools, such as Sketch, will automatically 'crop' the canvas area to selected elements. At the same time, don't crop the canvas area to the exact edges of elements. Antialiasing will still be applied to the SVG, and cutting it too close may also crop out the antialiasing. Instead, leave at least 2px clear wherever the edge of the canvas comes close to an element. Responsiveness and performance are closely related, so set the decimal precision to be no more than two points. SVG doesn't think in integers, so a vector point can have a value of 1.45882721px. This extreme precision is entirely unnecessary, and only adds to code bloat and file size, so it's better to truncate it at this point. Similarly, draw vector shapes using as few points as possible. Many new designers assume more points is better, when the reverse is actually true: a few points, placed well, provide greater control over an element, while also reducing file size. If you're given vector files that do not follow this rule, don't worry – most vector art applications have a 'simplify' option you can use to reduce the number of points in an element without changing its shape. Alternatively, for detailed work I'd suggest a plugin like Astute Graphics' VectorScribe. 02. Remove height and width attributes Most apps add a lot of proprietary, unnecessary code in their SVG export. The only required code at the start of most SVG files is the following: For our purposes, the most important aspect is the removal of the width and height attributes that most applications include automatically. This makes the SVG fully responsive in modern browsers. If you're processing a lot of SVGs, or are in a rush, you don't need to complete this step by hand. Instead, you can follow the suggestions laid out in the third golden rule... 03. Optimise and minify SVG output A combination of intelligent hand-editing and post-production optimisation can reduce SVG file sizes markedlyWhatever tool you use to create your SVG content, it's still worthwhile processing its output through a tool like SVGOMG, which will trim the code markedly. Typically, you can save around 20 to 80 per cent in file size. The same code can be integrated locally as a gulp or Grunt task. 04. Modify code for IE Rule 2 mentioned that correctly optimised SVGs are fully responsive in modern browsers. That's true if we count Microsoft Edge as a modern browser. For IE 9-11, we have a few issues to address. If we are using the SVG as an image: We can force IE9-11 to display the image correctly using the CSS attribute selector: SVG images work well in general production, but have limited interactivity: most browsers will ignore interactivity and animation inside an SVG placed on a page as an . In addition, SVG images are an extra HTTP request for the browser. For these and other reasons, SVG is increasingly used inline. In that case, the SVG code needs a little more treatment for IE: In addition to the preserveAspectRatio attribute, IE needs a little more guidance to preserve the correct scaling of the image: take the width of the SVG (365 in this case), divide it by the height (525) and multiply the result by 100 per cent. This will become the padding-bottom value for the SVG, 'propping' it open enough in IE to display the SVG in its correct aspect ratio: Note that, in order to keep things concise and clear, the code samples in the rest of this article don't include these changes. Amelia Bellamy-Royds has written an excellent article on scaling SVG. 05. Consider SVG for hero text Using SVG for hero text means it will automatically scale in line with its containerThere's currently no CSS standard for sizing text to its container. It's possible to scale text using vw units, but that will almost always require at least two media query interventions to 'clamp' the text at certain viewport limits. However, SVG text will resize to a container automatically: The CSS: Keeping the SVG inline preserves accessibility and SEO value, and allows the text to be styled using any font already embedded in the page. See here for more information. 06. Leave width and height in place for progressive icons A non-scaling-stroke line has been applied to this speech bubble so it will not change in width when the viewport is resizedOne exception to Rule 2 is icons and small logos, which should retain their width and height attributes if you want them to be progressively enhanced: You can see an example of this technique in action here. If we only size the SVG icons with CSS, and the site's style sheet doesn't load, the icons will appear at the default size of a replaced element: 300px x 150px. By keeping the height and width as attributes, we can size them to the nearest reasonable touch size by default, and use our CSS to enhance the way they are presented. 07. Use vector-effects to keep hairlines thin By default, SVG scales everything with the viewport, including stroke thickness. Usually this works out fine, but in some cases – diagrams and strokes applied as effects on the outside of text in particular – you may want to keep strokes the same thickness, no matter what the size of the drawing. This is the domain of the little-known vector-effect property, which can be applied as a presentation attribute or in CSS: Take a look at a full example of this technique. 08. Remember bitmaps Many developers assume SVG can only use vectors, but JPEGs and PNGs can also be applied to an SVG drawing. And so long as you've followed my rules so far, those images will be responsive when you add a bitmap via the tag: 09. Consider adaptive solutions The classic Coca-Cola logo rendered at different adaptive sizesMaking things go 'squish' is only one part of responsive design. What RWD is about, in the larger sense of adaptive design, is presenting appropriate content at all viewport sizes. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. responsivelogos.co.uk provides a series of examples that use SVG sprites, but I prefer to integrate media queries into the SVG to create what I call 'branding modules'. This approach enables me to add, remove and modify the visibility of components. Read more about adaptive branding modules in my article. This same technique can be used for diagrams, illustrations, maps and more. In the simplest modules, the CSS itself can be written inside the SVG, making it usable everywhere, as outlined in the previous rule. 10. Integrate media queries into SVG Many people don't know that CSS media queries can be written inside SVG itself: It's important to note that the media query can only 'see' the element it is inside of: that is, any measurement relates to the element itself, not the page. One potential downside of this approach is that the canvas area of the SVG will always remain the same, relative to the elements inside it. This can result in very small elements at small viewport sizes, framed inside a relatively large canvas area. There are several solutions to this, including resizing the viewBox and scaling up the elements to compensate. Conclusion The infinite scalability of SVG is its greatest asset, but a feature that is still somewhat underserved by browsers and vector graphics editors. By integrating these guidelines into your production workflow and communicating them to others in your team, you can create smoothly responsive SVG for the web, making it part of the assets you use in development every day. This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 283; buy it here! Related articles: 12 must-have code testing tools Sharpen your sketching skills Supercharge SVG animations with GSAP View the full article

It's great working in a creative industry, but can be tricky to stay enthusiastic and inspired all the time. We asked leading designers how they beat creative block. Follow these 20 quick-fire to get your creative juices flowing again. 01. Tap into your subconscious Shotopop took an imaginative approach in this Clarks Originals campaign"Strange things happen in a semi-sleep state, when your unconscious takes over," says Shotopop's Casper Franken. "Wake up and write down whatever was happening before you forget it." 02. Get it down on paper Write your main ideas down in columns, and list absolutely everything that comes to mind. You can mix and match the lists for unusual and original combinations. 03. Always carry a sketchbook Jot down any ideas as an when they come to youDon't go looking for inspiration: "A visually loaded word or phrase can jump out from a passage of text, or a song," proposes London based designer and illustrator Craig Ward. "Be sure to sketch those ideas down when they come." 04. Don't be afraid to step away Completely open briefs can be the worst for causing creative block. Try to distance yourself from the project; take a break and come back to it with a clear head. 05. Finish what you've started "There's no such thing as a bad idea: the creative part is in seeing it though to completion, and turning dreams into reality," argues Mr Mills, creative director at ustwo. 06. Put some fun in your studio "Sterility leads to an empty void of nothingness," adds Mills. Always try to inject some colour and life into your studio, and don't run it like a clinic or a prison. 07. Don't retread your steps Illustrator Alex Trochut believes in starting each new project with a fresh slate "Inspiration is intangible: you can't do it on purpose," believes illustrator Alex Trochut. "If you just try to reproduce how a good project happened in the past, you'll never get the same result." 08. Look in unlikely places Go and do something else entirely. You'd be amazed at where new ideas are hiding out. They're often where you would least expect them to be. 09. Expect the unexpected Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British) have worked together as Non-Format since 2000"The best ideas don't need to be sought out at all; you just have to train yourself not to swerve out of the way when they jump out in front of you," remarks Jon Forss, co-founder of Non-Format. 10. Explore other creative disciplines Inspiration can come from anywhere. Look beyond other illustrators and designers: photography, typography, fashion, film, packaging and signage, for instance. 11. Expand your mind Kladnik & Neon is a duo at the crossroads of art, illustration and design"It's like mushroom picking: you wander through the magical woods of inspiration and see a big, beautiful mushroom," are the surreal musings of Slovenian duo Kladnik & Neon. "Pick it, make a delicious meal, and if your friends like it, go into the woods for more." 12. Go against the flow Try to approach every brief with the opposite of what everyone else would do. It might not be the direction you choose in the end, but it can help to avoid cliched scenarios. 13. Take notes on life Joanna Basford's amazing illustrations are often inspired by uncreative pursuits"The best ideas often come when doing completely random, uncreative tasks," confesses ink evangelist Johanna Basford. Jot them down as they come to you, or snap a photo of things that catch your eye. 14. Grab some 'you time' Working on too many projects at once can stifle your creativity. If you're feeling burned out, take some time to yourself and turn everything off for a couple of days. 15. Don't be bound by the brief For its Freefolk rebrand, Planning Unit focused on conveying the creative collective's independent spiritOn smaller jobs, less information can sometimes be better to avoid forced influences. "Your solution might open the client's eyes to new things," points out Jeff Knowles, founder of Planning Unit. 16. Broaden your horizons Immersing yourself in particular arts or cultures that you wouldn't normally be interested in could lead to interesting mixed-context inspirations, so get involved. 17. Push the boundaries Experiment in your personal projects or, if you haven't got the time or energy after a hard day's work, go off on a tangent for an hour while working on an actual project. 18. Get a fresh perspective View things from different angles. Some upside-down lettering in a stack of papers or a scrunched-up sketch can create unusual shapes and spark off new ideas. 19. Sleep on it when you can Illustrator and letterer Jessica Hische created this typographical rug for her studio"Try not to think and do on the same day," suggests Jessica Hische. "You tend to sort the good from the bad naturally, and occasionally come up with some really off-the-wall things overnight." 20. Shake up your surroundings Try different working environments to keep things fresh. Sketch at home or on the train, refine final work in your studio, and brainstorm in coffee shops, for instance. Related articles: 10 inspirational design cities 5 Kickstarter projects worth watching How to shine at your degree show View the full article

Leave a design to age long enough and you may find it does not dissolve into obscurity, but rises from the ashes of its own datedness, crowned with a brand new descriptive: retro. Retro design is aesthetically dated – so uncool it’s cool again, so to speak. The concept is growing in popularity. Vinyl sales hit a 25-year high this year, cassette tape sales grew by 74 per cent, and remakes of classic 80s and 90s films now roll into our cinemas on a regular basis. Vinyl sales have seen a 25-year high, thanks to the retro crazeGraphic design is not exempt from the trend, either. If you look to today’s creations across print and the web, it won’t take you long before you come across a pixelated image reminiscent of old Game Boy graphics, or gaudy 90s-style lettering that straddles a tenuous line between being cringy and ironic. Why is graphic design looking backwards? The main reason graphic designers draw inspiration from the past is simple: people are nostalgic about the past. With the benefit of hindsight, there is certainty in the past, a sureness to its course and reasoning, and yet enough distance that ugly realities can blur and fade. It’s comfortable in a way that new designs are not – a dependable escape from the confusing present. The difficulty for designers is how to get this style pitch-perfect – to be just ugly enough to pass for ironic Even seemingly ‘edgy’ designs that borrow from 80s and 90s styles are comforting reminders of corny sitcoms and times when today’s youth were too young to understand what was happening on the news. As well as that, old styles can be a welcome divergence from contemporary trends – provided you use them right. In the same way a child is wowed by a Polaroid camera or a vinyl record, the tried-and-tested typefaces, shape sets and colour palettes that passed out of the limelight long ago can be exciting to a generation that has not yet experienced them. The difficulty for designers is how to get this style pitch-perfect – to be just ugly enough to pass for ironic, or aged enough to seem wise rather than boring. We have five questions you should ask yourself to make sure you hit the mark. 01. Does your product fit a retro look? The first thing to consider is what it is you're trying to promote. Does the product or service your designing for lend itself to being tied to a vintage style? For example, a wedding boutique fits well with older designs because it is typically linked to tradition, family and long-established notions of happily-ever-after. A clothing store that carries styles from the 60s and 70s or a coffee shop with a family heritage can also benefit from a retro design because it is part of the product. It feels authentic. Vintage styles work for companies like bridal boutiques, and other brands rooted in traditionSome products simply will not work with retro designs, and you should never try to force them together (unless your client is very, very insistent). Digital startups, for one, rarely work with floral script or funky 70s typefaces. These are businesses based on progress and innovation – drawing inspiration from a time without internet or even computers is too jarring. Similarly, if you have a brand new product or a service based on innovation, it is typically better to search for contemporary trends or to attempt to break the mould altogether. 02. What is your brand’s tone? Not all retro designs are equal. There is a big difference between a vintage clothing retailer that primarily stocks floral tea dresses, and another selling restored biker jackets from the 1970s. One may make use of flowing script or elegant patterns, and the other might decide to for a scratchy, neon typeface reminiscent of 80s rock album covers. There is also a big difference between an accountancy firm that would like to be considered strong and stoic with classic typefaces similar to Times New Roman, and another that would prefer to be more personable and approachable, with injections of colour or design flourishes. These stores may sell similar products, but their branding couldn't be more differentTypically, the further back you go in time, the more reputable you can appear, so words like elegance, luxury, trusted, upmarket and quality may be tossed around. On the other hand, a younger retro design will typically attract descriptors such as fun, quirky or creative. You can also subvert this and go for a more ironic tone by employing something like a 1950s-style illustration to promote a modern-minded brand, but it takes skill to really make this work. 03. Who is your audience? The 80s nostalgia of Stranger Things helped make it a Netflix smash hitTypically, we do not find a time period ‘cool’ if we have lived through it as an adult, or it is still too recent to be blurred into an aesthetic. For example, baby boomers may find very little to admire stylistically about the 80s or 90s, but millennials are often attracted to the styles they were too young to wear, enjoy or replicate while growing up. Therefore, if you’re going retro, make sure it’s the right era to be retro for your target audience. 04. Is anyone else doing it? Remember to research your competitors to gain insight on whether your design will workIf you’re still not sure, look to your competitors. You want to stand out, but if you’re the only one going down the retro route, consider why that might be. Is there something you’ve missed? Are you just trying something different? Make sure you haven’t strayed too far from what your audience will respond positively to. Alternatively, if every other brand in your industry is using a similar logo or design, you know that the design at least works. But in this environment, will you stand out or fade into a mass of other crests and badge-style logos? Do your competitor research to make an informed decision. 05. How long does your design have to last? Album covers and other timely designs can be more daring with their retro influencesSome trends die quickly. The edgy styles of the 90s may be just a few years away from becoming the next 80s neon-tutu-and-sweatbands costume at your local Halloween store. If you're creating a logo or any aspect of design that depends on longevity, therefore, either make plans for a design shift in five years’ time or dial back the retro influence. Typically, your sensible typefaces and layouts are classic for a reason and you have little to fear. If your design is what you would call ‘out there’ then proceed with caution – trends change fast and nobody wants to fall behind. If your design is only meant to last a few months to a year, though, you can obviously afford to be a more experimental with your vintage design. 06. Do you need to rethink? Mixing and matching vintage and contemporary styles can be a great compromiseLet’s face it: Sometimes, retro doesn’t work. A retro design risks ageing an already old product, instead of giving it new life, or straying into the realm of kitschy or stereotypical. If reverting to contemporary designs isn't an option for your brand, you could try implementing only certain aspects of retro designs. For example, an old-fashioned, black and white photograph with a bold, bright typeface can marry the two concepts stylistically. Similarly, a vintage floral design turned neon, or classic typeface paired up with a bold use of shapes, can be a great way to compromise on a truly retro design. Read more: Have we entered the era of bad graphic design? 10 best movie posters from the 1990s 10 things designers say that normal people don’t View the full article

It only seems like yesterday that we were having to make our creative and design work fit an HD world. But now, another technology has come along to change the game entirely. 4K is a high resolution format for images and video, and it’s something that every creative needs to know about. In this post, we’ll explain the basics, and how you can get on board the 4K train. 01. What 4K is The latest 4K TVs, such as LG’s OLEDE7, offer mindblowing levels of detail4K, also sometimes called Ultra HD (UHD), offers four times the density of pixels you get with 1080p HD – using 3840 x 2160 pixels. As a result, 4K offers an incredible amount of detail and a greater feeling of depth for the viewer. And while even some smartphone screens offer 4K resolution, the difference between HD and 4K is most obvious on large screen TV or video projections. While with HD screens, the closer you get, the more the picture blurs, with 4K the opposite occurs. In other words, the closer you get, the more you get immersed in the incredible level of detail. 4K TVs are already on sale, and increasingly affordable. There’s not a lot of 4K content to watch on them yet, but Sony, Netflix and Amazon all offer some streaming shows in 4K, as long as you have decent enough broadband to pipe it through. Cinemas have their own specific system too, called Cinema 4K, which offers the slightly higher resolution of 4096 x 2160. 02. 4K monitors A 4K monitor like the Asus PA329Q lets you view your work at pin-sharp levels of detailWhile the main market for 4K is the television audience, that doesn’t mean that film-makers, videographers and animators are the only creatives utilising 4K. With prices starting as low as £250, more and more graphic designers, web designers, illustrators and photographers are buying 4K monitors in order to see their work at pin-sharp levels of detail. 4K monitors we’d recommend for design work include the Samsung UD970, the Acer S277HK and, at the budget end, the Viewsonic VP2772. We also put six models for digital and 3D artists through their paces in our 6 professional 4K monitors for digital artists group test. Plus, new models are coming out all the time, so we’d suggest you keep an eye on the latest reviews at our sister site Tech Radar. 03. 4K phones The Sony Xperia XZ Premium can shoot in 4K, and it has its own 4K HDR display tooPerhaps the biggest news about 4K video is that shooting it doesn’t require an expensive, pro-level setup, because it’s already a standard feature of the latest smartphones. Our recommendations for 4K-capable phones include the Huawei P10 Plus, Google Pixel XL and Sony Xperia XZ Premium. You can also record 4K video on the latest SLRs and mirrorless cameras and wearable cameras, such as the GoPro. 04. 4K stock video iStock by Getty Images has hundreds of thousands of 4K clips to download for your projectsWhether you’re looking for a standalone clip, footage to use as a website background or in a header, 4K is increasingly de rigueur for all kinds of creative projects. But if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to shoot pro-level 4K video of your own, there’s plenty of high-end stock video available for your needs to download at low prices. iStock by Getty Images, for example, has been providing 4K video to its customers since 2015. So it already has a large and impressive array of professionally shot 4K video footage on the site: 394,182 clips at the time of writing. And you can download them for the exact same price as SD clips. Overall, iStock provides video footage in 21 categories. In our What the new wave of 4K video means for designers post, we detail 10 examples and how you might use them in your projects. View the full article

Queen Victoria commissioned Winsor & Newton to produce for her the finest watercolour brushes possible. The company, which already held a Royal Warrant, rose to the challenge. The formula has changed slightly for the modern age, but Winsor & Newton has preserved the quality and heritage of this range, named Series 7 after her favourite brush size, no 7. Today the Series 7 range is available in 13 sizes, from 000 to a healthy size 10. The head shape is round and the range is also available with short handles – ideal for the painting of miniatures. Series 7 brushes are handmade in England by brushmakers with over 40 years of experience. Every strand of the finest Kolinsky sable hair is measured, combed and carefully rolled into a precise dome shape to ensure the creation of the perfect point. Once tied and inserted into a nickel-plated ferrule, each brush head is then checked for blunt hairs under a magnifying glass before being securely fastened to the black polished handle. But it doesn't end there. It's vital that the balance, shape and point of every Series 7 brush is perfect, so each one is then tested by hand. Each brush is handmade and carefully testedThe larger brush sizes are packed into individual presentation boxes that include a tag with the brushmaker's name. This personal touch shows a real respect of the brushmaking craft, reaffirming the high-quality product that you've just invested in. The smaller-sized paint brushes won't break the bank (they're priced from £10.99/$14 for size 000), and it's a good way to experience the quality of Series 7. Upwards from the size 6, however, the price might make you hesitate. Size 7 costs £89.99/$115 and the range stretches up to £329/$420 for a size 14. But while you hesitate, let's explore why the Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brushes are often referred to as the world's finest. Aside from the obvious quality in materials and production, it has to be in the experience of painting. Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush performance Queen Victoria's favourite brush, size 7, seems a good place to start. With its smooth, black handle it looks smart and feels comfortable in the hand. It's a medium-sized brush and is reasonably thirsty, soaking up a decent amount of paint that produces an even flow and coverage in one movement. The incredible softness of the brush is immediately apparent as it easily glides across the paper, holding a good edge when used straight, but also allowing the brush tip to cleanly follow a swirling action without any resistance or bristles breaking out. This amount of control really does confirm its superiority and makes it a pleasure to use. Whether lightly or heavily laden with paint, the shape of the brush holds incredibly well. Sizes 1, 0 and 00 were also used with the same clean and controlled results. These smaller sizes would be perfect for fine, detailed work. The Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brushes will undoubtedly boost your enthusiasm for watercolour. They enhance the overall experience and have the potential to improve your results. If looked after well, these brushes should last years, maybe even a lifetime, in which case the extra cost of this quality product can be justified. This article originally appeared in Paint & Draw issue 7; buy it here! Related articles: Choose the right brushes for watercolour painting 14 wet-in-wet watercolour painting techniques How to choose which paint brush to use View the full article

To download the accompanying files for 3D World issue 223, simply click the link below each article and a zip file will automatically download the content to your Mac or PC. If you've missed this issue or other editions of 3D World, order a copy. If you have any problems downloading this content, please email: amy.hennessey@futurenet.com Pluralsight video course: Designing Motion Controller Experiences in Unreal Get this free video course from Pluralsight In this course, animator Nathan Glemboski shows you how to design motion controller experiences in Unreal so you can actually stand in worlds you have created. The videos cover setting up a VR character with motion controllers, interacting with objects and creating a teleport system. By the end of the course, which is under two hours, you’ll know how to move freely in a scene, and will also be able to pick up objects really easily. Software required: Unreal Engine 4 Download the video course here (826.3 MB) Create an explosion with FumeFX Learn how to create sparks and smoke Syawish A Rehman shares how to make a bang using Maya's nParticles and FumeFX. Download your files here (67.7MB) Create worn, ornate floors in Substance Designer Learn how to make high-quality materialsChris Hodgson shows how to create realistic materials in Substance Designer using masks generated in Photoshop and Hexels. Download your files here (74.9MB) Tutorial: Groom a furry creature Learn some top tips for grooming Jesus Fernandez shows us how to work with fur. Download your files here (177.5MB) Watch the videos here Tutorial: Create realistic, high resolution CG cloth Achieve great results with your fabric texturesJesus Fernandez shows you how to make convincing CG fabric that holds up to close examination. Download your files here (57.6MB) Download your video here (1.28GB) Artist Q&A: CG art problems solved Our CG artists fix your issuesThis month our team of artists explains how to make an Elsa-like plait, create a meteor shower, make plants in Cinema 4D, and sculpt caricatures in ZBrush. Download the video tips and files to follow these tutorials. Download your files here (54.4MB) Download your videos here (415.4 MB) View the full article

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