Rss Bot

For the last four years, Computer Arts has run a contest in partnership with D&AD New Blood for students and recent graduates to design the cover of the magazine's annual New Talent special. For this year's brief, CA's print finishing partner Celloglas offered up an extra-special finish for the entrants to get creative with: Mirri. After much deliberation, the CA team can now reveal the final shortlist of 10, one of whom will receive a £500 commission to develop their idea into the final cover of the issue, which goes on sale on 21 July 2017 (subscribe to CA now to guarantee your copy.) So without further ado, here's this year's top 10 in alphabetical order... 01. Camelia Pham Pham's lighthouse reflected in the binoculars represents the industryCamelia Pham is a second-year graphic design student at the Academy of Fine Art in Frosinone, Italy. "My idea is about a lighthouse as the talent seekers, shining down to find and shed a path to us, the young ones in the art community," she explains. "Meanwhile, we try to reciprocate the effort by sending you our best works with part of our soul attached to them, as seen in the eye in the forehead – the window of the soul." 02. Cathrine Understrup Fresh talented brains mix with golden noodles in Understrup's fun designCathrine Understrup graduated from the Danish School of Media & Journalism in 2015. She describes herself as "a creative wildcard", working across both advertising and graphic design. "I develop concepts with a strong emphasis on art direction," she says. "I have a passion for handcrafted tactile design." Accordingly, her cover concept relies on physical props, sculpted from clay and folded paper. "It's about literally picking up fresh talent," Understrup continues. "I would like to use Mirri on top of the noodles to make them shiny gold, and create a box of golden noodles with fresh talented brains entangled." 03. Dev Joshi Joshi's cover is a deliberately rough sketch reflecting ideas in development"As young, naive and often rather clueless new talent entering the world, we’re told to show only our best work to get noticed and get hired," points out the next finalist, Dev Joshi. "My cover design is just a rough-sketched pencil drawing, and it’s not very good. A lot of the time our ideas aren’t very good, but every concept starts with a simple sketch and grows from there." Joshi adds that his design breaks from CA's usual mould of "bright, beautiful and enticing covers", but adds that this approach can "help it become relatable to the everyman, or every creative." 04. Ingrid Tsy Tsy takes inspiration from fireworks as sparks of creativity"The fluid lines and dynamic forms of my design are like fireworks, in which ‘new talents’ are the sparks that illuminate the night sky," explains Ingrid Tsy. "The graphic is further enhanced by Mirri metallic finishes to captivate the audience with their explosive energy, just like a brilliant firework show." 05. Irinel Papuc Papuc focuses on the beating heart of the industryIrinel Papuc graduated from the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany, six months ago. She chose to submit an existing piece of work that fitted the brief – new talent is the beating heart of the industry, after all. Her goal was to find a way to show the intricacy and simplicity of a heart, without losing the aesthetic of the heart itself. "It was part of a '365' project, where I've been posting artwork every day for one year," explains Papuc. "It's a CGI sliced heart, with a slight transparent material – done in Cinema 4D and OctaneRender." 06. Jac Harries Harries hones in on the surge in VR influence on designersCurrently in his final year at Central Saint Martins in London, Jac Harries has developed a fascination with the increasing virtuality of the modern world. "This topic is increasingly relevant in the field of graphic design, as AR and VR become more and more widely used," he explains. "My design depicts a window into a virtual world, with a three-dimensional man on the other side touching the window. He could also be seen to be pushing through, as a symbol of the rapid speed that technology is shaping our future." Harries first rendered the man, focusing on his hands and fingertips, and then superimposed raindrops on top to achieve depth. "I believe this effect would add an extra level of depth and intrigue to a printed publication," he says. 07. Jenny Tang Tang's cover has a pearlescent treatment based on the 'world is your oyster' mantraEver since Jenny Tang graduated two years ago, she's been hearing the phrase 'the world is your oyster' – and she submitted a work-in-progress sketch to express the concept she had in mind. "Inspired by this expression, and the iridescent nature of a pearl, I chose to celebrate that feeling of being 'fresh out of university', with all of those endless possibilities waiting," she explains. "I wanted to create a grandiose display of life, choices and opportunities among a full shimmering 'pearl' cover to reflect this concept, and make something that will grab people's attention." 08. Jordan Pledge Pledge uses Mirri's holographic materials for his peacock designFor his cover concept, UWE Bristol graduate Jordan Pledge considered the fact that new talent needs to make itself known to the world – it doesn't just emerge out of nowhere. "My concept centres around one of nature’s biggest show-offs: the peacock," he says. "It uses the qualities of the holographic Mirri finish to represent the unique eye-catching skills and talents that we want the industry to recognise." 09. Kasia Serafin The design industry can be a jungle, Serafin points out“My concept refers to the brief’s suggested theme of ‘getting noticed’. The design industry can be a jungle, an unexplored territory, where the New Blood pencil-toucans reside and wait to be spotted," says Kasia Serafin, who featured in our New talent: 7 shining stars from D&AD New Blood 2016 post. Serafin proposes using a gold Mirri finish underneath her design, with a layer of white underpinning the colourful elements to help them pop. "It is stated in the brief that the entry only had to be a sketch or a mock-up, and there is always room for improvement, so I’d like to think of this as a first draft," she adds. 10. Robert Coker Coker used another well-worn phrase as his inspiration: the 'needle in a haystack'For Robert Coker, the phrase 'like finding a needle in a haystack' inspired a simple visual metaphor for seeking the brightest new talent. "Every year, more and more creatives pour onto the scene," he points out. "Looking for the brightest new stars has become trickier because of the sheer volume of creatives, in the UK alone." To enhance the concept, Coker suggests using a multi-level deboss on a textured soft-touch cover stock, to give the illusion of hay, or hair. "The needle in the haystack would be debossed, and finished with iridescent foil." Winner revealed at D&AD New Blood Computer Arts will reveal the winning cover design at D&AD New Blood Festival, which takes place at Old Truman Brewery in Shoreditch from 5-6 July. We'll share it here on Creative Bloq shortly afterwards. Good luck everyone! Related articles: Meet the best graduates from two corners of the UK 7 organisations design students need to know New talent: 7 shining stars from D&AD New Blood 2016 View the full article

New code and user testing tools and frameworks seem to pop up every day. Below is a varied list of code tools that accomplish various testing needs. Each one should be investigated to make sure it fits with your tech stack and technical needs. 01. Jasmine Jasmine is a behaviour-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code. It doesn't depend on any other JavaScript frameworks and it doesn't require a DOM. However, it does have a clean, obvious syntax so that you can easily write tests. 02. Mocha Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases. 03. Chai Chai is a BDD / TDD assertion library for Node.js and the browser that can be delightfully paired with any javascript testing framework. 04. QUnit QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework. It's used by the jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code. 05. Sinon Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. It doesn't rely on dependencies, and works with any unit testing framework. 06. Karma Karma is a framework-agnostic test runner for connected browsers. The results of each test against each browser are examined and displayed via the command line to the developer so they can see which browsers and tests passed or failed. 07. Selenium Selenium has a straightforward aim: to automate browsers. It is used primarily for automating web applications for testing purposes, but it can just as easily take care of web-based administrative tasks. 08. WebdriverIO WebdriverIO lets users control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code, making test code simple, concise and easy to read. The integrated test runner also lets you write asynchronous commands in a synchronous way so that you don’t need to care about how to handle a Promise to avoid racing conditions. Additionally, it takes away all the cumbersome set up work and manages the Selenium session for you. 09. Nightwatch Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser-based apps and websites. It uses the powerful W3C WebDriver API to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements. 10. PhantomCSS PhantomCSS takes screenshots captured by Casper.js and compares them to baseline images using Resemble.js to test for RGB pixel differences. PhantomCSS then generates image diffs to help you find the cause. 11. PhantomFlow PhantomFlow delivers UI testing with decision trees. It provides an experimental approach to UI testing, based on Decision Trees. A Node.js wrapper for Phantom.js, Casper.js and PhantomCSS, PhantomFlow enables a fluent way of describing user flows in code while generating structured tree data for visualisation. 12. Percy.io Percy provides iterative and fast feedback about visual changes, delivering what is calls continuous visual integration. It does this by running with a test suite, taking DOM snapshots, and uploading the, to the Percy service where they are rendered in a modern browser. This article was originally published in net magazine issue 285. Related articles 17 brilliant jQuery plugins 14 great free Bootstrap themes 21 top examples of JavaScript View the full article

You invest a huge amount of effort, time and resources in getting your design right. So the last thing you want is for it to come back from the printers looking like a blurry, incoherent mess. But if you’ve spent your career to date focused on digital-only design, you may be unsure about what to do when sending a design to print. So in this post we round up five fundamental things you need to know, with some links for extra reading to expand your knowledge further. 01. The difference between RGB and CMYK Set your software to CMYK when printing your designsThe system that your computer software uses for generating colour on screen is not the same system that printers use. Computer graphics use the RGB colour system, which is made up of red, green and blue. But printers work with the cyan, magenta, yellow and black colour set – commonly referred to as CMYK. The RGB system has a greater range of colours than most printers can reproduce. If your designs are intended for digital only, you need your software set to RGB. If it’s for print, you must use CMYK. However, even working in CMYK, what you see on the screen won’t always be exactly what you’ll see on the printed product. That's why proofing your designs is so important. For more on this, read our article: How to colour-match your print projects. 02. The importance of resolution 300 DPI is the standard setting to ensure a high-quality printWhen you're working on the web, resolution isn't such an issue. But when it comes to printing, you’re going to need some very high-resolution files indeed, or your prints will come back blurry, muddy and incoherent. For print output, the most important measure you need to worry about is DPI: dots per inch. As the name suggests, this determines the number of dots your printer will create on one square inch of your printed page. The best practice is to set your software to the maximum DPI of 300. There’s no benefit to going any higher, and it will just make your file larger and more unwieldy. Also note that DPI should not be confused with PPI (pixels per inch), which is concerned with the density of dots in a square inch of screen space, and is thus used for digital design rather than print design. 03. How your design scales Will your images become blurry when printed at large sizes?When you look at your design on the screen, it may look perfect. But if it’s going to be printed at a much bigger size (such as a poster or billboard) or a dramatically smaller one (such as a business card), you need to consider how well the different elements of your design will scale. One of the most important aspects of that is typography. So to make sure the text on a business card is legible, for example, it’s best to avoid light and thin fonts. Also, don’t set the size so small that people won’t be able to read it when it’s printed. Another problem with scaling your designs comes when images are printed at large sizes. If they’re raster images, you need to supply them at a high enough resolution to avoid them blurring. But vector images shouldn’t cause a problem, as they are innately, infinitely scalable. For more details, read our ultimate guide to image resolution. 04. The need for bleed Ask your printer how much bleed you need to incorporate in your designsThe way a printer cuts the paper down is not an exact science, so designers have always left a little room around the edge of their designs as room for error. This is called bleed, and all good design software will include guides to show you where the bleed starts and finishes. Different printers will require different amounts of bleed, so you should always ask your printing company to tell you this (or check your own printer settings if you’re using an in-house machine). Here are some other questions to ask your printer. 05. The importance of proofreading Check everything thoroughly before sending your work to print, including kerningThis sounds like obvious advice, but it cannot be stressed enough: one of the biggest pitfalls of printing your designs in physical form is making silly mistakes. Because unlike the web, you can't go back to correct it. If it's wrong, you’ve simply wasted your money. Obviously you should spell check your work, but spell checking will only get you 75 per cent of the way there. It won’t pick up on many grammatical mistakes, it won’t notice if you misspell proper nouns such as company names, and it won’t know if you’ve used the wrong homophone – such as 'you're' when you should have used 'your' (or their/there, it’s/its, and so on). Plus, typos are not the only mistakes that can ruin your print design. You need to meticulously check your kerning. You need to check your punctuation (is that the correct form of dash? Should that be in smart or dumb quotes?). In short, anything that can go wrong probably will go wrong, so it’s best to get as many eyes as possible on your design – preferably a printed proof – before you send it off. These are just the very basics of what you need to know about printing your designs. To learn more, check out our glossary of printing terms, our advice on how to get more from your print projects, our guide to printing a poster and our pro tips for being perfect in print. View the full article

http://thehackernews.com/2017/06/cia-wireless-router-hacking-tool.html … View the full article

The 12 principles of animation were first introduced by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, which was originally released in 1981. In this book, Johnston and Thomas examine the work of leading Disney animators from the 1930s and onwards, and boil their approach down to 12 basic principles. In this article, we'll take a closer look at each one, with helpful GIFs from Vincenzo Lodigiani, who also made the short video The Illusion of Life. Once you understand these 12 principles, you'll be able to take your animations to the next level. These are the 12 principles and what they mean: 01. Squash and stretch Show gravity with squash and stretch The squash and stretch principle is considered the most important of the 12 principles. When applied, it gives your animated characters and objects the illusion of gravity, weight, mass and flexibility. Think about how a bouncing rubber ball may react when tossed into the air: the ball stretches when it travels up and down and squishes when it hits the ground. When using squash and stretch, it's important to keep the object's volume consistent. So when you stretch something it needs to get thinner, and when you squash something it needs to get wider. 02. Anticipation Anticipation refers to the small movements that prepare you for a bigger oneAnticipation helps to prepare the viewer for what's about to happen. When applied, it helps to make the object's action more realistic. Consider what it might look like if you were to jump without bending your knees, or perhaps to throw a ball without first pulling your arm back. Not only would it look unnatural, we're not even sure it's possible to jump without bending your knees! So animating movements without a flicker of anticipation would also cause your animation to be stale and lifeless. 03. Staging Keep audiences' eyes on the main eventStaging in animation is a lot like composition in artwork – meaning, you are responsible for drawing the viewer's attention to what's important within the scene. Simply put: keep the focus on what's important, and keep everything else of non-importance to a minimum. 04. Straight ahead action and pose to pose Straight ahead action and pose to pose are often combinedThere are two ways to handle drawing animation: straight ahead and pose to pose. Each has its own benefits, and they are often combined. Straight ahead action involves drawing frame-by-frame from start-to-finish. If you're looking for fluid, realistic movement, straight ahead action is your best bet. With the pose to pose technique, you draw the beginning frame, the end frame, and a few key frames in between. Then you go back and complete the rest. Using this technique gives you a bit more control within the scene and allows you to increase the dramatic effect. 05. Follow through and overlapping action Follow through and overlapping action is the principle that not everything on an object stops dead at the same timeWhen objects are in motion, then they come to a stop, not everything on that object will stop at the same time. Also, not everything on an object will move at the same rate. If your character is running across the scene, their arms and legs may have a different timing than their head – this is overlapping action. Likewise, when they stop running, their hair will likely continue to move for a few frames as their head comes to rest – this is follow through. These are important principles to understand if you want your animation to flow. 06. Slow in and slow out Adding extra frames gives the impression of a change of speedThe best way to understand slow in and slow out is to think about how a car accelerates and decelerates. In both cases, things slow down. In animation, this effect is achieved by adding more frames at the beginning and end of an action sequence. Apply this principle to give your objects more life. 07. Arc Most objects follow an arc when they're movingWhen working in animation, it's best to stick with the laws of physics. As most objects follow an arc or a path when they're moving, your animations should reflect that arc. For example, when you toss a ball into the air, it follows a natural arc due to the Earth's gravity. 08. Secondary action Talking while walking is an example of a secondary actionSecondary actions are used to support or emphasise the main action. Adding secondary actions help add more dimension to your characters and objects. For instance, the subtle movement of your character’s hair as they walk, or perhaps a facial expression or a secondary object reacting to the first. Whatever the case may be, this secondary action should not distract from the primary one. 09. Timing Timing communicates believability and hints at a character's personalityAgain, we need to look to the laws of physics, and apply what we see in the natural world to our animations. In this case, timing. If you move an object too quickly or too slowly, it won't be believable. Using the correct timing allows you to control the mood and the reaction of your characters and objects. That's not to say you can't push things a little – but if you do, be consistent! 10. Exaggeration Earlier Disney animations ramped the exaggeration right upToo much realism can ruin an animation, making it appear static and boring. Instead, add some exaggeration to your characters and objects to make them more dynamic. Find ways to push the limits just beyond what's possible, and your animations will pop. 11. Solid drawing Giving your animations volume and weight is keyYou need to understand the basics of drawing. This includes knowing how to draw in three-dimensional space and understanding form and anatomy, weight and volume, and lights and shadows. While you can push the limits here, too, it's important to remain consistent. If your world has wonky doors and a warped perspective, keep that perspective throughout the entire animation. Otherwise, things will fall apart. 12. Appeal You can inject a lot of personality into animated characters through their movementsYour characters, objects, and the world in which they live need to appeal to the viewer. This includes having an easy to read design, solid drawing, and a personality. There is no formula for getting this right, but it starts with strong character development and being able to tell your story through the art of animation. Related articles: How to get started with animation Disney artists reveal how to survive in an animation studio How to land your dream job in animation If you're looking a little more guidance and some tools to help get you started, check out the Introduction to Moho tutorial series. View the full article

Sketching is a simple but powerful tool for anyone involved with making digital products. Pens, paper and whiteboards are readily available in every office; there is no need for expensive hardware or software. It's quick, it's cheap and we don't have to be artists to scribble down a simple diagram explaining our ideas. Top sketching tips for beginnersHowever, there seems to be a potential barrier stopping a lot of people from taking the first steps and picking up a pen – especially for those coming from a non-design background like programming, research or product management. The sentence 'I don't know how to draw' can be anchored deeply in our heads, convincing us that, if we never had a knack for arts, sketching can't be for us. The good news is that everybody can sketch. Sketching is not about creating works of art, but expressing ideas and making concepts visible. When it comes to sketching interfaces, for example, lines and boxes combined in different ways make up 99 per cent of our sketches. In this article we'll take a closer look at these basic ingredients and explore some simple techniques to make our lines and boxes neater, cleaner and more confident. Whether we're using sketches to clarify our thinking, to collaborate on a solution with colleagues or to present a concept to stakeholders and clients, we'll make it much easier for everybody to 'see what we mean'. 01. Draw confident lines Clear, confident lines make readability easierConfident lines have a defined beginning, a calm and steady middle, and a solid, defined end. To practise making your lines more confident, pay attention to each of these three parts of your lines. It can help to consciously pause at the beginning and the end to give the line a nice solid feel at both sides. You can even move the pen against the direction of the line before starting the line and after ending it to visually reinforce the ends. 02. Don't throw your lines Thrown lines are great for creating dynamism, but no good for a clear sketchWhen you throw your lines, the focus is at the beginning, but gets lost along the way. The drawer loses control and the line loses definition towards the end. Thrown lines are a great way to express dynamism (for example in a storyboard), but when sketching interfaces, the focus is on clarity and readability, rather than dynamic expression. 03. Lift your wrist to draw straight lines If you’re having trouble keeping your lines straight, try lifting your hand off the page and pulling the pen towards you, rather than pushing it awayIf your lines – especially long ones – all seem to come out slightly curved rather than straight, try lifting your wrist off the paper and moving your whole arm. You can use your little finger to stabilise your hand on the paper. 04. Draw towards yourself Another way to achieve straighter lines is to draw them towards yourself. We tend to have more control over our hand movement when we pull the hand towards the centre of our body (the belly button) rather than pushing away from it. Just rotate your piece of paper when you need to draw horizontal lines. 05. Find your optimum sketching speed Find the right speed so you don’t end up with shaky lines, or lines that go off targetSketching is a quick technique, but there's no need to be hasty. Don't rush your pen around the paper. Instead find a steady pace that allows you to control your lines and make clear marks. If your lines are shaky, you're probably going too slow. Speeding up your drawing can help you to create smoother lines. If your lines are off target, you're probably going too fast. Slowing down will help you control the path of your lines better. 06. Don't draw hairy lines Draw one long, confident line – hairy lines are distractingSome people have a habit of sketching a line in lots of small segments. From my experience, this usually happens when someone is not that confident with sketching yet and are trying to find the right line, bit by bit. The resulting 'hairy' lines show this insecurity and add visual noise to the sketch. Practise making full, continuous lines. If the line doesn't quite come out as you planned, just put another, 'better' line on top. Over time, this will result in a more confident, calmer look. 07. Sketch clear shapes Lift your pen between each straight line to slow down your drawing and keep your shapes crispA box is a simple shape made up of four lines that meet at 90-degree angles. To sketch a neat box, draw each side individually and lift your pen in between each line. This will help you to keep each side straight and make the corners nice and defined. Lifting your pen naturally forces you to slow down a bit as well, which is one of the best ways to avoid sloppy boxes. 08. Close the corners of shapes Take some time to make sure you close up your shapes. Gaps between lines simply add visual noise Our mind will perceive individual strokes as one complete shape, even when the corners are not properly closed. This is because the human brain is pretty amazing – especially the part that deals with visual perception. However, leaving the corners of your boxes open creates visual noise and diverts mental processing power away from what you actually want your viewer to notice. Make a habit of properly closing the corners of your boxes. If the corners overlap, that's okay as well. 09. Sketch neat blind text Opt for straight lines for body copy and a tight zigzag for headersWhen sketching, we often use lines and scribbles to represent text. This is a quick way to sketch headings and blocks of text while keeping the fidelity low and preventing viewers from getting distracted by actual, readable content. When we're not paying attention, it is easy to fall into the habit of using random wavy lines (like those we associate with handwriting), especially when we're trying to represent larger fonts like headings or big labels. This, again, adds visual noise and makes your sketch hard to read. Get into the habit of using straight lines for body copy and a neat, tight zigzag to represent larger text. When you put all these small details together, the difference it makes to the overall appearance of your sketches is quite impressive. Remember, the goal is not to create 'beautiful' or 'arty' sketches, but to make your output clear and calm, so the viewer can focus on the idea being shown, rather than getting distracted by unnecessary visual noise. 10. Go for low fidelity to convey your concept Practise paring sketches back to just the essentials needed to capture your idea Hans Hofmann once said: "The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." Beyond the mere technical skills of producing straight lines and neat boxes lies the much trickier, more conceptual side of sketching. Which parts do I need to sketch to convey a concept? What level of fidelity is right for the stage I am at? My general advice is: if you want to focus on getting better at one thing, make it sketching at low fidelity. Having taught sketching to hundreds of UX practitioners, I've discovered that reducing a sketch down to its essence is by far the hardest challenge. It is very easy to get distracted by the details and to lose clarity by cramming too much into one sketch. Practising low-fidelity sketching forces us to summarise complex concepts. It also teaches us how to spot patterns and helps us to understand structures. When we master sketching at low fidelity we become better communicators, as it helps us recognise how to show the big picture first and dive into more detail when and where it is needed. 11. Sketch existing interfaces Base your practice sketches on an existing page to focus on capturing the essence of the design, rather than creating a new layout The best way to learn how to create low fidelity sketches is to practise sketching an existing website layout. This allows you to focus fully on what and how you sketch, because you aren't having to come up with a good new design at the same time. Sketching existing interfaces can also be a great way to help you out if you get stuck in your design process. Sketching the current interface you want to improve, or the interface of a similar product, can help you find flaws and question the status quo on a much deeper, structural level. This can often lead to ideas of how to do things differently. 12. Imagine your audience Choose a screen from a website, software interface or mobile app. Imagine you wanted to explain to someone what this screen is about and what its main parts are. To focus the exercise, imagine you're talking to a particular person: a product manager, a visual designer, a developer, a content editor, a potential investor. Depending on who the audience is, your sketch will focus on different aspects of the screen design. Challenge yourself to sketch the overall structure first and to keep the amount of detail to the minimum. It usually takes a few rounds of sketches to get down to the essence. This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 285. Liked this? Then check these out: Create storyboards for web animations How to make your apps serverless 20 great resources for learning graphic design View the full article

June is a big month for digital creatives. Apple hosted its World Wide Developers conference (WWDC) and the games industry has E3 in the middle of the month. Around these two massive tentpole shows are a raft of new announcements. Here are the 10 we’re most excited about. 01. iMac Pro The iMac Pro certainly looks the part in its space grey enclosureAfter the disappointment that many digital creatives felt when the new MacBook Pro launched, Apple promised that it still wanted to provide the machines for digital creatives. The iMac Pro is the first step to win back hearts and minds. With up to 18 cores, 128GB of RAM and next-generation AMD Vega GPUs, there is enough power to keep many creatives happy. The starting price of $4,999 and lack of upgradeable components, however, could dampen that happiness. We will find out in December when the iMac Pro ships. 02. VR for Mac With the upcoming macOS High Sierra, it will be possible to develop VR on a MacWith the new High Sierra macOS, Apple is adding first party support for Thunderbolt 3 external GPU boxes. Combined with the arrival of Steam VR for macOS, these announcements means that VR and many GPU-accelerated render engines can be used and developed on the Mac at last, using either AMD or NVIDIA cards. Apple is backing this up with an external graphics development kit, which boasts a Sonnet eGPU enclosure with an AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card, and compatibility with HTC Vive VR headsets. 03. iPad Pro The new 10.5-inch iPad Pro replaces the 9.7 modelApple has released two new models of the iPad Pro, both with vastly improved screens and faster graphics. The screens now have a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, with a P3 wide colour display. The new iPads are likely to be the most colour accurate screens in any studio. The 9.7-inch iPad Pro has been replaced by a 10.5-inch model (priced from $649/£619) with thinner side bevels, alongside the revamped 12.9-inch behemoth (from $799/£769). 04. iOS 11 iOS 11 supports many new iPad-specific features, including drag-and-drop with the new files appOne of the biggest issues with the iPad Pro is the fact that doing proper work has always felt like a chore due to the limitations of iOS. With the upcoming iOS 11, Apple has provided a major focus on the iPad, with drag-and-drop now available on split-screen, and a new Mac-like dock. The Apple Pencil is also made more useful, thanks to inline notation, scan and sign for documents, and a new handwriting recognition system. With a new ARKit API available to developers that allows full support for tracking objects into a camera view, iOS 11 looks like it could be a major boost for iPad productivity and digital content developers. 05. Affinity Photo for iPad Affinity Photo for iPad is a desktop-class image manipulation applicationAffinity Photo has developed a reputation as a true Photoshop competitor at a fraction of the price. With the release of the iPad version of Affinity Photo, Serif has created a professional image manipulation tool for the iPad and iPad Pro. In our initial test run, we were able to import an EXR image and create a mask for it using another bitmap-based image. Effects and filters are applied blisteringly quickly, and Affinity Photo works superbly with the Apple Pencil. Affinity Photo is available with an introductory 30 per cent discount at $19.99/£19.99 on the App Store. 06. New MacBooks, MacBook Pros and iMacs Rounding out our Apple-fest is the announcement of key hardware updates for most Macs. Laptops across the board will see upgrades to Kaby Lake processors (Intel Core i5 and m3), plus there’s better discrete graphics for 15-inch MacBook Pros. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros cost from $1,299/£1,249. iMacs will also receive new processors, as well as Thunderbolt 3 ports, brighter screens, a new extended keyboard and the ability to install up to 64GB of RAM in the 27-inch model. The new iMacs cost from $1,099/£1,049. 07. Microsoft Surface Pro The Microsoft Surface Pro gets welcome specification and stylus improvementsIt hasn’t just been Apple revealing new hardware this month. Microsoft has announced the new Surface Pro, which is a favourite tool of many digital artists due to its ability to run a full version of Windows. The new Surface Pro comes with Kaby Lake processors and improved cooling. This means for the first time the i5 version of the Surface Pro joins the i3 in running silently without fans. There is a new stylus, now with tilt support and 4,096 pressure points. Starting from $799/£799, the Surface Pro is available now. 08. Avatar SDK Avatar SDK enables you to create 3D avatars from photographsCreating avatars from photographs is becoming more common in various media, including games such as EA’s Game Face. Itseez3D is making that process easy for developers on many platforms, including Unity and iOS with Avatar SDK. If the demo mobile app is anything to go by, avatars are easy to capture and the quality is excellent. With a per-use pricing model (which starts with 50 avatars per month for free), Avatar SDK should allow many developers to add this cutting-edge feature. 09. Character Creator Sketchfab integration With the latest release of Reallusion’s iClone comes a major upgrade to the Character Creator plugin. Version 2 offers a range of new improvements, but it’s the Sketchfab integration that is a real high point. This makes iClone and Character Creator a great (and cost-effective) starting point for many artists wanting to create shareable character assets for game and VR use on the Sketchfab platform. The Lite version is free, while a full version costs $199 (iClone 6 or 7 licensees can upgrade for free). 10. HitFilm Express HitFilm Express offers many of the VFX and editing features of its HitFilm Pro for freeHitFilm Pro has a become a major competitor to Adobe Premiere and After Effects over the past few years. FXHOME's new HitFilm Express offers many of the same features as its big brother – including 4K editing – for free. Extra features can be purchased as add-ons at reasonable prices, in order to make HitFilm Express into a bespoke editing and VFX package. Related articles: Adobe Stock improves visual search to bring you vibrant, beautiful images 20 best designs in video games What if Apple made a Surface Book? View the full article

Your days are full of stress, and it can be hard to find the time to deal with that pressure. Stop letting all that emotional weight hold you back and start living a healthier and more mindful life with Aura Premium. You can get a lifetime subscription on sale for 82% off the retail price. Aura is an app unlike any other that you've had on your phone. Crafted by top meditation teachers and therapists, this app combines the wisdom of wellness experts with groundbreaking artificial intelligence to give you a personalised plan to improve your health every day. Aura helps relieve stress and anxiety through mindfulness meditation exercises crafted to your specific needs. A lifetime subscription to Aura Premium usually costs $399, but you can get it on sale now for just $69.99. That's a saving of 82% off the retail price for a service that will improve your lifestyle, so grab this deal today! View the full article

In 2016, we witnessed the rapid rise of a new buzzword: serverless. At face value, the term makes it sound like servers no longer exist. Of course, this is absurd. Every serverless application is running on a server somewhere. But it does mean that entire applications can be successfully built without deploying code to your own servers. While the term 'serverless' may be misleading, the value of delegating server management to a third party is very real. The dream of spending less time worrying about servers and more time building software can be a reality. Serverless in action At Bustle (where I work as director of engineering) we serve content to over 50 million unique readers a month. This means traffic at our scale is significant but also sudden, as articles can go viral at any moment. Our legacy VM-based infrastructure was having trouble keeping up and our engineers were spending too much time on operations. We started looking at serverless platforms as a solution and, after a few successful experiments, began moving over our entire stack. It has been a complete success; our projects are more maintainable, easier to operate, and cheaper. Amazon Web Services It is difficult to talk about serverless without focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS has become synonymous with serverless because it answers one critical question: Where does the custom code go? The concept of using third-party services and platforms is not new. Databases, push notifications, caching, and many other layers of an application have all been available 'as a service' for a while, but they sat on the edge of your application. You still needed a place for core application code, which was usually a server (and often many of them) responding to external requests. This is where AWS came in. Its products AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway exposed primitives that made it simple to deploy custom application code without the overhead of managing your own servers. AWS Lambda Lambda is Amazon's version of functions-as-a-service (FaaS). It is quite simple: you write code and upload it – though currently only Node.js, JavaScript, Python and C# have official support. AWS will then run that code in response to events including HTTP requests, S3 uploads, DynamoDB updates, Kinesis streams, and many others. Scaling happens automatically and you are only charged when your functions are running. None of these features are strictly a requirement for serverless, but AWS has certainly set the bar high. Any serverless platform will likely have a stateless FaaS offering with very granular billing because of the precedent set by AWS. Other platforms Amazon may have the lead, but other providers are catching up quickly. All the major cloud platforms have recently launched services targeted at serverless applications. Here are a few: Google Cloud Functions: Still in alpha, this provides similar functionality to AWS Lambda and can also be triggered by HTTP requests. Azure Functions: This is also similar to Lambda and still relatively new. Azure has a pleasant UI and makes it easy to expose functions over HTTP without needing a separate routing service. IBM OpenWhisk: The only major serverless platform that is open source. If you are interested in deploying your own serverless platform or just curious how they work under the hood, you will want to investigate this. Challenges No servers doesn't mean no operationsServerless does not come without its challenges. The space is new and as such, the community is still discovering best practices – especially when it comes to operations. I've seen people assume that no servers also means no operations. This could not be further from the truth. My favourite definition of operations comes from Charity Majors: "Operations is the constellation of your org's technical skills, practices, and cultural values around designing, building and maintaining systems, shipping software, and solving problems with technology." This beautifully captures how integral operations is to any software team, and serverless does not change that. More than ever we are in need of tools for deploying, maintaining and monitoring our applications. Unfortunately, having no access to the server means we are unable to use many tools that have been battle-tested over the last couple of decades. I anticipate that we will see many new startups' third-party services targeted at solving these problems for serverless developers. Some companies have already sprouted up or modified existing tools, including IOpipe and Honeycomb.io. Tools The open source community has recognised some of these challenges and responded with a wide range of tools and frameworks specifically targeting serverless. Here, the market dominance of Amazon is apparent, as most of these only currently support AWS. Of course, it is possible to manually build and deploy serverless applications yourself, but I wouldn't recommend it – with even a few endpoints, building, packaging, zipping, uploading and versioning all become difficult to manage. Here are just a few of the frameworks out there for you to consider: Serverless Framework: This is the oldest and most established framework for building serverless applications. It has a robust plugin system and integrates with many community developed plugins. Its stated goal is to eventually support deployment to any of the major cloud platforms. Apex: This is written in Go but supports Python, Node.js, Go and Java runtime languages. The creator, TJ Holowaychuk, is a fixture in the open source community and has a great sense of what makes for good developer tools. Chalice: The only framework created and maintained by AWS. It currently just supports Python. Shep: Bustle's own open source framework, used for all our production services. It focuses exclusively on the Node.js runtime and strives to be opinionated about how you should structure, build, and deploy applications. The future 2017 will continue to see the rapid adoption of serverless technologies by everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Even in its nascent state, the serverless movement is a significant step forward in enabling teams to build better software. That has been our experience at Bustle, and I've talked to engineers at other companies with similar stories. Capital One, iRobot, and Nordstrom have all talked publicly about their adoption of serverless. Servers will never fully go away, but it is a joy to build software and let someone else worry about them. If it fits your use case, I highly recommend you consider serverless for your next project. This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 292; buy it here! Related articles: 4 of the most game-changing developments in tech 20 useful tools for web developers 15 APIs developers need to know View the full article

The era of Flash banners is coming to an end, and it's time for a better replacement. HTML5 animations are the perfect successor, especially considering how modern browsers handle and optimise animations created using JavaScript and CSS. SVG also makes an excellent tool for creating banners. By animating the content of SVG images, you can create appealing animations that look great on all screen resolutions. In this article we're going to animate an SVG banner using JavaScript. What is GSAP? GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is one of the fastest animation librariesThe GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is a suite of tools for creating scripted animations, and it is one of the most powerful JS animation libraries available today. I don't work for GreenSock nor have they paid me to write this article. I just love the library and highly recommend it for the great features it offers. GSAP has been around for a long time and comes with a mature API that covers the vast majority of our animation use cases. GSAP is created with a huge emphasis on performance and optimisation, making it one of the fastest animation libraries (it's up to 20 times faster than jQuery). Even Google developers recommend GSAP for JavaScript-based animations. GSAP's also solves browser compatibility issues, so you don't have to fret about browser prefixes, bugs or property inconsistencies. It handles all the cross-browser bits for you under the hood. The number one strength of GSAP is its animation sequencing capabilities. You can create individual tweens to animate just about any property of an element. You can also chain tweens into a timeline, making it simple to control them as a whole and precisely manage their timing in relation to each other. You can even nest timelines inside other timelines, as deeply as you want. The GreenSock team has quite a lot of animated SVG and HTML5 demos, including banners like this one, on its Codepen profile GSAP comes with core tools, and there are additional plugins that enable you to extend its functionality. You only need to add the plugins required for your particular project, thus maintaining as small a file size as possible. GSAP's TweenMax is a full-featured tool that handles the animation of any property over time, in addition to providing extra functionality by including some of GSAP's utility plugins by default. The focus is on being full-featured rather than lightweight. TweenMax also includes all the timeline sequencing and controlling capabilities we’ll be using throughout this tutorial. GSAP can be configured to work with the selector engine of your choice – it will even fall back to document. querySelectorAll() if you prefer vanilla JavaScript. So, unlike many other animation libraries, it has zero dependencies. Now you're (hopefully) sold on GSAP's superpowers, let's put it to practice and see how easy it is to create animated banners with it. Prepping the assets For this tutorial, we'll be animating a (modified) banner originally designed by Freepik. The image below shows the four 'screens' of the banner. We'll be animating from one to another in order to create a complex overall animation. The four scenes making up the banner. Each of these screens will be animated sequentiallyBy default, all screens are visible inside the banner, stacked on top of each other. Using GSAP, the elements are hidden, then animated into view and out again so the elements on the following screen can animate in. We will be breaking the animation down into individual tweens, combined into timelines (one for each screen) that are then added into one master timeline for the whole banner. First, we need to include TweenMax in our page. We can load it from a CDN: Next, we set the visibility of the SVG to hidden. This is something you will find yourself doing often. Because the animations will only start after the script is loaded, doing this helps us avoid a short 'flash' of the banner assets before the animation starts. We will unhide the SVG again at the beginning of the script, right before we run the animations. GSAP's tweening methods To create a simple tween you can use one of GSAP's methods: from(), to() or fromTo(). An example of these being used to animate an element might look like this: The from() method basically tweens backwards – you define the beginning values (in the tween) and the current values are used as the destination values. This is great for doing things like animating objects onto the screen, because you can set them up the way you want them to look at the end of the tween, and then animate in from elsewhere. This is exactly what we are going to do for our banner screens. The to() method will animate the target element from its current state to the destination values you define. Hopefully, fromTo() is now self-explanatory. These methods are used to define a single tween (which might be animating multiple properties). These tweens can then be appended to one timeline so they execute sequentially: You can add as many tweens as you want and those tweens can be applied to one or more elements. The timeline will play these tweens in the order you specify. The more complex your animations, the more scenes they will include. Each scene would be a series of 'micro' animations (the tweens) that happen at some point along the main timeline. It is possible to have tweens overlap and play relative to each other's time. You can also combine timelines into one master timeline. This is achieved by using TimelineMax's add() method to literally add the timelines into the master timeline. These timelines can then be controlled just like individual tweens can. For our animated banner, we will create four different timelines (one for each screen), and then these four timelines will be combined into one master timeline: Each of the functions inside the add() method will be used to define and return a timeline, which makes this sequencing possible. The autoAlpha property is the same thing as opacity except that when the value hits 0, the visibility property will be set to hidden in order to improve browser rendering performance and prevent clicks or interactivity on the target. With the help of GSAP’s plugins, you can create impressive HTML text animations, like the GreenSock homepage bannerAnimating elements into view We want to animate the screens into view so that they appear as if they were initially off-canvas. We’ll be using GSAP's from() method to define where they will animate from. Let's start by slide-fading in the text from the left. First, we create and return a timeline inside the animateScreen1() function, then we add to it the tween that will animate the text into view. You need to make sure you give the elements you want to animate proper class names and/or IDs for reference. The text is animated in from a -100% position (which means it is translated to the left, outside the banner's visible area) and opacity value 0. We'll get to the easing function part later. Instead of translateX and translateY, GSAP uses x, y and xPercent and yPercent to apply a translation to an element. You can learn about the difference between them in this video tutorial from Petr Tichy or this blog post from GreenSock. Synchronising tweens We want to fade the world map into view at the same time the text animates in. This is possible by using 'labels' inside the timeline. A label defines a point in time when the animation will start, and can be used in multiple tweens inside the timeline in order to play those tweens at the same time. You can call the label anything you like. Here, we've chosen "first" because it's the first point in time, so to speak. GSAP's labels can also be relative: you can use a label that specifies when to start a tween relative to the preceding tween. For example, you could use a "+=1" label that indicates that the current tween (or timeline) should start animating one second after the preceding one finishes. Staggering animations If you want to apply the same animation to multiple elements in sequence, you can leverage GSAP's staggering functions. This saves you from writing multiple instances of the tween for all those different elements. In the first screen, there are two sets of icons: a monochrome set and a coloured set. Each set is a group (<g>) which in turn contains other groups, one for each icon's contents. We will use the staggerFrom() method to define a tween that will be applied to icons in each group. This method will 'pop' the icons in one after the other: The numerical value right before the label (here "second") is the stagger value. This indicates the amount of time in seconds by which to stagger the start of each tween. Specifying easing functions When the second screen is to be animated into view, the function responsible for that animation first needs to remove the elements of the previous screen. The second animation will be defined in the animateScreen2() function, and will use staggerTo() to animate the first screen's elements out: The easing function specified for the ease property (Power2.easeIn) is used to create more elasticity, thus adding to the overall fluid effect. GSAP comes with a big bunch of built-in easing functions. Learn all about them in the docs. The tl.delay(.5) part is there to delay the execution of the animation. The reason we're delaying it is to give the user some time to read the contents of the first scene before we get to the other. The banner would be useless if the animations stood in the way of the message being read. .add("first", "-=0.6") enables us to create overlap by tightening the time between the previous and following tween. Specifying SVG transform origins The code for the third screen looks similar to that of the previous screens, with the exception of a new property that is used to animate the clock's hour and minute hands: You can specify the transform origin of an SVG element using either a percentage value (relative to the element's bounding box) or an absolute value (relative to the entire SVG canvas). The latter is specified using the svgOrigin property. Sometimes it can be useful to use svgOrigin instead of transformOrigin. Since both clock hands were being animated relative to the same point on the canvas, I've specified the coordinates of that point as the transform origin for both of them. Using Bézier tweens In the last screen, we have a line of text that is divided into multiple <tspan> elements – one wrapping each word, and a call-to-action. The best we can do here is to animate the visibility of the words. That said, if you are creating an HTML5 banner that animates HTML text, you can create extremely impressive text animations using GSAP's plugins. GSAP's homepage banner (at the bottom of the facing page) is a great example of that. You can check its code out here. To create a wiggly effect for the call to action button, we want to rotate it to the left and right a few times in a row. Instead of using multiple rotation tweens, we can use the Bézier plugin to move the values through a certain set smoothly, thus avoiding the jerky effect that could result from individual tweens. Provide the bezier object with an array of values and it will animate through them smoothly. Could it get any simpler? Summing up GSAP's powers really shine when you start creating sequenced, complex animations. All its sequencing and time control features make it an indispensable tool in our animation toolkit today. So go ahead, take GreenSock for a ride and propel your animation powers to the next level. Here's the finished animated banner on Codepen. This article was originally published in issue 273 of net magazine. See Chris Gannon live at Generate London and get an exclusive insight into his work Do you want to find out more about SVG animations and GSAP? Interactive SVG specialist Chris Gannon will present a deep dive into the GreenSock Animation Platform at Generate London on 21/22 September, a two-day/one-track conference also featuring Anton & Irene, Aaron Gustafson, Léonie Watson, Steve Fisher and many more great speakers. Book your ticket today! Related articles: Create storyboards for web animations 15 awesome email newsletter designs Master user experience strategy View the full article

Apple recently announced that it would be releasing two new versions of its iPad Pro that have the potential to transform the device into a true pro tool. The added features, bumped up specs and all new screen could even make this device a viable replacement for the MacBook Pro or other cumbersome laptops. The new iPad Pro could easily allow you to work away from your desk or even remotely, thanks to its smaller footprint. However, working away from the office poses an increased security risk as you will often be connecting to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks. By using a VPN to connect to the internet, you can better protect yourself online while working on the move, and the added security benefits of using such a service will ensure that your projects and your privacy remain safe from potential threats. Most VPN service providers offer services globally and thus charge in US Dollars rather than in local currencies, so we've listed pricing in Dollars for the sake of simplicity. When you click through to the actual deals, you may find the prices automatically displayed in pounds, or whatever your native currency may be. These are some of the best deals we found for staying safe online on the go: 1. IVPN – Great performance for $99.96 per year This VPN is a great choice for desktop users who value speed above all else. IVPN offers quality clients for both Windows and Mac and the company also provides detailed instructions for users who want to get the service up and running on Linux or mobile. The company truly values user privacy and it has a clear ‘no logs’ policy, as well as the option to sign up using minimal personal details. There is even an option to pay via Bitcoin for users who wish to remain truly anonymous. New customers can try out this VPN for free as IVPN offers a three-day free trial. 2. IPVanish – From $58.49 per year IPVanish has 700 servers across more than 60 locations and there are over 40,000 shared IP addresses available to its users. This VPN has excellent download speeds, which is useful for taking advantage of the company’s unlimited P2P traffic and support for five simultaneous connections. IPVanish keeps no logs on your browsing or download data, giving you total privacy. The company also offers new customers a seven-day money back guarantee if you are unhappy with the service. 3. ExpressVPN – 12 months from only $99.95 Setting up ExpressVPN is a breeze thanks to the numerous web-based tutorials the company provides on its site. This VPN supports both desktop and mobile with native clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and even BlackBerry. ExpressVPN has over 1,000 servers across 136 locations, and three connections can be used simultaneously. The service also has full P2P support, a kill switch to keep your IP concealed in the event that the VPN goes down, and solid performance across the board. A ‘no hassle’ 30-day money back guarantee is available for new ExpressVPN customers. Check out the best VPN services of 2017View the full article

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/06/14/news-in-brief-hollywood-fights-piracy-covfefe-not-a-typo/ … View the full article

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/06/13/news-in-brief-update-flash-now-heartbleed-fine-the-1-9m-email/ … View the full article

Mozilla fixed 32 vulnerabilities, including a critical bug that could have resulted in a crash, with the release Tuesday of Firefox 54, the latest version of its flagship browser. View the full article

DHS and the FBI warned that North Korean attackers are targeting U.S. businesses with malware- and botnet-related attacks that are part of concerted effort dubbed "Hidden Cobra." View the full article

Wireframes are dead! Interactive prototypes are everything! We’ve heard these shouts for at least the past seven years. If the popularity of these discussions proves anything, it’s that the opposite is true. The mere fact that we continue to discuss the alleged death of wireframing proves that wireframing continues to suit at least some projects and some designers. So how has wireframing survived? It continues to evolve. Long gone are the days of black on white wires built in Microsoft Visio or Excel Spreadsheets (yes, I worked with PMs who used to place wireframes in spreadsheets). The evolution of wireframes Today’s wireframing has been split into multiple techniques that serve the different purposes, projects or preferences of designers. Lightweight interactive wireframes Some designers like to gather early feedback with lightweight interactive wireframes (take a look at The Guide to Interactive Wireframing). Interactive wireframes are design deliverables that represent the high-level architecture and the most basic interactivity. Created in the span of hours instead of days, they help with user testing and getting early buy-in from stakeholders. Interactive wireframes might be destroyed soon after their creation, or evolve into a completely different asset that is part of the overall concept. Content wireframing a video app Content wireframes Another version is a content wireframe (see the Content Wireframing for Responsive Design guide). This static form serves as a structure that is used to plan content and information architecture before investing time and money into the rest of the interface design. This technique works well for content-heavy websites, which need a careful content strategy, before we designers get all creative with their form and beautiful looks. After all, content is king. Microframes Finally, there are wireframes that have evolved to be even lower fidelity. In this form the wireframe is minimised, text is replaced by geometric shapes and every piece of the interface is simplified as much as possible. That’s my favourite new form of wireframing. What microframes are Microframes, or micro-wireframes, are miniaturised versions of wireframes. Microframes amplify the benefits of wireframing and eliminate most of the shortcomings. Their benefits include speed, clarity of communication and lack of confusion. Microframes are as fast as sketching, but let you easily iterate on your work and immediately share the results with anybody, despite the location. They clearly communicate plans and requirements and let designers iterate together with a customer towards the common vision, without over-investing in disposable assets, and they cannot be confused with the final product because their form is drastically minimised. Microframes offer minimum effort and maximum speedMicroframes are also extremely flexible. They can be used on their own, as part of a user journey chart, documentation or even as part of a project roadmap. They serve as a cheap illustration and a tool to enhance design thinking. And guess what? You’ve been microframing for years – you were just doing it on a whiteboard. Microframes are digitised versions of the whiteboard sketches that designers use all the time when brainstorming with colleagues and clients. Unlike your whiteboard drawings, though, microframes are easy to share and optimised for speed and reusability. Get started with microframing Microframing is very intuitive. If you try to fit your ideas into a 200px x 300px container, the microframe will naturally come to life. To increase readability, consider the following: Avoid text: Replace text by blocks symbolising different levels of typographic hierarchy Use colours to represent different pieces of the interface: Separate CTAs, navigation links and blocks of text by assigning each a different background colour (preferably shades of grey) Add icons to remove confusion: Icons can clarify elements that can be easily confused with others – for example, the classic landscape icon could be used to indicate an image Skip details: You’ll have plenty of time to add them later once the concept is crystallised for higher levels of fidelity Once your basic drawings are ready, think about what needs to be added to enhance their communication value. A text description? Flows? There are no rules here. Whatever serves the purpose is good. An example of the microframe documentation used for the UXPin site redesign Microframing design language To optimise your microframing process for speed and reusability you have to create your micro design language. Think about a convention that works for you and recipients of your work, then document it. A glimpse of the microframing process while playing around with design systems libraries and symbols in UXPinJust like with a full-sized design, you should start with the foundation and gradually move to higher-level structures (if you’re interested in building a full-scale design system – I’m sharing my experience in this series of posts). Take all your text blocks and tiny patterns and turn them into symbols, nest them in your microframes and turn those into symbols as well. So is wireframing dead? Definitely not. Wireframing won’t die as long as we need ways to quickly create and share digital sketches. Creating micro-wireframes only enhances the communication and creativity of the team, without sacrificing the speed of the process. We’ve recently really fallen in love with this little deliverable. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful too. For more wireframing best practices, download UXPin’s free 100+ page Guide to Wireframing. Related articles: The 20 best wireframe tools All you need to know about mockups, wireframes, and prototypes 10 top prototyping tools View the full article

Have you started using the Flexible Box Layout module in your projects yet? Although the module has been around for some time, there have been two major barriers stopping frontend developers from using it in their projects. First, until recently the spec was in flux and there wasn't great support for it. Today, all modern browsers support Flexbox. The second barrier is that it is pretty tough to grasp the concept of Flexbox. While it is super-powerful, there are a lot of moving parts and it can be difficult to learn. But the ability to arrange page elements, and have them behave in a predictable way, across multiple screen sizes, is well worth the effort. Want to get started with flexbox? Read on!In this article, I will get you up and running with the fundamental concepts behind flexbox. Understanding these core concepts will open up a whole world of extremely flexible, easy to create layouts (especially for responsive web design). Next-generation design Flexbox is a next-generation tool to help you create layouts with CSS; whether you want to lay out a section of your website or display a grid of media elements. It enables you to easily align, centre, justify, scale and reorder elements on your page, without having to resort to nasty CSS hacks or fragile JavaScript dependencies. Flexbox can replace floats, positioning tricks, inline-block layouts and even – shudder – table display layouts. If you have ever pulled your hair out wondering why some seemingly simple layouts were difficult or even impossible in CSS, you are going to love Flexbox. Flex elements The magic of Flexbox is in the relationship between the parent 'flex container' and the children 'flex items'. In order to take full control of Flexbox, you must put aside any previous ideas of floats, positioning and clearing. This is a totally new way of laying out your page. Setting display:flex; on a parent element turns it into a flex container, and all of its immediate children will be turned into flex items. Once you have your markup set up, you can use one of the many available flex properties to create a layout. Note: any of the HTML elements can be a flex container or flex item. Any :before and :after pseudo-elements you have on your flex container will be treated as children, and therefore first-class flex items. Rows and columns The default flex-direction set to rowThere are two axes in Flexbox that control how the flex items on the page are laid out: the main axis and the cross axis. By default, Flexbox is set up so the main axis goes from left-to-right (or the opposite, for languages that read right-to-left) and the cross axis flows top-to-bottom (shown above). Before you go memorising that, note that this can – and will – all change with the flex-direction property. The main axis flipped with flex-direction:row-reverse;By default, Flexbox is set up with flex-direction: row; which means the items flow on the main axis from left-to-right, in a row. We can switch the main axis so it flows from right-to-left by using flex-direction:row-reverse (as shown above). The main axis switched from horizontal to vertical with flex-direction:column;To switch both the main axis and the cross axis, we change the layout to flex-direction:column;. This will alter the main axis and flex item flow from left-to-right to top-to-bottom, in a column (above). We can also start from the bottom and move up by flipping the main axis with flex-direction:column-reverse. Centring items One of the best things about Flexbox is that it allows you to align your content in any way you please – even vertical centring is an absolute breeze! There is often confusion surrounding Flexbox alignment, because there are three different properties that we use to modify the alignment of our flex items. One reason for this is that these properties align the items along the main and the cross axis. So instead of asking, 'how do I centre something vertically or horizontally?' you must first establish which direction your axes are pointed, and then figure out which CSS property to use to properly align and centre your flex items on them. In the next few examples, I'll be attempting to perfectly centre my items. However, you should know that each of these properties has a number of alignment options. For a full list, I recommend keeping this CSS-Tricks flexbox reference handy. The cross axis align-items:center; will centre our items along the cross axis, which in our case is top-to-bottomBy default, flex items stretch across the entire flex container along the cross axis. If we want to centre items along the cross axis, we can use the align-items property on our flex container and set it to center (shown above). In addition to stretch and center, we can also use flex-start and flex-end to anchor the items at the top and bottom respectively. Finally, we have baseline, which will align the items along the bottom (or baseline) of your text. This is extremely helpful when you are trying to align items with varying font sizes. Justifying along the main axis Justify-content:center; will centre our items along the main axisNow we have the centring working along the cross axis – top to bottom in our case – we need to get centring working across the main axis. For this, we use justify-content:center (shown above). Just like with align-items, we can also use flex-start or flex-end, as well as space-between and space-around, which will evenly divvy up the remaining space between the elements. This is super-useful when working with grid layouts that don't add up to 100 per cent of the margin and widths. Just remember, if we switch from the default flex-direction:row; to flex-direction:column;, the main axis can change from left-to-right to top-to-bottom. When we switch to column, align-items becomes the horizontal alignment while justify-content becomes the vertical alignment. Aligning multiple lines While align-items and justify-content work great when you have a single row or column of content, things get a little trickier when you're dealing with multiple lines of content as a result of using flex-wrap:wrap; on the flex container. align-content works just like justify-content, but kicks in when we have multiple lines of content. By applying align-content:center; we can ensure that the lines will anchor in the middle of the cross axis and centre their elements from there. Just like with justify-content, we can also use flex-start, flex-end, space-between and space-around. However, this time they refer to the space in-between the rows or columns of content, and not the flex items themselves. Now, with just four lines of CSS, we have a bulletproof way of vertically and horizontally centring all direct children of a flex container. Filling the space So far, everything we have learned about alignment has to do with the flex container and how it aligns its children. With align-self it is possible to override the align-items property set on the flex container by individually setting align-self to flex-start, flex-end, center, baseline or stretch. Another often misunderstood part of flexbox is how to work with grow, shrink and basis values. It's helpful to once again throw away any ideas of pixel-perfect grids and embrace that flexbox is, well, flexible. Each flex item can be assigned a flex-grow, flex-shrink and a flex-basis value. With these values we can indicate our ideal sizes, and then specify how the items should act in situations where there is extra, or not enough, space. From there, the items will just figure it out for themselves. I like to think of these properties as: flex-grow: How do I act when there is extra space available? How will the flex items divvy up the remaining space? flex-shrink: How do I act when there isn't enough room for all the flex items? Rather than overflow the container, who will give up part of themselves to make everything fit? flex-basis: Instead of setting a definite width or a height on your element, ideally what width (as a row) or height (as a column) will it be? Note that while it is possible to specify these properties individually, you will almost always be using the flex shorthand to specify the grow, shrink and basis values all at once. Check the videos at Flexbox.io for a more detailed description of the flex shorthand property. Growing and shrinking The idea is that we can set our ideal width or height with the basis value, and then when there is extra space available for the flex items, the flex-grow property will decide how much extra to take up. Similarly, when there is not enough space available, the shrink property will decide how much each element will give up (or 'shrink'). The flex-grow and flex-shrink properties are unitless, proportional values. They describe how much – in relation to all the other flex items – the item will grow or shrink. Let's say we have two flex items: video and credits. We will set the video to flex:1 1 700px; and the credits to flex:3 3 300px;. Now the parent of both of these items is the flex container, and when it is 1000px wide things work out perfectly: the video takes up its 700px and the credits take up the other 300px. What happens when the flex container is 1500px wide? We have an extra 500px to work with, so where does that go? That is where flex-grow kicks in. The video is set to 1 while credits is set to 3. That means of all the extra room, credits will take three times (375px) the amount of space the video will get (125px). Similarity, what happens when our flex container is smaller than 1000px? Let's say it's 900px: how do the video and the credits act then? Unlike with floats, we don't just break onto a new line, or scale them down with percentages. Instead, we use the flex-shrink property. Since the credits have a flex-shrink of 3 and the video has a flex-shrink of 1, this means the credits will give up three times as much space as the video. So since we need to shave off 100px from somewhere, the credits will give up 75px, while the video container will only give up 25px. Unknown navigation size Let's look at some common use cases of flexbox. If you have ever worked with a navigation in a CMS like WordPress, you'll know that it can be hard to predict how many elements will be included in your navigation. Evenly distributing the space between all the elements requires JavaScript. For example if you have three elements, each one should be take up 33.33 per cent of the width, while with five elements each one should take up 20 per cent. Let's take a look at this commonly seen code as an example: With flexbox, we can easily create this navigation, and even make it responsive, all with just a few lines of CSS. All we need to do is to set our navigation container (usually an unordered list of items) to display:flex, and then each of the flex items to flex:1 or flex-grow:1;. This will stretch the list items horizontally and fit them perfectly into the available width. The reason this works so nicely is that we set the flex items to grow 1, which means that when there is extra space left over, it will be divvied up evenly between all the items. For more on this, and to learn how to size your navigation elements differently, make sure to watch the responsive navigation tutorial available on Flexbox.io. Equal-height columns align-items:center; will centre our items along the cross axis, which in our case is top-to-bottomHave you ever wished that CSS had a height:as-high-as-the-highest-sibling property? We have all been there – we have three columns of content, all of which are different sizes (above). The content is dynamic and the site is responsive, so setting a fixed height on each one is out of the question, and a JavaScript fix isn't ideal. Earlier we learned that the default of align-items is stretch. This means the flex items will stretch to fit the parent flex container. And how is the height of the flex container defined? Almost always by the height of the tallest content box. Let's take the following markup, for example. If we render this out with floats and percentage widths, we will see the container is sized by the middle element and the other two are only as high as they need to be. With flexbox, boxes stretch to fit the flex container and all become equal heightNow, if we simply use display:flex; on the flex container, and set each element to be 33.33 per cent with the flex-basis property, immediately the flex items stretch across the entire cross axis, regardless of how much content is in them (see image above). Conclusion I hope by now you see the value in learning how to use the Flexible Box module. While it won't solve every issue you have with CSS, it's an important tool every designer and developer should know, and have in their arsenal. It has been a while since we have had anything this large come to CSS, and I'd argue it's one of the tougher parts of CSS to learn. Just remember that you pushed though learning floats, so Flexbox is totally something you can master! Must-have resources What the Flexbox?! 'What the Flexbox?!' is a free 20-video training course I've created. In the first half of the course, each video introduces a new aspect of Flexbox. I've kept these nice and short, so you can reference them later when you need to brush up on a particular part. The second half of the course dives into a real-world example, detailing how we can use Flexbox to quickly and easily solve many of the common layout problems we face. A complete guide to Flexbox Once you get the hang of Flexbox, you can put the training materials aside. However, it's helpful to keep a visual reference handy. This fantastic resource from Chris Coyier breaks down each of the 13 different Flexbox properties, showing which apply to the flex container and which apply directly to the flex items. Flexbugs Flexbox is not without fault, and like anything, there are a handful of cross-browser bugs and workarounds you should know about. Flexbugs outlines a range of known Flexbox bugs as well as offering possible fixes and workarounds. Flexbox in 5 minutes For a quick'n'easy introduction to the fundamentals of Flexbox, check out 'Flexbox in 5 minutes'. It's a step-by-step wizard that will guide you through how to create, style and change your first Flexbox-based layout. View the full article

This is heading directly into geek territory. But we are self-confessed geeks, particularly when it comes to logo design and typography. And that leads us to the meticulously regulated world of brand style manuals... A style manual, or style guide, is a set of standards for the design of documents, signage, and any other form of other brand identifier. The reason for their existence is to ensure complete uniformity in style and formatting wherever the brand is used. We've gathered 13 of the best to inspire you when you create your own brand style guide... 01. Urban Outfitters Urban Outfitters changes its logo often but has strict rules about its displayThe average branch might look as though a bunch of squatters decided to hold a jumble sale in a derelict factory, but hipster bazaar Urban Outfitters takes its visual identity very seriously, as a quick flick through its brandbook will reveal. The 42-page guide covers everything from Urban Outfitters' history and philosophy through to logo usage, typography, photography methodology and guidelines on the tone of voice to be used in communications. 02. I Love New York We're sure Milton Glaser approves of these cute treatmentsMilton Glaser's I Love New York logo is a wonderfully simple and iconic piece of design, so you might not expect there to be a 50-page set of brand guidelines attached to it. However there's more to I Love New York than Milton Glaser's logo; that's just the most memorable aspect of a campaign launched in 1977 and refreshed in 2008. The scrupulously detailed brand guidelines cover all the bases for a campaign that represents the whole state of New York and not just New York City; there's a mission statement and brand pyramid, consistency and typography guidelines, plus a whole load of thematic logo treatments and logo usage guidelines to follow. 03. NASA This beautiful reissue is available to buy nowThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Graphics Standards Manual was created by Danne & Blackburn in 1974 when NASA changed from its original crest-based logo to the 'worm' logotype that we are now familar with. The manual has recently been revived thanks to a Kickstarter campaign to fund its reissue. Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth's glorious new 220-page version of the case-bound NASA document comes with 'static shielding' packaging and can be purchased over at standardsmanual.com. 04. British Rail The British Rail style guide dates back to the 1960sCertain members of the Creative Bloq team have spent hours poring over the British Rail corporate identity manual (okay, it's me) and it is easy to see why. Epic levels of obsessive behaviour abound in the guide, which dates back to 1965, and some of the pictograms are a delight. Want to own your own copy? You're in luck; after a successful Kickstarter campaign, designer Wallace Henning has created a high-specification recreation of the original manual that you can order now; find out more here. 05. Channel 4 The Channel 4 style guide is simple, clean and uncluttered for ease of useChannel 4's comprehensive style guide leaves no room for confusion on how its brand is used. The guide is 46 pages long, each of which is clean and clear, stating a single guideline per page, often accompanied by a graphic for visual reference. 06. Skype The Skype style guide lets illustration do all the talkingThe Skype style guide is brilliant for many reasons - its pages of cool illustrations being one of them. The communication network hasn't filled its guide with pages of industry jargon, it simply employs easy-to-understand explanations and graphics to get its point across. 07. Apple The Apple style guide is made up of 48 pages detailing exactly how the company's branding is to be usedOne of the biggest companies in the world, Apple has a comprehensive style guide detailing how its branding is to be used. Clean, clear and concise, this 48-page guide explains exactly how to use Apple assets - even where to apply stickers to your Smart car. 08. Adobe Adobe's style guide goes into great detail about how you can use the branding, with some strict rulesAdobe is one of the design industry's strongest brands, and protecting that cast-iron integrity is this style document. So beware - do not use the red tag logo, it is for Adobe use only. (We do love it when you're forceful, Adobe!) 09. New York City Transit Authority The images of the New York City underground standards manual are a frustrating joyWe love this collection of photos of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, designed by Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International, which feature a font that looks very much like Helvetica and some great pictograms. 10. Barbican The Barbican has ultra-specific instructions for the use of its circle logoThe Barbican theatre's identity "is not just a logo. It is a design scheme composed of a number of core elements that come together to create a distinctive look and feel that makes the Barbican brand instantly recognisable". Which is why this guide is so important. Having said that, the Barbican allows a degree of creative flexibility for designers tasked with using its identity, and takes you through exactly how to achieve that. Which is nice. 11. Firefox The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox style guide will keep your fox facing the right wayMozilla has this handy description of an erroneously utilised Firefox logo: "Think of these as the equivalent of wearing your shoes on the wrong feet: they’re still shoes, they’re basically where they’re supposed to be, but it just feels wrong." This style guide will ensure you know your left from your right. 12. Macmillan Macmillan's document focuses on the charity's brand values as well as styleCancer charity Macmillan's 67-page document is comprehensive, containing identity design rules for everything from signage to infographics, plus how to use the brand's familiar green colours and which photos are best used as the image silhouettes you'll find in the charity's marketing material. 13. Boy Scouts of America No surprise that the Boy Scouts of America style document has strict guidelines for badge designDib dib dib! The quickest way to achieve your logo design badge is to follow the Boy Scouts of America's mildly militaristic manual. Just don't think of writing the scouts' tagline "Prepared. For. Life." without those all-important full-stops... Related articles: 10 commandments of logo design How to create a design style guide: 25 pro tips Speed up your web workflow with style guides View the full article

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/06/14/is-it-time-for-cash-for-medical-clunkers/ … View the full article

There's no bad time to start learning how to code. It might feel like you have some catching up to do, but it'll be easy to get up to speed with the Coding Powerhouse eBook Bundle. You can get it on sale right now for 91% off the retail price. Coding languages can look intimidating at first glance if you aren't familiar with them, but you can master them as you work your way through the Coding Powerhouse eBook Bundle. This collection of nine reference guides written by experts will teach you how to start speaking the languages of app and web development, from Java and Python to Swift 3. No matter what you want to build, this bundle has a course that can help. The Coding Powerhouse eBook Bundle is valued at $324, but you can get it on sale now for 91% off the retail price. That's a saving you can't pass up if you want to up your developer skills, so grab this deal today! View the full article

In its annual National Exposure Index report, Rapid7 found 160 million computers, IoT devices and servers with open ports that should not be exposed to the public network. View the full article

Microsoft released patches on Tuesday for unsupported versions of Windows, a decision prompted by three NSA exploits that remained unaddressed from April’s ShadowBrokers leak. View the full article

The main task of a visual development environment artist working in animation is to conceptualise, design and execute a believable world for characters to live in. But the success of these environment concepts doesn't rely solely on the drafting skill level of the artist – it's the whole package that makes the final product work effectively. Visual development is simply the visual evolution from an idea to the final product. So it's crucial that the structural makeup of the artworks in development occur in this order: concept, design, technique. To think technique is the key to the success of the artwork is totally missing the mark. Here are my key tips that point towards a successful process in creating strong concepts and compositions for animation. 01. Concept art = Concept + Art Here the main character is a design need; the secondary one is a design wantConcept art is not just about the epic, or its beautiful execution. It's artwork that grows out of a design process, well rooted in an idea that supports the story. The priority of concept can be identified thus: needs and wants. What the story needs has to be conceptualised first. The artist then provide his design wants that focus and support the story. So in the image above, the need for this image is to design an Asian fairy and her magical environment. A second character is a design want, to exemplify the scale and dimension. The design choice of the secondary character creates a relational affinity and familiarity between the two. 02. Dynamic research Sketch while doing your research so you don't drown in reference materialResearch breeds authenticity in the design evolution, from concept to the final product. Similar to the old adage about knowing the rules first before one can break them, I have to learn what's real before I can design, or redesign, an object or environment. Research gives a vision of functionality. What makes it dynamic is when I start sketching and creating thumbnails while doing research. This keeps me from getting bogged down in reference material. I trust my artistic instincts when I hit a design target from reference materials, and I stop looking for more and start sketching. My approach towards design improved by doing this. 03. Think inside before outside the box An inside- and outside-the-box retelling of the Titanic storyAs visual development artists and concept designers, we're always told to think outside the box. But I believe this is only possible if the designer knows what's inside the box. And not only to know what's inside, but also understand how those objects inside the box work. I've learned over the years not to go outside the box if what's inside it still works. At the end of the day, it's how the story/idea could be told more effectively that influences your design choices, not whether it's a safe or 'out there' idea. These quick sketches give me two spring boards on retelling the story of the Titanic. The first image is the inside-the-box translation, with a literal narrative of its present underwater situation. Alternatively, I can go for the outside-the-box option by creating a juxtaposed imagery of its supposed description and its present-day situation, encapsulated in a classic ship-in-a-bottle setting. 04. Design loosely Design with your arm but draw with your wristOne key discipline I've learned over the years is to design with my arm and draw with my wrist. There's a dynamic balance of freedom and control in my wrist, and a dynamic balance of freedom and control in finding the right design language when the arm is moving loosely. When I become lazy and miss the arm out, the artwork tends to be static and lifeless. These images are from a 90-minute demo process in a live workshop. The 18x24-inch canvas gave me a good amount of arm flexibility. Then I took a hi-res iPhone photo and transferred the file into Photoshop for value and colour. 05. Understanding composition Perspective, staging and value are key to good compositionGetting to grips with composition is vital to the structural strength of design. Composition is not just a standalone term that simply describes an arrangement of forms and shapes. Instead, realise that composition is perspective, value, staging and colour arranged harmoniously, to tell the story or idea more efficiently. Perspective is the placement of the camera and what type of lens is being used. Value translates the application of lighting. Staging is the arrangement of different elements in the canvas using the combination of shapes, sizes and overlaps, creating depth, dimension and balance. Colour is the harmony of palettes and temperatures. 06. Visual aesthetics using perspective A high-angle shot suggests invincibility, strength, confidence and leadership, an eye-level shot gives a perception of normality, neutrality, and is relatable, and a low-angle shot suggests vulnerability, weakness, danger and loneliness.Perspective has a strong psychological effect on viewers' perception. Below, various camera placements of the same subject and environment give different viewer perceptions. The viewpoint is the audience's eyes. 07. The application of visual aesthetics My original idea for this image was to place the male subject at the same distance from the camera, but staged right below the lady on the bridge. Yet this gave the impression he'd already reached his destination. So instead I moved him just a little bit to the left. It gave a hint that he's not completed his journey, but he's about to reach his destination very soon. It also helped to create a perception of movement in the painting.Visual aesthetics is the study of how compositional elements (value, perspective, staging and colour) interact and the audience's reactions to them. It's not enough to understand composition and expect to be effective visual storytellers. Rather, it's important to understand perception – how the audience reacts to composition. Improper use of composition will result in an audience's selective perception. Selective perception results in selective context. And selective context means the audience will have different interpretations of the story/idea. With the proper use of visual aesthetics, the compositional choices become intentional and directional towards intended perception. When the artist controls selective seeing, the visual message becomes subjective. Subjective means controlled perception. Controlled perception results in controlled context, and this means the audience will have a singular interpretation of the story idea. 08. Visual aesthetics using value Your value composition will determine the success of your colour compositionValue is the lightness or darkness of a colour. Every colour has a corresponding value and that lightness or darkness depends on the amount of lighting applied to the colour. The three important rules of value are: It controls focal points – usually the brightest area, the highest contrast, or when a predominant value encloses an opposite value; Value gives the illusion of three-dimensional form, when it shows the surface being hit by light and the surface under the shadows; Value creates the illusion of depth (altering the range of dark and light creates distance). The perception of mood or emotion of the story being told in the canvas is established by the applied lighting translated into values. The success of colour composition depends on the value composition. Next page: more concept tips 09. Visual aesthetics using staging Group and overlap shapes to infer cohesion in your compositionCombining different shapes and sizes together in a shot creates the perception of intensity. Intentional overlap in images also develops cohesion and relationships among characters and environment. The higher the contrast between sizes should result in greater intensity. The same goes with shapes. 10. Why the readability of shapes and form is key Make sure your shapes are readable by checking that they work as silhouettesFrom the overall form to the least visible prop, every shape has to be readable. Even in a busy setup, the effectiveness of information is not dependent on the details, but the readability of shapes. Even if those shapes were stripped of details to the point of silhouette, they will still be easily identifiable. World War II pilots were trained to identify specific enemy ships at sea by reading their silhouettes. So I would say your designs must be exaggerated and simplified, with clear silhouettes working harmoniously. 11. Balance in a scene The example above is balanced, with the closer tram on the left equalled by the lamp post and more-distant tramImagine the subject as the pivot of a horizontal lever. Now remember, all other elements that will be drawn on the canvas will have "weights" that are based on their shapes, sizes and value. Balance will be attained if these elements are staged on both sides of the pivot, without having the lever tilt on either side. 12. Less is more Simplify details to leave room for the viewer's imaginationIn designing what's supposed to be repetitive patterns, such as bricks on a wall, or organic patterns like rough textures on rocks, always apply the economy of lines and simplify without the compromise of information. This can be done through the less-is-more approach. This is either the simplification or purposeful removal of details on some sections. By doing this, the designer leaves room for the viewer's imagination to fill in the missing details. 13. Don't become dependent on photos and texture brushes Hand-drawn textures will give your work extra charmThis tip doesn't intend, in any way, to look down or undermine the direct use of photos in the digital painting process. If it's needed in production, then go for it. But the heavy reliance and dependency on photos should not become a designer's priority. Your goal is to learn how to create simplified textural patterns and concentrate on the design essentials first and foremost. There's a charm added when hand-drawn textures are applied. 14. Adding some history and story The statues indicate that penguins inhabit this islandResearch plays a big part in this process. The believability of a world doesn't come from a literal application of a photo. The designer has to find a way to design the history and story of an environment that personifies and supports the personalities in it. So in the image above, we're creating island that's inhabited by penguins. Just designing from a photo wouldn't be convincing – what makes it believable is applied history and story. Adding the two penguin monuments made sense in establishing the penguin world. 15. Lasso painting This is the technique I use when I'm pressed for time. I coined the name from the Lasso selection tool in Photoshop. Its simplicity and ease of use enable me to drop the values, carry out speedy colourisation and paint over highlighted surfaces. With practise, this process is very effective for a quick turnaround of art. At this point the heavy lifting has been done and all I need to do is a bit more painting over the image to create a refined, final version if needed. Thumbnail and line work I create a very quick thumbnail idea for composition and direction, then lay down the line work. The column and the character are on two separate layers. Then I drop and separate the local values using the Lasso tool. I also use a little bit of Airbrush to soften the edges. Duplicating the layer Next I duplicate the desired layer to be colourised, then select it. I pick the desired brush and then from the Brush Mode drop-down menu, I select Color (and I make sure to bring it back to Normal mode after this step). Keeping lighting consistent Using the Lasso tool, I select the cast shadowed surfaces. I soften the mask for the columns but keep it sharp on the character. Consistency in lighting is the key for this step. I create separate new layers for shadowed and highlighted surfaces and I increase the cool tone, then darken the layer with the shadowed surface. I increase the warm tones and contrast on the layer using highlighted surfaces. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 145; buy it here! Related articles: Just what is concept art? 4 steps to creating concept art with extra depth 15 concept art skills to power up your illustration View the full article

VR is fast becoming the hot topic in a lot of industries, no less our own, as we discover how to utilise this tool to actually stand in worlds you can create yourself. This issue 3D World has a huge 14-page guide to how virtual reality is sparking innovative projects in games, animation and design. There's also the best VFX secrets behind Transformers: The Last Knight and the challenges MPC faced when unleashing a more organic-looking Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. There are some amazing tips and techniques to be found this issue, including working with fur to create amazing creatures, making an explosion using FumeFX and how to make convincing CG fabric in just 12 steps. Subscribe to 3D World today Readers can dig into a fantastic video course from Pluralsite on Designing Motion Controller Experiences in Unreal. In this great video series you’ll learn how to set up a VR character with motion controllers, interact with objects and create a teleport system. Also in 3D World 223… Arnold 5 and the Stardust plug-in for After Effects reviewed The new features of Unreal Engine 4.16 revealed Explore Element 3D with a look at the development of Valley of the Kith We explore how game graphics are quickly catching up with film See the best art from around the CG community View the full article

How do slow-performing web applications impact user experience for people with disabilities? Are there aspects of the web rendering process that create barriers when you’re relying on a screen reader? In this talk from Generate New York earlier this year, Marcy Sutton takes a look at web performance through an accessibility lens, and discusses how, by studying the limitations of browsers with assistive technologies and establishing developer best practices, we can we make faster, more accessible experiences for our users. If you want to maximise your reach then both performance and accessibility should be on your agenda, and Marcy's talk will arm your for upping your game on this score, as she looks at progressive enhancement in detail with server- and client-rendered apps built with Angular 2, React or Ember FastBoot, and always remembering our good accessibility friend: static HTML. For more essential performance advice, head to Generate London on 20-22 September, when Patrick Hamann will discuss his latest performance research. Léonie Watson, meanwhile, will explain how JavaScript and accessibility can work together, looking at accessibility mechanics in the browser as well as the new Accessibility Object Model (AOM) JavaScript API. At her talk at Generate London Léonie Watson will explain how to use JavaScript so you only blow the bloody doors off There's plenty more to discover at Generate London, including talks Aaron Gustafson, Seb Lee-Delisle, Ally Long and Jaime Levy, so don't miss out and get your ticket today! View the full article