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Researchers warn of copycat type attacks as exploit code used in Mirai variant goes public. View the full article

Sometimes getting back to the basics is vital to staying on top of your game, as renewing your skills can reinvigorate your passion and you never know, you may just find an option or method you hadn't noticed or tried before. In 3D World's Essentials column each month, Vertex speaker Mike Griggs delves into the fundamental elements of 3D, which cross the boundaries of application, to reinforce your knowledge and open you up to essential tools that are the bedrock of being a 3D artist. The Knife tool It may go by many names: knife, slice or cut to name but a few, but effectively the implementation is the same – it cuts through polygons and edges to either split objects up or to create new boundaries within a mesh from which to create new geometry. A good slicing tool should enable an artist to cut either in a way that is sympathetic to the existing geometry or has the ability to slice through everything due to a creative decision. Some cutting tools offer the ability to create gaps when slicing; this can be really useful for all kinds of modelling tasks, especially when the software can cap the open cuts. This is because in most 3D applications meshes are seen as shells rather than being solid; there are some applications that can see meshes as solid, but you’ll find that they are usually limited to CAD and sculpting applications. Some applications offer the ability to create curved slices, which is useful for creating organic shapes, and if the application has the ability to place images in the viewport as a guide, using a curved knife tool is a great way to match reference. The other area where a cutting tool can be useful is in defining polygon flow on meshes that are going to be animated, as well as for making sure that n-gons are divided into quads or triangles for model export. 01. A simple Cut While it may seem easy to just use a slice or knife to cut across a plain mesh, be wary of creating geometry that can cause issues later in the modelling process. The classic example would be creating an n-gon (a polygon with more than four sides) which when subdivided creates a different shape than the one that was expected. The cut tools can be used to divide any problem n-gons into quad or triangular polygons. 02. Split objects While a knife or slice tool simply cuts through an existing geometry, there may be options in the software to suit your desired workflow. Some applications allow the object to not be directly split, which is useful if the model is being retopologised. Other options enable the choice of removing one of the cut elements, which is handy when creating new meshes as quickly as possible, without the need to delete unwanted elements. 03. Create gaps Some pieces of software come with the ability to create gaps when cutting a line. This can be a huge time-saver, especially when ‘caps’ are added to fill the ends of the cut, creating new geometry. As ever, you need to be mindful with any technique for adding geometry – make sure it is creating polygons that are flowing correctly for the final use. The knife or slice tool can be used to ‘retopologise’ any potential problem areas back into the desired flow. 04. Curved slices While most knife or slice tools can offer cuts based on points across a surface, one of the most creative tools available in some applications is a curved slice tool. This function is especially useful in sculpting applications where it is analogous to using a real cutter when working with clay. Learning how to manipulate the curve is key as every application has a different way of adding intermediate points in the curve. More from Mike Griggs at Vertex Mike Griggs will be holding a workshop at Vertex on 3D fundamentals. But why do we need to learn the fundamentals for 3D when surely the software has become so good that the basics are irrelevant? The truth is that as the tools for CGI have become more powerful it enables one artist to now have the potential skill set of a studio from 10 years ago. The real world has a lot to teach CG artists; for example learning how a camera works is directly transferable to setting up a shot in 3D, while life drawing is key to sculpting and character animation. A good CG artist should see a computer and its software as just another tool amongst many, which will let their talent shine and enable them to create more and better work. To book a ticket to Mike Grigg's workshop at Vertex 2018 head over to the Vertex site, where you will find information on all the day's activities, from keynote talks to the panel discussion and recruitment fair. You may be interested: 1. The ethics of digital humans 2. Scott Ross at Vertex 3. Why Vertex is a must for 3D artists View the full article

It's important that designers have a solid understanding of the rules of typography, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for some creativity. Just as with any area of design, certain typographic approaches become fashionable or fall out of favour. These can be due to technological advances, or one piece of design proving to be so effective it spawns lots of imitators and a trend develops. To create this roundup, we spoke to some of the top names in the business, and asked them for their thoughts on the biggest typography trends of 2017, as well as their predictions for what would be hot in 2018. Here's what they said... 01. Serif fonts Chobani's new look brings warmth to fonts "One typographic trend that I predict will be popular in 2018 is the use of warm, 1970s-evoking serif typefaces," says Jeremiah Shoaf, a freelance designer and founder of Typewolf. "I think this is a reaction against the cold, sterile neo-grotesques like Helvetica that seem to be dominating the design landscape." Shoaf comments on the recent Chobani rebrand as a prime example. "Its new bespoke typeface has a retro charm that brings to mind ITC Clearface and Bookman, two typefaces that will forever be associated with the good vibes of the 70s," he smiles. 02. 90s-inspired type Could we be seeing more retro fonts like 2017's Formula 1 rebrand? "2016 was all about geometric sans typefaces," says art director Rick Banks. "This carried on to some extent in 2017 (Moonpig, Sky Sports rebrand) but much less so. This year we have seen an increase in serifs (Southbank Centre, Chobani, and Medium rebrands). "I think next year we will see designers reacting more against geometric type . I think brands will want type with more character and standout value. It wouldn't surprise me if we see more 90s inspired typography – following on from the new F1 logo." 03. Custom type Text editors like Atom are popular with coders Dalton Maag founder and type designer Bruno Maag agrees with Banks. "Geometric sans typefaces continue to dominate the typographic landscape, but we can see a trend toward more condensed designs with a grid-like structure," he comments. "It also seems as if there is a resurgence of 70s inspired type, such as the new F1 identity." Maag also mentions a rise in the use of open source fonts in digital environments. This is thanks to a dramatic improvement in quality over the past few years, but also offers the benefits of (potentially considerable) cost savings, and means designers can avoid having to navigate the complexities of licensing for digital usage on a number of different devices. However, it does limit the role type can play as a brand tool. "We can see in-house design teams increasingly championing custom font solutions to close the gap between brand expression and controlling technical and logistic aspects of font usage," Maag continues. "A further trend in [custom] type is to involve scientific research on aspects of accessibility, and designers have to concern themselves with science." 04. Colour fonts Black is so last year "I think colour fonts (see FontMaker by FontSelf) will be a big hit in 2018. The user-friendly interface and the possibility to add colour as another dimension to typography represents a huge opportunity for designers and brands to add identity to their designs," says typographer Alex Trochut. "The fact that not only Illustrator but also Photoshop will support colour fonts opens up a door to create photographic typography, which represents a whole new canvas to play with. I'm very excited to see what are the good results coming out of this new technology." 05. No trends Anthony Burrill urges designers to forge their own route "I don’t think there are typographic trends any more; if there are I find it hard to identify them," says designer and print maker Anthony Burrill. "Depending on who you follow on social media, type foundries, designers, lettering artists, graffiti artist, there are numerous trends that simultaneously coexist. Scroll through your Instagram feed and you’ll see historic type examples rubbing shoulders with the latest type animation techniques." He acknowledges that this can be overwhelming, but offers some solutions to help you out. "Is possible to navigate your way through this visual avalanche. Seek out work that you connect with. By gaining more in-depth knowledge it’s possible to have a meaningful relationship with type design, rather than being dazzled with the latest technique. "Seek out work that informs your own work and inspires you, and use it as a launch pad for your own creativity. It's important to stay informed and have an opinion about work by other designers, but even more important to develop your individual response and approach to work." Related articles: 7 new typography tools for 2017 The 8 biggest typography mistakes designers make The rules of responsive web typography View the full article

You're reading Postcards: First Sneak-Peek, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! Now that 2017 is almost over, we are ready to show you what we’ll release in 2018. It’ll start with the release of Postcards, a tool that will help you to create and generate beautiful emails/newsletters for your website. It’s designed for any kind of business. View the full article

Another year has ended and the tooling landscape has become simultaneously more exciting and complex. It seems that every month there’s a new post about the convoluted and intimidating nature of the JavaScript tooling ecosystem. There are countless new libraries, frameworks, plugins, build-related tools, and so much more, released every month, each claiming to help you improve your productivity or solve a specific development problem. To start the year off right, we’ve done the legwork for you, weeding through 12 months worth of new releases and updates to bring you five of the newest, most practical and exciting options for JavaScript coders, designers and full-stack developers. 01. KUTE.js http://thednp.github.io/kute.js JavaScript animation engine with performance as its primary feature. This one grabs your attention immediately due to the gorgeous and super-smooth animation on the home page. The API looks elegant and well worth trying out. 02. Timeline.js https://ilkeryilmaz.github.io/timelinejs A jQuery plugin with a twist on the carousel component, for the specific use case of creating a carousel timeline (ie a slider that progresses based on chronological points) with lots of visual and functional customisation options. Tools like Timeline.js can revolutionise the way you develop with JavaScript in 2018 03. SweetAlert2 https://limonte.github.io/sweetalert2 Fork of the original SweetAlert, this is a replacement for native JavaScript popups like 'alert()' and 'confirm()'. The modals are attractive, responsive, customisable, and accessible. 04. Muuri https://haltu.github.io/muuri JavaScript API for responsive, sortable, filterable, and drag-and-drop Masonry/Packery-style grid layouts. The demos are really nice and there are lots of options available to customise the grid for different layout types. 05. Infinite Scroll https://infinite-scroll.com Unlike most of the rest of this list, this is an old tool but it’s been rewritten for version 3. New version includes URL changes while scrolling, no jQuery dependency, and lots of optional settings via a clean API. Want to learn more about JavaScript? Full-stack JavaScript developer Wes Bos will be going through what's new in JavaScript at our own web design event, Generate New York, on 25-27 April 2018. You can view the full lineup in all its glory, and book your tickets now, at generateconf.com. We can't wait to see you there! Join at to find out what's new in the world of JavaScript Related articles: 21 top examples of JavaScript 12 common JavaScript problems answered 20 JavaScript tips to blow your mind View the full article

Mozilla has patched one critical vulnerability in its Thunderbird email client along with two bugs rated high. View the full article

Houston, Texas, was a city obsessed with three things: sports, money and guns. Greg Ruth tried to fit in. As a boy, he'd go to football games. He liked to critique the "outfits" and would ask fellow attendees which team they thought had the coolest team badge, or the neatest helmet design. They answered him with blank stares. 50 tips that will make you a better illustratorWatching other people play games was "epically dull", so his mind would wander. He thought about nuclear war, laser blasters and falling in love with women from outer space. Back at home, a shag carpet became a furry space beast on which GI Joe figures acted out sprawling melodramas. He read Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, the Dune series by Frank Herbert and pulp novels, and he liked big band music. Superego-Egoid - "I count this as a symbolist image of myself, rather than a self-portrait. I think this was only my second graphite piece" He watched B-movies and Star Trek reruns, and Abbott and Costello marathons. He spent much of his childhood withdrawing into an imagined world – a skill that he'd use in adulthood to build a career as an artist. "I hid from Texas," he says. "I didn't belong in the nest into which I was hatched. So art became the other world into which I could flee to safety, until I was able to actually flee." A freaky Conan Conan - "Another cornerstone for me, this time with the estimable Kurt Busiek. Until Indeh, I learned more doing this series than any other as to what comics could and should do well" Ruth fled to Brooklyn and attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design school, where he tried architecture and fine art, before finally establishing himself as a comic book artist. He now lives in Massachusetts, and recently created a comic with Ethan Hawke, but previous to this, a music video with Prince and a picture book with Barack Obama. Ruth works on film art and book covers, and wrote his own New York Times bestselling graphic novel. He also created a new, weekly, self-initiated illustration, which became The 52 Weeks Project. Agatha's Mirror - "One of my favourite pieces. It was for a short story entitled Dragonkin. It got left because it skewed a bit too young for the story inside. It’s tough when you have to reject a good piece despite its merits" Ruth's busy. Working across so many different disciplines can pose problems. He once drew two comics simultaneously for Dark Horse, both 22 pages, the final issue of Freaks of the Heartland and the first issue of Conan: Born on the Battlefield. The workload alone was tough, but tougher still was the clash of genres. With Freaks, Ruth knew the story inside out – what he describes as a classic small-town gothic-horror story. He'd established a colour palette, a narrative rhythm. Conan, on the other hand, was a pulpy adventure book, garish and raucous in every way. For the first issue of Conan, he tried a Freaks-style approach. It didn't work: "Sometimes when you're making breakfast and dinner at the same time, you end up with pot-roast omelettes and fresh jam on your asparagus. It ain't so great. Nowadays, I have a better grasp of my own limitations." Freaks of the Heartland - "This was my first collaborative full-length graphic novel with Steve Niles. It was a sparse script that let me rush in and fill every corner, and a defining book for my time in comics" Ruth didn't find his groove until well into the second issue of Conan. So now, when working on a big job, he focuses on it entirely until the project begins "cruising on its own". He may take a book cover or some editorial work – particularly if one project complements the other in some way – but mostly he tries "not to cross the streams". He also likes to create a soundtrack for big graphic novels. This way, he can listen to music to help him get into the mood, tone and themes of the narrative. It's helpful if he does have to take a break to work on something else. "When I pop the soundtrack on, coming into work, I get right into the world of it." Some gigs, however, are just too good to turn down… Prince the cheerleader "Why would any human-shaped person say no to Prince?" Ruth says. He helped create a video for the legendary musician in 2004 – one of his favourite ever jobs. He created the dark, moody world in which Prince and his band perform. When the money men got twitchy about some of the video's themes, Prince stepped in and funded the project with his own money. "Prince pretty much left us to go nuts on that," Ruth says, "and was our biggest cheerleader and defender." Not every client is like Prince. He made another music video for American singer-songwriter Rob Thomas, which was "much more of a corporate affair". His work in films – where some actors have the power to veto the posters he creates – can be equally restrictive. "The movie industry," Ruth says, "likes to repeat what's proven to work, even if it's simply chasing diminishing returns or risking derivativeness." Indeh Battle Skull Cave - "One of the first big sort of adventure-epic attempts with graphite. Ethan Hawke and I wanted to tell a different story than the usual us-against-them battles that dominate stories of white settlers invading tribal lands. But violence aplenty happened." Greg recently accepted a job to design the poster for Ethan Hawke's 2018 film Blaze. "Ethan let me go crazy as I can," he says. They have a good working relationship. His current project is Meadowlark, his second graphic novel with the actor-director. While on a book tour for the first, Indeh, the pair tossed around ideas for scenes, images and characters, which grew into what's set to be an "epic crime melodrama". Indeh worked the other way round. Ethan initially pictured it as a film, so the final story came from a 300-page script. "More an act of pruning than growing," Ruth says. "I kind of love the differences between the assignments. There's something really invigorating about tackling new ways of thinking and seeing, and it all dovetails nicely into my overall work ethic of always seeking to tackle projects that scare the shit out of me." Daredevil for Mondo - "This one was a total lark. I just woke up one day and had this exact image in my head, drew it, posted it and it went wild, surprisingly. Mondo got in touch about doing a print and had this cool idea about using red paper." Ruth wakes up at 5am and works until around 6pm, breaking in between to take his kids to school and bring them home again. There's the odd all-nighter here and there. But sticking to this routine helps Ruth with his huge workload. "Inspiration or The Muse," he says, "comes more often if it knows where to find you." Darkly things Indeh - "My favourite graphic novel and the hardest thing I’ve ever done, with a new creative partner I never expected to have. This book opened my eyes and changed my life." Being so prolific has a practical purpose, too. Ruth aims to be recession-proof. If picture books are going through a slump, he has film work. If the movie work dries up then there are book covers. Having different sources of income also means that he's able to work on the graphic novels he really wants to work on. Ruth is currently developing a picture book, a script, more book covers, more movie posters, another graphic novel of his own, another 52 Weeks series… he's as busy as ever! But Ruth doesn't like to overthink what it is that he's trying to achieve. Instead, he tries to remember who he's making art for in the first place. "I honestly try to avoid over-analysing my work. I think this comes from being at Pratt and having that Clement Greenbergian, modernist bullshit crammed down my throat. "The audience is, in many ways, everything. Not so much to serve their assumed desires, rather to try and force me into an outside perspective, so that whatever I'm doing lands and reads. You have to be both the fan and the creator." This article was originally published in issue 153 of ImagineFX, the world's best-selling magazine for digital artists – packed with workshops and interviews with fantasy and sci-fi artists, plus must-have kit reviews. Buy issue 153 here or subscribe to ImagineFX here. Related articles: How to be an award-winning illustrator 10 hottest illustrators of 2017 How to break into children's illustration View the full article

If you've ever been on a boat or ship at sea, you might recall the smell of the sea air, the salty spray on your lips and the physical effort required to compensate for the rolling and pitching motion. For this workshop, I decided to recreate these sensations in the studio using a combination of sketches and photo references, but mostly drawing upon my own vivid memories of what it feels like to be at sea. 5 things you need for oil paintingFor me, capturing feeling and energy is more important than 'photographic' visual accuracy. I'm interested in recreating the emotions that the original experience unleashed. I never sit down to paint, this enables me to use my whole upper body to inject more energy. I also step back frequently to get a more objective view. So for this exercise, I hope you will also enjoy getting a bit more physical. 01. Break the ice Start off with a thin wash of colour Quickly cover the canvas with a thinned wash of colour. This will also create a sense of unity to the finished piece. I've used a warm yellow ochre to help prevent the later layers of blues and greens from looking too cold. Work fast and loose! 02. Lightly sketch in the composition Use brisk, diagonal sweeps to sketch in the composition Decide early on where your focal points will be and aim to place them with a strong diagonal arrangement. Using a large brush, quickly sweep some blue/grey colour into the sky area. Diagonal sweeps are dynamic to the eye, which is exactly what you want when representing movement. 03. Blend in sky colours Stipple some white into the sky tones and blend the edges Using the same large brush, pick up some white and stipple it into the blue/grey while it's still wet, blending the edges softly. This white will also blend nicely with the ochre background colour to give a range of natural cloud colours. 04. Sweep in the waves Use a palette knife to sweep in the shapes of the waves Pick up a roll of the dark sky colour on the edge of a palette knife and, using the knife on its side, sweep in the rough shapes of the waves. Stand back from your canvas and use your whole arm to do this with an energetic rocking motion. 05. Rock your body Build up wavelets with an overlapping zigzag rocking motion Switch to a small brush and continue using an overlapping zigzag rocking motion to build up the pattern of small 'wavelets' that make up the bigger wave shapes. As you work down the canvas, change to larger brushes so that the brush marks indicate that the waves are closer to the viewer. 06. Have patience Bring in some thinned turquoise then leave your painting to dry Begin introducing some thinned turquoise to your zigzag pattern, remembering that colours appear less intense towards the horizon. Don't use too much paint at this stage or it will obliterate the ochre that is peeping through and make the water look too solid. Now leave your piece to dry. This keeps the structure intact and prevents the colours becoming muddy. 07. Let it flow Try tilting your canvas so that the paint runs and bleeds together When the underpainting is completely dry, you can be more creative with the next layer. Add colour thinned with painting medium to make it more transparent. I often tilt the canvas so that the paint runs and bleeds together, creating fluid effects that are appropriate when painting the sea. It can be messy, but it's fun! Don't be tempted to move your piece until it's dry, or your 'runs' will change direction. 08. Sculpt the wave crests Add the crests of the waves with a palette knife loaded with thick white I use a palette knife loaded with thick white to sculpt the crests of the waves. I gently touch the knife onto the canvas at the highest point and then quickly sweep it down the face of the waves in just one pass so that the effect stays clean and fresh. 09. Make an atmospheric horizon With a dry brush and some upward strokes you can create a misty horizon Take a clean dry brush and softly 'stroke' the horizon, blending some of the sea colour upwards into the sky to create distance and a nice misty effect where sea and sky blur into one. 10. Define with contrast Make your painting more dynamic by adding in some darker areas Adding back in darker areas helps lift and define the whole image again, making it more dynamic and interesting. The more different tones there are in the waves, the more movement they will seem to have. 11. Create an action point Sweep some of the white from the main wave upward to create a point of action The very top of the main wave is the focal point of this painting, so this is where I want to imply the most energy and create a point of action – the moment that the wave is starting to break. Sweeping some of the white upwards and slightly backwards implies it's being carried on the wind. 12. Add foamy details Add some foam patterns, following the structure of the underpainting Using a rigger brush loaded with a highlight colour (a pale sea green), I lay in the foam patterns, following the structure of the underpainting. The holes in the pattern are more open on the vertical of each wave and then flatten out back to the zigzag shape on the horizontal. 13. Make bubbles Practise this tricky technique before trying it for real Use a fan brush loaded with some of the foam pattern colour mixed to the consistency of single cream. Hold the brush a couple of inches from the canvas and draw a palette knife across the top of the bristles to make a spattering of air bubbles. This can take a bit of practice so try it on a sacrificial canvas or board first and don't overdo it. 14. Sea spray Use the same spattering trick to add some sea spray Using the same technique, spatter the crest of the wave. This time I've used pure white as it's the focal point. It also appears brighter here, being backlit against the sky. Mix the paint slightly thinner here to create finer, misty speckles. Again, practise before you add to your piece! 15. Add the final transparent glaze Give your painting extra depth with a transparent turquoise glaze Let the painting dry fully before you do this last stage. Mix up a glaze of transparent turquoise using plenty of painting medium. Be aware you will need hardly any paint to tint the glaze – it's better to add more pigment gradually if you need it. Applying this glaze over the dry sea areas will create a translucent effect. This creates optical depth in your piece by deepening the dark areas and enriching and unifying the lighter foam colours. This article was originally published in issue 12 of Paint & Draw, the magazine offering tips and inspiration for artists everywhere. Buy it here. Related articles: How to create a realistic oil painting of nature Improve your brushstrokes in oils How to paint realistic waves View the full article

A more efficient workflow is the obvious benefit of improving your speed sculpting technique, but that’s not the only advantage; it can also boost your creativity, helping you to produce even more interesting and vibrant work. Of course, the key to perfecting your technique is usually practice; for example, if you want to sculpt anatomy quickly and confidently, the best way to achieve this is to do lots of sketching exercises to help you master human and animal anatomy. You can also learn from expert artists, such as The Mill New York’s modelling supervisor, Adam Dewhirst to really help you with your workflow. At his debut workshop at Vertex, our event to bring the CG community together, Adam explains how to create a digidouble in less than a 24 hours, using a range of techniques from photogrammetry and mesh wrapping to The Mill’s custom human rig. His workshop is on 13 March at Olympia London, so don’t miss it. In the meantime you can learn about 6 top tips to boost your speed now! 3D artist Liudmila Kirdiashkina has revealed some of her tricks for powering up her modelling speed, so check them out below! Violet Firefly by Liudmila Kirdiashkina 01. Assign hotkeys to the frequently used commands It makes sense to create keyboard shortcuts not only to the most frequently used tools, but to such actions as changing display/shading modes, switching between different selection methods and opening various editors. You can modify default hotkeys and assign combinations that are more convenient for you. Though it takes only a couple of seconds to open a menu and find the command you need, these micro pauses distract your attention from the modelling process itself. For speedy modelling you have to stay focused all the time. 02. Utilise custom scripts and plugins Various scripts and plugins not only expand the range of your modelling options and tools, they save a good deal of time as well. For easy access custom scripts can be placed on a shelf, bar or drop-down menu, depending on the program. You can go further and assign keyboard shortcuts to the scripts you often use. It’s also worth installing some plugins for smooth integration between your modelling, texturing and rendering software. These plugins will give you advanced export/import options, preserve more data about your model or scene and allow direct jumping between different applications. 03. The preparation stage – gathering references It’s advantageous to have a clear idea of your future model before you start making it. Collecting relevant and good-quality references can be a challenge on its own. I prefer going to Pinterest when searching for inspiration and interesting ideas, and I always find images and links to something very suitable yet unexpected. It’s better to pay attention to real-life photos rather than images done by other artists. Installing a reference-image viewer (such as PureRef) may also facilitate your workflow, as it is great at putting together numerous files. 04. Step-by-step modelling – look from different perspectives Start modelling with simple primitive objects. Avoid jumping into too many details at the very beginning. It’s better to refine geometry gradually, keeping all parts at the approximately same level of details. Think about the overall visual style of the model and try to keep it consistent while adding particular details. Occasionally change the scene lighting or shading modes and try out various materials, as this can give you a better feel for the model and helps to reveal weak spots or flaws in the geometry. 05. IMM brushes and model sets Model sets can be utilised in any program, and in ZBrush it is possible to save them as Insert Multi Mesh brushes, which is super convenient. Various model packs are great for making quick 3D concepts and blocking out rough shapes. It is also a fast method to experiment and add interesting details to your 3D sketch, especially if you don’t have any 2D drafts and you are about to model something on the fly. I find it timesaving to create a quick 3D sketch in ZBrush as a guideline and then export it to another 3D modelling application for clean topology creation. 06. Efficient time management Don’t forget about some general yet effective rules of time management, especially if you do freelance work and have multiple deadlines. To begin with, list everything that needs to be done and define the priority of your objectives, then set realistic time limits to each task and allocate time for several breaks. Even if you are short of time, it’s necessary to occasionally step back and assess what you have done so far. Once all your goals are set, concentrate fully on one particular task, try to avoid distractions and keep in mind your time constraints. Adam Dewhirst will be presenting his workshop at Vertex, our debut event for the CG community. Book your tickets now at vertexconf.com, where you can find out more about the other amazing speakers, workshops, recruitment fair, networking event, expo and more. Read more: Which CG discipline is right for you? How to digitally sculpt in ZBrushCore Why Vertex is a must for CG artists View the full article

The new issue of 3D World is out now and it's full of inspirational insights into the latest visual effects and animation projects, as well as the best tutorials and reviews to help you improve your art and make the most of your tools. Here's some of the great content you can expect to see in the new issue, on sale now. Buy 3D World issue 230 here Feature: ILM on The last Jedi We sit down to talk with the guys at ILM to discover some of the secrets behind the making of the latest instalment of the Star Wars franchise. Find out how they approached creating light sabres and furry alien creatures. Feature: Massive Saddles Up Massive, which sprang from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a huge help when trying to generate believable hordes of Orcs and Goblins, but also human groups and now, even mounted cavalry. Read about the company, the software and get a kickstart in creating your own crowd sims. Training: Create an Alien Pirate In this tutorial, Darrell Abney of ILM takes you through the process of creating this exceptional alien pirate character, which is also our cover star this issue. Training: Make a game vehicle in Cinema 4D In this tutorial you will learn how to model and render a game concept vehicle using Cinema 4D, including some excellent tips on creating meshes, setting up materials and lighting the scene. Training: Q and A Our regular Artist Q&A section is here, and this issue we have answered your questions on many topics, including a common one on how to use ZBrush to generate custom vector displacement maps. 3D World is the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists – packed with expert tutorials, inspiration and reviews. Buy issue 230 here or subscribe to 3D World here. View the full article

Often, it's the simplest effects that look the most striking, and neon text is one such project. It's also much easier to create a neon effect that looks realistic than you might think. While this entire tutorial only uses one background image, your brain tricks itself into seeing this as a real, functioning neon sign – that's the power of Photoshop CC's layer styles. Get Adobe Creative CloudThe fact that this entire project is build from scratch – from the font to the colours of the glow, to the eventual animation – means that there's a lot of scope for creativity. You can choose exactly what you want every part of this effect to look like. Neon is really popular right now online. Showing off saturated tones against a dark, muted background is a great way to present a landing page, a logo design or a header, and it's easy to animate your work and save it as a GIF with a low file size. Let's dive into how to create it. 01. Start creating the font Use Photoshop's Pen tool to draw your first letter Create a new document 550x550px in Photoshop, and bring up the grid by hitting cmd/ctrl+'. Create a new layer and with the Pen tool, sketch out your first letter. Leave gaps in the character, as this is going to be a neon-style typeface. Once you're happy, hit Stroke within the Paths tab to draw in the letter. 02. Work through the alphabet Don't forget about the special characters Create as many characters as you want, with the Pen on a new layer each time. If you want to, add in some special characters, such as currency symbols, punctuation and accented letters. Follow the same basic style that you started with, so your font is cohesive. 03. Move into FontCreator There's a free trial of FontCreator available if you need it If you have High-Logic FontCreator, this is the part where you can turn your characters into a font. If you don't, a free trial is available. By pasting each character into FontCreator, we can create a useable typeface for Photoshop. Work your way through FontCreator by double-clicking each character and pasting in your Pen-drawn work. Make sure that each letter is on the same baseline. 04. Kern your text Always double-check your kerning Kerning is the space between each of the letters (for more information, take a look at our typographic glossary), and the Auto-kerning option within FontCreator is what naturally spaces out your letters so that the font looks neat. Try this option and make sure each letter looks good together. Once it's complete, export your font and install it into your computer. This will automatically add it to Photoshop CC. 05. Set up a Photoshop document Use our suggested palette or create your own Create a new document in Photoshop. On a new layer, create a colour palette by using a big brush. We went with #501d26, #af273d, #f74663, #ffdae1, #35e985 and #b2dcc4. Then find a suitable background image and drag it into Photoshop. Create a new layer, fill it the deep red colour, and duplicate. Set one layer to Multiply, and one to Colour. Create a Brightness/Contrast layer and set to -75 in Brightness. Duplicate this and mask the centre for a vignette. 06. Input the text Type in some text and rasterise it Grab the Type tool and select your font (if you didn't create a font earlier, just place in each letter individually). Spell out your text, before ctrl+right-clicking the layer and selecting Rasterize Type. 07. Create a glow Give your text a bit more depth with a lovely bevel ctrl+right-click the layer, and go to Blending Options > Outer Glow. There, input an opacity of 50%, a spread of 5% and a size of 63px. Now, you can see your neon text beginning to look a lot more realistic. Choose a bright colour. Click on Bevel and Emboss, still in the Layer Styles option. Choose Depth: 250%, size: 5px, Soften: 2px. Use the Highlight and Shadow modes to add a little more depth to the text, and play with these options until you find the right mix. 08. Play around with shadows Don't mess up your Outer Glow with your drop shadow For the Inner Shadow, choose the same bright colour you picked for the Outer Glow. All you'll need to edit here is the size, depending on how big the text is. Alter this and leave all other values at 0. As the neon text is going to be sitting off the wall slightly, we're going to need a subtle drop shadow, but not too much as we don't want to compromise the Outer Glow. Use a low opacity, and give this one some more Distance and Size. 09. Light it up Make sure that the string follows through all of the characters Go to the text layer, Ctrl/right-click and choose Copy Layer Styles. Click on the animal layer, Ctrl/right-click and choose Paste Layer Styles. Double-click on the FX icon and turn the pink colours to green for a little contrast to the text. Grab the pen tool and create a string through the neon text and the animals that you've created. Make sure that it follows through all of the characters, and then stroke with #808080, with a 2px brush selected with 1% spacing. 10. Add a drop-shadow Give the string a bevel and a bit of drop shadow Go to the Blending Options for the string you've just made. Head to Bevel to give it a subtle shape, and give it a subtle drop shadow, too. The variables here depend on the size and shape of the string you've created, so just experiment to see what works. 11. Create an 'off' version Now make a non-glowing copy so you can create a flickering effect Let's create a layer of text that isn't glowing, so we can animate a flicker on some of the letters. Duplicate the text layer, then hide the Outer Glow style. Set the Inner Shadow to #808080, then alter the Lightness of this layer to -50, using Hue/Saturation (cmd/ctrl+U). On the glowing text layer, grab the Marquee tool and select a few letters you want to switch off briefly in the animation. Make duplications of this layer, with these letters masked out until you have sufficient layers to create an animation. 12. Animate your design Export as an animated gif and you're good to go Go to the top-right of Photoshop and select Motion as a Workspace option. The animation timeline will appear at the bottom; here, you can define which layers are shown or hidden at for however long you want them to be. Create new frames along the bottom with various letters either glowing or not glowing, depending on whether the layer is visible or not. Set the time of each layer's animation using the little arrow on each frame, too. Save as a GIF using Save For Web. This article was originally published in issue 267 of Web Designer, the creative web design magazine – offering expert tutorials, cutting-edge trends and free resources. Subscribe to Web Designer here. Related articles: 5 top tips for young animators How to debug web animations 3D text tutorial for graphic designers View the full article

We want to make Creative Bloq even better for you in 2018. We want to bring you the news, how dos, inspiration, insight and advice that you need to become better designers and artists. But we need your help. Participate in the Creative Bloq reader survey Your opinions are extremely important to us. The more we know about you, what you want from Creative Bloq and how you feel about what we do, the better we can provide you with inspiring, relevant content that aids you in your day-to-day projects. So, we’ve put together a quick survey to find out a little more about you and what you do. We want to know what sort of content and software you’re most interested in, and which areas we should focus on in 2018. Importantly: we won’t share your information with third parties. We know you’re busy, too, so it’s largely multiple choice. It won’t take more than a few minutes to fill out. Choose your free gift To say thank you, we’re offering you the choice of one of four free digital gifts: All six Computer Arts Design Handbooks (worth £54) These are: The Design Student Handbook, The Freelance Handbook, The Self-Promo Handbook, The Portfolio Handbook, The Design Studio Handbook, The Design Career Handbook The Javascript Handbook (worth £10.99) The 3D Art & Design Annual Vol. 3 (worth £10.99, see the print edition) The ImagineFX Annual (worth £6.99, see the print edition) You’ll be emailed a code to redeem the digital version of your choice after completing the reader survey. Fill out our short reader survey To fill out the survey, all you have to do is hit the survey link here or above. And a huge thank you from everyone at team Creative Bloq. Your insight is invaluable – and we can’t wait to make the site better for you in 2018. View the full article

Freelance 3D artist and Vertex panelist Maya Jermy shows you how to master VDM. She will be appearing at Vertex as part of the panel on digital humans. Vector Displacement Mesh (VDM) is a 3D sculpt used as brush building blocks that enables undercutting when drawing on a model’s surface. But what exactly does it mean? The simplest way to understand it is to start with alphas. Alpha textures are greyscale images that we often use for sculpting fine-detailed patterns like wrinkles and skin pores. Without them we would have to painstakingly draw the details on by hand, one by one. Alphas are awesome and quite efficient to use in combination with bushes, but they are basically flat images with black values, and they do not support undercuts and overhangs, which limits what can be done with them. However, Alpha 3D stores the information of all XYZ axes and does not have any vertical elevation restrictions. By definition, it is 3D as it uses VDM in its system. All you need to worry about is the polygon density to enable proper projection of the Vector Displacement Mesh onto your model. As I see it, Alpha 3D is an alpha with 3D information, or, a 3D sculpt plastered onto a plane and used as an alpha on steroids. 1. Sculpt the swirl To start off, we first need to get a canvas, so head to Lightbox> Project>MISC and select the Brush 3D template. With a clay brush selected, build a little hill in the middle of the canvas, more or less to the size of the swirl. Now, with the radial symmetry on and DamStandard brush selected, start sculpting the grooves and peaks of the swirl shape. 2. Fix distorted edges Make sure to stay away from the edges of the plane. If you accidentally mess up the edges, you have to fix them before saving the VDM: mask the edges, invert mask, go to Tool>Deformation>Relax Plane Grid or Morph to Grid, depending on the level of damage caused to your plane. This should reshape the edges and add more geometry. 3. Save out the VDM To save out your sculpt as a VDM, you need to select a brush that can save all the information contained in your model. With Chisel3D selected, open the Brush palette, select Create and click on Create MultiAlpha Brush. This automatically creates a new Chisel brush out of your model. Your current Alpha texture now contains a VDM of the sculpt with a 3D mark in top-left corner. 4. Save out the brush In order to now save out the brush and create an icon for it, open a 3D sphere and turn it into a polymesh. Divide it a few times and drag out your VDM. Position the sphere to capture the icon, go to the Brush palette, hold down the Alt key and click on SelectIcon. With the icon generated, you can finally save it out with Brush>Save As. Rename your brand-new brush and it is done! Learn more from Maya Jermy at Vertex Maya Jermy is a regular contributor to 3D World and has years of industry experience, working across various fields. She will be at Vertex 2018, taking part in our panel discussion, along with other industry veterans including Chris Nichols and Brett Inerson, where the future of digital humans is the topic. Make sure you get your chance to be there for the discussion, as well the workshops, recruitment fair and all the other activities we have throughout the day. Visit the Vertex site to book your tickets, from the free expo ticket, to the access all areas passes. We look forward to seeing you there! Related articles 1. Why Vertex is a must for CG artists 2. The ethics of digital humans 3. Scott Ross at Vertex View the full article

Researchers have identified a vulnerability in a Huawei home router model that is being exploited by an adversary to spread a variant of the Mirai malware called Okiku, also known as Satori. View the full article

I spent my early, bohemian years in fashion design amidst the best pencils, watercolours, markers and pens. I kind of miss those days, but once I made the choice to move to the Wacom Cintiq 13HD, there was no going back. My education started in an art institute, we’re talking ‘90s when all the internet was geek stuff, so my training was analogue. Also, after having obtained my fashion design degree in the early 2000s, I got my first job in the fashion industry without knowing anything about computer arts. Imagine a primitive woman looking at fire, that was me all those years looking at you Photoshop wizards. The truth is that anybody can handle a major change if they have the will to do so. In early 2016, I began shifting my career from fashion design to visual storytelling for advertising and editorial purposes, becoming a digital artist at the same time. Once I learned Photoshop basics such as layers, swatches and brushes, transitioning to digital was just a case of applying the number one rule for illustrators: just draw, draw, draw. 01. Do your research Cafforio’s digital working space. Research on current fashion and colour trends is vital before starting a piece Without an idea, preferably a good one, no digital nor analogue brush will help. My process is inextricably linked to research. This research usually generates a moodboard in the form of filling my working space with pictures from runways and Post-it notes, then the creation of one or more characters that I try to give a soul to, even before creating their physical features. I always try to tell an entire story in the single frame I have at my disposal, leaving the rest to the imagination of the viewer. Once I have my research and idea sorted, I get started on the more technical aspects of digital illustration. 02. Set up for online and print use Choose your specs wisely Unless otherwise specified by the client, I usually start my projects by creating an A1 canvas at 300dpi, which means 7016 x 9933 pixels. In terms of colour management, sRGB colour profile is a good starting point for all purposes: your work will be web/monitor ready and giclée/lithography adaptable. That’s because an illustration may have several lives that cannot be foreseen, as in the case of my award-winning piece Alice in Wonderland. Born for Instagram, it was subsequently lithographed on a number of magazines and on an art catalogue, fine art printed for a signed edition, reproduced on lenticular panels, and so on. 03. Build up a strong composition After the research stage, Cafforio digitally sketches directly on her Cintiq The first thing to do is avoid ‘white sheet panic’. How? I fill the background layer with colour, usually one picked out from the fashion palette of the season I’m working on. That coloured background will better bring out the black and white of my character’s complexion. After that, I select my favourite tools – the pressure and tilt sensitive tools of Wacom’s pens and Kyle T. Webster’s Photoshop brushes are simply incredible working together – then start to pencil sketch what I’ve got in mind, cutting and adjusting it to best fit the shooting angle. One of the first huge advantages of digital sketching directly on your Cintiq with the help of layers is repositioning at will. When I’m happy with the composition, I can give the client a first visualisation of what is going to be later highly refined. In minutes. And this also leaves me a lot of room to manoeuvre in case of disagreement, without having to start from scratch. 04. Use layers effectively Cafforio repositions layers to find the best fit throughout her workflow You might think an illustration seems like a big job, but actually it’s just hundreds of small jobs. Each of my illustrations can contain several hundred layers, depending on its complexity. The only limit is the hardware used. In my experience, working at high-resolution, a basic Apple Mac Mini can easily manage a couple of hundred layers without slowing down. My illustrations have a group of layers for each element of the illustration. The face, hair, arms, hands, eyes, neck, mouth, dress, accessories, and so on, are all folders containing a bunch of layers for the foundation, chiaroscuro (light and shade), and details. Working like this will allow you to go in to your image surgically on demand. This is important because small modifications are always around the corner and a happy client is a regular client. 05. Use 50 shades of everything Pantone colours form the basis of Cafforio’s colour spectrum, but she fine-tunes the colours at the end of the piece to add her own narrative Experience in fashion makes you realise how important understanding, and possibly forecasting, colour trends is. You might want to learn about how colour fidelity matters for a commercial artist, and will ideally become good at visualising products that customers will want. It’s really fun to mix analogue watercolours and other pigments, and this can be a good way to learn about colour. On the other hand, Pantone palettes, regularly published in .ASE format, are universally recognised as standard colour reproduction systems. In terms of rules about using colour, remember that nothing is set in stone. We live in the real world, not in a giant colour control cabinet that is ISO 3664 compliant. We are doing visual storytelling here, not designing a logo, and we’re not talking to machines after all. Learn the way, then find your own way. I start with Pantone colours as a foundation, then add chiaroscuro and details, generally with Kyle T. Webster’s watercolours. But in the final stages of the project, some global colour fine-tuning to add my vision of the narrative is required. 06. Resist shortcuts Cafforio tries to resist ‘Photoshop ominipetence’, preferring to make changes by deleting and redrawing layers Now that I’m done, I’ll probably want to make some small changes. For example, I don’t like the mouth because it’s looking a little crooked. But I don’t use the Liquify Filter, I hide the mouth Layers and draw it again. If I need to add shine to some jewels, I don’t even think of using Actions. I draw sparkles. There is nothing wrong with trying some Photoshop shortcuts, especially when dealing with tight deadlines, but it is essential to resist the temptation of Photoshop omnipotence. Here’s the thing: getting lazy and cutting corners won’t help you become the next Sergio Toppi. And this world already has enough Photoshop gurus. Just remember the first rule for illustrators: draw, draw, draw. This article originally appeared in issue 272 of Computer Arts, the global design magazine – helping you solve daily design challenges with insights, advice and inspiration. Buy issue 272 here or subscribe here. Related articles: The 9 best alternatives to Photoshop 100 amazing Adobe Illustrator tutorials The best drawing tablet: our pick of the best graphics tablets in 2017 View the full article

Breathtaking views, stunning skylines and beautiful cityscapes make great photographs, but can be rather daunting from the artist's point of view. The amount of details can be overwhelming and it is difficult to know how to draw and paint it all. Instead of capturing all of the detail, try to view the scene in an abstract way, as a series of shapes and colours, or patches of light and shadows. Squinting is one of the best things you can do to break down a busy scene. In this step by step oil painting tutorial, I'll show you how to simplify a complex cityscape and work layer on layer to build the painting. I painted this in plein air, but there's nothing stopping you from applying the same method when working from a photograph. When working outside, one of the greatest challenges is capturing the changing light. When I was painting, the clouds kept moving, so I had to choose which area I wanted to be in the sun, and then wait for the right moment to carry on. Finally, just remember to have fun and don't worry too much if you have forgotten a house here, a tree there or even an entire street! What matters is that you capture the essence of the place in a personal and convincing way. 01. Add ground colour The ochre ground colour matches the colour of the buildings As usual, I cover my blank board with a ground colour so I won't have to fill every gap at the end. This also helps achieve colour harmony in the piece. Make sure you pick a colour that is present in the scenery so it can be used in the final painting. The ochre here can be seen in the stone of the buildings. 02. Create a basic drawing Sketch out a very rough layout of the city The clue is in the word 'basic'. A cityscape is so complex that it would take hours to draw every single house and street. Instead, remember to approach the scenery in an abstract way and only lay down a few marks that will help you locate these elements. Here, I've drawn the placement of the green areas as simple blocks that will help show the limits between buildings and trees. 03. Block in the greens Use big bold strokes to roughly block in the greens Roughly fill in the outlines with various shades of greens. Have fun with big bold brushstrokes and don't worry about making it look neat or accurate. Just make sure you use more than one green to depict the variety of the vegetation and give a sense of distance too. The elements in the distance should be cooler, or bluer. The negative spaces left represent the sky and the buildings. 04. Paint the dark tones Paint in the dark areas of buildings and suggest some key elements I'm one of many artists who prefers working dark to light in oils. This is why I've decided to paint the dark areas of the buildings first. Look at the colour of the shadows in the cityscape and use this to cover most of the canvas with spontaneous brushstrokes. Loosely suggest some key elements (like a church or a street) with some stronger marks. 05. Add the middle tones Use a middle tone to depict large elements as solid blocks Load your brush with a middle tone present in the cityscape and start 'sculpting' your painting with directional brushstrokes. The aim is to depict large elements as solid blocks (such as a street or a row of houses). Remember to squint a lot to simplify the scene and detect what stands out. Don't worry if the painting doesn't look great at this stage, it will come to life in the next step. 06. Create highlights Use a small brush and your lightest tone to create highlights All the groundwork has paid off, this is now the fun part of the painting. Use a smaller detail brush and load it with the lightest colour seen on the buildings. Apply the paint where you can see the brightest highlights of the cityscape, where the sun hits the buildings. Try using and mixing various light colours (such as light yellow, pink and white) to bring interest and variety to the scene. 07. Block in the sky Try treating the sky as blocks of different colours It is now time to capture the sky and its moving clouds. My biggest tip is to avoid too much blending. Instead of filling the whole space with blue and then adding some clouds, I recommend treating the sky as blocks of different colours (white, pink, blue and grey) and applying the paint in each block without feeling the need to merge. This will convey a sense of structure and energy. 08. Brighten up greens Add more definition to the green blocks in your painting The previous steps have helped capture the essence of the scene. What the painting needs now is more details, structure and contrast. The green blocks painted at the start have been partly absorbed by the board surface and now look a bit dull. They need more definition. Look at the view, squint, spot the darkest green areas in the scenery and reproduce them on your painting. 09. Add light green Try to avoid blending the paint when adding highlights You can now do the same with the highlights of the greens. Add touches of light green where the sun hits the trees and the grass. Remember to use different greens depending on what you are painting – the colour of a patch of grass is usually more saturated than a group of trees. Avoid blending the paint too much and try to keep your brushstrokes fresh and spontaneous. 10. Work on shadows Sharp, directional marks will clearly define items in the shadows The aim of this step is to bring more contrast to the buildings and street, and redefine the drawing of the scenery. Use a small brush and make sharp, directional marks to clearly define items in the shadows, such as house facades and sections of streets. Don't forget to keep looking and squinting at the scenery to spot the darkest areas that need emphasising. 11. Take a step back Stand back and take a look at what needs a final touch It's time to stand back from the easel and assess the painting. All the elements in the scene have now been addressed and there is a satisfactory sense of composition, light and shadows. The painting could benefit from applying final touches, such as sharpening the spires on the churches, and adding finer details – the suggestion of chimneys and windows, for example. 12. Add final touches Let the paint dry a little before working on the finer details Adding finer details can sometimes be easier when the paint has dried a little, so I went back to the studio and applied those final touches later in the day with a steadier hand and fresher eyes. Only a few brushstrokes were needed to finish the painting. I like to keep my style loose and fresh, but there's nothing stopping you from adding more details if you prefer a more refined result. This article was originally published in issue 12 of Paint & Draw, the magazine offering tips and inspiration for artists everywhere. Buy issue 12 here. Related articles: Add vibrancy to your oil paintings with these top tips How to draw a landscape with pastels Improve your brushstrokes in oils View the full article

Speed painting is exactly what you'd imagine – creating art against the clock. Artists give themselves a limited time to finish a piece of work, from a few minutes to a couple of hours. It is a great way for beginners to learn how to paint and for more experienced artists to hone their painting techniques. It's also a load of fun. Unlike sketching, however, speed paintings are considered complete after the time is up – if you alter your work afterwards, it is no longer a speed painting. To help you become a speed painting master, artists who contributed to 3dtotal Publishing's Master the Art of Speed Painting have shared 10 top speed painting tips from the book. On your marks, get set, go! 01. Use custom shapes Some examples of Alex Olmedo's custom shapes Alex Olmedo says: "Custom shapes are super useful tools for artists and are often forgotten by a large majority. They are simple, fast, and fun to make, and are great time savers when designing and speed painting. On those days when you feel uninspired to make art, you can make these instead. "Simply scribble abstract shapes using a hard brush, then play with them; try copying, repeating, overlapping, and transforming the shapes and using them in your art." 02. Fill a blank canvas Don't think, just get some brushstrokes down Katy Grierson says "Use a big Brush tool to lay down some strokes of varying colour, tone, texture, and opacity. Try not to paint anything specific, just fill the canvas with colour and texture. You can switch brushes but try to keep the size quite large – this is good for speed and preventing the urge to paint something specific. "This initial letting go can be the hardest thing to master but the effects are worth it in the end. By starting this way there is less pressure to fill a blank white canvas, which can be a hindrance to creativity." 03. Warm up with brushes Try working with only a limited number of brushes to help you save time and not become distracted by different brush typesDonglu Yu says: "Before I start working on a speed-painting session I like to warm up with some custom brushes. Depending on the theme, try to limit your selection of brushes for the speed-painting process. Working with a limited range of brushes can force you to work more efficiently by thinking about shapes and design rather than brushstrokes. This may take a while to get used to but it will speed up your whole process." 04. Use the Gradient tool Use the Gradient tool to add a base colour Massimo Porcella says: "Once you have set the tonal values of your image you need to add a base colour. The Gradient tool is perfect here because you can choose the colour for every part of the sketch, starting from the ground, at the base of the buildings, moving to the skyline shade, and finally picking up a colour to define the shade between land and sky. For an even colour palette, use the Eraser tool to blend all the colours together." 05. Build your own photo library James Paick created monumental fantasy ruins in one hour using photo textures he found in his personal photo library James Paick says: "I can't stress enough the importance of having a good photo reference library. You can find plenty on the internet but nothing beats going out there and taking your own. You can get the right exposure, scenery, and contrast to work with your current piece, or just interesting landmarks or cloud formations which might spark a new idea and build the imagination. "Don't limit yourself to the natural world; there are so many fascinating and elaborate architectural elements on buildings and other human-made things." 06. Allow boredom to spark creativity Jesper Friis added and mixed the acrylic paint on his old scanner; the speed painting itself took two hours to completeJesper Friis says: "In a fit of boredom one day I decided I would drag out my old scanner I had sitting around and started painting on the glass with some watercolour. I closed the lid to see what would come out. Since then I have been making weird textures this way from time to time. "It might seem a little silly at first, but even a day spent experimenting with some of these methods for making textures can give you something in your library that you will keep coming back to, something that's uniquely yours and really can't be recreated." 07. Add complexity Explore with textures and custom brushesStephanie Cost says: "To add complexity to your painting you should make full use of textures and custom brushes – there are hundreds of free ones on the internet. Find yourself a nice variety such as a rounded lizard skin-esque one, a smooth chalk-like one, or maybe a chunky, rough gravel brush. They are great for breaking up the internal shapes of your composition. You can try using a soft flat brush with Hue Jitter on each stroke; this is good for harder edges and unexpected colours." Check out the 60 best free Photoshop brushes, the 30 best Procreate brushes and how to create your own custom brushes in Clip Studio Paint. 08. Select the right photos Choosing photos that blend well together is keyOlmedo says: "When making photobashing images it is very important to choose the right photos. Often if you try to include a photo with a totally different lighting source compared to others involved in the image you'll end up spending too much time trying to fix the problem and even dismissing the photo." 09. Experiment Compose your image by adding a background gradient, duplicating and transforming your shape assets Ian Jun Wei Chiew says: "The Transform, Clipping, and Smudge tools are essential to my workflow as I prefer to create a collage and find shapes, rather than painting right from the get go. I find this method to be more fun and experimental, which can lead to ideas and compositions you would never think of developing. "There are endless possibilities with Photoshop; you can find a new use for any existing tool. At the end of the day, what makes a good image is your own personal knowledge of the foundations such as composition, values, colour, and lighting." 10. Don't over-tell Stay with the most essential storytelling elements so you can have an iconic and impressive composition – this painting took Donglu Yu two hours Yu says: "My students often like to tell a very complex story with one image. My feedback is always that you should pick the top two or three things you want to tell through the image, and tell them really well. "When a story is too complex, you need to divide your canvas space into smaller portions to distribute it all to the different storytelling elements, making it difficult to come up with an iconic composition." These tips come from the book Master the Art of Speed Painting from 3dtotal Publishing, aimed at aspiring digital painters and concept artists. Related articles: Best iPad art apps for painting and sketching How to draw and paint - 100 pro tips and tutorials The best drawing tablet: our pick of the best graphics tablets in 2017 View the full article

A great logo, now more than ever, must cut through an awful lot of noise. The art lies in working out exactly how you do that. There's a lot of overlap in the logo design trends we've picked out here. Some logos – the best of them – used two or three trends. In 2017, a year of lots of noise and confusion, the very best logo designs offered a quiet, understated authority, something both familiar and new. "Evolution, not a revolution," is how one designer said it. That's not to say there was no room for the bold or the creative. The best logos of 2017 also took chances and dared to be different. 01. Simplicity and clarity Moonpig's new look is far more minimal Simplicity has been king for a while. Last year, we saw it in Pentagram's redesign of the Mastercard logo, in which the agency focused on "simplicity and clarity." At the beginning of the year, we saw it in Interbrand's bold redesign of the Juventus badge, "fearlessly embracing its potential as an identity brand." And we saw it towards the end of this year, with Moonpig, led by the brand's in-house creative director James Turner. Greetings card company Moonpig dropped the the .com from its name, and the cartoon pig that went with it, in favour of something a bit subtler. You could argue simplicity's offshoots include minimalism, black and white logos, and those with framed texts, which we've also seen a lot of. In noisy, confusing times, the trend towards making things neater and simpler looks set to continue. 02. Uppercasification The new Calvin Klein logo uses sleek all-caps typography This trend is perhaps based on principles opposite to simplicity. In noisy, confusing times, you could argue that it's necessary to be noisier than everybody else. At least, that's how logos created in all uppercase can appear. But done well – usually when paired with a simple design and a smart typeface – it gives a logo a certain authority. Done really well there's a quiet, understated authority to uppercase logos, with the typography feeling natural rather than forced and shouty. As a trend it's a bit of broad stroke, but an unavoidable one nonetheless, seen in new logos by brands such as Calvin Klein, Giraffe, Ebury and too many others to mention. 03. Modern retro The new F1 logo feels like a modern spin on a 1980s look Formula 1 recently unveiled its first new logo in 23 years. The design, led by Wieden + Kennedy London, aimed for a "modern-retro feel." It's dynamic, and a bit masculine, like the sport, but it also has a real 80s feel. You can see the idea of modern-retro logo design in new logos for brands such as SYFY, Fanta, and Nintendo. Again, you could argue that this trend is a sign of the times. With so much change going on around the world, brands want to tether themselves to the familiar, even when making a change of their own. 04. Evolution of established logos The new YouTube logo wasn't vastly different to the old one "It’s an evolution, not a revolution," said Christopher Bettig, head of YouTube’s art department, after the brand changed its logo earlier this year. The new YouTube logo incorporated the already iconic play button and moved the emphasis off the "Tube." Aside from that, subtlety is key here. Evolution not revolution was seen elsewhere this year in logo rethinks by similar brands. Pinterest's new look is a good example. But Dropbox had it both ways, with the evolution of its logo and a controversial revolution of everything else. 05. Flat design Audi's rings were flattened in its new logo When we looked at the best logos for startups in 2017, one trend stood out: among these innovative new companies, flatness ruled where logos were concerned – check out the designs for Mush, Monzo, and Uniplaces, for example. Perhaps the best use of flatness this year came in the redesign of Audi's logo. The car manufacturer has always been switched-on when it comes to branding and advertising, and this update is no exception. Not only is it flat, but it's simple, modern-retro, and an evolution, not a revolution. Vorsprung durch technik indeed! Related articles: 10 tools to make illustration easier in 2018 10 huge graphic design trends to know for 2018 The 20 biggest logos of 2017 View the full article

What is it? YouTube is great, Patreon is making training inroads and DVD courses certainly have their place but there are times when you don't need step-by-step instruction to duplicate a project. You might need very specific guidance on a stumbling block that you've hit, even as a working pro. This is where 3D World's Q & A section comes in very handy. You can submit a question and we then find the member of our expert panel most suited to answering you. Well, imagine that on another level, with instant mentoring, help and advice from some of the best artists in their fields, and that is what you will find at Vertex 2018. Who will be there? We have a growing list of industry veterans and experts on hand at Vertex to answer your specific questions, from our very own Q&A writers Ant Ward and Maya Jermy, through to the likes of Peter Seager of DNeg, Joel Best of Framestore and Valentina Rosselli of MPC. They each bring vast pools of knowledge to the table and will happily help you work through your issue. This is a massive opportunity for you to cross bridges, take the next step in building your own skills and to tap into the mindsets of some incredible talent. This is unique to Vertex and not to be missed. More on Vertex Vertex 2018 is the event bringing together all areas of the VFX/3D community, for a day of presentations, workshops, recruitment and more. Some of the biggest names in the industry are coming to talk and share their skills and knowledge, from Chris Nichols and Brett Ineson, to Scott Ross. Tickets are available at the Vertex site, so head over to sign up for the latest news direct to your inbox and to buy tickets. The tickets themselves range from discounted student options, to free expo tickets and the access all areas passes. Related articles Scott Ross to talk at Vertex Network with industry experts at Vertex The ethics of digital humans View the full article

The Beginner's Guide to Sketching is a book that offers lots of inspiration and advice for anyone looking to take their first creative steps or wanting to add a new piece to their design portfolio. The comprehensive guide covers everything from choosing the right drawing tools to understanding shading and value, adding colour, and creating a finished scene. If you're a complete novice, you should have a look at our seven fundamental pencil drawing techniques and our 100 drawing and painting tips and tutorials. But if you're ready to go, here some of the artists that contributed to the Beginner's Guide to Sketching offer some expert advice to get you off to a flying start... 01. Avoid smudging Use an extra piece of paper under your hand to avoid smudging your work"When shading, use an extra piece of paper underneath your hand," advises artist Brun Croes. "This will minimise the amount your hand smudges your pencil lines. If you're right-handed, start shading from left to right; if you're left-handed, start at the right and move to the left. "There's nothing more frustrating than trying to make a clean-looking drawing that loses its brilliance and value thanks to smudging. Instead, use smudging to your advantage every now and then to smooth out shading. You can do this with several tools. I use a simple piece of tissue paper to get the job done." 02. Create curly hair with simple lines Drawing curly hair in four stepsWant to draw curly hair? Illustrator Eva Widermann suggests these sketching tips: "Draw two straight vertical lines; these will be your guidelines for the width and length of the curl. Now loosely draw a wavy line down between the two lines. "Double this wavy line a little below the first. You can already see a curly ribbon forming before you. Now connect the open parts on the sides, remove the guidelines, and add some details." 03. Keep some texture The final image of Patricia's KangahorseDesigner Patricia Ann Lewis-MacDougall suggests keeping some texture. "Some artists might find using watercolour pencils a little on the grainy side; however I like the added life the grain gives to a sketch. You don't have to add water over the whole image. Leave some areas untouched to add a bit of texture to your sketch." 04. Sketch a sky with smudges Create subtle shading by smudging large areas of soft charcoalIf you want to sketch a sky, artist Marisa Lewis has some advice: "Sometimes it's preferable for your shading to be less sketchy and more smooth and subtle. Pencil lines don't blend perfectly unless you're very careful. We don't want a sky full of scribbles, unless it's on purpose. "Instead, use spare paper to doodle a big swatch of soft graphite or charcoal pencil, then use a large blending stick to pick up the soft dust to use for your image. Keep using the blending stick and adding more scribbles as you need more graphite. Using the same technique, start darkening some areas of the sky to define the tops of the clouds." 05. Take control of your pencil Tripod (top) and extended tripod (bottom) gripsTake control of your pencil by holding it correctly, says illustrator Sylwia Bomba. "If you position your hand closer to the end of the pencil, you have more control and precision, but heavier strokes (darker markings). Gripping further up the pencil will give you less control and precision, but lighter strokes (lighter markings)." 06. Use varied lines Shifts in the width and darkness of your lines will create interestUse varied lines, says illustrator Rovina Cai. "Not all lines are equal. Subtle shifts in the width and darkness of your lines will create a dynamic, visually interesting drawing. Controlling the kind of mark you put down can be tricky in the beginning, but with practice you will be able to create a variety of marks that work together to make a cohesive image. Experiment with different pencil grades (from 3H to 6B) and with holding the pencil at different angles." 07. Make characters readable as silhouettes If you look at the examples here, it’s clear that the first girl is holding a mug, but what about the second one? It’s not as clear!"Have you ever noticed that every important character in an animation movie is recognisable from their shadow alone?", says artist Leonardo Sala. "This magic has a name: the silhouette. The purpose of finding a strong and interesting silhouette is to create an easily recognisable character that will remain clear in the visual memory of the viewer. "To test out whether your characters are readable as silhouettes, grab a piece of tracing paper and trace around your character, filling it in with a solid colour. A great way to test your silhouettes is to show them to your friends or colleagues and ask them what they see." 08. Flip your image with tracing paper Flipping the image can help highlight any problems"A benefit of tracing paper is that you can flip it over to see how your drawing looks from the reverse angle," advises artist Justin Gerard. "This can help reveal errors in proportion. As you work, take advantage of this in order to arrive at a more successful drawing." 09. Make it symmetrical (but not quite) Keep a nice contrast going between a finished look and a more of a sketchy feel"I like symmetrical drawings but they often look boring all too quickly," says Croes. "A good way to prevent this is to add some subtle changes and only keep the general lines symmetrical instead of mirroring every small part. Keeping some elements asymmetrical helps to avoid boring repetition." 10. Mix things up with irregular lines An example of an illustration using irregular lines"The use of irregular lines when shading adds a lot of dynamism to your sketch," Bomba says. "If you want to create a fresh and unique sketch of a portrait, architecture, or concept art, you should definitely use this technique. I use it to sketch loosely, flat backgrounds (if there is no texture, this technique will add some), bushes, or grass." Related articles: The secrets to painting like Matisse Create character art with maximum visual impact 10 top speed painting tips View the full article

When John Resig developed the jQuery library back in 2006, he can't have imagined that it would become the most popular JavaScript library on the web, or that it would have tens of thousands of plugins written for it. But it's true to say that jQuery, above all other libraries out there, has been embraced by the web design community. It is a fantastic library for designing and developing user interactions quickly. Whether it's an image gallery or form, content-revealing CSS animation or an explosion effect, the library provides the core building-blocks to allow you rapid prototyping and to deliver a unique user interface with the minimum of code and effort. This presents an interesting question, however. Just because you can roll your own solution to any given problem, does that mean you should? Of course not! There's absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a bit of common functionality; use plugins to instantly add a behaviour. Doing so will save you even more time and effort! Here's our list. 01. Tilted page scroll Tilted page scroll adds a neat 3D effect to your pages This plugin from Pete R. is an excellent way to grab people's attention and add a little extra depth to your site. With it installed, items will tilt into view as they scroll up the page, and tilt again as they scroll out of the top of the page. It's a great-looking effect that's nice and easy to implement. 02. Focuspoint Say goodbye to badly-cropped responsive images The great thing about responsive web design is being able to create a single page that'll look good on any device. However if your site's automatically cropping images to fit certain viewports, it can often lose the focal point. But with Focuspoint you can make sure your image looks great in any container by specifying a focal point for each image, and the plugin will crop out unwanted parts before the important bits. 03. SVGMagic SVGMagic creates PNGs to replace SVGs where they are not supportedUsing SVG images is a good idea because they will look sharp at any size, and this plugin helps you to do that without having to worry about browsers that don't support them. It searches for SVG images and replaces them with PNG versions if SVG isn't supported. 04. Face Detection An easy way to use some powerful technologyDetect and get the coordinates of human faces in images, videos and canvases. 05. Round Slider The slider can be themed to suit your purposesThis circular slider enables the user to select a range of values by mousing over the circle. The full slider is the default setup, but you can also use it to get quarter-circle, half-circle and pie shapes. There are CSS styles you can adjust to theme it in various ways, for example, to look like a speedometer. No images are involved; it's all made with CSS and JavaScript. 06. jInvertScroll Get a parallax effect with easejInvertscroll makes it easy to implement horizontal scrolling with a parallax effect. Roll your scroll wheel on their demo site to whizz along sideways while two layers of landscape move at different speeds to create an illusion of depth. 07. Slinky A menu design that won't go out of style?Slinky is an elegant, timeless menu design that's useful for any scenario in which you've got a lot of sub-menus. Select an item and an animation slides the sub-menu over. There's a demo here. 08. TwentyTwenty ZURB's plugin helps you compare imagesInstead of placing two images side-by-side to show the differences between them, you can use this plugin which places one on top of the other. Users drag a slider so that the bottom image shows through, enabling them to see what has changed in a before-and-after situation. 09. Material design hierarchical display Animations can help to guide users' attentionHierarchical display animation effects can be used to guide users' attention and lead them from one point to the next in a process. This animation can be customised to suite your design, and has great documentation to get you going. 10. Tabslet Minimalist tab designAs the name suggests, Tabslet is a lightweight plugin for making tabs. It supports next/previous controls, rotation, custom events, deep linking and there’s lots of other useful functionality. Have a look at the demo to see if it suits your needs. Next: more essential jQuery plugins 11. Readable Set your text just rightReadable helps to make sure your text blocks stay within the optimum parameters for readability; too narrow or too wide makes your paragraphs harder to scan. There’s a great demo that shows you the edits made to running copy in order to make it easier on the eye. 12. nanoGALLERY2 A fully-featured, fast image gallerynanoGALLERY2 is designed to simplify your image galleries, and offers multi-level navigation in albums, lightbox, combinable hover effects on thumbnails, slideshow, fullscreen, pagination and image lazy load. It is touch-enabled, responsive, fast and it supports cloud storage. The newly released version 2 offers improved user experience, and new features such as filter by keywords, a shopping cart, social sharing, advanced hover effects, thumbnail display transitions, an info page with google maps location, and more. 13. Tooltipster Fancy tooltips with TooltipsterTooltipster is a modern take on the classic tool-tip, allowing you to present fully HTML-enabled tooltips in semantic markup with CSS used to control the display. There are a wide range of configuration options, making it customisable for any scenario. 14. Magnific Popup A lightweight, performant lightboxThis is a lightbox plugin for jQuery that focuses on being as lightweight and compatible as possible. The developer has concentrated on performance and user experience, so it doesn't have all the features of alternative lightbox plugins, but it is super-fast and works perfectly across a huge range of devices, including High-DPI (Retina) devices such as the MacBook Pro. 15. jQuery Knob Touch-friendly dials that also work on the desktopjQuery Knob takes input elements and converts them into touch-friendly dials that also work on the desktop. This is an excellent example of how you can tailor your content to suit new paradigms, and is worth a look for the technical approach if nothing else. 16. Typeahead.js Handy auto-complete tool built by Twitter's dev teamThe product of Twitter's development team, Type Ahead is an easy-to-implement tool that pulls from a local or external data source as your user types in to an input box, providing auto-complete suggestions as they go. 17. Lettering.js Get fine control over your typeLettering.js provides granular control over individual characters in your type, allowing you to apply kerning, colour individual letters, and apply event-listeners. It also plays nicely with FitText, giving you desktop-style control over your typography while remaining responsive. 18. FitText Automatically scale your text for responsive headlinesThis handy plugin allows you to fill your container's width with your type but automatically scaling the text size up or down to suit. Designed to facilitate responsive headlines, the plugin also integrates with Lettering.js to allow for granular per-character styling. This is an updated version of an article that first appeared on Creative Bloq. Related articles: 12 must-have code testing tools 30 Chrome extensions for web designers and devs The designer's guide to grid theory View the full article

It's the time when love is all around. Maybe you're thinking about asking out a designer you've had your eye on for a while now? Because everybody loves designers, right? How could they not? Well, if you really believe that, then it's time for a dose of unpalatable truth. From obsessing about the worst and best fonts, to caring more about our awesome tattoos than anything else; let's face it, designers can be 'difficult'. Here, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, we present some common designer bad habits that are bound to get you in trouble with your other half if you don't keep them in check. Be honest: does any of this sound like it might be you? 01. You analyse everything Why can't every menu be as elegant as this creation by Nuria Vila, paying homage to the Japanese folding fan?You're on romantic night out in a posh restaurant, away from the hustle and bustle and of everyday life. Your partner toasts to the day you met over a glass of your favourite wine. The waiter hands you the menu but while your other half decides what they're having quickly and efficiently, a mini-ice age passes while you study the choices. But it's not the comparative merits of the steak tartare and the confit duck that's bothering you – it's the kerning! And look at the choice of typeface! This menu design just isn't right, dammit! You wonder how your agency could do it better. Maybe we could make it smaller for a start? The colours need adjusting, too. And what about this awful stock? Appalling. Meanwhile your partner is lightly drumming their fingers, eyes raised, fully aware of what's going on. It's always the same. Can't you just go out for ONE night without over-analysing everything? Of course you can't. You're a designer. The best free graphic design software02. You know who did everything Design is everywhere – and you're sure to point it out every time. Every billboard, every poster, every theatre programme... you know who designed it, and you can't stop yourself from gleefully sharing the information, often with a side order of admiration or jealousy. Most people just want to enjoy what they're looking at without thinking about who made it or how. But can you help yourself? Of course not. You're a designer. 03. Nothing can be normal Why on earth would anyone want a normal lightbulb?"Why can't we just have a normal evening?" your partner cries, when instead of quickly knocking up supper, you start experimenting with the latest flavours and ingredients in a Heston-esque way. And what about the furniture? Why does that chair have no back? And why can't you just have a normal lightbulb rather than those weird Plumens? And what about buying all that food just because the packaging looks ace? All of this is normal, right? Normal to you maybe. But then, you're a designer. 04. You're never actually there You don't really have much time to spend with your partner. You have deadlines to meet, projects to discuss and pubs meetings to go to. If the big project hits, you may not even make it home some nights. What's more, you don't even complain to our boss, or consider getting another job, but take it all in your stride. The long hours are just part of the job – part of the lifestyle. That said, when you next arrive home at midnight to find your partner has packed their bags, will you still be thinking of your cool designer lifestyle? Probably not. 05. You constantly talk about other designers What do you mean, you've never heard of Neville Brody?Gushing over the time you passively inhaled Peter Saville's cigarette smoke at that ever-so-cool independent design festival in Prague is not going to win many hearts. And talking as though you're best buddies with Neville Brody is only going to elicit a shrug from most. In the real world, less than one person in 187* will have actually heard of these designers. But you can't help yourself. You're a designer. These are your heroes and you have to let everyone know just how cool they (and by osmosis, you) are. *This is a guess. Not a fact. 06. You can't stop tinkering When you're at home, you just can't help yourself. You and your partner are both watching a movie, but your mind wanders. You start thinking. Which is always a dangerous thing. Before long the MacBook is on your lap and you're experimenting with Muse and Typekit. You don't need to be, you just want to be. As your partner laughs at the endearing comedy you're both watching, you smile politely as you've just added the Typekit JavaScript into your Muse site prototype. Now that's a blockbuster evening! 07. You can't stop buying 'cool stuff' Where would you be without your Peter Fowler vinyl toy?You know that limited edition vinyl toy by that cool artist – the one you got signed and only cost you £200? It's cool isn't it? And your collection of comics? They are ace. And what about that old letterpress set you bought off eBay and had framed? That was a stroke of genius. And the new iPad Pro. And the iPhone 6S. And the list goes on. You, as a designer, just have to have the cool things you love, no matter the cost. Yes, it can be infuriating for your partner. But they can put up with it, right? 08. You're impossible to buy gifts for Buying gifts for you is a nightmare. You buy everything you want the moment you see it (see point 07). And any gifts you receive are subjected to a scrupulous examination and critique (see point 01). In all honesty, the only gift you'd truly be satisfied with would be a monograph from you favourite designer (the one you mention again and again) – not a reprint but an original of course, out of print but in perfect condition. And signed (even if the designer is dead). And dressed as a character from Star Wars. Yeah, that would work. 09. Everything has to look great. Always. If a things worth doing, it's worth doing with a cool retro fontYour partner is preparing a worksheet for their new teaching job. A cursory glance over their shoulder reveals they're creating it in Microsoft Word. And WHAT ON EARTH is the font they are using? You take it upon yourself to set up a grid in InDesign (which they struggle to use), purchase a display font and design the best ever worksheet on 'Learn your ABC' that there has ever been. The headline font is by Alex Trochut, the body is no longer Arial. It's Helvetica. You've added two hours to your partner's once quick and easy job. But don't worry, the six-year-olds will appreciate the subtle difference in glyphs between the two body fonts. They WILL! 10. Your clothes Look, there's nothing wrong with wanting to look good, and let's not put hipster and designer in the same sentence. Oh, we just did. Related articles: What NOT to get a graphic designer for Christmas The 9 most annoying things every designer does 26 books every graphic designer should read View the full article

When ecommerce software company Shopify moved to its new Ottawa, Canada headquarters in September 2014, we explored the halls like kids on a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Six floors – totalling 102,000 square feet – are filled with coworking pods, cosy corners and places to put your feet up. Our team worked with a world-class architecture firm to ensure there were workplaces for extroverts and introverts alike. They poured more than 180,000 pounds of concrete to create custom staircases between floors that allow conversations to continue, instead of being cut off by closing elevator doors. Every floor has a different theme, including Canadiana and streetscapes. My favourite nook is the library, nestled on our speakeasy-themed floor. Each meeting room on this floor is named after a cocktail, the exception being the Studio, which is a sound-proof room meant for recording video footage. A new musical instrument seems to appear here each day, turning it into a de facto jam session space as well. Shopify's Director of Design Cynthia Savard Saucier will be presenting a Tragic Design session at Generate NY Sidecar is a pair programming room; a small space for two people to collaborate on a development project. Other rooms range from phone booths to Scandinavian sauna-style arenas. We’re able to book them using Google Calendar, and reservations show up on iPads outside the door. As a company looking to change the future of commerce, Shopify hold onto historical mementos like old-fashioned cash registers to remind us how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go. This room is one small pocket of a bustling office that includes a yoga studio, massage room and fully-staffed kitchen. A home-away-from-home encourages colleagues to engage in conversations that inspire innovation. Tickets for Generate New York 2018 are out now Feeling inspired? Shopify's Director of Design Cynthia Savard will be one of the speakers at our web design event, Generate New York, on 25-27 April 2018. You can view the full lineup in all its glory, and book your tickets now, at generateconf.com. Related articles: 10 inspiring eCommerce websites Advanced Shopify theming techniques you should be using 11 huge web design trends for 2018 View the full article

At the AOI we always say: 'If you don't ask, you don't get.' An initial offer from your client may seem considerable and tempting, but is it the best offer for the kind of work you're about to create? If the answer to that is no, then it might be time to raise the bar and negotiate. Asking questions and negotiating can seem daunting, but becoming confident in doing so is necessary in order to advance your career. And with guides like our one on How to get your pricing right, there's no reason not to feel confident about negotiating a fair price for the work. We asked AOI member Vic Lee to share his experience with negotiation, and why communication and building relationships with clients are so significant to him... 01. Build your confidence first Vic Lee is a London-based illustrator who works in print, packaging, murals and events I began my illustration career by selling screen prints at shows and events, and that gave me the opportunity to meet customers face to face and hear great feedback from them. This experience definitely gave me the confidence to communicate with clients and carry on with my work. Because my murals are bespoke, long-term artworks, I rarely have to negotiate. It's a strange one, as I often expect to do so on larger works, but murals are, I find, often agreed (or not) from a first quote, whereas commercial work is more negotiable. I do find that when some design agencies are quoting for a client, their budgets are low and non-negotiable, and that can be frustrating; it can feel like they don't fully recognise the skills involved when they are commissioning you. 02. Know when to walk away One of the most important aspects for me is the level of fulfilment on a project. If a job comes in and it's too tight or unreasonable, I will simply walk away. It's tough at the beginning to say no, as you think this will lose you work, or you will never earn anything ever again, but you have to value your own self-worth. Being able to hold my ground means other jobs come in that are even better. On average I get two or three requests for work a week, from packaging to murals, campaigns to tattoos. 03. Build a relationship For me, the most important thing is to have a relationship with a client. I am a chatty chap, so never just turn up and 'do the job'. For me it's about understanding a client and what they want. I also realise that in certain circumstances, it's not about money, but forming a relationship. You need to see the bigger picture rather than the here and now. 04. Follow the magic formula Vic's client list includes Virgin Atlantic, Nike, The Famous Grouse and, as seen here, Credit Karma I think the best way to achieve balance in general when working with clients is by using the following 'formula': client + usage + skills + honesty = great possibilities. Through this formula I have worked with some incredible clients who value my work, and I have been honoured to work with them. Unsure on how to negotiate with a client? The AOI can help; join today! This article was originally published in issue 272 of Computer Arts, the global design magazine – helping you solve daily design challenges with insights, advice and inspiration. Buy issue 272 here or subscribe to Computer Arts here. Related articles: The 23 best Illustrator brushes How to negotiate better fees 4 ways to cash in as a freelancer View the full article

Many of this month's tools focus on the little things: finding shortcuts, dealing with special characters, digitising your sketches, and improving collaboration between designers and developers. On top of that, there's a free video series on learning React, a hub for startup knowledge from Google, and a few other things that will generally make your life easier when building websites. Let's get started! 01. React starter kit from Glitch Learn React with this fantastic video series Free Thinking of learning React? This is a great way to get into it. Glitch is an app-building community that includes a browser-based code editor and instant hosting and deployment so you can get started making apps without worrying about any of those things. The React starter kit is a five-part video course with interactive code examples that helps you to learn React from within the Glitch environment. 02. Startup with Google Resource hub for startup founders, from Google Free If you're starting a business, this hub of information and resources from Google is well worth your attention. It will help you find the right software tools; give you information about best practices for hiring people, leading your team and marketing your product; offer inspiring insights from successful leaders; and connect you with communities that will help drive you forward. 03. Whatruns Every single bit of tech powering a site, laid bare Free Whatruns is a browser extension that gives you a detailed report of all the technologies that are running a particular website. That includes the CDN, WordPress theme, JavaScript frameworks... everything. Use it to find out what's popular right now, what's no longer in favour, and what's powering your favourite sites. 04. Shortcuts.design Bookmark this one so you'll never be stuck for shortcuts Free This extremely handy site lists every keyboard shortcut for all the commonly used tools. It's split into sections: design (covering Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, InVision et al), development (Sublime Text and WordPress so far, with more including GitHub in the pipeline) and miscellaneous (macOS, with Slack and Google Chrome coming soon). While there are lots of tools still to be added, there's a mine of handy shortcuts already listed. Well worth bookmarking. 05. Froala Design Blocks Throw a prototype together quickly using established design patterns Free There's a lot of talk right now about websites looking samey, but there is a strong case for using tried and tested design patterns – people know how to use them, and if your client wants evidence, there's plenty of user testing that shows them to be effective. With this is mind, resources like Froala Design Blocks are great for putting sites together quickly. There are over 170 design blocks that you can assemble into a great-looking, responsive site. It's completely free and based on Bootstrap. 06. CopyChar Another one for your bookmarks - it's the best place to grab special characters Free Bookmark this site and fire it up when you need a special character or glyph - just one click and it's on your clipboard. 07. Flow Lets designers export code, saving devs a task Pay What You Want Flow has been created to ease collaboration between designers and developers by providing a way to make animations by importing Sketch designs and then exporting code that can be handed over to a developer. It removes some of the potential for miscommunication and streamlines the handover process. 08. Mini Dot Grid Bullet Journal Great notebooks for professional sketchers £9 If you like to sketch ideas while you're out and about, you need a good notebook. The Mini Dot Grid Bullet Journal is created with professionals in mind; it's got thick pages so you can use ink without much show-through, it opens flat so it's comfortable to use and the cover is hard and water resistant. There is of course a range of sizes if you're looking for something a bit bigger. 09. Tracy Digitise paper sketches with your phone Free When it's time to transfer some wireframes from your notebook to your screen, this is quite a good way. Scan the QR code with your phone or tablet, then photograph the sketches you want to digitise. Tracy then converts your lines to vectors in SVG format. 10. Siftery Product Alternatives What do people switch to when they stop using your product? Free Siftery Product Alternatives uses a large dataset to tell you what products companies typically switch to when they stop using something. It's useful to help you understand the needs of customers switching away from your product, and might also be useful if you're looking for an alternative to a product you use that isn't meeting your requirements. Liked this? Read these: The best Christmas gifts for web designers 28 outstanding examples of CSS 3 ways to create website mockups View the full article