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The new General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR – laws come into effect across the EU on Friday 24 May, and it's almost impossible to ignore them, especially if your inbox is filling up with increasingly desperate emails begging you to review privacy policies, or to give companies you can't even remember ever buying anything from permission to stay in touch with you. How to launch a creative business GDPR's a bit of an annoyance if you're an ordinary individual, but it'll at least mean more control over the data that companies hold on you. If you're running a business, though, even if it's just a small operation, you need to be GDPR-compliant. And in the face of complex and seemingly draconian rules, and the possibility of huge fines if you're doing it wrong, you might – quite reasonably – be terrified by the prospect of dealing with it. However, there's no need to be quite so scared. Even if you haven't quite got around to dealing with GDPR yet, don't worry: you're not going to get slapped with a fine tomorrow morning. There are loads of companies all across the EU, not all of which have got their GDPR ducks in a row, so you're in good company if you're not ready yet, and the worst thing you can expect in the short term is a warning, and realistically you'd have to repeatedly ignore several warnings (see below) before you run the risk of an actual fine. Don't worry, you're probably not going to be fined €20 million tomorrow So if you want to sleep better tonight, you'll need some easy-to-digest information about GDPR and what you need to do about it. Thankfully the European Commission has produced just the guide you want, in the form of a comprehensive – and great-looking – infographic. From the basics of what personal data actually is and the reason for the change in the rules, through to practical tips on what your company should do to comply with GDPR and whether you need a data protection officer, this infographic neatly summarises most of what you need to know about GDPR and, with a bit of luck, should soothe any fears that you might have about it. Need to know what to do about GDPR? This infographic will get you started Need to know more? You'll find more in-depth information about GDPR over at the European Commission site. Related articles: 8 business tips for selling design goods 10 ways to be more business-savvy as a designer Grow your design business without losing focus View the full article

WordPress is both the world's most popular blogging platforms and the most widely used CMS. One of the reasons for its popularity, is that it happily supports templating and plugins, making it highly flexible and customisable to suit different website needs. This flexibility, alongside the platform's huge popularity, means there are many thousands of free WordPress tutorials , WordPress themes and plugins available on the web. That's the good news. The bad news is that sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a real challenge. So check out our choice list of the best Wordpress plugins available below, to add functionality to your website. And the best part? They're all available for free! 01. Modula Image Gallery Add a gallery to your site with ease with the Modula WordPress plugin WordPress ships with some limited abilities to host image galleries, but for a truly customisable and flexible solution, a plugin such as Modula offers a far better experience for both the web designer and website maintainer, and for the visitor to your site. This WordPress plugin offers a host of different options that allows for true customisation rather than forcing you to adopt a visual style that matches every other gallery on the web. 02. Speed Booster Pack Help your site's loading speed with the Speed Booster Pack Website visitors have always been reluctant to hang around for a slow-loading website, and as the primary consumption platform has moved from desktop and laptop computers towards smartphones accessing over 3G and 4G, this has only increased. If you want your visitors to stick on your website, you need it to be quick to load as well as engaging and useful. Speed Booster Pack helps with the loading speed by automatically minifying your scripts, removing blocking scripts, optimising database calls and loading assets asynchronously. The results can be quite dramatic, giving the impression of a huge loading-speed boost. 03. Google Analyticator Enable Google Analytics on your WordPress dashboard with the Google Analyticor plugin If you want your WordPress blog to become more popular, you need to start thinking about promotion. If you know the keywords that visitors are using, you can use those in your post. The Google Analyticator plugin adds the JavaScript code necessary to enable Google Analytics on your WordPress dashboard. After you enable this plugin, go to the settings page, input your Google Analytics UID, then authenticate your Google Analytics account with Google Analyticator. 04. Duplicator If you’re a web designer, setting up your 100th WordPress site can feel like a real chore. Most designers will have a typical base-build that they use because they’re familiar with the configuration, plugins and options, and they know what works well for their customers. This plugin helps to reduce the installation pain by allowing you to migrate, copy, clone and move a site. Set up a core build, then use it as the source for a clone operation to simplify deployment and automatically generate a new site with the basic environment already configured. 05. The Events Calendar Quickly add events to your calendar with the Events Calendar plugin There are loads of different event plugins available for WordPress, but one of the best (and most popular) is The Events Calendar. This module extends the WordPress post types with a new Event class, allowing you to quickly create events and adding functionality such as the ability to render a list, calendar view, search events and integrate maps. If you're running a club or society, or designing a WordPress-powered website for a client that regularly runs events, this plugin will save you a huge amount of time. 06. AMP for WP Whether or not you feel that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is a good thing, one thing is clear: Google is deliberately showing websites with AMP pages higher up the search results page than those without. With this is mind, this plugin makes it easy to add support for AMP automatically. Grab it, plug it in to your WordPress environment and that’s about it; you’ll find AMP-specific versions of each of your pages, which in turn should lead to more mobile-based traffic. 07. Page Builder Page Builder is a plugin that allows your content editors to get involved with controlling the page layout, in an intuitive, WordPress-like environment. It works with all themes and plugins, making it simple to generate flexible responsive layouts without the need for any coding knowledge at all. This is ideal for websites that will be managed by a less-technical user, who wants more flexibility than a pre-set list of page templates. 08. Wordfence Security Help protect your site with Wordfence Security Security is a massive issue for WordPress websites, just as it is for any site on the web. One of the biggest issues is that as WordPress is such a popular CMS, there’s a lot of knowledge out there about how to compromise it, and exploit security holes. While this WordPress plugin wont solve all of these for you, it does allow you to monitor attempts to maliciously access your site, and adds in support for the likes of two-factor authentication, which is a security must-have in the modern era. 09. JetPack Blogging plugin JetPack's features are wide and varied JetPack brings some of the functionality of WordPress hosted blogs to self-hosted WordPress installations. The features are wide and varied, and include cloud-hosted stats for your site, email subscription to your site, a built-in URL shortener service, social network-based commenting, inline spelling and grammar checking and an enhanced gallery system. 10. Everest Forms Create image galleries for your WordPress site with the NextGen Gallery plugin Practically every website out there features a form of one kind or another, whether it’s a simple Get in touch form, or an online registration form, there’s a definite need for a simple way to create, maintain and manage form construction and layout. This plugin makes it a breeze to create forms using a simple drag-and-drop interface to craft a layout that works just as well on smartphones as the desktop. It even includes options to support multiple languages! Related articles: 18 great examples of WordPress websites 14 best free blogging platforms How to start a blog: 11 pro tips View the full article

The manifesto at the heart of this excellent book is that collaboration matters, whether it's between different design disciplines uniting to create consistent brands, or businesses and the creatives they hire fashioning identity systems that are both attractive and effective. “Make it beautiful, but above all else make it work,” advises Jowey Roden, co-founder of London agency Koto. The shared DNA of the many, varied projects on display in Graphic Design For... is a rigorous and procedural commitment to problem-solving. The essential guide to tools for graphic designers Responding to questions from Andy Cooke – a graphic designer and creative director at Weather – key creatives divulge their rules of engagement with collaborators and clients. “Brilliant ideas do not come from thin air... or Pinterest...,” writer and lecturer Angharad Lewis reminds us in her foreword, but once these ideas are plucked from the ether, it takes imagination, skill and experience to transform tentative briefs into elegant brand identities and campaigns. And while strategies, techniques and theories of creative evolution vary wildly between studios, all interviewees offer equally informative insights that lift the veil from seemingly effortless solutions to reveal the powerful engines beneath. Cooke tastefully curates each project with crisp, unfussy layouts Combining aesthetics with function dominates the discussion, along with a weighty sense of the increased value of design as a vital component in the creation of new business, not just a veneer of branding to apply when the product is done. “It’s not just about designers providing clients with identity, packaging and marketing tools,” explains Torgeir Hjetland of Oslo-based studio Work in Progress. “It’s designers being used to shape ideas and help build business solutions.” Brand building now, more than ever, is about delivering messages at multiple touchpoints. A logo may need to work on stationery, posters, buildings and animations for indents, co-exist with photography or architecture and, most importantly, continue to evolve and adapt, sometimes without the original designer involved. Mutable design systems are as vital as inter-disciplinary skills, and these projects all demonstrate tremendous flexibility. Rare double page spreads of iconic campaigns make for satisfying pace changers Cooke’s book also exposes the occasional angst designers may suffer when dealing with Creative Cloud-wielding clients and consumers who, when confronted by less-is-more minimalism, may be tempted to think, or even suggest, 'anyone could design that'. (We all have Microsoft Word, but does that mean we are all successful authors?) Such are the perils of beautifully refined simplicity, but the exposed workings of these projects vividly illustrate the intense experimentation that is required to achieve Zen-like design perfection. Non-designers in particular should find the (relatively) jargon-free, frank discussions illuminating As creative director of Studio Makgil, Hamish Makgill, drily observes: “If [the clients] are design-savvy, they will also appreciate that they aren’t designers.” Collins’ design director Ben Crick is perhaps more gracious when he suggests that “The true value of graphic design is not just aesthetics, but insight and the creation of meaning. There’s no software for that – yet.” Non-designers in particular should find the (relatively) jargon-free, frank discussions illuminating. It’s almost impossible to choose highlights, as the book is itself a distillation of some of the very best contemporary design (when we spoke to Cooke he admitted that the book “could easily have been twice as long, there’s just so much good work out there”), but Hort’s iconic Nike campaign work , Studio Makgill’s intoxicating design system for G.F Smith and Freytang Anderson’s genius identity for Fraher Architects are all masterclasses in ambitious thinking and faultless execution. Seven different sectors across 240 pages shouldn’t work, but great curation by Cooke means it does, and proves for a refreshingly broad industry overview This is an elegantly edited time capsule of where design is now, which extracts wisdom from some of the sharpest creative minds around and is a beautiful book in its own right that can be endlessly browsed for visual and cerebral inspiration. Graphic Design For... is fascinating for fellow professionals, instructive for prospective clients looking to join forces with a design agency, and utterly invaluable for students who want to learn what the industry will expect of them. Buy Graphic Design for Art, Fashion, Film, Architecture, Photography, Product Design & Everything In Between here Also read: Port magazine review View the full article

Whether you're a freelancer working from home or a small studio owner, something everyone has in common is money. You do the work, you get paid, right? Sounds simple. However, making sure you get paid correctly and on time requires a lot of planning and patience, which many freelancers will attest to. There are many things you need to consider when calculating how to price your design services, so where do you start? Earlier today Mitch Goldstein, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, started a thread on Twitter asking creatives to share their valuable insights on money. He also pointed out that the subject was not one covered much in design schools, and so called on 'Twitters' to help. And the design world answered his call in droves. Goldstein's conversation now has creatives all over the globe sharing their experiences and offering advice and tips on everything from how best to price your services to things they wish they'd done from the start and what to avoid when it comes to money. Below are just some of the tweets that have come flooding in, and these handy tips featured represent just a snippet of the brilliant money advice up for grabs over on this Twitter feed. Do you have a money-related question? Or have you got any finance tips for freelancers? Why not join in the conversation and help out your fellow creative folk. Related articles: 6 ways to save money as a freelancer The freelance survival guide 6 things to know about getting freelance clients View the full article

Schneider Electric on Tuesday issued fixes for a vulnerability its SoMachine Basic software that could result in disclosure and retrieval of arbitrary data. View the full article

Everyone likes a good deal, and if you're after some great deals that can help you in your design career then there's a new free platform that can sort you right out. 6 sure-fire ways to build your creative network Glug Club is a brand new initiative from Glug, one of the most popular creative events around. It started out as a handful of friends talking shop and showing off their work in an East London pub in 2007, and since then has grown into an international movement with events all round the world and talks from some of the biggest names in the business. With over 40,000 global members, Glug has found itself in the perfect position to negotiate a stack of killer deals with 45 industry-leading suppliers. Glug Club has been specially curated so that there's something for everyone from young creatives to industry veterans, and members can unlock exclusive offers and perks that they might not be able to access as individuals. "We've curated the list of products and services based on the experience of a select group of Glug Ambassadors," explains Glug's Malin Persson. "They know what's worked and what hasn't, so we can pass these insights down to the next generation of agency owners and young creatives." Membership of Glug Club is free, and since its announcement last week, it's already attracted another 3,000 members keen to take advantage of its benefits. And with a who's who of top companies involved, including Adobe, Getty Images, Pantone, Slack, Fontsmith and Microsoft, it's easy to see why. Glug has been organising informal talks and 'notworking' events since 2007 "We've been working on Glug Club for some time, trying to negotiate a range of great deals for our community," says Glug founder and CEO Ian Hambleton. "With over 40,000 global members, we're now able to push brands to give our community better rates and services." Hambleton expects that as Glug Club grows, the range of services and offers it's able to share with its members will grow with it. "Glug Club embodies everything we've tried to build with Glug," he continues. "To help young creatives on their career journey and provide them with useful tips and tools to get ahead. In this case, it's not a speaker talk at an event, but rather an amazing list of tools they should use to get ahead." Want to get involved and give your career a free helping hand? Head over to the Glug Club sign-up page today. Read more: How to network successfully: 19 pro tips The essential guide to tools for designers The best laptop deals for May 2018 View the full article

Cartoon Network has been up and running in the USA since 1992, but it took another year to arrive in Latin America, making 2018 the 25th anniversary of Cartoon Network Latin America. The 7 best modern cartoons And to mark 25 years of entertaining kids (both young and old) and inspiring the next generation of animators, the ever-popular channel commissioned Buenos Aires studio Le Cube to create this 25th anniversary celebration film. Designed by Argentinian freelance illustrator Delfina Perez Adan, this wonderfully stylised short brings together a whole host of Cartoon Network favourites from the past quarter of a century, all of them rendered in an eye-catching CMYK palette. There are so many of them flashing before your eyes in quick succession that you're going to have your work cut out spotting them all. Naturally you'll notice Finn and Jake from Adventure Time – not to mention Ice King – and the eagle-eyed among you won't have failed to notice the likes of the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter and Dee-Dee, Johnny Bravo and Cow and Chicken. Le Cube's anniversary short features Cartoon Network characters old and new After a bit of frantic dashing around and the occasional scuffle, the characters all come together to form a suitably celebratory giant 25. The whole film lasts just over a minute, but there's so much action and so many details and characters to try and recognise that it rewards multiple viewings. It wouldn't be Cartoon Network without Finn and Jake For the team at Le Cube, it's been a joy to produce. "Cartoon Network has always been an inspiration for kids everywhere," they say. "So much so, that even many grown-ups who work in animation do it exactly because of how much they loved Cartoon’s creations when they were young. "That's why it was such a gigantic honour for us at Le Cube, after we too were not so long ago just kids sitting in front of the TV amazed by what we saw, to create the channel’s 25th-anniversary celebration film." Related articles: Behind the scenes of Cartoon Network's 20th anniversary video 10 top cartoons reimagined in real life Cartoon Network's Head of Design on how to succeed in your career View the full article

The Barcelona edition of OFFF kicks off later this week. If you can’t make it to sunny Spain for this three-day fiesta of creativity, fear not – you can follow all the action as it unfolds, right here on Creative Bloq via the Adobe livestream (running from 24-25 May from 11am CET). Now in its 18th year, OFFF offers creative inspiration and artistic innovation from world-class speakers. Adobe will be livesteaming the best bits of the festival across each of the three days, as well as offering exclusive interviews with speakers, pro portfolio advice, special product speak-previews, and one awesome competition – read on to find out more. This year’s lineup is stronger than ever, with industry-leading designers taking to the stage (or direct to your screens) to share their creative secrets. Adobe will be going live with the likes of French illustrator Malika Favre, motion designer Patrick Clair and the inimitable Stefan Sagmeister. Take a look at the full schedule here and make sure you get the livestream up and running so you don’t miss any of the action. As well as presenting on-stage, Favre, Clair and Sagmeister will also be getting stuck in and offering portfolio advice as part of Adobe’s Behance portfolio review. These are available to OFFF attendees as well as the online audience – so if your Behance portfolio isn’t getting the attention it deserves (and you’re feeling brave!), register for a portfolio review now. Here’s another session to set a reminder for: On May 24 at 10am CET, Adobe will host an exclusive Adobe Stock panel discussion explore the hottest new visual trends. This session will bring together futurologists, photographers and illustrators to put the spotlight on ‘multilocalism’, and how travel and technology are turning the world into one interconnected, global village. You might be missing out on visiting Barcelona, but how about a trip to Los Angeles? Adobe will be offering lucky creatives the chance to win a trip to Adobe MAX 2018 in LA in October. Special guests from the Visual Trends panel debate will each design an image inspired by the Top 30 Adobe Stock search terms for Barcelona. All you need to do to be entered into the Adobe MAX prize draw is vote for your favourite image via Twitter. The competition kicks off on 24 May. View the full article

Image: Insydium The first ever Vertex conference took place in March, and it was a runaway success. Run by the makers of our sister magazines 3D World and 3D Artist, the event brought together experts of all kinds from the CG industry to offer insights and advice to help hone your 3D skills. Included in the lineup were talks from event partners Notch, Maxon and Insydium. Matt Swoboda, real-time graphics pioneer and founder of Notch, explored the history of real-time graphics and why now is the right time to dive in; Jonas Pilz from MAXON explained how to create eye-catching motion graphics setups inside Cinema 4D; and Bob Walmsley, a technical trainer at INSYDIUM LTD, demonstrated the latest X-Particles features and hyper-realistic rendering in Cycles 4D. Scroll down to watch videos of their talks. 01. Adventures in real-time Matt Swoboda is a pioneer of real-time graphics at companies such as Sony. His software, Notch, has been used to create visual experiences for some of the world’s most memorable events, including Beyoncé and U2 world tours. In this talk, Swoboda explains why now is a really exciting time for motion graphics artists. Designing in real time, without a having to pause to wait for your work to render, brings you closer than ever before to the thing you’re creating. Watch now to discover how Notch can help you rediscover the joy of problem solving, experimenting and improvising on the fly. 02. Cinema 4D MoGraph In this presentation, Jonas Pilz introduces the powerful MoGraph tools and explains how they can be used to quickly create eye-catching motion graphics in Cinema 4D. You’ll learn how easy it is to set up any kind of graphic 3D animation, from abstract animations to moving fonts and breaking objects. Pilz will also show you how to use MoGraph setups for VFX and visualisation purposes. In short, you might fall in love with Cinema 4D while watching this talk. 03. X-Particles and Cycles 4D In this talk, Bob Walmsley demonstrates the latest versions of INSYDIUM LTD’s Cinema 4D plugins X-Particles and Cycles 4D. Using the major new features xpClothFX, xpExplosiaFX and xpFluidFX, Walmsley explains how designers can can switch effortlessly between motion graphics and VFX, within a unified system built on the intuitive particle software. Discover how X-Particles and Cycles 4D integrates seamlessly into the Cinema 4D workflow, enabling artists to immerse themselves in design, rather than getting bogged down in the technical process. Read more: 6 expert tips for better 3D renders How to model concept art in Cinema 4D Illuminate your 3D work with Dome lights View the full article

In 1999, I built my first website using Web Studio 1.0. Web Studio was a graphic user interface. It was possible to create a new landing page and drag and drop elements into it. I then set up a free domain and hosting with GeoCities and voila! I had a website. Fast forward to 2004, I wanted to go further and so, like many others, I set out to build a band website. 12 common JavaScript questions answered A lot has changed since then. In this article, I'm going to be taking a trip down memory lane and recreate the same site for the web today. Get the files for this tutorial. I built my first website in 1999 So, let's start! First off, generally every new project for me starts with mkd followed by g init. For those of you who know me, at some point, I've probably mentioned dotfiles to you. Dotfiles are files that simply begin with a dot (it took me a surprisingly long time to actually make that connection!) and they can be used for a number of purposes. Two of my favourite dotfiles are .aliasas and .functions. Let me elaborate… In bash, it's possible to create a new directory using the command mkdir then after that you'd have to change directory cd into the directory that you have just created. Using the code I have in my .functions file, it's now possible to run mkd. This will not only create the new directory, but also have changed into that directory as well. This may seem overkill at first, but I love these micro wins. Over time, especially if running these commands several times a day, they soon add up to a lot of saved time. The next command, if you're familiar with git, is simply git init, which will enable us to version control the project. I use git a lot, even for shopping lists! So rather than having to type out git every time, adding alias g="git" to .aliases again is a nice, small time saver for me. These days, there's a plethora of different frameworks and technologies. For this project, I want to keep things simple. I'm going to use HTML, CSS and if required a sprinkle of JavaScript. First up, let's create the basic HTML markup. But wait! Let's stop and think for a minute. The 2advanced.com site heavily inspired me to learn Flash Sometimes developers, myself included, can be super-excited about a project and want to get cracking immediately and go straight for the keyboard to write code. However, I find this is often not the best approach. I love to get an overview in mind of the project first. By doing this and having a much clearer vision of the project as a whole, I find it allows for much better decision making. For example, if I dived straight into the code, I might encounter an issue that I'd then have to go back and refactor. There are a few different outcomes with this approach. First, it might be that I have to delete the code entirely and start again; second, if continuing in this fashion I may end up with 'spaghetti code' making it difficult in the future to update, debug and result in performance loss; third, sometimes it does work out okay and you end up with better code, but I'd tend to say the first and second outcomes are far more common. This project is fairly small; it has a few pages: Home, News, Gigs, Media, Albums, Links and common parts among these pages: header, navigation, typography content, lists, images, videos. When originally building the Flash site in 2004, things were a lot more simple in terms of testing. The site was built in Flash, for Flash on a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard. These days, mobile and tablet internet usage is more common than on a desktop computer, and this trend is continuing to rise. In order to make this a better experience for whoever views the site, I'm going to take a few things into account at the start of the project and use a mobile first strategy. To do so, and again, before writing any code, I'm going to get out a good old-fashioned pen and paper. First, I write out the sitemap; in doing so there are some key areas I think can be improved. For example, my original site consisted of different pages for each of the band's albums. At the time they had three albums and so fit nicely in the navigation. Now they have a lot more and potentially more to come, so already in my mind I'm thinking about ways in which to make the site more future proof (an oldie but a goodie is Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design). Now I have a rough idea in my head of the sitemap and pages, next up is to create some low-fi wireframes. From previous experience building many responsive sites, mobile comes with interesting design challenges, namely how to create a navigation, but still enable people to view the main content of the site. I'm going to go along with the design outcome we've all grown to love/hate: the burger menu approach. However, I'm going to add a little twist. The original artwork used birds, so rather than the standard burger menu icon, I'm going to use bird artwork that will activate the menu and open and close its wings as a way to indicate if the menu is active or not. Flash tree navigation in Adobe Animate CC 2018 Things in my mind are now starting to take shape, with an idea of how people will be able to navigate around the site. I'm now going to think about how the pages themselves might look. Starting with the homepage, it's fairly simple, with typography content. Next, news – again typography content, potentially images and then some sort of navigation to view older posts. Gigs – a list of upcoming gigs with links to purchase tickets. For Media, looking back at the previous site, I had 'images' and 'videos' as two different sections, but here I think there's room for improvement and to consolidate as 'media'. Albums, ah, yes Albums – now this is where doing this sort of thing pays off. You see, the Albums page has typography and an image, and is going to need some sort of navigation to view older posts. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the same structure as the news page! Having this top level overview I can look at and think things over at a more granular, component, some could even say atomic design level, if you're familiar with the work of Brad Frost. Now I have an idea of how the site is going to work on smaller devices and reusable elements, it's time to repeat the process with larger devices. As the site is fairly simple, and with the wireframes already created for mobile, I see the larger devices being fairly similar – apart from now we have some extra room, so we can widen the content areas and also include a side navigation. The side navigation is the bit of the site that from the offset I'm most excited about. Taking inspiration from the band's original artwork, I built the navigation as a tree silhouette with leaves. Each leaf was a button that linked to a different page of the site. Also, as you scrolled in and hovered away from the leaf, the leaf would animate, falling to the ground. Flash was great at this; it was called tweening. You could set an element at one keyframe in the interface on the timeline, create another keyframe further along the timeline and add a path for the element to follow. Taking things a little further, varying the paths, duration and speed of the falling leaves, I ended up with something I was very pleased with. But now we're not using Flash, so how do we do this? Quite often I'll jump to CodePen or JS Bin. For those of you who aren't aware, CodePen and JS Bin are online services that enable you to quickly code and save. I tend to see CodePen as more design led, and JS Bin more JavaScript focused. For this project I'll be using CodePen to create the tree navigation for a few reasons. First, I want to start building up the main mobile version of the site, and in fact by doing this, if things were time critical, I could end up with an mvp. Although there are enhancements to the site that could be made by adding the nice leaf navigation and animation, this will take longer to produce. An advantage of working in CodePen for the tree navigation means it's isolated from the main site and code base. If things get tricky with completing it, I'm able to save where I'm at, carry on with the main site build, and then come back to the navigation. Sometimes I find that in going away from a problem, or even sleeping on it, my subconscious can carry on thinking about it. Then upon returning back to the problem, a solution presents itself. SVGs! I love SVGs. Previously in Flash, I drew out the leaf assets in Illustrator. Amazingly I still had a working CD with the original artwork and was able to open it. These days I use Sketch and it did a great job of opening up the file. I now have the leaf assets all ready to be exported as SVGs. Why SVGs? There are a lot of reasons. If we were to use a jpg, or gif on a Retina device, we'd also have to supply bigger assets, otherwise they would look blurred. Also, with SVGs, we can use CSS. This is great and lets us simply change the colour of the SVG using a bit of CSS rather than having to create another image asset. This means it's easier to maintain, and as a bonus it's also more performant. If you're not familiar with SVGs I'd highly recommend reading up on them and the incredible work from my good friend, Sara Soueidan. Mobile first, responsive navigation menu With the tree and leaf assets now in place, the final thing to add is the animation. There are a few approaches I could take with this. One would be to stay true to the original Flash path tween I did. This would mean replicating the paths and using SVG and then potentially further SVG work with paths and animateMotion. I quite like this idea from a nostalgic point of view, but CSS has come on a lot over the years, and we now have transform and translate at our disposal, so this could be another approach. Taking things a step further, we could even add some JavaScript that would randomise the falling leaves. Both options sound good, but I'm swaying towards the more CSS-led route. Here's another benefit of using CodePen, I can quickly go and try out one approach. If it turns out that it's more complicated than I originally thought, or it doesn't feel right, I can try another approach with little time wasted. In fact this turned out to be a great idea! I'm still looking at options for this – please refer to the project on GitHub for the final result. With the tree navigation now sorted, I turned back to the mobile first approach, building up the navigation. If you're familiar with Sass, you've more than likely encountered variables. But did you know variables are now available in CSS? They have pretty decent browser support in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Samsung Internet as well! As I'm trying to keep to basic CSS and avoid the need for any extra dependencies, this is great news. So how would we implement this? At the top of the style sheet I declare my variables: Now that they're declared, I can call them, so for example setting the body background colour would look like this: Taking this a step further and to help with grid alignment, white space, vertical rhythm, you may have noticed I've also defined a grid size variable. Variables work extremely well with calc and that looks a little something like this: With the mobile navigation styles complete, let's tackle the functionality for hiding and showing it. For the toggle button we'll apply a label tag, then in the nav tag we'll add an input: Using the following CSS, we can show and hide the navigation menu; because we want the label in the header, we can use ~ aka tilde or (U+007E) so it works while not being immediately succeeded by the first element. With the mobile navigation complete, it's time to implement some responsive web design. Adding in the main content for the site, then using the Responsive View in Chrome Developer Tools, I'm able to increase the viewport width until I feel there's enough room to adequately hold the tree navigation. This ends up being at 600px, and for this we can use a media query: Almost there! Finally for the tree navigation to sit next to the main content area, I'm going to make use of Flexbox: Now the tree navigation takes up 100% height, with the content doing the same and sitting to the right of it. This means that no matter how long the content becomes, it will never flow underneath the tree navigation. If you'd like to know more about Flexbox, I'd recommend checking out flexbox.io by the one and only Wes Bos. There's a lot it can do! An example showing 'display: flex' preventing content from wrapping underneath the tree navigation That's all I have time for at the moment, but there are still plenty of things we could do to make this project even better. If you have any questions, or liked the article, please say hello on Twitter or through my site, or send me a pull request on GitHub! This article was originally published in issue 304 of net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 304 here or subscribe here. Related articles: 5 tips for super-fast CSS Animate SVG with JavaScript Understanding the CSS display property View the full article

Illustration is a beautifully expressive, versatile artform. It can add impact, style and personality to any graphic design project. But it's not always easy to get right. Whether you're visualising an abstract concept, bringing some highly complex subject matter to life, telling a compelling story, or just adding a touch of stylistic beauty to a piece of work, the possibilities are endless with illustration. Part of the beauty of working with an illustrator is they can be based literally anywhere, and with talented practitioners all over the world to choose from, it can be a challenge in itself choosing the right style for the job. In an ideal world, everyone would commission and art direct something bespoke, but if you don't have the time or budget to do so, there are also thousands of quality illustrations to be found in stock libraries. So read on for our essential guide to getting more from illustration in your design work. We will continue to add to this list in the coming months... 01. Inspiring illustrators to commission 02. Tips for using illustration in design 03. Illustration commissioning advice View the full article

Summer is finally on its way, and with it comes a whole load of great new web design tools. One of the most exciting of which is Lobe, a system that enables you to use machine learning in your apps to create powerful features. Perhaps you already have the idea for an app but don’t have the coding skills required to build it? Lobe could be the answer. We're also excited about Jeremy Keith’s new book on Service Workers. Read on for more details on these, plus our pick of eight more useful new tools and apps that have emerged this month. 01. Going Offline by Jeremy Keith Make your app behave gracefully when it's offline using Service Workers When connectivity is poor, your users expect your app to still work – or at least deal with the situation gracefully. Service Workers are how you make that happen, and Jeremy Keith is one of the smartest writers on this topic. In his new book he explains how Service Workers function and provides some great strategies for getting the best out of your app when the internet connection fails. This is a great resource, whether you're new to the topic or looking to improve your Service Worker game. 02. Lobe Incorporate the power of deep-learning models into your apps Lobe is very cool. It enables you to build and train deep-learning models, that can be easily incorporated into your app, without writing any code. The introductory video shows you some examples of what can be done – one model uses the camera to detect the angle at which someone is holding their hand, another reads handwriting, another detects what type of musical instrument is being played. In a further example, an artist scans in some flower petals and trains the model to generate new petals that look like natural variations of the originals. You could use Lobe to build the core functionality of a very interesting app. It's available now in beta form. 03. Fugue Link back to this site and use the music for free Fugue is a great selection of royalty free music for your videos, websites and other projects, which you can use without payment if you set a link back to the site. The material is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence. If you don’t want to link, you can pay $20 per month instead. Overall quality is high, and the site has a sticky player that's always in place, ready for you to click through the tracks. Music is organised according to themes, genres and moods for easy browsing. 04. Layoutit! Get Grid code using a simple interface The new CSS Grid generator tool at Layoutit! generates CSS Grid code for you based on your input to a graphical interface. Define your grid by adding rows, columns and the amount of gap you want and hit the button to get the code; it will also add IE10 and IE11 support if you want. If you're not up to speed with Grid this could be a useful stop-gap, or an aid to your learning. There's also a Bootstrap Builder tool to help you create Bootstrap UIs with a drag-and-drop interface. 05. Unique Create your own custom fonts and logotypes by choosing a template and tweaking it Unique is a custom font generator that you can use to make a logotype or unique font for any purpose. It's from the people behind Prototypo, which is a more complex tool for doing the same thing – the difference is that Unique is simpler and faster to use for people who aren't designers. Creating your font or logotype is straightforward: just tell the app whether you're trying to create lettering for a logo or another purpose and you're presented with a selection of templates that you can adjust to design your own unique font. 06. Site Palette Extract the main colours from a website and generate your own palette This Chrome extension extracts the main colours from a website and generates a shareable palette. It's compatible with Google Art Palette and Coolors.co so you can export to either of those for editing and refining, and it also generates a shareable link to the palette so you can easily show it to collaborators. You can download a Sketch template, and there is also Adobe Swatch support. 07. My Morning Routine Morning lifehacks from successful entrepreneurs and creatives My Morning Routine is an online magazine that publishes an interview every week with a successful person about how they start their day. It has just released a book of 283 interviews with a range of vibrant individuals, including tech entrepreneurs and creatives such as Julie Zhuo, vice president of product design at Facebook, and podcaster Lily Percy. These inspirational conversations are full of life hacks that will help you to get more out of your work days by starting better. The website also has an interesting section on statistics which gives a broader picture of people's routines. 08. GDPR Checker by Siftery Track GDPR statements from over 1,100 SAAS vendors, plus other data privacy information No doubt you've heard about the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); it starts 25 May and affects any organisation that handles personal data. To ensure your organisation is compliant, you'll need to know how your SAAS vendors are handling privacy and security, which is where the GDPR Checker comes in. From this interface you can get easy access to GDPR compliance statements from over 1,100 SAAS vendors, as well as information about whether they have self-certified for EU-US Privacy Shield and offer a DPA. 09. CSS Blocks High performance, maintainable stylesheets CSS Blocks is a CSS authoring system that helps you create high-performance, maintainable stylesheets. Its creators tout its capability for static analysis as one of the most powerful features. According to the project's GitHub page, "static analysis means css-blocks can look at your project and know with certainty that any given CSS declaration will, will not, or might under certain conditions, be used on any given element in your templates". It’s component-based, and CSS errors are detected at build time so they're caught before they cause you any headaches. 10. Spirit Studio Create and manage web animations Spirit Studio is a powerful, easy-to-use Mac app for designers and developers that enables you to create web animations without needing in-depth coding knowledge. You can animate SVG or HTML, and once you've connected the app to your site you can edit live animations directly. There is currently no way to try it out without subscribing, but a free trial is in the works, and Windows and Linux versions are also in the pipeline. Related articles: 10 apps for endless design inspiration How to make an app The future of web design View the full article

If there's one piece of advice that all 3D artists, no matter which field they are in, should be given, it’s to learn how to work from references, preferably anatomical human references. This builds many skills, from learning about silhouette and form, to understanding light and shadow, as well as surfaces and materials. These are all key to a good skill set for 3D artists. 30 top examples of 3D art The problem is choosing which references to invest in. You could create your own, but selecting something pre-made is usually better. Here, there are many options available. One of the best is this multipart kit from 3dtotal which, although not cheap (at around the £200/$260 mark) is thoughtfully developed to account for certain tricky areas to master. The kit, which stands at over a foot tall, is cast in smooth resin, which is well finished – even if there are a couple of lines that could do with a little trimming (an easy job with a craft knife). The sculpted details are captured well and the transfer to casting has kept a great definition of detail. The real benefit of this kit is that it comes with multiple options to enable the artist to focus on a particular task, from muscle deformation to skeletal details. These are themed around arm and hand poses, which are often tricky to get right. This reference model is one of the most thoughtfully developed and covers many bases There are also two torsos, which really complete the posing, as much of what happens when an arm is moved has an effect in other areas. This in itself shows a good level of thought from the designers, as does the fact that the pieces connect via socket and peg, with magnets fitted to keep things from moving. These small details are what make this an attractive option for anyone looking for references that cover écorché, skin, bone and particularly muscular details. A few minutes' clean up time after opening the model and you’ll be set. If you often need anatomical references, then this is a fantastic resource that has been thoughtfully developed with the artist in mind. This article was originally published in issue 233 of 3D World, the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists. Buy issue 233 here or subscribe to 3D World here. Related articles: Illuminate your 3D work with Dome lights 6 expert tips for better 3D renders Where to find free textures for 3D projects View the full article

If you’ve got great ideas and a passion for design, this is your chance to work with Computer Arts and create a one-off cover, showcasing your talent to the creative industry. In partnership with our friends at D&AD New Blood, this year’s competition is offering a £700 prize for the winner, and with the addition of a special decorative print finish from our pals at Celloglas, this will be a unique addition to the winner’s portfolio! The brief To enter you must be a current student or recent graduate (within the last two years). That includes mature students, and you can be based anywhere around the world. The issue your cover will adorn is our annual New Talent issue. Inside we will be looking at the very best of this year’s UK creative graduates. As such, we’d like a cover design that speaks to the spirit of new talent. You can visualise that anyway you want – be abstract, funny, literal, whatever – but it must be at the core of your design/illustration. The special print treatment from Celloglas will depend on what works best with the winning entry. Maybe it'll be six metallic colours, or scratch and sniff paper? Maybe, like last year's winning entry, we'll go for Mirri, or we might decide that glow in the dark works best. Take a look at what treatments Celloglas offers, and by all means tell us if you have a favourite! Download the cover template, and make sure your idea works to the Computer Arts' cover specification. Once you’re happy, you’re ready to enter! How to enter This competition is a little different to others, as it accepts mockups as well as finalised art. This is because entrants span designers, typographers and illustrators, so it may not be possible to provide the finished article straight away. Also, the winner will then need to work with CA’s art editor to make sure their entry works perfectly as a cover with a main hit and other coverlines. Therefore, we need some information about you, including a link to your portfolio, and a short paragraph giving it a bit of context to your entry – maximum 100 words. Send all that to hello@computerarts.co.uk. Entries will be judged by the CA team based on creativity of concept, its suitability for use as a magazine cover, and the quality of your existing portfolio – and the winner will receive a paid commission of £700 to develop it into a final cover with direction from CA's art editor. Deadline for entries: Midnight (BST) Sunday 24 June 2018. We will also showcase a selection of the best entries on Creative Bloq, including a paragraph about the artist and a portfolio link. Good luck! Hi-res artwork (or any amends) will only be requested from the chosen designer once the commission is set up. All IP remains with the creators, until a contract is set up with the winner. View the full article

I’m not a typographer. And if my shoddy handwriting is anything to go by, I’m not very good at creating letter shapes either. I am, however, lucky enough to write about design for a living, which means I get to meet all sorts of creative folk who help make people like me experience what it’s like to make something. That’s just what happened at this year’s TYPO Berlin as I got to dabble in a typography tutorial with a difference. For the uninitiated, TYPO Berlin is an international conference where the biggest names in typography and design come together to share their stories, reveal how a project was made, and generally dish out inspirational advice for creatives to put into action. This year we learnt how some technical wizardry with OpenType features can help you design a handwriting font that isn’t boring. Another amazing part of TYPO Berlin is the workshops. Hosted by big names in the design industry, these sessions are an invaluable opportunity to watch experts like logo designer Aaron Draplin in action. This year I dipped my toe into the world of type design first-hand as I attended a Tricotype workshop and created lettering out of a rarely used font medium: wool. Multiple strands of wool can be fed through the knitting machine As well as being new to typography, I’m also an inexperienced knitter. (My portfolio consists of an unevenly knitted length of wool I generously call a scarf.) Thankfully, just as digital tools can take out some of the strenuous legwork of illustrating, there was a domestic 1970’s knitting machine hired from the Electronic and Textile Institute Berlin that made knitting idiot-proof. That was the knitting process sorted, but what about the typography? In the workshop hosted by artist and videosmith Sam Meech and Jonathan Hitchen, even this became easy thanks to the use of punch cards. Simple punch card grids can create lots of different lettering styles With the help of the grids on these punch cards, typographers (and me) can create lettering that looks like a piece of pixel art. All you have to do is pencil-in your letter shapes in the grid, punch out the marked squares with a hole punch, and you’re ready to feed the card into the machine. If you’re familiar with a jacquard loom, you’ll know what happens next. Once the machine has cast on the wool, and you’ve created a few layers by moving the mechanism left to right and back again by hand with a satisfying shunk-shunk, it’s time to feed in the punch card and change the settings. Thanks to a simple turn of a dial, the hooks on the knitting machine change position and start feeding a new strand of wool through the gaps in the punch card grid. A few more shunk-shunks later and the lettering starts to appear. It’s like a combination of ancient computer coding and traditional crafty materials. Different colours of wool create dynamic combinations It only took a few minutes for the punch card design to be knitted. And it turned out that the knitting machine did make the process idiot-proof. Mostly. Occasionally, the wool slipped off one of the many sewing hooks, but luckily Sam was on hand to recast and easily fix these little mistakes. I think they give the finished pieces an extra level of character. Like all of the workshops at TYPO Berlin, this one was incredibly popular. Each workshop walked six people through the process, with each person creating a letter for a knitted alphabet. The workshops build up an entire knitted alphabet The finished pieces showcase just how much flexibility there is for type design, even when you’re working with a standard grid. And thanks to the different colours of wool, no two designs looked the same. All of the finished designs will be compiled into a pattern zine so members of the type and knitting community will be able to recreate the letters. Want to stay in the loop for when future workshops are on the horizon? Be sure to bookmark the Tricotype site and check in for updates. Related articles: The 10 commandments of typography The rules of responsive web typography How to improve your digital typography View the full article

You're reading UX Design and GDPR: Everything You Need to Know, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! The internet is where we spend a lot of our time, whether working, studying or communicating. And if in physical life there are very clear laws and regulations in terms of privacy and personal life, things are quite different on … View the full article

Yet another speculative execution side channel flaw has been disclosed in processors - and security experts warn that more may be out there. View the full article

A pen-tester has found five vulnerabilities in Dell EMC RecoverPoint devices, including a critical RCE that could allow total system compromise. View the full article

A bug in Comcast’s activation website for its Xfinity routers leaked sensitive customer data. View the full article

This year's OFFF Barcelona is just around the corner. Taking place 24 - 26 May, the ever-popular design festival promises to delight with a range of innovative and international speakers, plus workshops, activities and performances. The upcoming event is the eighteenth edition of OFFF Barcelona, and to mark the occasion it's trying to answer a crucial question: just what exactly is OFFF? As well as trying to find some definition through all the talks, Italian artist duo Mathery have puzzled it out with some lateral thinking for the OFFF opening film (teaser above). Taking the name of the event as a starting point, Erika Zorzi and Matteo Sangalli explored what OFFF would mean if the word was an acronym. Possible ideas have included Oyster Flavoured Food Festival and Orange Fringe Feathers Festival. We talked to the pair about how the project came about... A series of characters feature in the OFFF opening film "Last year we reached out to OFFF to see if they were interested in having us as speakers," Mathery tells Creative Bloq, "unfortunately all the spots were already taken, but they mentioned that for us they had a different plan… So a week later they got back asking us to design the campaign OFFF2018 and the opening film, it was baller news!" "There was no brief, we were completely free to do whatever we wanted, which at first was shocking, but we knew it was just the best thing ever!" As for where the idea for acronyms came from, the pair tell us that "after the moment of panic and excitement…we started the process by analysing the festival and all the campaigns from previous years." "When doing this research, we realised that none of us were aware of the real meaning of the OFFF acronym, and talking with OFFF we understood that the real meaning is something that doesn’t reflect the festival anymore, for us that was the perfect input to work on." The film has a 'What the hell am I looking at?' feel The project is Mathery's second short film, and with it they wanted to recreate the feeling of an opening ceremony. "We wanted the film to respect and represent our aesthetic, with a narrative that doesn’t tell the audience right away where you want them to go, but that gives a bit of suspense and a 'What the hell am I looking at?' feeling that magically disappears at the end where everything comes together." Details of the rest of the opening film are firmly under wraps, but Mathery was able to give Creative Bloq a taste of what to expect. "If you imagine we gave the OFFF letters a body and soul, what could happen? What are these four characters getting ready for?" "If with the photographic campaign we have explored the idea of the acronym in a visual way, in the film we went even deeper as the letters that actually dictate the story." Given that OFFF is a big, globally recognised event, the chance to create the opening film was a great opportunity Mathery didn't want to miss. "For us it’s been a unique experience to work on this because we rarely get the chance to spend time on projects without creative boundaries, aside from our personal projects. And the fact that OFFF always completely trusted our ideas and taste was gratifying and inspiring. We felt free to push boundaries and we can’t wait to see our images printed on giant canvases and to show our film for the first time to such a cool audience." Keep up to date with all the latest OFFF news here. Related articles: How to organise a conference 4 design trends we're all tired of hearing about 10 top design-related movies View the full article

Running a successful design studio requires dedication, ambition, talent and a fair bit of business savvy. But you also need the right equipment to do the job. There are certain tools every graphic designer should have on their studio shopping list, ranging from hardware and software to furniture and more. Creating an enjoyable, fulfilling working environment goes beyond providing the basics, however. There are various ways to make your studio a better place to work, ranging from communal refreshments to flexible working. Read on for our guide to eight great gadgets that will help make your design studio more stylish, productive and fun... 01. Stay alert with regular coffee Tell this Smarter machine to make you a coffee using the app A communal coffee machine is a great addition to any design studio, and it's a great way to help fuel designers through those heavy project deadlines. Take it a step further, save time and make everything run smoother by automating the process with a WiFi-enabled machine, like this one from Smarter. The best office chair in 2018 You can adjust it to suit the preferences of individual team members, or regular clients – and schedule hot steaming coffee remotely using the iOS or Android app. It can also be fully integrated with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. 02. Keep the team cool in a heatwave The Evapolar air conditioner cools an area of 45 square feet This is a neat little extravagance if your design studio finds itself in sweltering, dry heat over the summer and fans just aren't cutting it any more. Claiming to be the first desktop personal air conditioner, the Evapolar cools, humidifies and cleans the air around your workstation, creating a perfect microclimate to get on with the task at hand. Each unit cools an area of approximately 45 square feet immediately in front of the device, which should easily cover a large desk or meeting room. It's portable, and relatively energy-efficient – consuming just 10W of electricity. 03. Add whiteboards anywhere for cheap Think Board XL turns any surface into a whiteboard cheaply There are plenty of digital collaboration tools for design studios on the market, but sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than the old-school analogue approach. Think Board's XL whiteboard is a almost clear film that turns any surface – wall, desk top, floor, whatever you need – into a reusable writing surface for dry-erase markers. It's as simple as peeling and sticking the film on: a lo-fi way to transform any space into the perfect venue for a creative brainstorm session with the team. 04. Give your laptop a touchscreen AirBar makes your MacBook or PC laptop recognise gestures Ever found yourself instinctively reaching for your laptop screen to tap, swipe and pinch after spending a few hours working on your tablet? Invest in an AirBar and you'll never have to check yourself again. This simple, lightweight device attaches to the bottom of your laptop screen with magnets, and connects via USB. Use anything from a paintbrush to a gloved finger to interact with your screen. It works on Mac or Windows 10, great for impressing clients in pitches. 05. Automate common tasks with one touch bttn can either be WiFi enabled, or work with a 2G data sim This one's for anyone who likes a touch of drama in their day. If you've ever fancied your own physical Big Red Button on your desk, a bttn may be ideal for you. While it won't summon a nuclear strike, or Batman, you can use it for plenty of other things. It'll save time, and give you a little smile while you do so. Basically, your bttn can be programmed as a shortcut to products, services, or entire workflows. This could be anything from reordering supplies, to booking your favourite meeting room, to booking a taxi. Whatever you do regularly. 06. Reap the benefits of natural light Get a healthy spectrum of natural light at your desk Research has shown that natural light is much more conducive to a happy, healthy, productive working environment than its artificial counterpart. But not all design studios can afford giant floor-to-ceiling windows to flood them with light. One solution is the LifeLight Touch Natural Desk Light, a beautifully designed lamp that delivers the ideal spectrum of light required for peak performance. It also comes with a uniquely flexible positioning system, which directs light from above to eliminate glare. 07. Share real-time notes with everyone SMART kapp Capture Board's 84-inch and 42-inch models At the other end of the technological scale from the Think Board peel-and-stick instant whiteboard is this stylish offering from SMART Technologies. Available in both 42-inch and 84-inch models, the SMART kapp Capture Board is both intelligent and fully connected, so remote team members, clients and collaborators can see what's written on them from anywhere in the world. Best of all, you can write on it with the same dry-erase markers you'd use on the Think Board XL. When you do so, anyone you've invited – up to 250 of them – can see your notes. You can also save them to your phone, tablet or computer. 08. Add an extra perspective to meetings It looks like an owl... but it also captures meetings in full 360 Give video conference meetings with clients an extra twist of character with the Meeting Owl, a robotic video conference camera from Owl Labs. Its charming likeness to an owl is one reason to invest – but more importantly, it can capture incredible 360-degree detail around the room during your meeting. It uses audio and video cues to understand where people are sitting, and shifts focus automatically to highlight up to three speakers at once. Just place it in the middle of the table and get started – the Meeting Owl has plug-and-play compatibility with all major web-based video conferencing platforms. Related articles: The best computer for graphic design 2018 5 fail-safe ways to beat procrastination The five best desks for home office or studio View the full article

Intel on Monday acknowledged that its processors are vulnerable to another Spectre-like speculative execution side channel flaw that could allow attackers to access information. View the full article

It’s no secret: the best way to build your creative network is to deliver outstanding creative, on time, to budget, with a brilliant attitude. Word of mouth is the holy grail of self-promotion, and exceeding the expectations of your clients, colleagues and collaborators is the most effective way to achieve it. We’ve already looked at how to project your work onto the global design stage. Here, we explain how to build on that momentum once your work’s out there. Read on for pro tips on how to build your creative network. 01. Give your clients something to talk about Canadian motion studio Vallée Duhamel exceeded Samsung's expectations in this striking short video, Satisfied clients aren’t just repeat clients – they’re the gatekeepers to a whole new market of prospective clients and collaborators, so it’s in your interest to give them something to talk about. We don’t just mean exceeding expectations on the creative side during a project: this is also about investing in client care. You need to ensure your clients know when and how to get in touch with you, arrange regular catch-up meetings, and always be proactive with ideas to improve a project – or even a client’s wider business. The best way to encourage a client or collaborator to speak out about your services is to make every project the very best it can be. Just ask Julien Vallée, co-founder of motion studio Vallée Duhamel, which created both projects featured above. His studio has built a global reputation thanks to the team's stunning attention to detail, and willingness to go above and beyond every brief. 02. Exhibit your work Illustrator has displayed his work at exhibitions like London’s Pick Me Up Another great way to expand your industry reach is to participate in a relevant exhibition – or stage your own. However hosting an exhibition could raise your blood pressure before it raises your profile, so you’ll need to be organized: know your angle (what are you showing and why?), pick the right venue for your budget, and choose your date carefully. Publicizing your exhibition is crucial, so set up a website, design some eye-catching flyers and shout about it on social media. Then, on the day, don’t hide away. Approach visitors and be ready to talk professionally about your work. This is a prime opportunity to add to your contacts, so don’t waste it. Our best tip? Leave a large stack of business cards where they can be clearly seen, along with some beautiful takeaway marketing material – postcards or posters, perhaps – that tells prospective clients or collaborators who you are and how they can contact you. 03. Attend the right events Headline speakers like designers Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh can often be seen wandering around events like OFFF Barcelona There’s no substitute for meeting people face-to-face. Networking for the sake of it can be a soulless activity, but there are a few tips and tricks for making valuable connections – and they all start with picking the right events. First, identify who you want to meet and why: are you looking for prospective new clients, collaborators or creative employers? Heavyweight industry conferences like How Design Live, OFFF and Generate New York boast big-name speakers and lucrative networking opportunities; while weekend events like Georgia’s Creative South are fantastic for meeting like-minded new collaborators. Having good connections close to home can be invaluable, too. There are hundreds of less formal, local meet ups like Glug and AIGA events, as well as exhibitions and more – attending one or two might just reveal a booming creative network right on your doorstep. 04. Make the right impression A well-designed business card will leave a lasting impression with new contacts – so take them with you everywhere Once you’ve decided which events you’re going to attend, do some research before turning up. Which speakers or attendees do you most want to make a connection with? One way to make that initial conversation easier is to break the ice before the event – perhaps with a quick introductory email or tweet, letting them know you’ll be attending too and would love to meet up. During the event, your goal is to make a good first impression, so ditch the hard sell and focus on building relationships. Basic conversation skills are important here: listen as much as you talk, ask questions, make direct eye contact and smile. And whatever you do, don’t forget to bring your business cards: this is exactly what they’re for. 05. Break onto the speaker circuit Designer Gavin Strange, aka Jam Factory, speaking at Reasons to be Creative conference Speaking at creative events is a brilliant way to raise your profile, as well as cement your authority as an expert in your chosen area. Plus, being able to talk confidently about your work in any situation – whether you’re on stage talking to an audience or pitching to a client – is a crucial design skill that will elevate your practice. However, without experience it can be tricky to bag your first speaking gig. But there are ways to persuade a conference curator to take a chance on you. Here are our best tips: Learn from the pros Analyze the presentation style of your favorite speakers: what do they do well? Why was it good? Equally, what didn't work so well and why? Write a winning proposal The best speakers don’t just walk through their portfolio – after all, it’s already online for everyone to see. To stand out as a speaker, you need to have a great story to tell. Know your audience Make sure you pitch your talk at the right level. There’s a difference between talking to students and professionals... Share the lows as well Audiences don’t want to be marketed to. They want to know about your failures and mistakes – and how you dealt with them; not just the highlights. Make your talk realistic and relatable to leave a lasting impression. 06. Get creative with video Artist and YouTube sensation has built up a huge following with his short, quirky art walkthroughs Video is king. Not only do audiences react well to video, search engines and social media platforms love it – so if you want higher visibility, a video strategy should be high on your list of priorities. That doesn’t mean you need to develop complex video-editing skills overnight, though. It could be as simple as natively uploading a 30-second video for your next artwork to Facebook (a sped-up screencapture, for example) with a call-to-action at the end and a link to your website. If you’re feeling more confident, why not use Facebook Live to offer portfolio reviews, or Instagram video to share a quick how-to? The key is to create engaging content that people want to share – so do what you do best and get creative. Ultimately, it's the same principle as getting your clients to speak out about your services: if you give value to your audience, they'll spread the word for you. And if you’re lucky, you might just go viral. Step up your self-promotion by heading over to digital print and design company moo.com. You’ll find a wealth of fun, affordable, easy-to-use tools for creating premium business cards and stunning self-promotional material that will project you onto the global design stage, and get your work in front of the people who count. Related articles: 10 steps to go freelance this year The pro's guide to creating memorable business cards Create better business cards in less than five minutes How to project your work onto the global design stage View the full article

Over the past 15 years WordPress has become the world's most popular content management system. Easy to get started with and extremely versatile, it's one of the best blogging platforms around – the ideal home for your design portfolio, or something more ambitious. There's a huge assortment of WordPress themes to choose from, while if you're unafraid of a bit of code you'll find loads of WordPress tutorials that'll help you get to grips with its more complex features. 10 top WordPress resources A big drawback of WordPress's popularity, however, is that it's a prime target for hackers. If you want to avoid losing control of your shiny new site, follow these tips for keeping it secure. 01. Add extra security to user accounts Lock down user permissions to prevent unauthorised access to admin areas A great deal of vulnerability comes from the user accounts that intentionally give access to your site, particularly administrator and editor roles. If a hacker gains access to one of these accounts, of any user on the site not just the main admin's one, then they can make changes at will on the website. Always make sure accounts only have the access they need. For example, if a user is only going to be writing articles, consider giving them only contributor or editor access, never administration. Keep in mind the level of ability of your users, ensuring that anyone with admin or editor access is fully trained to use all the account's features to avoid accidents. You can add features to allow temporary access to a certain role level, i.e. if you have a contractor working on the site and they need temporary admin access, you could give it to them with a set time to expire so that you don't need to remember to revoke their access later down the line. If a certain role level does not need all of the default permissions, you can install a roles and permissions plugin to turn off certain permissions that will never be used. You can also create other roles with only specific access. Restrict users to only the permissions they need to avoid accidental or intentional misuse of a feature. To help prevent attacks coming from user logins, put a limit on the number of times an account can make a failed login attempt before that username is locked out for a period of time. This mostly catches out bots who are guessing passwords, but remember to warn your users that they should not attempt to log in more than the number of times you set in a row. If they can't remember their password, and if they forget their password, they should reset it instead of trying to guess! It's also good practice to remind users to use secure passwords (over eight digits, with upper, lowercase, numbers etc), and to change them every so often. Remind them never to write their passwords down, and log out when they are finished with their session to avoid unauthorised access to their accounts. Two-factor authentication is an extra level of security that can be added to logins. They require users to use their authenticators when logging in to increase the number of credentials needed from just the standard. Users will need an extra code or pin to log in, usually randomly generated by an app or sent to a phone by text. It can feel like an extra barrier to login for users, but it's also an extra barrier for hackers. 02. Change old defaults Changing the name of your admin account will make a hacker's job a lot harder New WordPress installs make you choose a custom username for your admin account, but if you installed your site a while ago, your admin account may have the default name of 'admin' – this makes it easier for hackers to guess your login credentials as half the work is already done for them. Change the default admin username to something else to improve security. You can do this manually via the database in the wp_users table, or you can create a new admin profile and delete the old one via the Admin panel (be sure to attribute all the old account posts to the new one). You can also change the default database prefix to something other than wp_ to add a further layer of obscurity to your default setups. The easiest way to do this on an existing install is via a plugin, but backup your databases first. 03. Keep WordPress updated Make sure you're running the latest stable build of WordPress WordPress is always updating and improving its built-in security, so make sure that your version is the most up to date to stay ahead of old vulnerabilities and exploits. Most WordPress installations update automatically, but if yours doesn't, keep an eye on your Admin panel or Inbox to be notified of when new updates are ready to install. Hackers are on the lookout for sites that haven't been updated, and only 22% of WordPress sites are running the latest version. Since WordPress runs almost 30% of all websites on the web, that's a lot of outdated websites! If you're running a staging site, you can test all updates for compatibility with your current theme and plugins before pushing live. This is good practice to avoid any automatic updates accidentally conflicting with existing installations. It gives you a chance to catch any problems before going into production. Don't forget to update your Plugins and Themes too. It's not just old core WordPress vulnerabilities that can give hackers a way in; anything you install on your WordPress website needs to be secure as well. The next tip will tell you more on choosing trustworthy plugins. 04. Install trusted plugins and house clean regularly Not using an old plugin any more? Get rid of it! There's a temptation to install as many plugins as you have problems to solve, but too many plugins can cause bloat and one unreliable plugin can cause a security risk. Always check that plugins are trustworthy before installing. Download through the official WordPress interface or website, and always check the star rating and reviews for negative feedback that may indicate a security flaw. Plugins are created by developers with all different levels of ability. Even though plugins are vetted before being added to the WordPress site, you should always do your own research to make sure the code you are installing is solid. The WordPress website will tell you how old a plugin is, when it was last updated, and most importantly, if it's compatible with your version of WordPress. A plugin that has not been updated in a while is not necessarily a bad one, it may just mean it hasn't needed an updated in that time. Check for recent reviews to confirm the plugin is still viable, and that it's still compatible with your version. An old plugin with recent low star reviews and an unknown compatibility is worth avoiding. Regularly delete unused themes and plugins, as even a deactivated plugin can be a security risk if a vulnerability is found and exploited. Keep your plugin directory clean. You should only have plugins installed that you are currently using. Check older plugins when you update to see if they're still compatible. Review your plugins periodically to make sure you still have the best one for the job. There could be a new plugin that combines the features of a few that you already have and might be better supported, more secure and easier to maintain. 05. Consider managed hosting Managed hosting will cost you more but will prevent cross-server contamination It's not just the security of your own site you need to think about. If you host your sites on shared servers, you run the risk of cross-server contamination, where hackers gain access through a different site and are able to damage other sites sharing the same space. Consider managed hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting to eliminate this threat, where your site is hosted separately. Cost is an obvious implication, but for sites with high loads and traffic, dedicated servers can improve performance as well as security. Different hosts have different solutions; compare a few to assess which best suits your needs. 06. Mask, lock and hide Hide your WordPress version number and change the name of your login page Hackers have less leverage if they don't know where to start. Hide your WordPress version number from your code so only admins know which version of WordPress you're running. That way, hackers don't know which vulnerabilities are present to exploit. Move your login page from /wp-login to something that's not default. This makes a huge stumbling block for DOS and brute force attack bots that trawl sites looking for login forms to target. It also adds a more aesthetic value, in that you can change the URL to something more memorable for your users. Deny external access to wp-config.php and .htaccess using the following code in your .htaccess file: You can also disable file editing from the Admin panel if you know that your themes are only going to be edited via file uploads on an FTP. This prevents anyone with access to the Admin panel from directly editing files accidently or as a hacker with malicious intent. Insert the following into your wp-config.php file: 07. Run backups frequently Never forget: if it's not backed up then it's not important Make sure that your site is backed up in the event that your site is hacked and you need to roll back to an earlier clean version. How often you should run backups depends on how often your site is updated. It's integral to back up in a place where your site isn't hosted to avoid any malicious activity on your WordPress hosting from infecting your backups too. Backups can be stored on your own computer or a cloud-based service like Google Drive, Dropbox or Amazon S3. Backing up in a location that is not your current server also helps if you have an unresolvable plugin or theme conflict and can't access your site, or if there's a catastrophic server malfunction and you lose all your work. Dedicated backup plugins exist to help you keep on track, most with options for scheduled or manual backups. Free and premium versions give you various options, BackupBuddy being the most popular paid service as they have their own third-party storage for your files, plus the ability to restore from a backup directly. Compare other plugins like UpdraftPlus and BackWPup for their free and premium versions to see which has the features you most value. 08. Install security and anti-spam plugins A good set of security plugins will keep your site safer Many security features can be added with a comprehensive security plugin, such as iThemes Security or Sucuri, both of which both have free and premium versions. Security plugins come with a suite of tools to lock down vulnerabilities on your site such as those already mentioned in this article; from masking your version number, to installing two-factor authentication for logins, the feature lists are often extensive. These types of plugins can be invaluable in making your WordPress site more secure, and most security plugins are easy to use with single-click installation for the most important features, and optional installation for the more advanced or complex features. This makes them perfect for WordPress beginners, as there's no coding needed to get a well-protected site in minutes. More advanced users will have access to features that can further secure your site, such as closing down unneeded access to protocols such as XML-RPC, and updating the WordPress salts used in encoding. Such plugins will help to protect your site against brute force and DOS attacks, which can take your sites offline if there is too much load on the server. They can also firm up the login process with additional levels of security to prevent your user accounts being used as a method of attack. Malware scanning and activity logs keep records of any suspicious behaviour or corrupted files for review, warning you of any attacks in progress and giving you an idea of where your site's vulnerabilities lie so you can resolve them. Some security plugins also come with backup options, for that all-inclusive service. Having all of your security needs organised by one plugin means that the features are easy to organise, with less risk of conflict between similar plugins. Make sure you do your research, however, as this plugin is going to be the thing standing in the way of your site and anyone wanting to cause it harm. You will need to pick one that will do the job admirably. Additionally, an anti-spam plugin such as Akismet will keep spammers from clogging up your site with unrelated comments. If your security plugin isn't already doing so, it can assist the security plugin by adding an extra layer of security to your community interaction by using validation tools like CAPTCHA and other anti-bot devices to make sure only real people are commenting. An anti-spam plugin helps keeps your site clean, as well as your database behind the scenes. Screening for valuable comments has the added bonus of giving your content more weight by only showing proper engagement from readers. Each plugin comes with its own different tools, so compare the options for something that suits your needs. Consider premium versions of plugins for additional features since this is an integral part of your site and generally speaking, paid plugins will give you the most comprehensive service. Ideally you want a suite that covers at least the basics of security, such as the other tips named in this article. This article was originally published in issue 272 of creative web design magazine Web Designer. Buy issue 272 here or subscribe to Web Designer here. Related articles: 37 best free WordPress themes 9 security tips to protect your website from hackers Power a blog using the WordPress API View the full article

For some time now, the paradigm for web service architecture has been RESTful services, which enable representations of resources from one system (usually in JSON form) to be made available to another over a network. A basic REST service might expose a /customer/ resource that returns a collection of all customers in a company’s system. An HTTP GET request to /customer/12/ would return the record for customer number 12, attributes as JSON properties. It’s this simplicity that has made REST so attractive. However, there are limitations to RESTful services that can make more complex use cases needlessly convoluted. As a result, in 2015, Facebook’s GraphQL was unleashed. GraphQL offers an alternative paradigm and language that overcomes many of the perceived shortcomings of REST, and alongside Facebook counts Twitter, GitHub and Pinterest among its users. REST services provide responses in a format determined by the server, and aim to isolate resources based on a logical model. This introduces two issues that GraphQL sets out to solve: Since the response structure is determined by the server, a typical REST response will provide more information than is necessary for the client. Changes to this response structure may be breaking and require versioning the API. Where development responsibilities are separated, this also places a dependency on the team developing the API to respond to changing front-end requirements. It’s rare that meaningful functionality can be implemented by manipulating individual REST resources in isolation, resulting in ‘chatty’ APIs that require significant back and forth across the network to fulfil any practical Let’s say our RESTful /customer/ resources include a customer’s name, email, and a list of order IDs. We also have a separate collection of /order/ resources representing individual orders that include the product name. To get the names of all products a specific customer has ordered, we first need to retrieve the customer resource (GET /customer/12/), then get the order resource for each item in the array of order IDs (GET /order/#/). Along the way, we also receive the customer email, which we don’t need. Conversely, GraphQL lets the client specify the exact information needed as a single request. The complexity of gathering this information and consolidating it into the required format is shifted to the server. A server-side runtime sits in front of your application, and processes these requests based on a set of data types and functions you define. Many developers are excited about GraphQL, and it’s likely that its footprint will continue to grow To fulfil our need to obtain a list of products a customer has ordered, the GraphQL client will tell the server that it wants the customer name, and a collection containing the product names of their orders. The server will return only this information. In GraphQL terms, this is a “query”. If we want to modify resources on the server, we use a “mutation” (as a POST request). These are defined similarly to queries but each request specifies a function that is implemented on the server to update data. Many developers are excited about GraphQL, and it’s likely that its footprint will continue to grow. A turning point will come when it reaches sufficient maturity that corporations become comfortable using it. The best place to start learning how to create and deploy GraphQL services is graphql.org, and howtographql.com offers an excellent set of resources for popular web development stacks. View the full article