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The fifth annual conference for web designers and frontend developers is brought to you by net magazine, Creative Bloq and Web Designer. Featuring 16 fantastic speakers, it covers web animation, IA, JavaScript, performance, CSS, UX, content strategy, diversity, and much more. If you work in web design or development then you'll want to attend Generate NYC on 25-27 April 2018, for lots of good reasons, and here are 10 of them. 01. There's a top line-up of 16 speakers We've gathered together some of the biggest names in web design for Generate NYC 2018 to share their knowledge and inspire you to create better work than ever before. Our stellar line-up includes Donna Lichaw, Dan Mall, Wes Bos, Val Head, Cynthia Saucier, Jenn Lukas, Abby Covert, and nine other great speakers. Check out the whole lot. 02. It's in a new venue Generate NYC has moved home! The conference will take place at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattans desirable Chelsea neighbourhood. A beautiful open space, close to subway lines and hotels, this is the perfect venue for our fifth Generate in NYC! Check out their site for hotel deals. Generate NYC has moved to the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattans desirable Chelsea neighbourhood 03. You'll learn about tomorrow's trends today Things move pretty fast in the web business, and whether you're in web design or frontend development you need to be up to speed on the latest web trends. Over three days, 4 workshops and 16 sessions you'll learn about web animation, IA, JavaScript, performance, CSS, UX, content strategy, diversity, and much more besides. The event will also give you an inspiration boost. If you're running low on creative energy it can be easy to let your work become mundane. Attending events like Generate puts you in a room with energised, vibrant people who will remind you why the web is amazing and give you new perspectives from which to view your contribution. 04. You won't miss a thing Ever found yourself torn between two equally appealing conference sessions happening at the same time? That's not a problem at Generate NYC, as for the first time it's a single-track programme, which means you'll be able to attend all the sessions without missing out on anything. Also, videos and slide decks of all the sessions will be made available to attendees after the event, so you can dig deeper and don't have to spend ages taking notes. You can then even share them with the rest of your team. In fact, sharing what you've learnt is positively encouraged! Up your skills and get ahead of the game; book your Generate ticket today! 05. Enjoy a whole day of workshops As well as two days of inspiring and practical talks, Generate NYC also features an entire day of in-depth workshops. On 25 April, you can learn new skills from the best in the business. There are four workshops to choose from; you can learn information architecture for everybody with Abby Covert, get an intro to React JS with Wes Bos, learn essential web animation techniques with Val Head, and modern front-end performance strategies and techniques with Jason Lengstorf Learn information architecture for everybody with Abby Covert 06. It's a great networking opportunity As well as a lineup of quality speakers, Generate NYC also offers a great opportunity to forge new contacts among the other attendees. Whether it's during one of the session breaks, or later on at the post-conference happy hour, it's the perfect chance to meet other web professionals and expand your network. 07. You will stay ahead of the competition If you're not offering up-to-date services then you can be sure that potential clients will seek out other studios and agencies that do. Generate NYC is the perfect place to boost your skillset and get insight into where you should be focusing your efforts for the future. If you're not there then you can be sure that your competitors will be. Don't get left behind; book today! 08. There's a goodie bag and lunch Attendees will receive a jam-packed Generate goodie bag full of useful content, including the latest copy of net magazine. Lunch and refreshments will also be provided every day. 09. We're having a party, too Of course there's also a party, where you'll have a chance to do even more networking with the speakers and fellow attendees. The party will take place straight after the first conference day on Thursday evening. Venue TBC! You might get the chance to meet designer and developer Wes Bos 10. There's a variety of ticket options There is a variety of ticket options to suit everyone's schedule and budget. You can book a workshop-only pass, a single- or two-day conference pass or a full conference + workshop pass. There's also a student conference pass. RELATED ARTICLES: Learn more about APIs at Generate Smart typography tool generates font pairs in an instant 68 best free fonts for designers View the full article

As the industry standard in digital sculpting, ZBrush boasts a toolset flexible enough to allow it's users to choose a 3D art workflow that suits them best. With so many options available it can be easy to miss less used or older features that might be perfect for a particular situation. What follows are 10 things that you may or may not have known about ZBrush, mostly aimed at beginner and intermediate users - but there might be the odd one that is useful to seasoned users depending on your workflow of choice. 01. Sketching ideas in PaintStop Sketch out your ideas with ZBrush's inbuilt drawing plug-in PaintStop While Quicksketch mode may be more popular for roughing out ideas, ZBrush also has its own built in painting and drawing plug-in called 'PaintStop'. Pre-installed with all the latest versions of ZBrush, you will find Paintstop under Documents > PaintStop. When launched you will be taken to a minimalist UI with Brush and Canvas settings along the top and the Brush types down the left hand side. While not as full featured as stand-alone apps such as Art Rage, Photoshop or Sketchbook Pro, PaintStop still has a wealth of natural media tools that allow you to sketch and paint out ideas. It has the added benefit of allowing you to load anything you sketch directly back into ZBrush for use as reference or as a texture. 02. Spotlight as a reference tool Although primarily a texturing tool, the Spotlight feature in ZBrush can also be used for reference images to aid in sculpting Although primarily a texturing tool, the Spotlight feature in ZBrush can also be used for reference images to aid in sculpting. This is particularly useful if you have limited screen real estate or don't have access to a secondary monitor. Start by importing a reference image via Texture > Import, with the image loaded, click on 'Add to Spotlight'. Spotlight will appear with the image loaded, now go back to Texture>Import and add as many reference images as needed, they will automatically be added into the Spotlight Tool. To ensure our sculpting brushes function normally we need to make sure the Spotlight Projection feature is turned off. This can be turned off by going to Brush>Samples>Spotlight Projection. 03. Using Transpose Move Tool for extrusions and non-uniform scaling Using this technique when blocking out objects or characters can be an efficient way to work I use this technique when blocking out objects or characters and combined with the masking tools in ZBrush, it can be an efficient way to work. For example when blocking out a character using you could use the Move or SnakeHook brush to pull out the arms, or alternatively mask off an area, switch to the Transpose Move tool (W) and extrude out the shape. When creating hard surface objects, combine this with the Shift key to ensure you get a straight extrusion. This technique can also be used as an alternative to the Transpose Scale tool (R) for non-uniform scaling and in many cases I find it more intuitive and quicker. 04. Rigging with ZSpheres You can also use ZSpheres to rig single and multiple subtools The Transpose tool is more commonly used for posing in ZBrush but it is important to note that you can also use ZSpheres to rig single and multiple subtools. As it is an older method of posing in ZBrush, new users may be unaware of it, but it is a powerful tool all the same. The key to this is start with a single ZSphere and then go to Tool > Rigging > Select Mesh, pick the mesh you wish to rig and then start building up the skeleton using ZSpheres. It is similar to placing joints in other 3d apps like Maya and Softimage. Once you are happy with the rig, go to Tool > Rigging > Bind Mesh, now you are free to pose the mesh as required. 05. Customise the UI One of ZBrush's greatest strengths lies in how flexible it is as an artist's tool One of ZBrush's greatest strengths lies in how flexible it is as an artist's tool, allowing you to get to the same result in a way you find most comfortable for your style and workflow. This is extends to the UI, which can be customised in subtle ways, for example changing the colour of the UI to the more advanced options of creating a totally bespoke UI with custom menus and pop-ups. To get started go to Preferences > Config > Enable Customise, this will turn on the Customise mode and allow you to rearrange and alter the UI. A quick internet search for custom Zbrush UI's will give you a wealth of ideas - personally I just change the UI colour, while leaving the layout at default. 06. Load multiple objects One of the most useful plug-ins is the SubTool Master ZBrush comes pre-installed with a wealth of plug-ins that help improve productivity. One of the most useful is the SubTool Master, allowing you greater control over your various subtools which is a life-saver if you are working on a mesh with a lot of parts. For example, if you have built a basemesh in an external app such as Maya and it is made up of a lot of separate pieces, loading these into ZBrush one by one can be tiresome. Subtool Master makes this process quicker, first start by loading one mesh, i.e. a characters head, now go to Plugin > Subtool Master > MultiAppend, this will let you select the remaining parts and load them all in at once. 07. Backface masking Turn on the 'Backface Masking' feature to avoid geometry collapsing A common issue for new ZBrush users is when it comes to sculpting thinner parts of a mesh where the geometry will collapse in on itself. To fix this we have to turn on the 'Backface Masking' feature, this option automatically masks areas that are facing away from the camera, allowing us to sculpt on thinner meshes without problems. To turn in on go to Brush > AutoMasking > Backface Masking. It is important to note, however, that this should only be turned on for certain brushes as it can have undesired effects with certain brushes, for example the Move Brushes (Move, Move Elastic, Move Topological) will not work as expected. 08. Initialize primitives ZBrush primitives work a little differently from traditional polygon modelling apps For new users moving from traditional polygon modelling apps it might be strange working with the ZBrush primitives as they work a little differently in ZBrush. It isn't immediately apparent that you can edit the primitive before turning it into a polymesh to be sculpted. The key to this is the 'Intialize' tab under the Tool menu. Some primitives have more options than others but they will give you more control over how your base primitives start out and lets you create brand new primitives as well. For example, the Ring3D primitive can be edited into a more conical shape, that could be used as the base for an animal or creature horn. 09. Topology and polygroup masking Polygroup masking will allow you to adjust how much influence a brush has over a Polygroup Earlier we looked at the Backface Masking feature but there are many other useful masking types that can be used to improve your workflow. Two that I use regularly are Topology and Polygroup masking, both of which are found under the Brush > Auto Masking menu. Polygroup masking will allow you to adjust how much influence a brush has over a Polygroup, with the setting at full, you will only be able to sculpt on the first polygroup you select. With Topology masking if you have two separate objects that make up one subtool, this option adjusts if you can sculpt across one or both of the surfaces. With the setting at full you will only be able to sculpt across one of the surfaces. These options can be very useful when detailing your subtools, in particular for creating clothing seams or hard surfaces. 10. Setting up reference planes While ZBrush only has a single camera, you can still set up reference images If you are moving from apps such as Maya, Softimage or 3DS Max then you might miss the classic quad view that you can apply reference images to. While ZBrush only has a single camera, you can still set up reference images. Using the toolbar to the right of the canvas, turn on the X, Y and Z floor grids, now access the Draw menu and scroll to the Front-Back, Up-Down and Left-Right sections. Here you can import and map images to the desired axis, there are also a number of options for adjusting the image in ZBrush, such as flipping the image if it is pointing the wrong way, negating the need to alter the images in an external app like Photoshop. Book your Vertex 2018 ticket now On 13 March we’re launching Vertex 2018: a one-day event in London for the CG community. Featuring a jam-packed schedule of inspiring talks from the industry’s most exciting practitioners, there will also be workshops, networking opportunities, a busy expo and lots more. Get your ticket to Vertex 2018 now. This article was originally published in issue 231 of 3D World, the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists. Buy issue 231 here or subscribe to 3D World here. Related articles: Model an alien pirate creature in ZBrush The best VR headsets for 2018 Behind the scenes on The Shape of Water View the full article

In the design world, a standard business card based on one of the many business card templates out there just won't cut it. Like a mini creative resume, a business card is a small but powerful marketing tool that enables you to showcase your unique identity and help you stand out. Your business card should leave a long lasting impression and reflect a little piece of your personality. To inspire you, we scoured the web to find some innovative business card designs. Here goes! 01. Jim Profitt We love this beautifully simplistic design from furniture designer Jim Profitt We absolutely love this simple yet clever business card design from furniture designer Jim Profitt. His contact information is small and subtle, yet still clear, with the brilliantly crafted pop-up chair left to tell prospective clients everything they need to know. 02. Lush For the best results, spread seeds then add lush. Genius This brilliant business card design by Struck Creative cleverly doubles as a seed pouch for lawn and property management company Lush. Not only does it provide all the relevant information in a clear and concise way, it hold precious cargo, meaning it's much less likely to be discarded. 03. Gong Kantapon Kantapon covered a poster of a woman in mini cards that passers-by could peel off New York City-based illustrator Gong Kantapon went all out when it came to getting his business card noticed. Kantapon covered a poster of a woman in mini cards, that passers-by could peel off and take away. It got everyone's full attention by leaving people wondering just what would be revealed when the cards were removed. 04. Lego business card These Lego minifig business cards are customised to match their owner Not only do the guys who work at Lego have a super-cool job, they also get these awesome Lego minifigure business cards. It's been reported that the company does its best to match each employee's features, even down to their hair and accessories. The individual's name, email and contact number are then printed on the figure's clothes. Best business card ever! 05. Bon Vivant Ad agency JWT designed this awesome cheese grater business card design for Bon Vivant We love this business card, which doubles as a tiny cheese grater, for Brazilian cheese store Bon Vivant. Created by ad agency JWT, the clever networking tool had proved extremely popular, with the owner having to tell customers to wait a few days before returning to take another. The awesome design also comes complete with a protective sleeve. All in all, a simply grate idea! (See what we did there? OK, we'll get our coats...) 06. Cotton business cards These business cards have a hidden secret These business cards from MOO may not look anything out of the ordinary, but they’re in fact made entirely out of offcuts from cotton T-shirts (the fabric left over once the pattern has been cut out). The company worked with Mohawk Fine Papers to reinvent one of the oldest methods of paper-making. The T-shirt offcuts are collected, turned into a pulp then dried and pressed into strong, flexible, naturally bright white paper, ready to be turned into premium business cards. Watch the video to see how it’s done. 07. Flow Yoga Flow Yoga's innovative business card lets the materials do the talking The innovative business card for this Vancouver-based yoga studio has been designed to leave a lasting impression: it has been fashioned from flexible foam, and rolls up just like a real yoga mat. A great example of a designer cleverly using a material to communicate their message. 08. Engraved John T.Kim created this design by laser cutting and etching basswood The clue is in the title of these 'Engraved' unique business cards by New York-based designer John T.Kim. Created by laser cutting and etching basswood, the woodgrain pattern makes every card truly unique. Engraved started life as a kickstarted project with a funding goal of $1,500. It ran for 30 days, and during that time garnered enough attention to raise nearly $24,000. 09. MODHair This cool musical comb business card plays a rock theme When its owner runs their fingernail along the teeth of this musical comb, it plays a classic rock theme. The innovative concept was developed by Amsterdam-based designer Fabio Milito for MODhair, a rock'n'roll hair salon in Rome. A brilliant way to encapsulate the brand's identity in a single card. 10. Bentply This ingenious business card can be folded into a miniature armchair What you see here is a neat letterpress business card and mailer for furniture shop Bentply in London that can be made into a mini plywood chair. The ingenious card was created by designer Richard C Evans and produced by Elegante Press in Lithuania. Just follow the instructions and the kiss-cut card can be folded into a miniature of the iconic 1934 plywood armchair designed by Gerald Summers. 11. Greek A brilliant design by Draft FCB for Greek restaurant OK, so these probably aren't the most practical business cards in the world, but the idea is pretty cool. Developed by Cape Town-based creative agency FCB, these creative cards were crafted for a Greek restaurant, and play on the traditional Greek custom of smashing plates. Made from broken pieces of pottery, the unique design is decorated simply with the restaurant's name and telephone number. 12. Yuka Suzuki Hair and make-up artist Yuka Suzuki sells her creative skills with these brilliant business cards The hair and make-up industry is a competitive one, so Yuka Suzuki decided to develop a business card that would make her stand out from the crowd. The clever design uses different coloured hair grips to create colourful hair styles, and the owner gets some free hair accessories to boot. Cool huh? 13. Choko La Clients get two treats with this design; a delicious chocolate and a brilliantly creative business card This candy wrapper business card is, unsurprisingly, a popular design. Another entry by ad agency FCB, this time to promote a range of delicious chocolates. This design incorporates two treats; a chocolate and a brilliantly creative business card. Genius. 14. Techkeys This business card design certainly ticks the 'innovative' box We've come across what might be the world's geekiest offering; it's a business card that also doubles up as a computer keyboard, created by Techkeys. "This PCB with on-board re-programmable ATMEGA16U2 allows for full flexibility for hackers, tinkerers, and makers," says the company. "Take home one of these as a project, keycap display, switch tester, or a shortcut to yours truly, TechKeys.us." 15. Martyna Wędzicka A personal and handmade approach makes these business cards unique Polish designer Martyna Wędzicka has created these gorgeous business cards to highlight her hands-on approach to projects and design in general. The clear canvas allows Wędzicka to add a personal touch with some brilliant doodle art. 16. Elfriede-Lilly Friedeberg The letterpress business cards capture Friedeberg's aesthetic Elfriede-Lilly Friedeberg is a Berlin-based illustrator and graphic design student who creates inspiring, colourful and cute characters and patterns that are guaranteed to raise a smile. Packed full of pastel tones and handmade style, these brilliant business cards sum Friedeberg up perfectly. 17. Cerovski London-based agency Bunch was responsible for the business cards These business cards were created for Cerovski – a Croatian print production studio that revels in the challenge of “nebulous finishing, microscopic editions, absurd materials and crazy deadlines”. London design agency Bunch was responsible for developing its entire brand – which included a custom logotype and typeface – but it's the business cards that we've fallen in love with. 18. Doctor Zamenhof These business card designs will make you drop your jaw in awe Spain-based design studio Doctor Zamenhof aims to 'diagnose' design problems and prescribe remedies and solutions. Continuing this medical theme, the team has designed this rather brilliant set of business cards that mimic tongue depressors. The stick shape features all of the design studio's contact information and will certainly stand out from other business card offerings. 19. Vitor Bonates Vitor Bonates combines work and play with these creative business cards How cool is this personal buisness card for designer Vitor Bonates? A self-confessed lover of music and vinyl, Bonates based his card on classic vinyl records, replacing track name and details with his own and finishing off the design with a sleeve that holds the replica record. A simple but brilliant idea. 20. BDH Millwork Leftover wood from BDH Millwork provides the material for its innovative business card Canadian advertising studio WAX are the team behind these sophisticated buisness cards for cabinet-maker Brad Haniak of BDH Millwork. On a tiny budget, the WAX team came up with the idea of rubber-stamping Haniak's business card information onto pieces of leftover wood, available in abundance at his carpentry workshop. 21. Powell Peralta We love the design and attention to detail in these skateboard business cards We're a little in love with these miniature skateboard business cards for American skateboard company Powell-Peralta. The design follows true skateboard style, made of thin wood and featuring grip tape on one side surrounding a skull design. Created by the talented bunch over at Jukebox, all it needs now is a set of wheels! 22. Ritornell This is one of the coolest business cards we've come across to date. As an integral part of its set list, Austrian duo Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private music boxes. Katharina Hölzl designed the very special business cards, with the aid of laser-assisted milling. They feature nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell's contact information applied to a long music box paper stripe. Related articles: The 20 best sneaker designs of all time How to create a Snapchat Geofilter in Photoshop Design a stunning letterhead: 10 expert tips View the full article

For old hands, image resolution and DPI make perfect intuitive sense, but for folk just starting out – or, with wearying inevitability, for those with whom designers collaborate who aren't themselves design professionals – it can be a hideously baffling mess. Yet when you try to answer the question 'what is DPI?', you end up tying yourself in knots – as I can attest from the writing of the below – and so we're here to help. This guide is designed to help everyone understand image resolution, whether you're just starting out; work in a department such as marketing where you have to deal with design professionals; or even are a seasoned pro who needs to point a colleague to a guide that helps explain why, no, just changing the resolution to 300dpi in Photoshop doesn't magically make it a 300dpi image. Well, it does... but not in the way I mean, OK? Which brings me to: this guide will contain a lot of lies to children; that is, some of what I say will be a simplification, and though I'll add some caveats and detail later, I want to try to keep things simple early on. A tangent on vector formats We'll be discussing bitmap formats below (broadly speaking, things like JPEG, PNG, GIF and PSD) because they're the tricky ones when talking about image size: they contain a finite amount of detail. Vector images such as EPS, SVG and AI are usually infinitely scaleable. They have their own problems, but we're ignoring them here! What is a pixel? Bitmap images are formed of rows of coloured squares So probably everyone knows this, but we need to start at the beginning. Irrespective of the format they're saved in, bitmap images are all formed in the same way: rows and rows of coloured squares stacked on top of each other. Zoom into a bitmap image far enough and you can see these squares – 'picture elements' or pixels; a little like individual tiles in Roman mosaics or stitches in cross-stitch – but pull back and your eyes just perceive them as smooth gradients and unbroken lines. What is DPI? DPI stands for 'dots per inch'. Broadly, the higher the DPI, the more information there is in an image, so the more detail you can see and the crisper it looks. Think of it this way: if you were constructing a photo on a wall using coloured tiles which were each an inch square, your image would have a resolution of 1dpi, and you'd have to stand quite a way back to see the image as smooth and coherent. If you instead used tiles half an inch on each side, you'd produce something that was 2dpi, and which you wouldn't have to stand as far back before it stopped looking blocky. (Technically, you only use 'dots per inch' when discussing printed output, while 'pixels per inch' is for displays and digital images, and 'samples per inch' for scanners, but the concepts are all so closely related that at this stage in the explanation, you can treat them interchangeably. This is the most egregious lie to children in this piece; clarification coming later!) Ask not how many pixels per inch, but how big the pixels The above sounds pretty simple – 'more dpi' equals more better, right? – but there's a problem. The problem is that the size of the pixels – or tiles, in the analogy above – is only one of two factors that govern image size and quality. The other is the physical size of an image once it's printed, and the thing that ties them together is how many pixels there are in an image: the pixel dimensions, often expressed as a number of pixels wide and a number tall, such as 640×480. (In photography, image size is usually expressed as megapixels, but that's just arrived at by multiplying the number of pixels wide by the number of pixels tall the images a camera produces are. 640×480=307,200, and since that answer divided by a million – the 'mega' in megapixels – is 0.3, early cameras could be said to produce '0.3 megapixel' images.) The two things – how many dots per inch, and how big the image ends up – are completely dependent on each other (with a caveat that's coming up after Example B); change one, and the other changes. I'm going to give you some examples to help explain how this works, but viewing them here on screen (especially if you're on a smartphone) is only an indication of the effects we're talking about; to get the effect for real, download and print out this PDF, and follow along! The figures I mention refer to this document, not what you see on screen. I've given a photo and logo for each example, as the effect can sometimes affect different types of images in different ways. Example A: Same pixel dimensions, higher DPI; lower physical size Here, there are the same number of pixels in the images on the right as in the originals on the left, but we've just raised the DPI value from 72 to 300. The effect is that there are now more dots to each inch, but because the total number of dots making up the image hasn't changed, the mathematical inevitability is that the image becomes smaller, since each of the pixels which make up the image has become smaller in order to fit more of them into an inch. The grid of pixels that makes up your computer screen never change size – 'a pixel' is a abstract, sizeless thing – but the pixels that make up an image can be printed at any size you like. Below, simplified, is what's happening: Example B: Same physical size, lower DPI; lower pixel dimensions On the left are the original images. On the right, each has had the number of pixels reduced to about a quarter of the original values while maintaining the same physical size, which means that each individual pixel has got bigger and thus the DPI value has dropped (since there are fewer dots fitting into every inch). Here, simplified, is what's happening: Interpolation interjection With me so far? Good, because I'm about to throw a curveball. While Example A doesn't change the amount of information in the image, and Example B reduces it, you can add more information through a process called interpolation. Think of it like this: if you have a blue pixel next to a yellow pixel and want to add a third pixel in between – so that you can either increase the DPI while keeping the image the same physical size, or more usually to increase the size at which it can be output while maintaining a similar DPI – then the computer can guess that that pixel should be green. Sounds great, but in practice, you can't just magic up loads of information that wasn't there in the first place, and that's why taking, say, a 150dpi image and making it 300dpi (at the same physical size) isn't a solution to the problem of not having sufficient resolution. Example C: Higher pixel dimensions (interpolated), same physical size; higher DPI On the left, a 72dpi image, and on the right a 300dpi image made by interpolating information from the one on the left. Here, simplified, is what's happening: However, look more closely at the 300dpi image we just made with interpolation (below, left) and a 300dpi original (below, right), and you'll see that the 'fake' detail we've added with interpolation doesn't compare to an image that genuinely has all that detail. On the PDF, compare the image at the bottom right with the one on the left of the middle row. Next page: How to work with image resolution in Photoshop How do you actually do all this in Photoshop? The 'Image Size…' dialogue in Photoshop – or similar apps – looks simple, but it's a minefield if you don't know what you're doing. If you remember nothing else, remember that all the fields are essentially connected (because the pixel dimensions, resolution and physical printed size are). Changing one value will change others too, depending on what kind of resizing you're trying to do. Here's a guided tour. This maintains the aspect ratio – the relationship between the width and the height – and for almost every job you do, this should be active. Click to toggle. You can see the image size displayed in pixels, centimetres or other measurements. Note that of course everything's still interrelated, so if you switch to centimetres and change the values, the pixel count might change as well. This is the DPI (or, more correctly, the PPI; clarification coming…) of the image. This is the tricky one. With this Resample option unchecked, the pixel dimensions – the number of pixels across and down – of your image won't change as you tweak the values. You're essentially just making each individual pixel bigger and smaller for output (Example A) when you adjust the resolution or physical size. With this box checked, you're changing the pixel dimensions, either up or down. If you ultimately add more pixels (keep an eye on the Dimensions readout at the top), they'll be added using interpolation (Example C). You have some options for how the image is resampled here; if you're unsure, leave it on Automatic. 'Nearest Neighbor' is the only option not to use interpolation, and you should usually not use it; a common exception is if you're dealing with pixel-perfect graphics such as low-res screenshots or eBoy-style pixel art, and you want the detail not to get smeary when you boost or reduce the resolution. In this case, work in increments of 100%. That should hopefully have given you a basic understanding of the role of DPI and resolution, but I bet you still have questions. Let me guess what they are and try to answer them! What DPI should my images be at? For print, 300dpi is usually optimal, but you can get away with less; even 150dpi is often okay for photographic images, though it would be starting to look a bit rubbish for logos and the like. However… But I thought all images for screen should be at 72 or 96dpi? DPI is broadly irrelevant for designing images for screen, and not just because 'DPI' is specifically a print concern. Because you'll be presenting a grid of pixels (your image) slotted one by one into another grid of pixels (a screen), 'the size of the pixels', which is what we're talking about when we're talking about DPI, is irrelevant. So in general terms, you just need to care about the pixel dimensions, not the DPI/PPI. The 72/96dpi thing is a legacy kludge, and you can mostly ignore it, especially with today's high-resolution displays, which have their own problems with creating @2x versions. There's a wrinkle, though: in some contexts, systems can try to read a DPI value from metadata and be clever about how they present an image, when all you want them to do is just display the pixels 1:1. So, much as it annoys me, I do sometimes manually set the resolution of images destined for web pages to 72dpi. My printer prints at 4800dpi, though…? Each pixel on a normal modern computer screen can display one of 16.8 million colours, but when that pixel is printed on, say, an inkjet printer, unless it's pure cyan, magenta, yellow or black, the printer has to recreate what colour it is by placing even tinier dots of pure C, M, Y or K ink within the bounds of that pixel so that our eyes perceive the pixel as the correct colour. Therefore, the number of actual dots per inch the printer needs to be able to place has to be high – much higher than most of the images you'd send to it – in order that you can create the colours necessary for each pixel. And that's why conflating DPI, PPI and SPI as I did early on is actually a terrible idea, technically. Many people do just call all three 'DPI', however – even if Photoshop does correctly call it PPI in its dialogue box – and unless you're getting technical or pedantic, you usually can too. (There's LPI too, but let's not complicate things further.) So is 'resolution' the pixel dimensions or the DPI (or PPI)? Uh, either. Sorry. Different people use the term for each, and anyway it depends on context. If you're unsure, clarify. Related articles: The 10 commandments of Photoshop etiquette The designer's guide to printing a poster Create special print finishes in InDesign View the full article

Lookout researchers discussed Dark Caracal's implications for APT actors in the mobile space and why its now a juicy target. View the full article

Hanwha is patching 13 vulnerabilities in its SmartCam security camera that allows attackers to take control of the device, use it to gain further network access or just brick it. View the full article

Stephen Doyle, creative director of New York-based design studio Doyle Partners, has been called a magician more than once. An outspoken advocate of the joy of designing under duress, his work goes beyond the brief, defying client expectations with unexpected solutions. If you’ve seen his intricate paper sculptures, you’ll understand the magic part. Meticulously constructed from lines of text cut from books, the narrow strips elude gravity and show no glue or pencil markings. Hypertext is a foray into sentence structure And that isn’t where the magic of Doyle’s work stops. In a world of visual overload, his studio's projects – which span everything from graphic and environmental design to video and sculpture – succeed in forcing viewers to stop and think. Unsurprisingly, he’s picked up more than a few awards for his services to design. In 2010 Doyle was honoured at the White House with a National Design Award, and he’s been recognised with a 2014 AIGA Medal for being the ultimate “designer's designer.” Doyle’s speaking in Dublin at OFFSET 2018 – where we’ll be reporting live. We caught up with him ahead of the event to find out what it was like studying and working with design legends like Herb Lubalin, Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser – and what it takes to launch a world-class design studio of your own… Starting out in design Spotlight on Broadway installation by Doyle Patners Creative Bloq: You studied under the likes of Herb Lubalin, Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser, and then worked with Tibor Kalman at the start of your career. How did working with such celebrated designers shape your work and thinking in design? Stephen Doyle: My most impressionable class at Cooper Union was one co-taught by Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf. Milton, larger than life, hailing from the Bronx, towered over Henry, refined and delicate, with his Viennese sensibility. The class was editorial design, and at break time, the students would line up at the water fountain and down aspirins. The disagreement between these two design champions was at times ballistic! What kind of a career path could this be, I wondered, when these two titans couldn't agree on a single thing. Just the career for me, I decided, because there didn't seem to be any rules whatsoever: just free-wheeling open-eyed opinion. The opposite of science-based and factual fields, design seemed to be a wide-open frontier with endless possibilities, wide open to reflection and imagination. My kinda playground. Doyle Partners designed a barricade at the International School of Photography that housed a mini photo exhibition viewed only through peepholes You’ve talked before about honing your typographic craft at Rolling Stone. Looking at your career as a whole, how important was this time for you? And how important is it for designers to spend time honing traditional skills in today’s fast-changing design landscape? My first job, at Esquire, and originally working under Milton Glaser there, was where I learned to hone the skills of cooperation. Working as part of a design team is very different from the experience as a solitary flier in school. Telephone skills, collaborating with editors, assigning illustration and photography – all these simple tasks were full of lessons about how to get what you want from others – superiors, comrades and freelancers. It's one of the pleasures of a design career, because it is so very social, and one is exposed to experts of all sorts to learn from. "Read this" is sometimes better whispered than shouted. Stephen Doyle My second step was working at Rolling Stone, and it was here that I began to focus on typography. At the time, I thought that type and design that was the hook for me. But ultimately I learned that the appeal was to be able to refine the narrative – that type and layout were in the service of seduction: "Read this" is sometimes better whispered than shouted. This attention to craft really helped me build out – and differentiate – my own toolkit, and set me nicely apart from many peers. I became not the 'type guy', but better yet, the 'language guy'. It seems, for me, it wasn't so much the typography as the end goal – it was the words. How to launch your own studio Cover design for Metropolis magazine by Doyle Partners Why did you decide to leave M&Co to found your own studio? What did you want to do that you couldn’t working in Kalman’s studio? After a year and a half as art director at M&Co working with Tibor the brilliant, I was challenged by a client that I brought in. He asked me why I had an 'agent' who was taking a large commission from my design work. Hmmmm. I had always fantasised about having my own studio, and I thought, at 28 with no wife and no kids, it was time to make the leap, so that when I failed I would never wake up at, say, 50 years old, and regret never having tried it. Partnering with my friend Bill Drenttel, an ad guy with a business sense, I put all my savings into an account with his name on it too. Terrifying. Our credo from the start was to abide by the rule of the 'Three Fs'. Fun. Fame. Fortune. Pick two – any two. But we could not accept any job that promised only one of these. Stephen Doyle Our credo from the start was to abide by the rule of the 'Three Fs'. Fun. Fame. Fortune. Pick two – any two. But we could not accept any job that promised only one of these. Eventually, I became romantically involved with one of my clients, who became my wife, and that added yet another 'F' to the equation, but we're not going to go there right now... What advice would you give to other designers who are thinking about launching their own studios? Launching your own studio is, as always, a serious commitment. Consider yourself, and identify your shortcomings. Now go out there and find that kid from school, or from your social circles who has those skills that you don't. Team up with her or him: you'll be stronger and more versatile, and have twice as many contacts to start with. Pledge honesty with each other or call it off. Work your brains out for five days a week, and take the weekends off. Feed your mind. Don't look at design blogs; go to museums. Clients have the option of hiring any number of designers for any job. Be really nice and really fun and funny, if you can. Enchant them, and seduce them. Clients want to enjoy the process of design (often their only creative breakout) as much as you do. They want to be involved in the process, and friendly beats arrogant every time. How to get a job at Doyle Partners Branding for the Seaglass Carousel by Doyle Partners And what about people who want to work for you? Doyle Partners works across everything from environmental projects to video, sculpture and conventional graphics. What do you look for in the portfolios of would-be new hires at the studio? The first test for me is the resume. I scan it for typos, and a single error here means the candidate is voted off the island. Or if, as sometimes happens, the cover letter says, "I've always wanted to work at Pentagram…" Well, that's a disqualifier too. There is no magic bullet for preparing your portfolio. I look for imagination and appropriateness. Lots of portfolios have lots of style, but the ones that are actually intelligent are wonderfully rare. Being able to design like your teacher doesn't cut it anymore. It's individuality and passion, craftsmanship and artistry that cut through the fog for me. Can you share any key portfolio do and don’ts for a designer preparing their portfolio for you? Rafia, bay leaf, dried orange peel or anything that might fall into the "potpourri" category fastened to what you think is the "design" category. Orgami of any kind. I'm sorry, my friends, but it's really over, and no matter how hard you worked on that calendar, it's not getting produced. Which reminds me: calendars! Especially with different fonts for each month. Really, get over it. We have phones and no wall, desk or mental space for them. Design work should be explanatory, and if you need to quote Roland Barthes or Umberto Ecco, you have ultimately failed. Stephen Doyle Long verbal rationalisations for dull creative work. Design work should be explanatory, and if you need to quote Roland Barthes or Umberto Ecco, you have ultimately failed. Individually wrapped samples. Makes the presentation noisy, and the dismissal part of the interview interminably long. Hands (or any extremity for that matter) holding posters aloft, books extended, etc. Keep yourself mostly out of your photos of your work. Put your heart in, keep your hands out. How to stay fresh as a designer Here Lies LoveBranding and album packaging for David Byrne's immersive musical. Finally, you’ve talked before about the joy of designing under duress. How do you navigate the line between fresh thinking and failing to find the right solution for the client? Staying fresh and coming up with unexpected solutions is a challenge that we all face. To keep my batteries charged, I keep adding to a very robust scrapbook collection – both analog and digital. Keeping your eyes open when flipping through foreign newspapers and snapping photos of signs, materials, juxtapositions; collecting scrap from unexpected sources online – you can build yourself a personal arsenal of inspiration that helps to get the juices flowing. I've got stuff stored that took me an entire decade to find the project worth appropriation. But thoughtful thievery from unlikely sources is one of the best tools we have. And don't forget to eat breakfast! Related articles: How to start a studio: 18 pro tips Be a better designer in 2018 32 brilliant design portfolios to inspire you View the full article

To mark International Women’s day, we’re celebrating 10 of the world’s most inspiring women in design. These are the glass-ceiling-shattering trailblazers who inspire us to be better designers. Their work crosses disciplines and breaks boundaries. And looking at the incredible women here, it seems hard to believe that the design industry still lacks diversity. 25 names every graphic designer should know But according to a 2016 report from the Design Council, a staggering 78 per cent of the design economy is male. "Male designers seem to be concentrated in the highest paying sectors. 83 per cent of the total male design workforce earns an average of £606 per week or more, which is above the national average," continues the report. Meanwhile, only 3 per cent of creative directors are women, adds The 3% Movement. The 10 women we’ve highlighted here haven't just made an incredible contribution to design: they're also important role models to designers around the world – both female and male. Read on to be inspired… 01. Paula Scher Paula Scher has been a partner at Pentagram since 1991 Paula Scher is a multi-talented partner at Pentagram's New York office. Having started out by designing album covers for Atlantic and CBS records, including the distinctive Boston UFO sleeve, Scher quickly found recognition - not to mention Grammy nominations - coming her way. In design circles Scher is best known for her dynamic use of outmoded typography that echoes Art Deco and Russian constructivism. This work, which featured on posters for the Public Theatre, helped to reposition the institution as an accessible space for people who would not normally attend the venue. Scher's typography work has been often imitated over the years Described as both an "unabashed populist" and a "master conjurer of the instantly familiar", Scher's varied career has seen her work with top brands including Coca-Cola, the Museum of Modern Art, and Microsoft, as well as co-founding design studio Koppel & Scher. Speaking to Creative Bloq, highlights the benefit of stepping out of your comfort zone: "I try to force myself to grow by doing things I don't know how to do very well. Sometimes I fail utterly at it; sometimes I make breakthroughs." 02. Neri Oxman Neri Oxman, photo by: Noah Kalina, 2017 How can we describe the work Neri Oxman? Considering that she's seen to be ahead of her time, labelled as "shatteringly different", and even had to coin the phrase "material ecology" to define her own creations, summing up Oxman is no easy feat. The American-Israeli architect, designer, and professor at the MIT Media Lab is renowned for her creations that blend technology and biology. In a recent talk at Design Indaba 2018, Oxman said that her goal is to augment the relationship between built and biological elements. Oxman's 3D printed wearables are inspired by organ systems “Nature doesn’t assemble. It grows,” she pointed out. “We’re at a point in time where there’s a clash between the world of culture and the world of nature. It’s a slow process, but they’re colliding.” With designers becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impact of their work, Oxman is leading the way when it comes to re-evaluating how we design and the materials we use. 03. Es Devlin Es Devlin in her 2016 Mirror Maze If you've seen live music performances from the biggest artists over the last few years, chances are you've seen the stunning work of Es Devlin. A set design mastermind, Devlin has worked with the likes of Kanye West, Beyoncé, and U2 to create jaw-dropping backdrops and stage sculptures. Preoccupied with exploring the boundary between stage design and art, Devlin's impressive portfolio also includes kinetic stage sculptures for the London Olympic closing ceremony and the Rio Olympic opening ceremony. Es Devlin designed the amazing London Olympics closing ceremony Her career started with an art foundation at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. From here she went on study set design before creating small experimental pieces for London theatres such as The Bush and The Gate. Over the years as her profile has grown, Devlin has been awarded the Linbury Prize for Stage Design, three Olivier Awards, the London Design Medal 2017, as well as being appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to stage and set design. 04. Jessica Hische Jessica Hische is something of a typography celebrity Fans of typography are probably already aware of Jessica Hische. The American letter, illustrator and type designer already has a legion of devotees thanks to her work on a diverse range of projects including the Love Stamp for USPS, book Covers for Dave Eggers, and revamping the typographic logo for MailChimp. When she isn't busy working for clients such as Wes Anderson, Penguin Books and The New York Times, Hische also finds the time to create popular personal projects, such as the Daily Drop Cap and the humorous (yet useful) flowchart Should I Work For Free? Jessica Hische shares her typography secrets in her book, In Progress As if all this wasn't enough, Hische has also released a book called In Progress. Described as a "show-all romp"through her lettering and type design projects, the book also shows you how to sketch distinctive letterforms with step-by-step instructions. 05. Malika Favre Malika Favre (image from the artist's Instagram page) Malika Favre is a London-based French artist whose distinctive work has made her one of the most sought after illustrators in the UK. With a style that has been described as Pop Art meets OpArt, Favre's illustrations combine crisp colours with clean shapes. Despite drawing from an early age, illustration was not Favre's first calling. After a brief stint studying quantum physics with a view to becoming an engineer, she changed course and studied graphic design and advertising. From here she completed an internship at Airside before going on to start freelance commissions. Favre's distinctive work has often appeared on the cover of The New Yorker Favre's unmistakable style has landed her work with The Yorker, BAFTA, Penguin Books and many more. And had the 2016 presidential election gone the other way, we would have seen her work gracing the cover of The New Yorker. An erotic edge runs through Favre's work, because as she says, what is more universal than sex? This helps to combat what she describes as "a lot of bad sex art". 06. Catt Small Catt Small promotes diversity in the web industry Catt Small has been working as a web designer in her native New York City since 2011. Despite having only been in the industry a relatively short amount of time, her CV boasts some big names: she's worked at Nasdaq and SoundCloud, and since late 2016 has been a senior designer at Etsy. Small specialises in product design, but also finds time to create games as part of Brooklyn Gamery. Breakup Squad is a five-player game based around keeping two ex-lovers apart at a party Alongside her web design work, Small plays an active role in promoting diversity within the web industry. She co-founded Code Liberation in 2013, and has also worked with Good for PoC. "I spent much of my youth surrounded by boys who also played video games. Not being like other girls was a source of pride. When I got older and wiser, I realised the errors of the things I was trained to think," she said in an interview with net magazine. "Women are often underrepresented in tech and games spaces. Instead of being encouraged to make space for each other, they are pressured to compete for the coveted ‘female ambassador’ position... Eventually, I felt tired of being the only woman in the room. Fielding sexist jokes and feeling inadequate drained my will to participate in activities I loved. The more I learned about the gender spectrum, the more I wanted to meet and learn about people with other cool genders as well." 07. Samantha Toy Warren Samantha Toy Warren is famous for creating Style Tiles Samantha Toy Warren is currently an Adobe XD manager and product design lead, and prior to this was senior designer at Twitter (an experience she describes as “electrifying”, and “like being on a rocket ship”). However, Warren is perhaps best known for creating Style Tiles, a system for developing the visual language for a website that gained widespread popularity within the industry. In an interview with net magazine, she explained the inspiration behind the project. A few years prior to creating Style Tiles, Warren had designed a site for a Scandinavian hotel chain. She and the client agreed that the site should somehow capture the essence of the patio area outside one of the hotels, which was filled with transparent bubble chairs that reflected the landscape. Visual language developer Style Tiles went down a storm with designers “They needed help getting from one to the other. So it was a matter of taking these attributes – the light, the almost invisible lines and this ethereal feeling – and dissecting and reconstructing them into things like gradients, thin lines and lots of very subtle shadows,” she explained. “You can use it to have a conversation around what someone is imagining in their head when they say certain things to describe a visual. You can say: ‘You’re saying the site should feel light and airy; so does this line feel light and airy, or does this one?’ That’s what Style Tiles is, it’s the translation process.” 08. Mina Markham Mina Markham was a key figure in Hilary Clinton's web presence Frontend architect Markham is a senior engineer at Slack in California, but it was a slightly more stressful role that propelled her to prominence in the web industry: Markham was a key figure in designing Hillary Clinton’s web presence during her presidential campaign. In 2015-16, she created and maintained the brilliantly named pattern library Pantsuit, as well as various supporting microsites. "Campaigns move at an incredible pace. You could have an idea on Monday and it would be live on Wednesday," she said of her experience in an interview with net. "Pantsuit was completed in about two months, and I felt bad taking that long. Deadlines tended to be more urgent and unyielding. If you were working on something for the caucuses, you have to be done on time – otherwise, the project is useless." Marham's work on Hillary Clinton's web presence propelled her to prominence Markham's achievements are all the more notable given she's only been working in tech for around six years. Her difficulties breaking into the industry are part of the reason she's now active in initiatives such as Girl Develop It and Black Girls Code. "When I was attempting to start my career in tech, I felt very alone and like I was stumbling around," she said. "If I had something like Black Girls Code to show me that women, black women, can be developers, it would have made a world of difference." 09. Rachel Inman Rachel Inman makes sure team morale stays high Inman is a design lead at Google, on the Google Maps team. Last year, she worked on the new Google Earth – an update that enables users to fly through landmarks and major cities in 3D, then inspect them close up by switching to Street View, or explore curated stories from the likes of BBC and NASA through Voyager. Her ethos as a team leader is centred around inclusivity. "Morale is high because there are no more walls,” she enthused in an interview with net magazine. “A design solution from an engineer is just as valid and celebrated as an engineering idea from a designer.” Inman's updates let users fly through landmarks Her decision to move into the web industry was motivated by a desire to create things that would make life better for others, and as well as her work for Google she teaches design classes around the world. "If my students walk away with any message, I hope it’s that they don’t need permission to create and experiment," she said of her Introduction to UX Design class at General Assembly's New York campus. "Aside from understanding their users, I really want them to feel free to keep making, testing, failing and continuing. That’s the only way they’ll get better!” 10. Debbie Millman The multi-talented Debbie Millman is behind the popular podcast Design Matters Debbie Millman is perhaps best known by designers as the founder and host of the podcast Design Matters. Besides setting up and running one of the world's first and longest running podcasts, Millman is also a designer, artist, curator, educator and writer. In 2009 Millman co-founded the world's first graduate programme in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City alongside Steven Heller. Meanwhile her illustrations have appeared in The New York Times and New York Magazine among others. Millman's work has also been featured in Print, a magazine on which she has served as Editorial and Creative Director. Millman's work on the Burger King logo helped to reinvigorate the brand Between 1995 and 2016, Millman was the President of the Design Division at Sterling Brands, as well as being its Chief Marketing Officer. Here she worked with top name brands such as Pepsi, Gillette, Burger King and Star Wars. Related articles: Artists celebrate International Women's Day Women's fashion brand celebrates 10th anniversary with empowering messages New exhibit tracks colourful history of women in comics View the full article

Sketch. First Adobe Photoshop's rival, then Adobe XD's rival, and now InVision Studio's rival as well. It's surprisingly resilient for an app that's never released a Windows version – although this might not seem so surprising when you learn both what it can do, but how it does it. Sketch vs Photoshop: which design tool should you use? Sketch is an app for designing user interfaces, but its powerful, intuitive tools makes the design process so artfully smooth that you'll quickly understand why and how it paved the way for a new generation of design apps. Here are 21 tips that will make you a power user in minutes. 01. Make your design collaborative with Libraries Can other designers also use your symbols? Absolutely! Sketch Libraries are incredibly easy to use. All you need to do is to create the Symbols in a separate .sketch file, and then leave that .sketch file somewhere accessible, such as on Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. Other designers can then import the Sketch Library into their Sketch documents by navigating to File > Add Library…. After that, symbols from that Sketch Library will be accessible via the usual Insert > Symbol method. Sketch Libraries are a terrific way to enable design collaboration in teams. When the Sketch Library is updated, any .sketch file that's using that Library will receive a notification requesting if you'd like to update the document. Pretty cool, right? 02. Test a responsive design using resizing You have a container, which can be either a Group or an Artboard, and various layers inside that container. Let's say that this container is a website header with a floated logo and navigation – the logo floated on the left, and the navigation floated on the right. When you resize the container, you want the logo to still be floated to the left, and the navigation to the right. Enter Resizing, where contained elements can be floated to a container edge, helping you to test responsive designs. Once again, this all happens from the Inspector, under the Resizing tab. There are four possible locations that you can pin from: Left: object will be fixed to the left-hand side Right: object will be fixed to the right-hand side Right and top: object will be fixed the top and right sides Pretty simple really, but there's a snag. When you resize containers ordinarily, the contained elements are resized accordingly. You can fix this by activating the Fix Width and Fix Height options, which will stop this from happening. Centralised objects will remain centralised as well. Magic. 03. Separate your projects by Page After a while, your canvas will start to feel cluttered despite the fact that it's essentially unlimited. Large designs require organisation, which is why we can logically separate Artboards into different Pages. The best way to organise Artboards into Pages is by platform. If you were designing, for example, an Android and iOS version of a mobile app, you could have a separate Page for each. The reason for this, is that when you use prototyping and design handoff tools, you'd want to export the right Artboards to the right Project, so separating them in this way makes logical sense. With web designs, I typically create things like Symbols and logos on their own Page. 04. Automate your asset exports Once you have defined your export options, you won't have to do that again. And this is true whether you're actually exporting image assets from Sketch or you're exporting to a design collaboration app, such as InVision, Marvel, Sympli or Zeplin. Here's what you need to know: file format matters. SVG is better for the web because it's a vector format, which means that you can scale it up and down without losing quality. SVG formats are usually smaller in file size too, which makes webpages load faster. We use PNG for mobile apps, although to cater for Retina/HDPI screens, we export images @2x and @3x, depending on the device that we're catering for. You can define as many options as needed, all at once. Just click the "Make Exportable" button at the very bottom of the Inspector and list the different export options. And then, whenever you need to re-export, hit Cmd+Shift+E. Your export settings will now be saved, but you will also be given the option to export only one, or some, or all of the layers you have chosen. 05. Organise image asset exports into folders Developers don't want to sort through an entire folder of exported image assets, especially with large designs. Breaking them down into folders is more organised and we can do this from Sketch. Simply rename the layer using this format: "subfolder/asset.png" to auto-create folders in your export. Tip: did you know that you can drag a layer from the layer list onto your desktop to export it? It'll be a @1x PNG file by default. 06. Analyse colour contrast with the Stark plugin Although it's not as trendy as concepts such as prototyping and animation, colour contrast is a big deal. Poor colour contrast results in limited accessibility, especially for users who have limited eyesight (something which affects 285 million of us worldwide). The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) sets worldwide standards for colour contrast, which can be somewhat difficult to understand for somebody that's never heard of them before. The Stark plugin not only helps you to compare two colours against these WCAG 2.0 standards, to make sure that your contrast is sufficient enough, but also test your design against the eight different types of colour blindness. The key things to check are when two backgrounds are adjacent to one another; buttons against backgrounds; and most importantly, text against backgrounds. Font size factors into this as well, as smaller text is harder to read, so considering that there's so much to think about here, Stark is handy to have in your toolbox. Stark opens in a new window (Plugins > Stark > Show Stark). Press ↑ and ↓ to cycle through the types of colour blindness, ← and → to cycle through the Artboards in your document, or select two colours to analyse the colour contrast. Colour contrast is defined by two different levels/ratio (AA and AAA), and your colour contrast should be meeting at least the AA requirements. 07. Design handoff with the Zeplin or Sympli plugins Design handoff is typically built into prototyping apps such as InVision and Marvel, but they are only available to teams with enterprise-level subscriptions. Smaller design teams (or solo designers) won't need design collaboration on that scale, so dedicated design handoff tools, such as Zeplin and Sympli, might be more suitable. You'll have design hand-off and collaboration, but at the cost of prototyping features, which might be fine depending on the way you or your team does prototyping (because there are also paper prototyping and free tools, such as Craft). Like most tools of this calibre, you can export screens from Sketch to Zeplin or Sympli using their Sketch Plugin. Both tools work largely the same way. With Zeplin, use Cmd+Ctrl+E in Sketch to export screens; with Sympli, use Cmd+Y. Both apps let you tag screens for added searchability (useful for narrowing down screens in the handoff interface) and automatically collect image assets you've marked as exportable in Sketch, ready for the developer to implement them. As with all competing tools, use the free trials and decide for yourself. 08. Combine shapes with boolean operations Booleans make it easy to make new shapes Boolean operations let us combine shapes to make new shapes. Step 01: Creating two shapes Let's use a circle as an example here. You can combine as many shapes as necessary with boolean operations, but for now we'll use only two. Create a circle, and then duplicate it (Cmd+D) to create another circle. Make sure that they overlap, so that we can use one of them as a mask and see the effects. Step 02: Select a boolean operation from the menu bar As you can see from the Sketch menu bar, there are four boolean operations to choose from: Union, Subtract, Intersect and Difference. Union is the simplest of all the boolean operations, where the two shapes are combined to create a new shape. With Subtract, one of the shapes eats into the other shape or shapes, subtracting from them. With Intersect, only the section where the shapes overlap will be visible. With Difference, it's the complete opposite, only the sections where the shapes don't overlap are shown. For simple shapes, this is often faster than creating them freehand using the vector tool. Step 03: Make it clear which layer is the mask As I said before, you can combine more than one shape with boolean operations. One of them has to be the mask, and this is the one that appears at the "bottom", as indicated in the Layer List. Combined shapes act like a Group once combined, so whichever one is lowest in the hierarchy is the mask. You can reorder these layers to change which one is the mask. Note: boolean operations technically consist of paths and subpaths, but the concept of masking might make boolean operations feel more familiar. Step 04: Learn the keyboard shortcuts for quick-access Naturally, like everything else in Sketch, there are keyboard shortcuts that you can use to access these boolean operations faster: Union: Cmd+Ctrl+U Subtract: Cmd+Ctrl+S Intersect: Cmd+Ctrl+I Difference: Cmd+Ctrl+X If you have one of the latest MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar above the keyboard, these tools are also available for quick access via touch as well. 09. Create your own Sketch shortcuts You can add as many new shortcuts as you need You can create your own Sketch shortcuts. To set your own Sketch shortcuts, head to macOS Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > +, and then choose Sketch as the Application and type the menu command you want to define a shortcut for. For example, "Collapse All Groups" (Cmd+Ctrl+C) is a useful way to quickly clean up your Layer List! Add as many shortcuts as you need. 10. Define measurements with maths functions There's no need to waste time on tricky mental arithmetic When specifying measurements with the Inspector, you can use maths functions to save you from having to do the calculations in your head. Say that you wanted a Rectangle to span the full width of an Artboard minus 20px on each side (i.e. a 20px margin), you could define the Width as "100%-40px". With a 320px Artboard, the Rectangle's width would then equal 280px. 11. Mimic CSS frameworks Layout Grids give you the flexibility of responsive grid systems Web developers often use CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation, which come with their own responsive grid systems. So to make designs more durable and flexible (and to protect development costs) designers using Sketch might want to replicate these grid systems using Layout Grids. Navigate to View > Canvas > Layout Settings… to bring up the Layout Grid modal, then specify the numbers of rows and columns along with the overall width of the website container and any column/gutter widths. Layout Grids appear light grey on the canvas, although you can change this colour. Toggle them on and off with Cmd+Alt+L, your developer will thank you later! 12. Keep your common colours handy Ensure visual consistency by having your go-to colours to hand Colours are reused throughout a design for visual consistency. When used correctly, colours mean something to the user and so the UX is improved. It's typical to have a certain colour for the brand, the body text, the headings and so on, and we can save these colours in Sketch for quick-use, so that we don't have to recall hex/RGBA values from memory. Whenever you're inside the colour chooser widget and you have the desired colour selected, click the "+" icon underneath "Document Colors" to save it to the document swatch. If you add colours to the "Global Colors" swatch, they'll appear in all Sketch documents. Drag the colours out of the colour chooser widget to remove. 13. Use shortcuts There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts in Sketch. Popular ones can be found in this article; you can see more here. 14. Prototype like a pro Prototyping and design collaboration is all the rage right now. The ability to see your designs come to life with interactive hotspots, dynamic components and animations before development has even begun, is not only fun to watch, but lets teams and stakeholders test user experiences and leave feedback early on. Being able to iron out the majority of creases before the user even experiences the app or website ensures that your conversions are higher, your customer complaints are lower, and your product launches have more impact. One of the best ways to prototype directly in Sketch is arguably the Craft plugin by InVision, which supercharges your design process in a number of ways. Here's the rundown: Provide your design with realistic dummy data. Source stock images for your content. Duplicate content vertically and horizontally. Create shared design libraries that are stored in the cloud. Enter "Freehand" mode for discussion and collaboration. Make your designs dynamic and interactive. Sync all of this into the core InVision App. Enable handoff, so developers can inspect design styles. Craft exists as a vertical sidebar alongside the Inspector in Sketch. Despite its many features, the UI is fairly easy to use. Marvel is another prototyping app that has a Sketch plugin. Although it only serves as a way of exporting designs into the core Marvel app, there are some benefits of using Marvel over InVision. Although it's not as flexible as InVision – which has more prototyping features, for example – the learning curve is smaller and the Marvel interface feels simpler than InVision's. Give both a try, they're fantastic! 15. Time-saving shortcuts Speed up your workflow by learning these essential Sketch shortcuts Let the keyboard be your mouse Actually, you'd be quite surprised what you can do with Sketch using only the keyboard. Many of the tools are single-letter shortcuts, and repetitive, mundane tasks are something of an urban myth now. Once again, here are the shortcuts you'll love: Rectangle: R Oval: O Line: L Text: T Artboard: A Edit mode: Return Move up in hierarchy: Esc Change opacity of object: 0-9 Rename: Cmd+R Export: Cmd+Shift+E Zoom in/out: Cmd and +/- Cmd/Alt/Shift combos are your new best friends Group: Cmd+G Ungroup: Cmd+Shift+G Move object: ↑→↓← Resize object: Cmd+↑→↓← Move object by 10px: Shift+↑→↓← Resize object by 10px: Cmd+Shift+ ↑→↓← Click through to Object in Group: Cmd+left-click Activate Smart Guides: Alt Smart Guides with click-through: Cmd+Alt+left-click Move object up/down in hierarchy: Cmd+Alt+↑↓ Increase/decrease font size: Cmd+Alt and +/- Align left: Cmd+Shift+{ Align centre: Cmd+Shift+| Align right: Cmd+Shift+} Minimise your workspace What always frustrated me about Adobe Photoshop was how bloated and cluttered it felt. It was a multidisciplinary tool, used for both design and art, so it's no wonder. Sketch, by contrast, is focused on UI design, so not only is it minimal by default, but you can toggle the toolbars on and off with a quick shortcut. This is useful for creating more space on the canvas when needed, or when you need to enter the "Just show me the design" mode. These are the Sketch toolbar shortcuts that you need to know: Show/hide Toolbar (at the top): Cmd+Alt+T Show/hide Layer List (on the left): Cmd+Alt+1 Show/hide Inspector (on the right): Cmd+Alt+2 Presentation mode (hide everything): Cmd+. You shouldn’t forget about these shortcuts either: Slice: S Creates a rectangular selection that can then be exported, which is useful for highlighting or screenshotting key sections. Be sure to activate the Trim Transparent Pixels option in the Inspector to remove any whitespace from your Slices. Vector: V Vector tools are there to help you freehand draw totally unique shapes – icons or illustrations, for example. You can use 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the keyboard once focused on a vector point to change the point style from the default Straight style, to Mirrored, Asymmetric or Disconnected. Mask: Cmd+Ctrl+M When a shape is used as a mask, it redefines any content that overflows that shape. One example of this could be when you need a square image to fit inside a circle – the circular mask hides the 90-degree angles of the square image. Handy. 16. Reuse components with symbols Colours aren't the only thing that we can reuse. In fact, we can reuse entire components. Take a main navigation, for example – you'll use that on most (if not all) screens, right? If you made a change to it, you'd want that change to be universal, right? This is where symbols come in. Select the component that you want to make reusable and then click "Create Symbol" from the toolbar at the top. After that, navigate to Insert → Symbol and then click anywhere on the canvas to insert it. You can choose to store the master instance of the symbol on a separate page, away from the main design. This is the instance of the symbol that you edit when you want to make a universal change to it. Double-clicking on any other instance from the main design will redirect you to the master instance anyway. 17. Nested symbols and symbol overrides You can also embed an SVG image into the page in CSS, using the same method as you would to attach any other kind of image to an element. By using the SVG this way we can take advantage of the other CSS background properties allowing us to size, position and repeat our image as the background of an element. To provide support we can use a trick in the way CSS is parsed by the browser and provide a fallback PNG right before we include our SVG. 18. Maintain design consistency with Shared Styles And finally there are Shared Styles, which are like Symbols but for layers. Consider your heading styles, button text styles, body text styles and so on – the styles that you'll reuse time and time again. Shared Styles are created in the Inspector. To create Shared Styles, select the layer in question and then click the "No Shared Style" dropdown from the Inspector (or "No Text Style" if it's a text layer). Then, choose "Create new Text/Shared Style" from the list of dropdown options, then give it a meaningful name (such as "Largest Heading", for example). Flexibility comes more naturally with Shared Styles than it does with Symbols, where you can simply change what you need to change in one instance of a Shared Style and those changes won't sync with the other instances automatically. The change is a manual one, where you'll need to hit the sync icon in that same drop-down menu. By not hitting the sync icon here, you are making a singular change to an otherwise visually consistent Shared Style. 19. Live preview your designs with Sketch Mirror When mobile apps and websites are designed to be used by thumbs, it makes sense to test them with thumbs, which is exactly where Sketch Mirror comes in very handy. We need this to bring our designs off the big screen, and onto the little screen. With Sketch Mirror for iOS, you can preview your Sketch artboards on your iOS device. Click "Mirror" from the toolbar, then select your device from the list of options. If you can't see your device, make sure that you have Sketch Mirror open on your device and that they're both on the same wireless network. Tip: swipe right on the iOS Control Centre and tap the Record icon to record a user test or create a video demonstration, which you can then send to your teammates – or anyone else – in a quick message! 20. Create that smokey iOS blur When designing mobile apps for iOS, you'll often use a lot of their native UI elements and visual concepts, one of which is the smokey blur that appears as a backdrop to reduce visual distraction from any background elements. This effect blurs out the background when the Control Centre is open, for example. You can create this effect by selecting the "Background Blur" option from the Inspector. It should be noted that this doesn't work if the opacity of the Fill is 100%. The lower the opacity, the greater the blur effect. Background Blur differs from Gaussian Blur in that with Gaussian Blur, the edges of the blurred background are blurred too. 21. Space savers Sketch Cache Cleaner quickly gets rid of all those unwanted earlier builds Sketch users often complain that .sketch files take up a lot of space on their computers. Here's what you can do to get around that problem. Deleting the Sketch cache to save space When a .sketch file is automatically saved as a backup, the new cached version doesn't overwrite the old cached version. Each cached version is stored somewhere safe, which is what enables Sketch's native version control features. While this is useful for those needing to roll back to an earlier version of their design sometimes, those versions eventually end up stealing all of your megabytes (or gigabytes). Sketch Cache Cleaner is an independent app that deletes all of these versions when this cache becomes too large. Of course, you can turn off version control in Sketch's Preferences, but sometimes it's useful. Instead, clean the cache only when you're sure there's nothing you'll need from it. If you're using a version control app such as Abstract or Plant, then in that case it would serve you well to turn off Sketch's native version control. Reducing the size of sketch files Even Sketch files themselves can become quite large, but Sketch now has a built-in feature that reduces their file size, which you can find at File > Reduce File Size. Some designers say that Reduce from the Flawless App team (flawlessapp.io/reduce) is a little more efficient at this though, since it retains the colour quality better. Reduce is free to download and sits in the macOS menu bar, making it quick and easy to access at any time. Being a neat freak Generally speaking, getting in the habit of cleaning up your .sketch documents as you design (or at regular intervals), will reduce their file size. By that I mean removing any redundant layers, Ungrouping (Cmd+Shift+G) any redundant Groups, and basically making your documents clean and easy to read. This not only benefits your file sizes, but also makes your work readable for anybody that views it after you, which might include developers who are inspecting your work so that it can be converted to code, or even another designer that you might be collaborating with on a large design. This article was originally published in issue 269 of creative web design magazine Web Designer. Buy issue 269 here or subscribe to Web Designer here. Related articles: How to get started with Sketch for app design 24 top Sketch plugins How Sketch update changes everything View the full article

Every industry could use a bit of disruption. If you have an idea worth pursuing, you can find funding and opportunity to make it happen. You just need to know how to get in front of the right people. That’s exactly what the Complete Startup Toolkit Bundle can teach you, and you can get it for 99 per cent off the retail price! Getting your startup up and running is one of the most difficult things you will ever do, but this bundle of courses has the information you need to do it – and help you find success along the way. Gain the basic skills to create your product, then learn how to network and connect with the people who can help you turn it into a real business. There’s a course for every step of the way, with 23 information-packed courses and 14 full-service apps that you can put to use right away. If you’re ready to get your startup up and running, you can get the Complete Startup Toolkit Bundle on sale for 99p er cent off the retail price! You won't find a better deal for a collection of courses that can help your startup get off the ground, so grab it today! About Creative Bloq deals This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life. We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more. Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com. Related articles: 5 essentials for your start-up studio How to design for startups The 17 best startup logos of 2017 View the full article

Hailing very much from the art side of the STABILO stable, the CarbOthello Pastel Pencil Set (24) is aimed at mid-level artists. And as with most STABILO products, you’re guaranteed a high level of quality. The best pencils for designers and artists This 24-pencil set comes in an attractive two-piece tin and includes a decent spectrum of colour choices. The pencils sharpen very well, so you can fashion a good tip with a new scalpel blade and a sandpaper block. The pencils really come alive when mixed with water The pencils’ dry stroke is perfect for blending, but the fun really starts when you begin adding water, with some particularly interesting results achievable when working in wet areas with dry pencils. Playing about with the balance of these elements is one of the joys of this set. And when you do, you’ll realise that the great advantage of using pastel pencils is the lack of mess at the end of the day. Stabilo’s pencils are fuss-free and solid, with good pigment strengths matched with quality wooden shafts. If you’re looking for your first reasonably priced set of pastel pencils, this is a great mid-level entry point. This article was originally published in issue 154 of ImagineFX, the world's best-selling magazine for digital artists. Buy issue 154 here or subscribe to ImagineFX here. Related articles: How to hold a pencil correctly How to draw animals, people and landscapes Pencil drawing in 6 simple steps View the full article

You're reading How to Send Emails That Your Subscribers Will Love, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! To develop a strong business, you must develop a good relationship with clients. This doesn’t just mean promoting an excellent product or service. It is also important to stay in touch once the sale is complete. One way of doing this is to send customers regular email newsletters. If you want to offer the most […] View the full article

In typography, as in grammar, there is no objective ‘right’ way to do things; there are just conventions, and these conventions change over time. And what's more, while we could argue that the examples we're about to give are indeed mistakes – that is, things that are wrong – it's also true that there are often technical or style reasons to make them deliberately (we do on Creative Bloq all the time). But enough with the caveats. Typography rules and terms every designer must know Bonus points if you can identify the problem with each example before we explain it. The more points you have at the end, the more fun you are at parties! Note: Due to technical limitations (and to delicious irony) some characters in this post may not display properly depending on your browser and platform. Suggestions on how to type characters are confirmed correct for UK Mac keyboards. 01. Quote marks Yes, yes we are. For example, we’ll now point out that you should of course have used proper typographic quote marks above – “You’re a bunch of type nazis”. Because supporting “, ”, ‘ and ’ would have added complexity to typewriters, we just decided to simplify with a single symbol for single and a single symbol for double quotes that could be used everywhere, and this ‘dumb quotes’ convention stuck. (If you ever doubt how influential typewriters are even today, not only could we point you to the persistent QWERTY layout, but you’ll also see on many keyboards that the staggered grid allows for a bar to lead straight up from each key, like on a typewriter.) Bonus fact: you use «guillemets» (not ‘greater-than and less-than’ chevrons!) in French and Spanish, and „this style“ in German. As always, Wikipedia can out-pedant anyone on this topic. To type proper typographic quotes on a Mac, press alt+[, alt+shift+[, alt+] and alt+shift+]. Of course, you could let your software convert from dumb to smart quotes for you (check under 'Edit > Substitutions') but be careful, as the next mistake shows. 02. Apostrophes You might think that allowing your computer to make your dumb quotes smart absolves you of all responsibility, but the problem is that computers can sometimes be a bit too smart for their own good. One of the common mistakes computers make is to use an opening single quote where an apostrophe (or closing single quote; there’s really no difference) should be used. If you’re talking about the ’80s (with a closing quote mark), say, many computers would be tempted to write ‘80s (with an opening quote mark) instead, because it thinks you’re starting to write a sentence ‘in quote marks’. To fix this, make sure you type ⌥⇧] manually. The opposite can be true too these days; start a sentence with a double-digit number and some systems will convert a single dumb quote to ’, even if you then end the sentence with another quote, such as in ’10 years ago’. Here, manually typing ⌥] is necessary. ‘Smart’ computer systems can land you in other trouble too. For example, once you’ve got your eye in, you might often see something like this online: “The point size for body copy wouldn’t normally be bigger than 11.5″. The problem there is that a smart CMS has decided that because that quotation ends with a number, it should convert the double dumb quote you typed into a double prime (″) rather than the closing quote marks (”), since it’s assumed you meant inches. What’s a double prime, you ask? We’re glad you did. 03. Double prime You might be congratulating yourself because you knew that dumb quotes were wrong for enclosing quotations, and that the correct use of the straight ' and " is to denote feet and inches. Your smugness is misplaced, sadly. In fact, those glyphs really, typographically speaking, serve no purpose. Feet and inches should be represented by ‘primes’ – a single for feet, a double for inches. So 6' 6" is wrong, but 6′ 6″ is correct. Of course, not all fonts have primes characters, but all that means is that you should be using better fonts! It’s easy to type primes if you’re running OS X 10.9 or later; just tap the spacebar while holding ctrl and cmd and a character palette will pop up. You don’t have to know where to look; start typing ‘primes’ and the characters will appear. On earlier systems, choose Special Characters from the Edit menu, and in apps such as InDesign, browse the Glyphs palette. 04. Fractions Ah, so you got the primes right that time, but what the hell is with those fractions? Properly, fractions should be individually typeset – often using LaTeX formatting – but even if that’s not technically possible most fonts have dedicated glyphs for common vulgar fractions. (‘Vulgar’ is a technical term there, not a synonym for ‘common’; keep politics out of typography. Actually, technically, mathematically, ‘vulgar’ is a synonym for ‘common’ but we’re in danger of disappearing down the wrong rabbit hole entirely.) By calling up the character palette again you can search for ‘fraction’ (or specifically ‘half’, ‘quarter’, ‘third’ and so on) and so correctly – or at least more correctly than using normal numbers separated by a slash, like an animal – render ‘3½″ and 5¼″ disks’. 05. Multiplication/by This is a particularly subtle one in some fonts, but there is a proper glyph for the ‘x’ that stands in for ‘by’, so the above should read ‘5120×2880 pixels’ rather than ‘5120x2880 pixels’. The particular Unicode character we’re using there is the multiplication sign – and yes, you could argue we’re co-opting it here – so be sure to search for that in the character palette rather than ‘x’. Searching for ‘x’ shows up many different variants, including multiple mathematical, algebraic ‘x’ symbols, but not the multiplication symbol you actually want. Next page: 5 more typographic mistakes we all make 06. Interpunct Well, there’s no arguing with the sentiment there (and the price is correct at least at the time of writing), but there is a typographical faux pas in that sentence. We’ve lost the battle on this one, we know, but properly the decimal point shouldn’t be a full stop or period, but should be an interpunct, thus: £29·99. This is only true in Britain – although possibly some other countries too, especially those that were British colonies in 1971 when decimalisation struck – but technically you were only supposed to use a full stop when technical limitations meant an interpunct was unavailable. Happily, these days, should you wish to render prices correctly (as surely any good Brit would wish to do), you can easily get an interpunct by typing alt+shift+9. 07. Degrees And it’s literally freezing in the UK as we write this, but the thing we’re specifically complaining about here is that degrees symbol, because it isn’t a degrees symbol at all. Now pay attention, 007: 24º is wrong, 24° is right. That first character is an ordinal indicator for masculine (the feminine variant is ª), and you can read about their use on Wikipedia. In some fonts, it’s actually really obvious that it’s not a degrees symbol because the O will have an underline, but that’s not common and it’s easy to see that someone, mashing a keyboard till they find a degrees symbol, would think they’ve found it; you get it by typing alt+0, which makes some kind of sense. In fact, the degree symbol’s shortcut is actually somewhat logical too. To get a bullet (that’s this character: •) on a Mac, you type alt+8, and to get a degrees symbol, it’s alt+shift+8. Conceptually, then, you can think of it a little like a ‘superscript bullet’. 08. Hyphens and dashes Now, this is tricky, and depends very much on style, but the official line is that hyphens specifically should only be used in words like ‘anal-retentive’ and ‘super-annoying’ or for splitting words across lines in hyphenation; you shouldn’t even use them for a minus symbol, as there’s a specific, slightly longer Unicode character for that: −. (We’re not making this up, we promise.) But while hyphens in the sentence above are definitely wrong, there is no definitely right. Convention would have it that in the UK you’d use en-dashes – like this – while in the US—where everything is bigger—the longer em-dashes are favoured. Note too that in the first example, there are spaces either side of the dashes, but not in the second; that’s deliberate. In fact, thanks to the fractal nature of pedantry, you can also say that this is still wrong, since if you’re being super-correct there should be hairline spaces around the em-dashes. Or possibly thin spaces, which are technically thicker. But let’s not split hairs. You type an en-dash with alt+- and em-dashes with alt+shift+-. (Bonus: you should sometimes use an en-dash where you might think a hyphen is called for, when you’re dealing with attributive compounds.) 09. Asterisks and stars The noble asterisk – at least as noble as Astérix – while technically being a star should nevertheless not be used as a star when you’re talking about ratings; its main purpose these days is to direct you to a caveat somewhere else on the page. Happily, there are filled and empty – technically, black and white – stars in the Unicode table, and they’re pretty commonly supported. Thus you could say that this post is ★☆☆☆☆, even though of course you know in your heart it’s ★★★★★. You can type these symbols easily by searching ‘star’ in the character pop-up, and to make them even easier to type, you can enter a range of them with shortcuts in the Text tab of the Keyboard pane in System Preferences. Thus typing [[3 autocorrects to ★★★☆☆. Best of all, these shortcuts should sync over iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, so you can use them there too. 10. Ellipses Technically, there is a difference between three full stops and an ellipsis. Wrong: ... Right: … To type an ellipsis, it’s alt+; – but of course, you could out-typography-nerd anyone by airily claiming you manually kern three periods each time because you think the default ellipses in your chosen font are badly set. Does any of this matter? Now look, we know that by making any of these ‘mistakes’ you probably won’t impair the sense of what you’re saying, that good grammar and clarity should take precedence, and that even with the broad acceptance of Unicode there are often good reasons to ignore these old traditions. And honestly, this was just meant to be a ‘oh, I didn’t know that!’ post rather than an infuriating blend of a telling-off and a diktat. But maybe, just maybe, now that you’re aware of some of these established conventions, you can help honour the rich and beautiful history of typography in the next chunk of text you set. Related articles: 10 typography tricks every designer should know 20 fonts every graphic designer should own 68 best free fonts for designers View the full article

Colour, more than any other element of a designer's work, has the greatest influence on how viewers feel. Understanding colour theory, its cultural symbolism and the relationship between colours is necessary to becoming a better artist and designer. It's always better to learn the basics before striking out to develop your own colour language. We are surrounded by colour every moment of our lives and certain things become ingrained on our consciousness, so we immediately understand what the colour is supposed to make us think or feel. 21 outstanding uses of colour in branding Take red, for example. If you see a red sign in a public building, or a red road sign, you instantly know that it is likely to be a warning sign. You don't need to be aware of the content of the sign or even its shape to immediately get the sense of potential danger. However in Eastern Asia, for example, this cultural understanding could lead to a misunderstanding. That's because the colour red in Eastern Asia is often used to signify good fortune or prosperity. Sparking an emotional response There is another side to this language of colour, and that is emotion. Studies have shown that some colours can spark a emotional response – yellow is uplifting and cheering while blue is calming, for example. This emotional language may have a cultural basis, but the relationships between colours are fixed. Complementary colours are the same no matter where you are in the world, and a colour triad is fixed and not influenced by cultural background. This means it is easy to build a colour palette for your project where the results work together (not in harmony, that is something else again!). It's up to you to judge whether the scheme works in its context. The basis of all colours is the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. Mixing these together, you can make any other colour you want. However, bear in mind that to get the shade you want, you may have to alter the brightness or saturation (this is assuming that you are working digitally). To understand how complementary colours work, I recommend using a colour wheel. Here are some more tips to help you really get to grips with colour... 01. Colour can be used to subtly affect perception Film directors are often inspired by colour, and use it in a way to convey atmosphere and style Some film directors use colour in a very deliberate way, in order to help the viewer understand where they are in a film and to 'stamp' it with their own distinctive style. Jean-Pierre Jeunet has an instantly recognisable style and visual language that is consistent across all his films. This still, from the film Delicatessen, has a very similar look and feel to his other movies, where colour is used to convey atmosphere, even if it's not accurate. In fact, colour use is as much about perception as it is realism. 02. Shared colour associations can create an emotional response Perception is key to communication in your use of colour Moonlight isn't blue, it's just our visual perception playing tricks on us. When we look up at the moon, what we're actually seeing is the white light of the sun reflecting back at us off the moon's grey surface. There's nothing there to give the light a blue tone. So why is moonlight blue in films? Because of a shared understanding of colour and its meaning, where we accept blue as a calming moonlit night and red as fierce daylight. Perception is key to communication in your use of colour. 03. Colour can add or remove warmth Temperature relates to how 'warm' or 'cool' a colour is Temperature relates to how 'warm' or 'cool' a colour is. Although there are actual mathematical values for this – temperature is defined in Kelvins – most people refer to the red end of the spectrum as warm and blues as cool. Saturation is a measure of how much of a colour is present. The easiest way to visualise this is to turn your TV's colour setting down to black and white. By decreasing the colour saturation, you will just be left with various shades of grey. 04. Use colour tools to pick the right palette Tools such as Adobe CC can help you speed up your understanding of colour Although there is no replacement for learning and observing, there are tools that can help you speed up your understanding of colour and give you a helping hand along the way. These can be traditional, such as colour wheels (there are many to choose from and explore for different reasons) or handy apps, like Adobe Color CC , which is part of the Creative Cloud. 05. Experiment with Adobe Color Find a complementary colour palette has never been easier I'm after a new colour palette so setting my mode in Adobe Color to Complementary. You can see that the blues are opposite the oranges on the colour wheel, which is a great start. All that needs doing now is to change the saturation using the arrow markers, and then tweak the results. You can see my approximation in the screengrab above. It really is that easy, and a great way to set a unified colour palette in your work. Book your Vertex 2018 ticket now On 13 March we’re launching Vertex 2018: a one-day event in London for the CG community. Featuring a jam-packed schedule of inspiring talks from the industry’s most exciting practitioners, there will also be workshops, networking opportunities, a busy expo and lots more. Get your ticket to Vertex 2018 now. This article originally appeared in 3D World magazine; subscribe here. Related articles: The designer's guide to the Golden Ratio 10 of the best logos ever 21 outstanding uses of colour in branding View the full article

If you're part of the CG community, you can’t afford to miss out on Vertex – our one-day event celebrating all things CG. Launching on Tuesday 13 March, the schedule is bursting with inspiring talks from industry leaders, pro techniques, innovative new tech and expert advice. And now you can find out exactly what’s on in our special show guide. Inside, you’ll find a schedule – so you know exactly what’s happening and when; opinion columns from Vertex keynote speakers Chris Nichols and Scott Ross; a guide on how to get your dream job in CG; and much more. Get your Vertex 2018 ticket now There’s still time to get tickets to Vertex 2018, if you're quick. You can get an Access All Areas pass to mingle with the experts – or see the latest in tech in our Expo hall for free: either way, just head to the Vertex website to book now. Come and join us at Vertex, our debut event bringing the CG community together! Related articles: 7 reasons you can't miss Vertex The best 3D modelling software 2018 Press Start on your game art skills at Vertex View the full article

With web fonts natively supported in almost all browsers, and more and more typographic features being implemented in the latest versions of HTML and CSS, a bright new era of increasingly sophisticated web typography is upon us. This means web designers need to get (re)acquainted with the rules of classic typesetting – but it doesn’t end there. Whereas print typography is static, web typography is a fluid medium. More than simply learning how to achieve a specific look, designers have to tackle responsive typography, and be able to predict the end result across different browsers and devices. Here are some of the basic dos and don’ts of typography, specifically applied to the web. 01. Find out what your fonts can do Check your font has all the characters and features you need The very first thing you must do is check the capabilities of the fonts you are going to use. All fonts are created equal, but some fonts are more equal than the others. Unicode encoding means fonts can hold literally tens of thousands of glyphs, and the OpenType font format supports numerous features like small caps, old style numerals, discretionary ligatures and contextual alternates. Yet any font is only as good as the type designer who built it. What use are all those typographic niceties if the designer neglected to draw the necessary characters or failed to code the relevant features? Creating professional fonts takes an enormous amount of time and effort, and some designers are not prepared to go all the way. This is why it is very important to check the character set and the features of a font before incorporating it in your web design. A font is like a toolbox; if a crucial tool is missing, you won't get far – if there is a screwdriver, a saw and pliers but no hammer, not a lot of hammering will get done. 02. Subset cleverly Font fallbacks happen on a character by character basis. As soon as character is missing in the specified font, the fallback system will use the corresponding character from the next font in the list, then switch back to the original font. This technique can be used in an unconventional way with surprising results. If, for example, the character set of a font has no old style figures, find a corresponding font that has them. Subset it, leaving only the desired numerals, and put it first in the fallback list. All numerals in the text will then be set in that old style figure subset, and the rest of the text in the regular font. This prevents you from having to format numerals separately and keeps your text file clear of unnecessary HTML tags. 03. Figure out numerals Most professional quality fonts have several sets of numerals, each with a specific use. For example: Tabular: Each character occupies the same amount of space, so they will line up in vertical columns Proportional: Character widths vary according to their design Old style: Figures mimic the lowercase characters with an x-height, ascenders and descenders; blend perfectly with mixed-case text Lining: Meant to be used in numerical matter or in combination with all-caps text 04. Don’t fake styles Typeface: FF Ernestine by Nina Stoessinger CSS enables you to fake a number of things. If there is no bold variant of your font the <b> tag will artificially embolden the text by rendering it double with a slight lateral translation. Applying the <i> tag to a font without an italic style will digitally slant the characters. The resulting distorted letters invariably look dismal. Generally speaking, you want to define all your text formatting in the CSS file, and avoid local character formatting as much as possible. 05. ... but when you do, fake well Faking small caps when they are missing in the character set always makes them look too thin by comparison with the surrounding text. When the type family has a semi-bold variant, or the difference between the regular and bold weight is moderate, use that bolder weight for the small caps to adjust the darkness of the text. Don’t forget to give the small caps a little extra character space. 06. Be careful with copy-pasting text You can sometimes find words in web pages with illegible character strings where there should have been an accented or other special character. This occurs when text is copied from text editing software using a character encoding other than UTF-8. Character encoding systems map all glyphs in a given character set to facilitate the transmission of data (generally numbers or text) through telecommunication networks or for data storage. As HTML works with UTF-8 it will misinterpret copy-pasted text from any other encoding system, turning specific characters into bizarre combinations of random letters and signs. Furthermore certain content management systems will not only copy the text but also the formatting, causing unpredictable results. The best way to avoid this is to convert the copied text to text-only format in a simple text editor, then copy it from there and paste it into the CMS. 07. Learn your HTML entities Typeface: FF Spinoza by Max Phillips Looking at your keyboard, you may not realise what a wealth of characters is available. Many of them are defined by HTML entities, so it is a good idea to memorise the most common ones and have an overview handy when typesetting for the web. A lowercase x is not the same as a multiplication sign, the trademark sign is not simply a raised capital T and M, and a floating acute accent will not do for an apostrophe. For more detail on this, take a look at our article on typographic mistakes everyone makes. 08. Define relationships, not absolute dimensions A big advantage of text on the web is that it can be resized by the user. If text is defined in pixels, resizing a web page may cause discrepancies in the relative sizes of the different text styles and, for example, body text may end up bigger than the headlines. It is crucial for all text sizes to be defined in ems in relation to the standard body text size. This ensures that all text in a web page is resized accordingly, respecting the relationships between the different text sizes. 09. Take control over line breaks Typeface: FF Spinoza by Max Phillips Resizing the browser window makes text columns go narrower or wider, and end-users can also alter text sizes. This could make you believe that you have no control over line breaks. Yet when you look beyond the desired end result and understand what exactly you want to achieve there are certain aspects that can be steered. Line breaks occur at the end of paragraphs that are wrapped with a <p> or <div> tag. In all other cases, line breaks are very seldom inserted solely for the purpose of having the next word start at the beginning of the next line, so use the <br> tag sparingly. The most common reason is to keep two or more words together. 10. Space with care The non-breaking space is not the only special space character available in HTML. An em space is as wide as the type size, creating a perfectly square separator. The en space is half its width. Very useful in tabular material is the figure space, which takes up as much room as the numerals in the font, while the punctuation space is as wide as the dot or comma. Thin spaces can be used between the dot and the next letter in abbreviated names, and hair spaces to detach em dashes from the neighbouring characters. And then there’s the three-per-em space, the four-per-em space, the six-per-em space … Reading is as much about the space within and between letters as it is about the black of the letters themselves. The correct hierarchy is that the space between letters is smaller than the space between words, and the space between words is smaller than the space between lines of text. Avoid adding space between letters as this causes words to break up and hinders legibility. Judiciously increasing letter spacing is only warranted for text in very small sizes. On the contrary text in display sizes often benefits from tighter tracking, but here as well don’t overdo it. Full justification has an adverse effect on the appearance of text. The process of justifying the words to fit the line length increases the spacing between words, making those word spaces vary wildly between subsequent text lines. This gives the text an uneven appearance and creates unsightly gaps between words in some lines. Justified left/ragged right is the preferred alignment for ease of reading. Besides character spacing and word spacing, line spacing also influences legibility. Lines of text that are too close to each other create a dense text image that is hard to decipher. If on the contrary the line spacing is too generous the reader has difficulties finding the correct next line after a line break. Related articles: 7 great examples of typography in web design The rules of responsive web typography 68 best free fonts for designers View the full article

Self-promotion is one of the trickiest and most elusive skills a designer must acquire. Like learning to ride a bicycle, you have to do it to find out how it's done. Nor is it something that can be avoided. As soon as designers emerge from education they have to be able to promote themselves to prospective employers. How to make the perfect exhibition take-away Later, as they enter the freelance world or the world of studio ownership, they have to be able to promote their services to prospective clients. None of this is easy, and for many designers, it's as painful as falling off a bicycle. It's hardly surprising that self-promotion is problematical. Design schools don't teach it, and few established designers talk about it in public. To make matters worse, we're surrounded by thousands of other designers all frantically self-promoting. Adrian Shaughnessy illustrated by Zaneta Antosik For many of us, promoting ourselves feels like shouting into a wind tunnel. The whole process of self-promotion is made even more difficult by the realisation that clients mostly choose designers based on reputation and word of mouth. Yet there's no need for pessimism. Done properly, it's possible to self-promote in ways that get results. Most of the rules of self-promotion apply equally to finding employment and to finding clients. But in truth, there is really only one rule of self-promotion: if your work is good, you can ignore all the rules; good work is the best and only reliable form of self-promotion. While you are working on that, here are five rules for self-promotion... 01. It's not all about the work The best self-promotion is often not about your work, it's about the other stuff you do. Back when I ran my studio, we mostly designed record covers. After doing this for a few years, we published a book on contemporary record cover art. It featured some of our own work, but it mostly contained the work of other designers. It wasn't done as self-promotion, it was done from a love of the subject, but the result was recognition on a scale we hadn't experienced when we merely shouted about our work. Now, not everyone can publish a book on their chosen subject (although you might be surprised how easy it is to get published if you've got a good idea), but everyone can find ways of adding to the body of knowledge that surrounds their discipline. As well as telling the world that you've just finished a new brand identity, write a blog post about an issue that interests you. Offer to write for the design press. Start debates. Promote design, not yourself. 02. Face-to-face is best With the internet, and social media in particular, it's possible to 'speak' to almost anyone. Fancy working for that cool fashion label? Simple, send them a message on Facebook or Twitter. But unless you have something earth-shattering to show them, you will most likely be ignored. The aim of all self-promotion should be to get face-to-face meetings. If you make meeting people the main focus of your self-promotional activities, the results will be far superior to impersonal online communication. In other words, don't ask for work, ask for a meeting. 03. Be different Most self-promotion looks and reads like everyone else's self-promotion. You only have to look at the majority of designer's websites. Firstly, many of them 'sound' and look depressingly familiar: the same stock phrases and the same neat piles of business cards and letterheads. But more worryingly, they look as if they are aimed at other designers. It seems we worry more about what other designers think about our work, rather than what clients might actually want. Run a health check on your website. Is it something a client might respond to, or is it aimed at friends and peers? 04. Clients prefer results to artifacts It's depressing but nonetheless true that most clients care more about the impact of a piece of work has than the finely crafted details of typography, layout and production. This is not an argument in favour of abandoning high standards of thinking and execution; rather it is a reminder that outcomes, impact and results are what clients really care about. Make sure when you show work, you also describe its impact. 05. A good reputation speak volumes The cultivation of a good reputation is the most important aspect of self-promotion. The winning lottery ticket in self-promotion is when clients, or employers, call you. Trish Finegan, managing director of leading design studio Spin, has a theory that a client has to see – and be impressed by – three pieces of work before they will consider you. What this means is that unless your work is seen in the right places and talked about in the right places, you are not going to get that "can-I-come-and-talk-to-you" call. So growing a reputation is vital. This means talking to journalists; speaking at conferences; getting your work on blogs; and using all of the dozens of other channels that are open to modern designers. Liked this? Try these… The designer's guide to self-promotion 7 ways to craft a killer self-promo campaign Be a better designer in 2018 View the full article

Don't miss Vertex 2018, our debut event for the CG community. Packed with inspiring talks from industry pros working in games, VFX and more, plus career advice, workshops, an expo and more, if you work – or play – in CG, it’s unmissable. Book your ticket now. Vector Displacement Mesh (VDM) is a 3D sculpt, used as brush building blocks, that enables undercutting when drawing on a model’s surface. But what exactly does it mean? The simplest way to understand it is to start with alphas. Alpha textures are greyscale images that we often use for sculpting fine-detailed patterns like wrinkles and skin pores. Without them we would have to painstakingly draw the details on by hand, one by one. Alphas are awesome and quite efficient to use in combination with bushes, but they are basically flat images with black values, and they do not support undercuts and overhangs, which limits what can be done with them. However, Alpha 3D stores the information of all XYZ axes and does not have any vertical elevation restrictions. By definition, it is 3D as it uses VDM in its system. All you need to worry about is the polygon density to enable proper projection of the Vector Displacement Mesh onto your model. Create detailed 3D shapes with ease Let’s look at an example of creating some highly detailed 3D art: imagine I want to model some dragon scales, but I don't want to use a 2D alpha because this way I would have to go back and sculpt them some more for extra depth. Scales do not just sit there side by side, they overhang and partially cover one another, so it takes a great deal of time making them look realistic. It is a long, tiring and very repetitive process, but there is a way to make it easier and quicker in the future. I can create a Vector Displacement Mesh, save it as a brush and simply draw my sculpt onto a model with a single stroke, as many times as my heart desires. Job done! I know that I still have to spend some time making those VDM brushes, of course, but once they are done, I will not have to go and create them again – they will be sitting in my brush library, waiting for the next time I need them. Here I will demonstrate how easy it is in these simple steps, making a swirl frosting for my 10-minute 3D cupcake. 01. Start the swirl With a clay brush selected, build a little hill in the middle of the canvas To start off, we first need to get a canvas, so head to Lightbox> Project>MISC and select the Brush 3D template. With a clay brush selected, build a little hill in the middle of the canvas, more or less to the size of the swirl. Now, with the radial symmetry on and DamStandard brush selected, start sculpting the grooves and peaks of the swirl shape. 02. Fix distorted edges Make sure to stay away from the edges of the plane Make sure to stay away from the edges of the plane. If you accidentally mess up the edges, you have to fix them before saving the VDM: mask the edges, invert mask, go to Tool>Deformation>Relax Plane Grid or Morph to Grid, depending on the level of damage caused to your plane. This should reshape the edges and add more geometry. 03. Save out to the VDM To save as a VDM, select a brush that can save all the information contained in your model To save out your sculpt as a VDM, you need to select a brush that can save all the information contained in your model. With Chisel3D selected, open the Brush palette, select Create and click on Create MultiAlpha Brush. This automatically creates a new Chisel brush out of your model. Your current Alpha texture now contains a VDM of the sculpt with a 3D mark in top-left corner. 04. Save out the brush Last thing to do is create an icon for your brush and save it In order to now save out the brush and create an icon for it, open a 3D sphere and turn it into a polymesh. Divide it a few times and drag out your VDM. Position the sphere to capture the icon, go to the Brush palette, hold down the Alt key and click on SelectIcon. With the icon generated, you can finally save it out with Brush>Save As. Rename your brand-new brush and it is done! This article was originally published in issue 230 of 3D World, the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists. Buy issue 230 or subscribe to 3D World here. Book your Vertex 2018 ticket now On 13 March we’re launching Vertex 2018: a one-day event in London for the CG community. Featuring a jam-packed schedule of inspiring talks from the industry’s most exciting practitioners, there will also be workshops, networking opportunities, a busy expo and lots more. Get your ticket to Vertex 2018 now. Related articles: Behind the scenes on The Shape of Water Model an alien pirate creature in ZBrush How to master creature anatomy View the full article

In a world where users have high expectations of their experience on the web and mobile, prototyping and user evaluation is key. It's now common to progressively iterate on prototypes with increasingly high fidelity, and a flourishing user experience industry has grown up around this critical set of activities. Ultimately, getting software right at the prototyping stage saves you time and/or money later on. 10 top prototyping tools There are many approaches you can take to prototyping, and numerous tools out there to assist. One of the newest on the block is Origami Studio, developed by Facebook and available free for macOS. Origami Studio, which actually started its life as a plugin for Quartz Composer (a visual programming language within macOS's Xcode development environment) before becoming a standalone tool, has gained a great deal of attention over the last year. This is not only because it is built by a big-name developer, but also because of the combination of power and simplicity it brings to developing high-fidelity, interactive prototypes. Follow these steps to discover just how easily you can use Origami Studio to build a prototype. 01. A new prototype Start by creating a new iPhone 8 prototype We're going to create a prototype for a mobile app which will allow us to swipe through pictures of cats and 'like' some of them. Once we've installed Origami Studio, we'll create a new iPhone 8 prototype from the splash screen. 02. Adding layers We can start to add some layers to our prototype straight away. In this case, we'll add a logo positioned at the top of the screen. We add the layer using the + button in the top right and selecting 'Image Layer'. We can then resize and position it appropriately by highlighting and modifying the layer's properties. After our brand, we'll also add a heart image at the bottom of the screen to serve as our 'like' button. 03. Creating an interaction For interactions you'll need to create a patch We need to make our heart button respond to user interactions. You'll notice that in the preview window, the cursor changes to represent touch on a mobile device. To respond to this, we need to create a 'Patch', which is essentially a function in Origami that takes inputs and produces outputs. Double-click the empty grey area to bring up a list of new patches, and search for 'interaction'. Place your patch and it should appear on the screen. 04. Linking interactions to layers Change the patch properties so that it only responds when you click in the right place At the moment, your patch will respond to touch anywhere on the prototype. Test it out by clicking and you'll see the 'Down' and 'Tap' properties changing in real time. If you select the 'Layer' property in the patch, you can link it to the layer containing the heart image, and it will now only respond to clicks on that specific area. 05. Animations A pop animation will give users a bit of visual feedback Now we want to have something happen when our interaction triggers. Create another patch, this time a 'Pop Animation'. This is used to create a springy effect. Leave the properties as they are for now, but we'll create a link between the Tap output of the Interaction we created previously and the Number input of our new Pop Animation. We do this by clicking and dragging between the small circles next to each. If you click the heart now, you'll now see the interaction triggers a change in the 'Progress' output of the Pop Animation. 06. Transitions You can change the extent to which objects change size when they're clicked The next thing we need is a Transition patch. This will allow us to specify low and high values to move between as the Pop Animation's Progress output changes. We can then link the Transition's output values to the Scale property of the heart image layer to tell Origami to resize it when it's clicked. You should now find that clicking the heart causes it to animate a brief change in size. It's not quite right, however, since it pops back to normal straight away. 07. Switches Use switch patches to toggle objects between different states Switch patches are Origami's way of toggling between two states. This is what we want for our 'Like' button. An input passed to a Switch patch can flip it between 'on' and 'off' states, which can then be passed as an output to subsequent patches. Let's create a new Switch and place it between the Interaction and the Pop Animation. You should then be able to click the heart to toggle it between small and large states. 08. More complex behaviour By experimenting with patches you can add more complex behaviour to your prototype Congratulations! You've now created your first interactive feature, using the most common patches that you'll find you use time and time again. We can add more patches to create more complex behaviour. Let's create a different coloured heart layer directly behind our current one, then add new patches both to scale it simultaneously, and modify the opacity of our original layer so it's made visible. Now, when you tap the heart, it will toggle larger and smaller, but also appear to change colour. 09. Carousel It's time to bring on all the cats To finish our prototype, let's add an image carousel with the cats we want to allow users to 'Like'. To do this, we first need to add a group of layers. Each image will be a separate layer, with increasingly offset x co-ordinates so that they essentially sit side-by-size in a row with only one visible on screen at any one item. 10. Swiping left and right Follow these steps to add a classic swiping action to your carousel The last thing we need to do to make it work is enable left and right swipes to scroll the carousel. We do this by creating a Scroll interaction to link to the carousel layer group (not the individual images). The interaction outputs an x co-ordinate which we can then link to the x property of the carousel to move it. In-between, we'll add a Clip patch, which can be used to limit values to ensure we do not scroll to co-ordinates outside the edge of the carousel. 11. Next steps Now you've learned the basics you can add more advanced features That's it. You've created a very basic app. You can also use Origami Studio's built in 'frames' to place it onto a device background, which can help give a professional finish. Now that you're familiar with the basics of using patches, you can begin to create more advanced behaviours. There are plenty of guides on the Origami Studio website, which explain how to implement popular functionalities commonly seen in apps. This article was originally published in issue 270 of creative web design magazine Web Designer. Buy issue 270 here or subscribe to Web Designer here. Related articles: Trends that will shape app design in 2018 3 top ways to build a website prototype All you need to know about mockups, wireframes, and prototypes View the full article

People who know how to get things done are the people who are tapped to lead important projects. If you want to be the one who knows how to get the most out of others, you need to grab the eduCBA Project Management Lifetime Subscription Bundle. You can get it on sale now for just $29 (approx. £21). To prove your skills as a project manager and to make sure you’re learning all the skills you need for this career, dive into the 100 in-depth courses inside the eduCBA Project Management Lifetime Subscription Bundle. It will provide you with over 400 hours of knowledge about project management. This bundle is built to prepare you to manage your way to success regardless of your field, and will make sure you’re ready to prove your skills with certifications. The eduCBA Project Management Lifetime Subscription Bundle is valued at $797 but you can save a whopping 96 per cent off the retail price right now. That means you pay just $29 (approx. £21) – that's an incredible amount of savings for a bundle that will help get you into the career you want, so grab it today. About Creative Bloq deals This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life. We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more. Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com. Related articles: Top tips for nailing project management Best project management software The tools of the trade for project management View the full article

A great logo design, as any visual identity specialist will tell you, is only a small part of the branding package. Yet to the rest of us – those outside the veiled, mystical industry of brand consultancy – logos are what we latch onto. We subliminally take meaning from these marks. We care, too. Often the public responds loudly and fiercely to the introduction of a new logo. And why not? Michael Wolff, co-founder of branding agency Wolff Olins, has argued that a brand belongs to its customers. They define it, because they're the ones who buy its products or use its services. It isn't surprising, then, that logos are discussed far beyond the presentation rooms of global branding agencies in Manhattan or Shoreditch. 10 ways to find logo design inspiration Even if you only have a passing interest in graphic design, it’s fascinating to see what the BP logo looked like in 1930, or debate how the Coca-Cola identity has evolved (or not) over the past 125 years. If that’s your thing, then you’re going to love our listing of the 10 best logos ever... 10. I love New York In 1977, Milton Glaser designed the I Love New York logo in the back of a taxi, for a fee of zero The I Love New York logo seems ubiquitous and eternal today, but it was designed by Milton Glaser in 1977 for the New York State Department of Commerce in a moment of inspiration during a taxi ride through his beloved city. So universal is the design that ‘to heart’ has now become a verb, colloquially speaking. Here, the legendary designer discusses his love for his home city, as well as his body of work and the role technology plays in his design practice... How important is New York City to your work? "I’ve often thought about it and I can’t imagine a life, for me, outside of the city. I would have found another way of being in the world and doing work, I’m sure. All I know is the nature of this city: its complexity; its diversity; that it offers so many opportunities for learning; and the fact that it’s so contradictory. New York is not the most beautiful of cities. It changes all the time. It’s not a city that imposes its vision on people who come in; they impose their vision here." "Everything is open, everything is up for grabs, everything is to be questioned. That aspect of not accepting anything as being ultimate or the final truth seems to me a source of great vitality, energy and options for people. Anything can happen here. And that, of course, creates a very different environment than a culture where very little can happen." Is there enough understanding of the past these days? "Well, the [design] field itself is dominated by fashion and by the idea of selling stuff, so you have to be concerned with what’s currently being done, and the economy is based on the idea of change and new styles, and this year’s whatever. Unfortunately, that’s not the real basis for serious work." "If you’re more serious about it, you have to be more concerned about durability and ideas that go beyond the moment, so I think the best designers around are always designers that have had a kind of broader look and don’t change with the prevailing wind. If you find that all you’re doing is copying what is already being done, you’ll have no position in the field. You’ll have nothing to offer and, after 20 years of doing it, you’re nowhere." What is your relationship to digital technology? "I have an ‘arm’s length’ relationship to it, but I’m also mad about what you can do with a computer. I love working with other people on the computer, sort of like dancing. It’s a way of working collaboratively that’s never been done before." "But you have to come to it with an existing sense of form. If you don’t have form and an understanding of visual phenomena, and don’t understand how to draw, from my point of view, it’s a very mischievous instrument because it forces you into patterns that it imposes." Next page: IBM 09. IBM The roadmap for IBM’s modern design ethos was set out in the 1950s with the hiring of design consultant Eliot Noyes, who’d worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He brought influences like Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and Isamu Noguchi to bear on the company’s industrial design, and hired Paul Rand to create the IBM visual identity in 1956. This move was repeated with the refresh in 1972. Discover the evolution of the IBM logo below: Next page: London Underground 08. London Underground This 1919 logo design became the basis for the modern logo Though it's hard to imagine a simpler logo than the white type against a blue bar, all run across a red thick-stroked circle, the London Underground logo is one of the world's most recognisable. Branding buses, stations and subways in England's capital, it has become an imperishable symbol of the city that created it – and has been more than a hundred years in development. Here we take you through the changing face of the London Underground logo: Enduring Appeal In his recent book, A Logo for London, David Lawrence traces the history of London's most enduring sign, attempting to pin down the logo's enduring appeal. "The logo is sufficiently abstract and yet so widely reproduced that it represents many things for many people – city, transportation, culture, place, a unified system, cool design. It's this that makes it a flexible, enduring brand," he says. It's never been out of fashion, he adds, "because at worst it tirelessly sits in the background telling us where to catch a bus or train." Next page: The Red Cross 07. The Red Cross The red cross emblem is an incredibly economical symbol, but one that delivers its meaning – of neutrality and protection – in the most effective ways. The red cross emblem, 1864 It's a simple mark, but one that conveys its message immediately. With no exact specification of red, and the only guidelines instructing that the cross should always have arms of equal length and be shown on a white background, the red cross emblem is easily displayed in places where materials to create perfect design might not be available. The red crescent, first used by the Ottoman Empire in 1876 The red cross, and indeed the red crescent (first used by soldiers from the Ottoman Empire in 1876 because the red cross reminded them of the crusaders of the Middle Ages) is a sign of neutrality and protection in armed conflict . Its use is restricted by international and national laws. Both emblems have the same meaning and status, and have no political or religious significance. The restriction of usage is important here: the red cross emblem must be trusted to signify this neutrality and protection, and therefore unauthorised use is forbidden in international and rational law. Next page: Target 06. Target Stewart K. Widdess, 1962 One of the most recognisable brands in US retail, Target now has more than 1,800 stores in the US alone. Its mark was visualised at the conception of the brand name itself and symbolises the company's aim to achieve the perfect in-store customer experience. The original Target logo In the months before the first Target store opened its doors, director of publicity Stewart K Widdess was tasked to name and brand the new retail store. Legend has it that Widdess and his staff debated more than 200 possible names. In a moment of inspiration, both the name Target and the now-familiar bullseye (although in a slightly different form) were conceived. The reasoning? Just as a marksman's goal is to hit the centre bullseye, the new store would do much the same in terms of retail goods, services, commitment to the community, price, value and overall experience. One of the first advertisements – from 1969 – to bear the new, simplified Target logo The current version of the logo was designed in 1968, removing a number of the inside rings to simplify the design, and making it a more direct and recognisable symbol for the company. Next page: Apple 05. Apple Rob Janoff, Regis McKenna, 1977 Apple's initial logo was a drawing of Isaac Newton by Ron Wayne in 1976. Steve Jobs knew it would never work as a brand and commissioned a new mark the following year. Since then, the apple's shape has remained the same, aside from some geometric tweaks for the 1998 refresh, and the move from coloured stripes to a solid silhouette. Rob Janoff's logo has remained an important element in Apple's global success story since its inception. In pictures – how the Apple logo developed: We spoke to graphic designer Rob Janoff, the man handed the job of designing a logo for a company called Apple Computer... What was your original brief and what did Apple want the logo to convey? "I didn't have much of a brief, when I think about it. It was a few words from Steve Jobs, which were, 'Don't make it cute.' I think he was referring mostly to the typography." "Don't make it cute" Steve Jobs How did you come up with the idea of an apple with a bite taken out of it? "When you take a bite out of an apple, it stays sort of bite-shaped, it doesn't collapse as a peach would. It was to make it look more like an apple, and to give it scale – because people's mouths are a certain size and an apple is a certain size, and the bite would be a size relater." How many versions did you present? "I've never done this before or ever again, but I was just so sure about this design that there was just one version. However we did have a back pocket one, which was the apple without the bite in it, in case they thought it was a bit too cute. That never got shown." Next page: Woolmark 04. Woolmark One of the world's most recognisable logos doesn't belong to a commercial brand at all – but who designed it? 1963 Formed from five black bands that crisscross to form a traditional skein of wool, the Woolmark logo is soft, elegant and organic. It's perfectly suited for its purpose: representing the use of pure wool in a product. The logo is officially credited to Francesco Saroglia, as the winner of a design competition. Nothing further is known about Saroglia, however, and it's believed that Italian designer Franco Grignani was responsible for the logo. A mark of quality Simplicity is often the key quality of a perfect logo. So what could be more representative of a mark that's meant to signify a garment is made of pure wool than an elegantly drawn skein of wool? The logo is elegant and instantly recognisable without being overly detailed. "People associate it with the product they see on it: wool" Rob Langtry, Woolmark The Woolmark is used on a variety of eligible garments of all types Because it's instantly recognisable, the mark also speaks of the qualities of wool. "In an age where we've moved far too quickly to synthetic fibres and disposability, there's something reassuring and positive about a mark that represents a natural, renewable resource," enthuses Rob Langtry, global chief strategy and marketing officer at Woolmark. "The brush strokes allow a finesse that sometimes gets lost in the world of digital origination" Rob Langtry Next page: Nike 03. Nike Carolyn Davidson designed this logo in 1971 for a fee of only $35 Ticking all the boxes for $35 The Nike emblem is one of the world's most recognisable, and it's often the simplest ideas that are the best – as proved by this mark created by Portland student Carolyn Davidson in 1971. Paid $35 for the logo at the time, she later, in 1983, received a gold swoosh ring embedded with a diamond and an envelope containing Nike stock from founder Phillip Knight. It's perhaps one of the most interesting – and most widely reported – stories in logo design history. Nike swoosh sketches by Carolyn Davidson and US Patent papers Victory Davidson's tick-like logo was seen as a symbol of positivity, but it's actually the outline of the wing of the goddess Nike (who personified victory). Her logo was subsequently registered as a trademark and, aside from some tinkering with the Nike lettering, has remained unchanged. A Nike archive shoot from the 70s of a running shoe bearing the famous swoosh Chasing Originality According to Nike's website, upon first seeing Davidson's design, Knight said: "I don't love it, but it will grow on me." In 2011, Davidson told OregonLive.com that it was a challenge to come up with a logo that conveyed motion and that Phillip Knight was very impressed with the stripes of rival company Adidas, so it was increasingly hard to come up with something original. Next page: Shell 02. Shell Raymond Loewy, 1971 It was French-born designer, Raymond Loewy who drew the first modern Shell logo. He simplified the logo to make it more recognisable and bold at a distance – essential when your logo is primarily placed on the side of a road with traffic going past at speed. He gave the lettering and red border of the shell itself greater impact. View the below gallery to see the changing faces of Shell's iconic logo: Next page: FedEx 01. FedEx This logo introduced a name change as well as a new look Replacing the original Federal Express logo, which was designed in 1974, the new logo introduced a name change and a cleaner, simpler look and feel. Purple was retained as a brand colour with orange added, and the FedEx logo thrives on its use of white space. It was applied to 600 aircraft, and 30,000 ground vehicles. With that sneaky little arrow nestling between the E and the X, the FedEx logo perfectly embodies what the company does – moving letters, boxes and freight from A to B. It has won over 40 design awards, and even though it was unveiled in 1994 it's still a favourite. We spoke to Lindon Leader, who was senior design director at Landor Associates when it was designed... Lindon Leader It's over 20 years since the FedEx logo was designed. What do you remember best about the project? "I've always said it takes a great client to make a great project. Frederick Smith, the CEO, allowed us to do our job, and simply said to me, 'Lindon, if you feel that our trucks need to be pink and green, just give me a good reason.' In other words, he was trusting us." "If you feel that our trucks need to be pink and green, just give me a good reason" Frederick Smith, FedEx CEO What were the key things the client wanted the identity to communicate? "The primary attributes of the FedEx brand are precision, service, speed, reliability. They're the kind of attributes that you just don't develop overnight – no pun intended, given their original tagline." The old Federal Express logo How did you approach it? "We conducted a nine-month global research study that revealed that customers were generally unaware of Federal Express' global scope and full service capabilities." "Customers had come to say 'FedEx a package' even when they were using other shippers. So the process of express shipping had become generic. We advised them that the company needed to leverage its most valuable asset, and that is the FedEx brand." "On an international scale, 'federal' had some negative connotations in certain parts of the world – Federalists in Latin America; Federal Republic of Germany. That was among the reasons why moving to the name FedEx was going to be so much more communicative for them." Three of the five final designs presented to the FedEx board What were the other potential logos like? "Each of the five candidates did pretty much what the current identity is doing. They maximised the impact of the identity, whilst also maximising the colour white. It's on their envelopes, it's on their vehicles, it's on their aircraft because white is traditionally associated with Federal Express." Tell us about the use of white, and your process of subtraction? "I cannot tell you how many times I fight with a client who says, 'I'm paying an enormous amount of money to pay for an ad in a magazine and you're telling me you want 60 per cent of it to be empty space?' On the one hand I can understand where they're coming from. But basically the average client does not have a sophisticated enough appreciation of white space to understand that it can be a strategic marketing tool." Shipping packaging created after the redesign For you, what is it that makes a logo last, and when do you think a company should change its logo? "From a historical perspective, back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, a company would come to a design agency and look to, more often than not, refresh an identity that had been around for quite a while. In those days what a client hoped to accomplish was to get 20 years out of a logo before it needed to be refreshed or changed." "If you take Silicon Valley start-ups out of the equation, these days companies are looking to refresh down to as little as five, maybe 10 years, if you're lucky." Related articles: 7 examples of 2017's biggest logo design trend so far 14 controversial moments in logo and brand design 25 logo design tips from the experts View the full article

In recent years, a whole string of rebrands for major companies have made the internet fizz with discussion. DesignStudio's work for Airbnb and Premier League, for example, got legions of fans frothing at the mouth with both glee and rage. More recently, North's new identity for London's Science Museum and W+K's rebrand of Formula 1 were the talk of the design industry – in the latter case, for litigious reasons as well as aesthetic ones. But we're not here to talk about those today. Small businesses are the bread and butter of the design industry, but they often fly under the radar of the design press – with some notable exceptions. Read on to discover five small-scale rebrands that received a disproportionate amount of attention, and what you can learn from them. 01. The Butcher The Baker This brand scheme from The Partners' is based on a popular nursery rhyme Relatively small-scale rebrands that are pitched at niche markets, or highly location-specific, are unlikely to garner widespread attention unless they're covered by the design press, or fare well at the major design awards. Unless you were based in Dundee, Scotland, or prepared to travel a few hundred miles for a string of sausages and a freshly baked loaf, you wouldn't think a merger between a third-generation artisan baker and a local family owned butcher would be big news. Step up The Partners (now Superunion). The fact that a butcher and a baker were involved was almost too good to be true. The children's rhyme Rub-a-dub-dub provided the perfect creative copywriting opportunity, with the third line ("The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker") playfully conveying relevant brand messages. The logo resembles a candlestick but, on closer inspection, is constructed from inverted silhouettes of a butcher and a baker. The branding is beautifully clever and stylishly simple, and picked up gongs from D&AD, the Brand Impact Awards and more – showing how, with the right investment in smart design, a tiny artisan producer can punch above its weight. 02. Hidden Characters Re: gave PR a more thoughtful face in this project Public relations has had its reputation tarnished over recent years. In the era of incessant media spin and 'fake news', the gloss and glitz have definitely dulled somewhat. Consumers increasingly want authenticity and substance, and brands have had to respond accordingly. For its rebrand of Bang PR, Australian studio Re: repositioned the agency's offering as a more thoughtful, strategic beast – a far cry from the champagne-quaffing, red-carpet-rolling hedonism of old-school PR. In short, the rebrand put the focus on the clients' needs, not the PR firm itself. Hidden Characters was the perfect name to express how the firm works behind the scenes to offer value. Using the unseen typographic symbols in programmes such as Word and InDesign as a graphic device, Re: built a simple but effective branding system, using print finishes and folding techniques to play with the viability of different aspects. All in all, it's a great example of branding that practices what it preaches, putting a smart, thoughtful twist on a sector not renowned for its subtlety. Like The Butcher The Baker, Hidden Characters was noticed at the design awards – picking up a Graphite Pencil at D&AD, amongst others. 03. Boxes In Boxes its wit and simplicity helped this garner attention for this Studio Sutherl& project Showing off a series of different sized cardboard boxes may not seem like a dream design brief at first glance, but Studio Sutherl& founder Jim Sutherland has a knack for finding joy and playfulness in the most unlikely places. Like The Partners with The Butcher The Baker, Sutherland found the perfect source of inspiration in a children's nursery rhyme for this project for London-based printing and packaging firm Boss Box, using lines from 'There was an old lady who swallowed a fly' to express the idea of progressively smaller objects fitting inside each other. Like the previous two examples, wit and simplicity is crucial for the impact of this project. The concept is conveyed entirely through different weight, size and playful placements of type, which also highlights the format and construction of each box. Another D&AD success – this time with a Yellow Pencil – Boxes In Boxes reinforces the importance of a strong idea for turning even the most potentially mundane brief into a major talking point. 04. Mr Cooper Johnson Banks' Mr Cooper identity was was all over the design press even while the product was still being tested Johnson Banks is well known for its smart, high-profile branding programmes for clients in the cultural, not-for-profit and education sectors in particular. Its work for Cystic Fibrosis, Unicef UK and the University of Cambridge cleaned up over three successive years at Computer Arts' Brand Impact Awards. The world-class consultancy is perhaps less known for working with artisan startups. But its cheeky, stylish and colourful brand identity for Mr Cooper – an 'adult' ice-cream brand specialising in alcoholic and gourmet flavours – was splashed across the design press, even while the product was still in its testing phase. Johnson Banks expressed the hedonistic nature of Mr Cooper's product through a beautiful hand-lettered mark, produced in collaboration with copywriter Rob Clarke. The mark utilises positive and negative space to spell out the brand name within the shape of a pair of lips. The logo can be rubber-stamped directly onto cups and napkins, as if a cheeky kiss had recently been planted there. Designers love a clever application of negative space, as well as a playful, versatile brand mark – and the design press lapped it up like it was ice cream. 05. Penstripe Taxi Studio's Penstripe rebrand is based around visual metaphors for creativity Taxi Studio's rebrand of Leeds Booklet Printing Company shows that a twist of creative genius can turn a middleman service business into an 'event' brand in its own right. Taxi ditched the perfunctory name and replaced it with the more stylish, location-agnostic Penstripe – all part of a strikingly creative, highly versatile brand identity that blends traditional typography with a contemporary pinstripe pattern. At its heart is a series of line drawings of visual metaphors that sum up creativity, efficiency and innovation. There's a rabbit being pulled from a hat, with a tagline about quick, clever solutions to challenges; a lightbulb filament inside a head, communicating bright ideas and market-leading solutions; an alarm clock being slotted into a piggy bank, with a tagline about saving precious time. Penstripe went on to win multiple awards. And like the other examples on this list, it goes to show that if you treat every design brief with the same level of rigour and creative expression – regardless of the size of the client – it can pay off in the long run. Related articles: 5 logo design trends for 2018 25 logo design tips from the experts 5 inspiring illustration trends from Barcelona View the full article

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It's that time of the month: the new issue of Computer Arts magazine is on sale now. This issue puts the spotlight on careers, with a special report that aims to help you upgrade yourself. It offers advice for identifying where your skills gaps are and shows you how to pinpoint what employers are looking for, to help you get a step closer to your dream job, no matter what that might be. Buy Computer Arts issue 277 now In the Projects section, the team goes behind the scenes on groundbreaking new design work. This issue, there's a closer look at Baxter and Bailey's colourful rebrand for the OUP's Education division, and Wieden + Kennedy NY's irreverent interpretation of online dating for OkCupid. Plus, the team visited Here Design to find out how it brings together thinkers, writers and makers to create design magic. Find out how Wieden+Kennedy NY put a sweet spin on online dating for OkCupid Each month, the Computer Arts team gets top designers' views on the topics on everyone's minds. In issue #277, CBA Paris' Anne Henry offers her thoughts on how larger brands can connect with the new wave of more socially conscious consumers, and The Other Box founder Roshni Goyate explains why the diversity problem in the design industry doesn't have a quick fix. Finally, the community critiques Pentagram's new identity for Mills & Boon – is it hot stuff or a little limp? For a sneak peek inside the issue, use the arrow icons to flick through the image below. Save up to 63% on a Computer Arts subscription Computer Arts is the world's best-selling design magazine, packed full of insights, inspiration, interviews and all the best new design projects. For all this delivered direct to your door each month, subscribe to Computer Arts. Right now you can save up to 63%! Read more: How to manage a huge client Why there's never been a better time to quit your job 5 fascinating stories behind unusual logo designs View the full article