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One of the most common routes into graphic design is through a junior designer position. But what is a junior designer? What do they do every day? How much do they get paid, and how quickly can they progress? Our guide to becoming a junior designer brings you everything you need to know. It's no secret that a career in the creative industries is extremely competitive, but by mapping out a clear career path from the start, you can sharpen your focus and gain that all-important edge. 15 free resume templates01. What a junior designer job entails You're starting at the bottom, but working as a designer, not just making tea (Image: Sweaty Eskimo)A junior designer job is an entry-level position, generally aimed at creatives with between zero and three years of commercial design experience. At this level, you'll work closely under the supervision of more senior designers, who will provide mentoring as you learn the ropes in design conception and implementation. During your first few years you'll be assigned the smaller aspects of multiple projects. Depending on the company, you could find yourself doing anything from laying out pages and making colour corrections, to designing stationery and website banners, to sitting in on client meetings. 02. What a junior designer job doesn't entail Here's what a junior designer isn't: someone who solely pours the coffee, answers the telephone or runs errands. If you find yourself in this position, talk to your senior designer, map out your expectations and ask for new work. If the situation doesn't improve, it might be time to move on. 03. Do I need a degree? A degree isn't essential, although it does helpYou don't necessarily need a degree to become a junior designer – although the benefits of learning design theory and design thinking, plus the freedom to develop your own ideas outside of client briefs, shouldn't be underestimated. Bear in mind, too, that some job adverts will specify being educated to degree level. However, while a relevant degree will stand you in good stead when it comes to getting on the graphic design career ladder, it by no means guarantees you paid employment. Talent, experience and confidence will often triumph over a degree. "The most important things that Landor looks for in a candidate are talent and attitude," agrees Peter Knapp, an executive creative director at Landor Associates. "Spirit and raw ability are things that are preloaded." 04. Typical junior designer starting salary Starting salaries vary wildly depending on sector and geographical location. As a junior designer in the UK you can except to pocket anywhere between £20,000 and £25,000. According to Major Players' 2017 salary survey, the national UK average salary works out at £22,000. For those of you in the US, use this salary calculator to see what you can expect in your state. 05. What experience you need Craig Ward did "a string of terrifying placements" as a young designerRelevant work experience – and lots of it – will stand you head and shoulders above the competition, so it's good practice to have at least one placement or internship (and preferably more) on your resume when it comes to looking for your first junior designer position. "Fear put me into the industry in the second year of my degree," recalls award-winning designer and art director Craig Ward. "I did a string of terrifying placements, and when I graduated I was ready to make the most of my final placement, which became my first job." Placements and internships show that you have valuable real-world experience and, crucially, that you've started to translate your hard-won skills and knowledge of design theory into practice. The more you can chalk up, the better placed you'll be when applying for a job as a junior designer. 06. Specific skills you need You'll need skills in Adobe software such as InDesignAs well as a strong understanding of design and the processes required to do it, you’ll need to be good at problem-solving (you’ll be expected to come up with creative solutions) and pretty handy with programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Communication skills also rate highly. After all, being a brilliant designer isn't much use if you can't explain your decisions to clients. "You need to be hard working, passionate and reliable, as well as prepared to do the less desirable jobs," advises Ben Topliss, creative at LOVE, who quickly rose through the ranks after graduating. "Despite being the youngest member of the team, you should also be able to bring something new to the table; whether it's knowing a piece of software no-one else does, or an unhealthy obsession for obscure type foundries," he adds. 07. In-house or design agency? Some of the work created by Target's in-house design department called, er, InHouseAs a junior designer in a studio or agency, you'll be involved in strategy and creative problem-solving, producing graphic design, advertising or visual communication work for a wide range of different clients. The pros? Variety and creative stimulation. The cons? Burnout. Deadlines are final: miss one and you risk losing the client, which could have huge knock-on effects on job stability for studio members. As an in-house junior graphic designer at a large organisation like HSBC, Google or the government, you'll work as part of a team of designers who are responsible for the company's marketing and advertising material, website and so on. Pros here include stability, predictable working hours and potentially better pay. The cons? Working on a single brand for too long can limit your portfolio – particularly a risk for junior designers – and numb your creative juices. 08. How to progress Progression from junior designer to a middleweight position or senior designer is normally possible within around three to five years, after which the next step might be art director, creative director or a more managerial position with the studio or firm. "Work hard and build good relationships with as many people as you can," advises Topliss, adding that it's essential to develop both your reputation and book of contacts before you take the next step. "Aim as high as you can," concludes Martin Brown, creative director at Paul Bedford Ltd. "Try to work for people you revere and companies you respect. That first name makes such a difference for your second job." 09. What it's actually like to do the job Now a senior designer, Ben Topliss explains what it was like being a junior designerIn 2013, multi-disciplinary designer Ben Topliss had just started a new senior designer position at sports and fashion-wear retailer JD PLC that was created especially for him. We caught up with him to find out how he made the jump from junior designer to senior... Creative Bloq: Your first job out of uni was junior designer at an architectural practice called Prism. What did you study at uni, and how well did your course set you up for this role? Ben Topliss: I studied product design at university, with a minor in interactive design. I didn't realise until I'd signed up to study for the interactive modules that graphic and digital design were things I was really passionate about and wanted to do after graduating. The main thing I took from studying design at university was the process of design and problem-solving. I didn't do any placements or internships in agencies or studios, but I did as many jobs as I could get my hands on for local businesses, designing anything they'd let me including identities, branded stationery, websites, booklets, flyers and menus. Taking this also route taught me about the other side of design - dealing with clients, and managing my time and finances - which can be just as important as the actual work. CB: What was the job market like after you graduated? How tricky was it to get your first job as a junior designer? BT: It was a struggle to get a job after graduating. It's so competitive out there and it's hard to differentiate yourself, especially when competing against others with graphic design degrees. I wrote a lot of letters but didn't really get anywhere. I had a few interviews and finally got something in the September after graduating. It was great to finally get a job. CB: Why did you decide to work in-house as a junior designer, rather than in a design studio or agency? BT: Prism was a small design studio and I got to work on projects for clients including Sainsbury's, Cambridge University and Marks & Spencer. There were only four designers - two senior and two junior - so I got to work on some large projects straight away, as everyone had to get stuck in. Ben is currently working at TBWACB: Talk us through a typical day what were your responsibilities? BT: As it was only a really small agency I'd have to do plenty of admin-type jobs like order the stationery, be the IT guy and make tea for everyone. But I'd also get to head out to client meetings and take ownership of projects, which was good as you might not necessarily get that level of trust working somewhere larger. CB: What was the best part of the job? BT: Actually doing work and getting paid for something I wanted to do was great. It wasn't groundbreaking stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but I was working in the industry I wanted to be in and gaining experience all the time. To me then, that was amazing. CB: How long did you work in this position before taking the next step in your career, and what did it take to move up the ladder? BT: I spent a year at Prism, and another year in my next job - both in small teams so I did get to take control of a lot of projects, but I maybe missed the guidance I would have got from larger organisations. Stepping up to the next level in a much larger agency was fun: suddenly I was working with a large group of really talented creatives. I certainly had a feeling that I needed to up my game. That's how you improve though. You need to get out of your comfort zone, push yourself to be better and learn from those around you. CB: How long did it take you to get to a senior designer position? BT: I graduated about seven years ago, with the last three of those working at TBWA. There I had the opportunity to learn from lots of talented people and gain some good experience working on some great projects, big and small, for clients like Manchester United, EA Games and BP. CB: What do you love most about your job now? BT: Getting to work with talented and inspiring people. I've got a busy couple of months coming up, with the launch of at least two iOS apps and a couple of site redesigns on the horizon. CB: What advice would you give a junior designer for becoming a senior designer? BT: Work hard, ask questions and soak up as much as you can from more the experienced people you are working with, whatever their job role. Do the jobs no-one else wants to do - make yourself indispensable. Also, it pays to be nice. The industry is smaller than you think - you never know when you'll come back into contact with someone you used to work with, met at an industry event or even slated on Twitter. Further reading: How to become a creative director How to get a promotion Create the perfect design resumé 15 free resume templates 30 brilliantly creative resumés Tips for design interview success View the full article

This week saw Penguin Random House's non-fiction imprint, Ebury, rebrand itself with a less corporate and more creative logo that appears to cash in on some of 2017's biggest design trends. Designed by London-based studio Form, the centrepiece of the new look is a capitalised letter 'E' wordmark. This isn't the first rebrand we've seen this week that's based on this idea. Just a few days ago we saw how Elton John's new visual identity pulled a similar trick with its star-shaped glasses inspired lettering. And just like the musician's makeover, Ebury's rebrand treads the same path as other big brands such as Fanta and Calvin Klein in that they all seem to have adopted 2017's biggest logo design trend: uppercasification. (That's our unofficial term for saying brands currently have a habit of putting all their text in uppercase.) Click through the image gallery below to see how the new Ebury logo compares with the old one. Replacing the lowercase, italic red logo previously used by Ebury, the new design opts for a new colour scheme that Form partner Paula Benson describes as "fresh and vibrant." Following another trend, the colour choice also taps in (coincidentally) to a major global survey which found that a rich teal hue is the world's favourite colour. Thanks to an overprint of two semi-opaque colours, the logo appears three-dimensional and leaps off both the screen and printed page. The overprinting method also references traditional practices such as screen printing. This results in a sense of imperfection that Bensons says helps to "embrace the spirit of creativity." Capitalisation is used to communicate the imprint's nameThis logo is even more striking thanks to its use of contrasting colours. The 'E' itself is rendered in a beautiful teal, while the drop shadow is picked out in the Penguin brand's signature orange. The consistent typography also brings it in line with the overall Penguin Random House branding. The new logo has already started to appear across online platforms, and readers can expect to see more of it later in the year as it continues to roll out across marketing materials, products and packaging. [Via Design Week] Related articles: 25 logo design tips from the experts There’s more to Sir Elton John’s new logo than meets the eye Why the SYFY rebrand avoided traditional genre visuals View the full article

Testing frontend code is still a confusing practice to many developers. But with frontend development becoming more complex and with developers responsible for stability and consistency like never before, frontend testing must be embraced as an equal citizen within your codebase. We break down your different testing options and explain what situations they are best used for. Frontend testing is a blanket term that covers a variety of automated testing strategies. Some of these, like unit and integration testing, have been an accepted best practice within the backend development community for years. Other strategies are newer, and stem from the changes in what backend and frontend development are used for now. By the end of this article, you should feel comfortable assessing which testing strategies fit best with your team and codebases. The following code examples will be written using the Jasmine framework, but the rules and processes are similar across most testing frameworks. Best pieces of user testing software01. Unit testing Unit testing, one of the testing veterans, is at the lowest level of all testing types. Its purpose is to ensure the smallest bits of your code (called units) function independently as expected. Imagine you have a Lego set for a house. Before you start building, you want to make sure each individual piece is accounted for (five red squares, three yellow rectangles). Unit testing is making sure that individual sets of code – things like input validations and calculations – are working as intended before building the larger feature. It helps to think about unit tests in tandem with the ‘do one thing well’ mantra. If you have a piece of code with a single responsibility, you likely want to write a unit test for it. Let’s look at the following code snippet, in which we are writing a unit test for a simple calculator: In our Calculator application, we want to ensure that the calculations always function independently the way that we expect. In the example, we want to make sure that we can always accurately add two numbers together. The first thing we do is describe the series of tests we’re going to run by using Jasmine’s describe. This creates a test suite – a grouping of tests related to a particular area of the application. For our calculator, we will group each calculation test in its own suite. Suites are great not only for code organisation, but because they enable you to run suites on their own. If you’re working on a new feature for an application, you don’t want to run every test during active development, as that would be very time consuming. Testing suites individually lets you develop more quickly. Next, we write our actual tests. Using the it function, we write the feature or piece of functionality we are testing. Our example tests out the addition function, so we will run scenarios that confirm that it’s working correctly. We then write our test assertion, which is where we test if our code functions as we expect. We initialise our calculator, and run our addNumbers function with the two numbers we wish to add. We store the number as the result, and then assert that this is equal to the number we expect (in our case, 10). If addNumbers fails to return the correct figures, our test will fail. We would write similar tests for our other calculations – subtraction, multiplication, and so on. 02. Acceptance tests If unit tests are like checking each Lego piece, acceptance tests are checking if each stage of building can be completed. Just because all the pieces are accounted for doesn’t mean that the instructions are properly executable and will allow you to build the final model. Acceptance tests go through your running application and ensure designated actions, user inputs and user flows are completable and functioning. Just because our application’s addNumbers function returns the right number, doesn’t mean the calculator interface will definitely function as expected to give the right result. What if our buttons are disabled, or the calculation result doesn’t get displayed? Acceptance tests help us answer these questions. The structure looks very similar to our unit test: we define a suite with describe, then write our test within the it function, then execute some code and check its outcome. Rather than testing around specific functions and values, however, here we’re testing to see if a particular workflow (a sign-up flow) behaves as expected when we fill in some bad information. There are more minute actions happening here, such as form validations that may be unit tested, as well as any handling for what shows our error state, demonstrated by an element with the ID signupError. Acceptance tests are a great way to make sure key experience flows are always working correctly. It’s also easy to add tests around edge cases, and to help your QA teams find them in your application. When considering what to write acceptance tests for, your user stories are a great place to start. How does your user interact with your website, and what is the expected outcome of that interaction? It’s different to unit testing, which is better matched to something like function requirements, such as the requirements around a validated field. 03. Visual regression testing As mentioned in the introduction, some types of testing are unique to the frontend world. The first of these is visual regression testing. This doesn’t test your code, but rather compares the rendered result of your code – your interface – with the rendered version of your application in production, staging, or a pre-changed local environment. This is typically done by comparing screenshots taken within a headless browser (a browser that runs on the server). Image comparison tools then detect any differences between the two shots. Using a tool such as PhantomCSS, your tests specify where the test runner should navigate to, take a screenshot, and the framework shows you differences that came up in those views. This visual regression framework illustrates decision trees in your application, exposing complexity to those outside of developmentUnlike acceptance and unit testing, visual regression testing is hard to benefit from if you’re building something new. As your UI will see rapid and drastic changes throughout the course of active development, you’ll likely save these tests for when pieces of the interface are visually complete. Therefore, visual regression tests are the last tests you should be writing. Currently, many visual regression tools require a bit of manual effort. You may have to run your screenshot capture before you start development on your branch, or manually update baseline screenshots as you make changes to the interface. This is simply because of the nature of development – changes to the UI may be intentional, but tests only know ‘yes, this is the same’ or ‘no, this is different’. However, if visual regressions are a pain point within your application, this approach may save your team time and effort overall, compared to constantly fixing regressions. 04. Accessibility and performance tests As the culture and awareness around frontend testing grows, so does our ability to test various aspects of the ecosystem. Given the increased focus on accessibility and performance in our technical culture, integrating this into your testing suite helps ensure these concepts remain a priority. If you’re having issues enforcing performance budgets or accessibility standards, this is a way to keep these requirements in the forefront of people’s minds. Both of these checks can either be integrated into your workflow with build tools like Grunt and Gulp, or semi-manually within your terminal. For performance budgets, a tool like grunt-perfbudget gives you the ability to run your site through WebPageTest automatically within a specified task. However, if you’re not using a task runner, you can also grab perfbudget as a standalone NPM module and run the tests manually. Here’s what it looks like to run this through the terminal: The same options are available for accessibility testing. So for Pa11y, you can either run the pa11y command in your browser for output or set up a task to automate this step. In the terminal: Most tools in these categories are fairly plug-and-play, but also give you the option to customise how the tests get run – for example, you may set them to ignore certain WCAG standards. Resemble.js is a popular image comparison library, and gives you a lot of control over what triggers a visual differentiationNext page: How to introduce testing into your workflow Many developers are on board with having some kind of frontend testing present in their codebase, but some are still skeptical about the cost-benefit balance. If you're just considering how testing would fit into your team and workflow, you should think about the following: 01. Start with known pain points If you’re constantly seeing the same bugs popping up in certain parts of your codebase, it’s wise to investigate if testing could help. If it’s code regression and it’s not possible to unit-test the code, try to adjust your acceptance tests so they cover the scenario at a higher level. This will also give you a baseline test to experiment against. If the number of regressions on this feature goes down after writing tests, you may find other developers more inclined to embrace testing in the future. 02. Make it part of the workflow In order to keep the team honest about their test-writing, everyone should hold themselves and others accountable. Perhaps talking about tests becomes part of your code review process: ask why tests weren’t written, or point out areas where they might be helpful. By having an open dialogue about tests, you may find ways to motivate your team to keep writing them. Using a continuous integration service such as Travis CI to run your test suite automatically on your development branches can also make your test suite more visible. Services such as Travis CI can make testing more visible03. Don’t do everything at once For teams that are new to testing, adopting all the testing types at once might be overwhelming – and if you’re starting with new code, you might not even need all the methods. For example, if you don’t have a lot of client-side logic or user interaction, maybe visual regression tests will cover most of your application. Introducing one testing type at a time will give your team a chance to learn how to test and adjust any parts of the process that prove difficult. At the end of the day, your team needs to be on board and dedicated to this practice. 04. Revisit and review Testing, like any other part of your codebase, requires constant revisits to make sure your current implementation still makes sense. Remember, a test suite that nobody runs is a test suite that may as well not exist. But if you put the time and effort into your testing strategy, the time saved by fixing regressions means time that can spent building new features, or making your existing code even better. This article was originally published in net magazine issue 285, buy it here Next page: Best pieces of user testing software 20 JavaScript tools to blow your mind 11 great UI designs View the full article

We've decided to shake things up in the latest issue of Paint & Draw with the introduction of a new regular feature. With Masterclass, we talk to renowned artists about the pieces of work that inspire them the most. Kicking off this feature is portrait artist David Cobley, who gives an impassioned speech about his favourite painting. We hope you find this a pleasant change of pace from all our hands-on tutorials and workshops! Buy issue 10 of Paint & Draw here! On top of this, our cover feature sees Paint & Draw's resident pastel expert, Rebecca de Mendonça, reveal how to create a beautiful, realistic illustration that guides the viewer's eye across the page. As if that wasn't enough, you'll also find a ton of our usual tips, tutorials and lessons to push your skills to the next level. Make sure you don't miss it! Subscribe to Paint & Draw here! Realise fresh paper collages Clippings from old magazines can form the basis of a collageIn our easy to digest Bitesize tutorials, Sylvia Paul reveals how creating a collage can help you break out of an artistic routine. Create lifelike pastel illustrations This pastel tutorial captures the energy of a beautiful Arabian horseRebecca de Mendonça helps you build up your pastel skills with the latest instalment of her in-depth feature. In this issue she shows you how she drew this stunning Arabian horse. Artist interview: Stan Miller Stan Miller discusses his love/hate relationship with watercoloursEvery artist has a medium that they struggle with. For Stan Miller, it's watercolours that prove to be a difficult tool to master. In this interview the American artist discusses how he keeps his passion for painting alive. Construct buildings with shapes Simple shapes can form the basis of architecture artworkWhen it comes to painting buildings, getting bogged down in details is a mistake that trips up a lot of artists. In this article, Amnon David Ar demonstrates how breaking buildings down into shapes can make the whole process a lot easier. Draw textures with coloured pencils This lifelike illustration looks good enough to eatBelieve it or not, this amazing still life was created using just coloured pencils. Want to know how it was done? You're in luck! Steven Marquette is here to show you how he creates his realistic drawings that are bound to leave you hungry. More from Paint & DrawView the full article

A style frame is a snapshot of a finished frame as it would look within a longer animation. It aims to capture the overall look and feel of an animated or live action video, but in a still image. Style frames can help capture the colours, mediums, textures, photography, and assets that you plan to use in your video. Showing a client both a storyboard and style frames is an excellent way to make sure you both are on the same page for what to expect with the project. How to master the art of storyboarding These examples are very different, but all do a great job of communicating what the final piece will look like [click the icon to enlarge the image] You can see in the examples above that style frames don’t show every frame of the video, as a storyboard would. Let’s get into what it takes to create style frames in Photoshop. We'll focus on some of the main techniques you need to know to make multi-photo composites all feel like they are part of the same piece of work. For this tutorial we'll use an example for a title sequence that would precede a new TV show. This show has themes of mystery, preconceived notions about class, and it’s based near the ocean. 01. Start with a single image This image will be our starting point. Click the image to download it First, let’s take a look at the star of our show. The photo above will be our starting point, and I have a lot of plans for it. I want to isolate our hero from the background, wrap some neon light loops around her, and integrate them by adjusting the lighting. 02. Cut out the figure Start by quickly selecting the rough silhouette [click the icon to enlarge the image] Start by using the Quick Selection tool to get most of the figure’s silhouette. Click the Select and Mask button at the top, and a Properties dialog will appear. Make sure your view is set to Onion Skin and turn the Transparency slider down so you can see the area you’ve already masked out. 03. Focus on the hair Now let's deal with those wispy hairs. It would have been tricky to cut these out using just the Refine selection tools, but Photoshop CC 2017's new Select and Mask functionality make things much simpler, even considering the low light conditions in our image. Grab the Refine Edge brush tool and begin painting it over those hairs. Now crank the transparency back up to 100% to see where you need to use the Brush tool to bring back any areas where you’ve overdone it. 04. Finalise your selection Refine your selection until you're happy with the result [click the icon to enlarge] Repeat these steps back and forth until you’re happy with the hair selection. At this point, increase your shift edge just slightly, as well as the contrast, and add a bit of feathering (2px). Click OK. Click the Layer Mask button to commit this selection to a mask. 05. Adjust the background Now add a solid background. Use the colour picker to match a dark shade on the figure’s jacket. You might notice that the selection doesn’t look as perfect now it’s isolated on a dark background – don’t worry, we’ll cover this up with the relighting. 06. Paint in some neon lights The swirls should both overlap the figure’s head [click the icon to enlarge] Before you get to any relighting, add those neon lights. Choose two colours from the subtle sunset in the original background: a soft pink and blue. Using the Pen tool in Shape mode, set the Fill to none and the Stroke to one of your colours. Set the Stroke Width to 26px. Now you can have some fun – on two different layers, draw some pink and blue neon swirls. 07. Add a glow A narrower, white strip creates the illusion that the lights are glowing [click the icon to enlarge] Now duplicate both of the shapes, change the stroke colour to white and decrease the stroke width to 9px. This white stripe should sit in the middle of each swirl – if you notice it’s not lined up correctly, select all your strokes and use the Set Shape Stroke Type drop-down to choose Center Alignment. Change the feather of the wider strokes to 9px and the feather of the narrow white ones to 5px. If you feel the effect isn’t vibrant enough, duplicate the coloured strokes and feather them at 6px. Clean up and group all these by selecting them and hitting the Create Group button. Finally, add a layer mask to the group and paint out the area of the lights that goes behind the figure’s head. 08. Start relighting Use the neon shades to paint over the wispy hairs [click the icon to enlarge] To begin relighting, create a few new layers and begin painting over the wispy hairs using the pink and blue swatches. It should look rough and crazy. Convert all your painted layers for smart filters and add gaussian blur. You want to blur the biggest strokes the most – for the smaller strokes, you might even want to turn the opacity down. 09. Mask your layers Save time by reusing our mask from earlier [click the icon to enlarge] We need to mask these layers, but instead of making a new mask, we can simply reuse the one we made before for the background. Hold alt and click the mask on the original photo. Then hit cmd+A to select all, and cmd+C to copy. Select each of the layers you painted on individually and add layer masks to them. alt+click into each of those masks and hit cmd+V to paste the copied original mask. 10. Refine your work Change the blend modes on your relighting layers [click the icon to enlarge] Go into each of those masks and paint black over any areas you think have too much colour. You can also use the Smudge tool on the light painting section, in order to add some of that wispiness back in. Change the blend modes for these layers to something like Lighten, Screen or even Colour Dodge. I added another layer of freehand painting on top of the hair to give it a little more depth of colour. Put all these layers in a group called 'Relighting'. 11. Add some dust Motion-blurred dust particles really bring the image together [click the icon to enlarge] Now to really pull it all together I want to add a layer on top of everything that looks like some motion-blurred dust (download this photo from Shutterstock). Place the photo at the top of the layer stack and resize it if needed so it covers the whole canvas. Change its blend mode to Screen. Add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer and alt+click between the adjustment and the dust layer to clip the two together, so the dust layer doesn’t affect other layers. Decrease the brightness slightly and crank up the contrast. Next page: Add two more images to your style frame and tie all the colours together 12. Add a secondary photo This will be our second image [click the icon to enlarge] Now it’s time to add two more photos. Let’s start with the one above. I’m going to use a gradient map to match the colours in the image. Open the photo and colour pick that darkest blue in the water. Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer, and click the gradient to edit it. You should begin with a white stop on the far-right, and make the stop on the far-left that dark blue swatch colour. 13. Colour-match the previous image This is a very simple way to get the colours to match up [click the icon to enlarge] Now click the bar just below the gradient to add more colours. Towards the white end we want to add the pink neon swatch from our previous composite, and towards the blue end add the previous neon blue. This neon blue swatch will look a little odd and slightly too light, so double-click on it and make it a little darker. 14. Round things out with one more photo Our third and final image [click the icon to enlarge] Let’s work on one more photo to round the set of style frames out (download the photo from stockSnap.io). We’ll use the same gradient map technique but with a twist. 15. Adjust the gradient map Turn down the opacity so some of those original colours peep through [click the icon to enlarge] Follow the same gradient map steps as before but leave out that neon blue colour. Make the pink a slightly hotter shade than the one you used previously, and push the dark blue slider over to the right so that more of the image will be on the dark end of the spectrum. We want to maintain some of those amazing colours from the original photo, so turn down the Opacity of the Gradient Map layer to 75 per cent. 16. Add a light leak A light leak adds interest to the image [click the icon to enlarge] Now you can spice things up a bit by adding a light leak effect (I used an image from Shutterstock for this). Duplicate the gradient map and clip it above the light leak image. You may need to turn up the opacity of the gradient map on the copy. 17. Bring the images together Place the three style frames in a wide document [click the icon to enlarge] Now bring all these images together into one document. You’ll need to save out your style frames as PNGs or JPGs first, then create a new document with a very large width such as 4000px. Place the style frames into the new document and space them evenly. 18. Match the tones and values The central image appears too dark at the moment [click the icon to enlarge] We want to match that darker middle frame with the others, which appear much more similar to each other in colour and value. First rasterize your layers by right-clicking them and choosing Rasterize Layer. Create a copy of the middle style frame ('styleframe1'), then with this selected go to ‘Image > Adjustments > Match color’. Choose the Source as this ‘CombinedStyleFrames.psd’ if you have multiple Photoshop documents open. Then select either style frame 2 or 3, depending on which one you prefer – I went for 2. Turn down the opacity of this copy to blend it with the original frame until you have just the right mix of colour. If you want to learn more about style frames, take a look at my full video tutorial. About Pluralsight Pluralsight is an enterprise technology learning platform that delivers a unified, end to end learning experience for businesses across the globe. Through a subscription service, companies are empowered to move at the speed of technology, increasing proficiency, innovation and efficiency. Related articles: Create a cinemagraph with Photoshop in 60 seconds The 10 commandments of Photoshop etiquette Master the art of storyboarding View the full article

For a web developer, a line of code can look like a stroke of paint on a canvas. If you want to see code as a work of art, then you need to check out the Ultimate Front End Developer Bundle. You can get it now for just $39 (approx £30) For any aspiring web developer, the Ultimate Front End Developer Bundle is the perfect starting place. This collection of courses will teach you how to work with the most important languages in web development, from JavaScript to HTML5 and CSS3, to bring your dream designs to life. There are eight courses with 48 hours of actionable lessons that you won’t want to miss. You can get the Ultimate Front End Developer Bundle on sale for just $39 (approx £30), which is 96% off the retail price! That’s a massive saving on a course that could set you down a new career path, so grab this deal today! View the full article

Digital painting has historically suffered from looking too artificial, but with the vast range of software available today, it’s much easier to realistically replicate the look of natural media. Here I’ve done a quick sketch using Photoshop, demonstrating a few ways to create an organic, painterly feel, using a process that also reflects the way I paint in oils. 01. Tone your canvas Turn on Color Dynamics [click the icon to enlarge the image] I start off with toning my canvas using a heavily textured canvas brush to give the subsequent paint something to ‘grip’ on to. I also have Color Dynamics turned on – this is a good way of adding subtle hue variations that mimic the mixing of colours on a canvas. Foreground/background Jitter is great when you have a colour range in mind. Otherwise, Hue Jitter on a low percentage is usually fine. 02. Block out a sketch Set Angle Jitter to Direction [click the icon to enlarge the image] I create a quick sketch and then, just like I would when oil painting, start by blocking out the darker shadow shapes before gradually laying in lighter colours. The orientation and direction of brushstrokes play a huge part in replicating the look of natural media, so at times I have the Angle Jitter set to Direction. This is a good way to create organic strokes that showcase your brush’s textures, such as the hairs on a bristle brush. I like to use this when painting hair or for bold impasto brush strokes that follow the form. 03. Adjust your brush angle Manually adjust your brush orientation [click the icon to enlarge the image] When I want an even more controlled brush angle, I switch the Angle Jitter off and use the brush orientation compass to turn the bristles to the angle that I want. This can give you great control over the look of your brush strokes and is great for flat brushes. Using this method does require a little more patience, but it can yield organic and decisive painterly strokes. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 149. Buy it here! Related articles: How to paint realistic waves Paint a Munch-style portrait in Photoshop CC Concept design tips for artists View the full article

When I started my career, I was a web designer. I worked in web design for four years, starting with small business sites and eventually moving on to bigger clients. I found out that it wasn't graphic design that interested me, nor working for bigger brand names. I was more interested in pagination patterns, the way people interacted with forms, and things like perceived performance, than the visual design of a web page. When I watched sci-fi movies, I would look at the interfaces. And when I played videogames, I would observe the way the menus were laid out. If any of these traits sound familiar to you, you might also be a UI designer at heart. I quit my agency job and started my own company. On my LinkedIn page, I tried to summarise my new career goal: to make the best software possible. It's been four years since I started as a freelancer, and my journey hasn't stopped. These days I help run a small UI design company called Mono. We recently welcomed our fourth team member. In this article I want to describe what it's like to be a UI designer: What does the work constitute? Where are the best learning resources? How do you get better at your craft? The work of a UI designer A UI designer’s job can be roughly split into four key areasI find that generally you can divide the work of a user interface designer into four categories. You communicate with the client, you research, you design and prototype, and you communicate with the developers. Let's take a look at each of these phases in more detail. Client communication Client communication is all about understanding the client's problem. The goal is to get to grips with your client's business. The beginning of a project typically constitutes a lot of talking. It's fine not to know too much about your client's domain when you start out – you can look at their business in a fresh way while you envision possible design solutions. To be a good UI designer, you need to be able to eventually think along with your client's business. For example, your client might be in aviation. Working for them will eventually make you pretty knowledgeable about that industry. So, a tip for your own happiness here is to choose the industries you work for wisely, so you don't end up being an expert in something you don't care about or have no interest in. During a project, the communication doesn't stop. As a designer, you will be presenting your work constantly. At our company we are a remote team, so we don't have many in-person meetings. Instead, we make heavy use of screen sharing through video conferencing. Communication tools like Skype and Slack are used every day. It's useful to combine synchronous and asynchronous communication methods. A call is great if you need a lot of information quickly, but you have to be around at the same time. We think of Slack as our 'virtual water cooler' and use Basecamp to manage complex design projects. When we design prototypes using HTML and CSS, we use GitHub Issues to discuss code directly. Research As well as client communication, you will do a lot of research. This could include field studies, workshops with the client, analysing the competition or defining a strategy – essentially, just about anything that helps you understand the problem at hand. Research is what informs your design choices. It's an article you once read, or that new thing Apple just released. When it's time to explain why you made a particular design choice, your research backs you up. Research can be very broad. I often test new devices for research purposes or sign up to a new web app to study its user interface. Design and prototyping Some of our tools of choice: Sketch, Illustrator and InVisionAs a designer, you will likely spend most of your time doing design and prototyping work. A UI design project can move forward in any number of ways, from sketching, to detailed design, to coding. The method you use largely depends on the type of project. What are you designing? Is it a website, or would you rather call it an app? Does it use native technology? Is it a redesign or are you starting from scratch? At our company there is no fixed process, but most projects follow the same rough order: they start with sketches and wireframes, go on to detailed visual and interaction design, and end with a prototype. As designers, we spend a lot of time thinking about our tools. While great tools are important, they aren't the most important thing. Being able to use the Adobe Creative Suite and apps like Sketch competently is the equivalent of being able to use a pencil to draw or a brush to paint. You still need to make the painting. That being said, a healthy interest in tools is a good thing. I love trying new tools that can help me to be more productive. My favourite vector editing tool is Illustrator, but most of my visual design work is done in Sketch these days. Other team members have switched to newer tools like Affinity Designer. Tools are a very personal choice. As long as we can easily work together, everyone is free to choose their own. To make it simpler to talk about our designs with clients, we make prototypes with InVision. For more advanced prototyping, however, we use HTML and CSS. The tool you need all depends on the job you want to do with it. Developer communication GOV.UK provides a guide to enable users to make their service consistent with the main siteAn oft-forgotten part of the work of a UI designer is developer communication. These days you can't get away with just sending your designs off to the devs and hoping they get implemented correctly. The best designers know the challenge isn't in creating the design, but in communicating it – not only to the stakeholders who have to give their approval, but also to the developers who have to implement it. Communicating a design comes in many forms: detailed specifications, providing assets, reviewing the design together. What it makes sense to deliver in each instance largely depends on whether the project is a native or a web application. The traditional approach is to deliver assets next to screen designs. The screen designs can be used to see what the design will look like as a whole, while the assets are ready-to-use PNGs and SVGs of icons, so the developers don't have to deal with a graphics editor. Explore adaptive interfaces at Generate London with keynote speaker Aaron Gustafson, who will discuss and dissect several adaptive interfaces and demonstrate how they smartly morph to meet their users’ needs At our company we are proponents of delivering more than that. We use component style guides to help maintain consistency in our designs. When we're dealing with a web project, we deliver detailed sets of HTML and CSS, documented piece by piece, ready for implementation. I believe that having a design eye in every phase of software development is the only way to reach my goal of creating world-class software. Web vs native apps When you design a native app for a platform (eg iOS or Android), you tend to adhere to certain guidelines. When you design for the web, there's not so much guidance. What typically happens is that your client has a set of graphic guidelines for their brand that determines how things should look. However, these guidelines tend to be tailored towards marketing websites, and what's in there doesn't always lead to good user interface decisions. Fonts tend to be chosen for marketing reasons, not for legibility reasons. Colours may be bold and striking, which works in an ad campaign, but not in an app you use day-to-day. These guides have to be interpreted. There are few UI guidelines for the web. You could argue the web is a melting pot of different styles. If you are making anything that feels more like an app than a website, you need to know about widely used frameworks like Bootstrap and ZURB Foundation. The framework starts to determine how things should look, because you don't want to reinvent the wheel. And that's probably a good thing. At our company, we like to use Bootstrap. It provides sensible default sizes for common UI elements like buttons, data tables and modals. In web design, you are more constrained by the technical capacities of the web. It used to be that it would be difficult to implement simple visual flourishes like rounded corners on a website. These days are long gone – you now are free to draw user interfaces with plenty of shadows, transitions, animations and even 3D. As a designer, it's way more realistic to take control over the process and design in the browser. I haven't seen many UI designers take over the UI programming of a native app, but a designer doing the HTML and CSS of a web app is a common occurrence. If you can code your own designs, you will have an edge over your non-coding peers, and to me it's the only way to truly understand how the web works. Web constraints You will soon discover that not all the cool tricks you learn are supported in every browser, and that's the reality of designing for the web. It's good to follow well-known principles like progressive enhancement, where you load enhanced content whenever possible, but also think about how the content degrades. Recently, 'cutting the mustard' has become popular. Championed by the BBC's web team, this involves differentiating between 'good' and 'bad' browsers, and providing a limited experience to 'bad' browsers. However, it really only works for content sites. When it comes to application-like experiences, many people are limiting support to a few leading browsers only, to make development easier. Sadly, this brings us back to the 1996 situation where you need a certain browser to view content. Improving your skillset So, how do you keep up to date with the fast-moving web industry and improve your skillset? Let's look at a few different methods for boosting your skills ... Platform knowledge A major part of a designer's arsenal is platform knowledge. You should know about the various operating systems, and how people are using them. As designers, we tend to use Macs, but then it's easy to forget that the majority of people out there are using Windows boxes to get their work done. I feel you can only truly understand something if you use it yourself. I prefer using my Mac to design, but spend a lot of time catching up on the evolution of various other platforms. I have several copies of Windows installed on my Mac as virtual machines. I've been busy testing new builds of Windows 10 using Microsoft's Insider Program to check out the various changes in the UI. I also regularly buy new hardware to test how it works. I bought an Apple Watch just to test the platform. I then sold it because I felt it wasn't adding so much to my life. Further to this, the web can be seen as its own operating system. It's constantly evolving, with new features being added to every browser vendor each week. It's extremely worthwhile to know about the technical aspects of browsers, especially regarding CSS and graphics abilities. You need to know what SVG and WebGL are, and how you can use the Web Animations API. Every platform evolves over time and as a user interface designer it's your task to stay up to date. After all, whatever you are designing doesn't live in isolation, but is part of a bigger software ecosystem. Go back to the basics What we are struggling with today is not so different to what we were struggling with 20 years ago. There is a ton of good advice in books. Try Defensive Design for the Web by Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman and Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug for starters. If you don't know about concepts like modality and affordance, you need to read up. You should to be able to explain what Fitts' law is. The Gestalt law of proximity? This is the bread and butter of UI design. Get inspired by games and films The UI for 2006’s Oblivion (left) is much more decorative than that of Skyrim (right), released in 2011As a UI designer, I draw on other sources of inspiration to do my work. I find a lot of inspiration in games. Some games are very complex, and the UI designers have had to solve the same complex interface problems as UI designer working on business projects. Games can also signify trends. The minimalism found in the menus of Colin McRae Rally reminds me of the direction of iOS7. In a way, the UI animation design that is now trendy was appearing in games years and years ago. The move from skeuomorphism to bare, functional interfaces and 'flat design' has been apparent in games too. Compare 2006's Oblivion with 2011's Skyrim. Both games are RPGs in the same series, but the difference is striking. The futuristic interfaces in Marvel films like Iron Man have also been an inspiration for me. They aren't exactly usable examples, but they do make me think more about computing as a whole. Do we want a future of screens, or do we want the screens to disappear? This is probably a good question to pose in a pub full of designers. Honing your craft You grow as a designer through hard work, persistence, talking to your peers, and reading an awful lot. About a year ago I read a piece in the New York Times about people well into their 80s that continue to hone their craft. I feel like I'm only starting. What about you? In his Generate London talk Aaron Gustafson will also introduce you to a battle-tested tool for planning, discussing, building and testing adaptive interfaces, while Ally Long will explain how to build field-tested interfaces for the next billion and Giles Colborne will explore conversational UIs. Get your ticket today! Related articles: Meet the team moving the web forward and improving client relationships Why you should be excited about zero UI 7 UX tools to try this year View the full article

Whether you're designing a website for a client or yourself, it's very easy to create something that looks like every other site. And sometimes that's a good thing: if visitors are primarily coming to your site to access a service or buy a product, a familiar looking design can help them from A to B quickly and easily. But if the purpose of your site is to showcase your agency's design smarts and originality, then often you'll want to do things a little differently. In this post we've brought together 10 of our favourite agency websites. All show how it's possible to infuse your site with a sense of personality and individuality that shows what your agency is all about. 01. Sagmeister & Walsh Sagmeister's site offers live feeds of the office, nude pics and moreWhenever superhip New York design studio Sagmeister & Walsh releases something for public consumption, it never fails to make a splash, whether that be its superlative work for big brands or its trademark nude pictures of team members. The agency's website continues in that tradition, featuring three angles of live feed video from the studio, including one from inside its pet snake's enclosure (yes, really). These webcam scenes form part of the navigation of the site, with the main destinations superimposed over each view. The case studies, such as the agency's work for Appy Fizz, make delightful use of subtle effects and animations to really engage the visitor. 02. Stink Studios Stink Studios' site makes full use of its screen spaceA global creative agency comprised of Stink Films and Stink Studios, Stink has some huge clients including Google, Spotify, Twitter, Ray-Ban and Nike, and consequently a lot of great work to show off. This it does masterfully on this site. Huge, bold imagery and video dominate the case studies and make full use of the screen. But it's the little touches and attention to detail that really float our boat, such as being able to filter projects by subject and discipline, and the written-out times that appear when you mouseover the location of each office in the website footer. 03. Bolden Dutch studio Bolden makes, er, bold use of type on its inventive siteA strategic design and development studio based in Amsterdam, Bolden makes intriguing use of typography on its wonderful new site. From the opening spread shown above (click on the red and blue shapes to reveal each slogan) to the big and beautiful type of the menus, the confident use of lettering throughout this site compels you to delve further. 04. Haus Haus's portfolio site is vibrant and filled with colour and energyIn a world of cookie cutter sites, it's great to see something original in digital, and that's just what LA-based brand development agency Haus has brought us with its site. The structure may be clean and simple, but everything is presented in such an energetic and inventive fashion it never stops being visually stimulating and engaging. And if you thought the idea of showcasing your work in a carousel was outdated, just check out what Haus has done with it here. 05. Studio Rotate Studio Rotate makes great use of its name to inject visual playfulness into its siteDutch digital agency Studio Rotate takes its name as the central organising design principle of its new site, making for an innovative approach to presenting work based on hollowed-out circles. It's a minimal design, and in fact not that easy to navigate, but the visual playfulness of it all can't help to put a smile on your face. 06. Active Theory Active Theory's site uses background video to make it popActive Theory is a creative digital production studio based in Venice, California, and its compelling website makes great use of background video to draw you in. Rather than the dreaded video wallpaper that adorns many agency homepages, there's a real sense of movement and energy to these clips. 07. Twenty Nine NYC Twenty Nine NYC's fanzine-style site is a beautiful hot messTwenty Nine NYC, a "small but good creative studio", does things a little differently, and that certainly applies to its anarchic website. Breaking almost every rule about how an agency site should look and function, this intentional mess of a design looks more like an old-school fanzine than a website, but it's infused with a sense of fun just makes you want to learn more about this charming company. 08. FCINQ FCinq's portfolio of work is a joy to scroll throughParisian agency FCinq (French for 'F5') has one of those websites that's just a joy to scroll through. Its catalogue of work is presented artfully, in a way that allows both text and images to breathe. In many ways it feels more like a magazine or newspaper blog than an agency portfolio. The ability to switch between English and French is also a nice touch, and adeptly implemented. 09. Joan Joan's website makes a bold statement about its future directionJoan is a creative studio founded in 2016 by ad agency veterans Jaime Robinson and Lisa Clunie, formerly of Wieden + Kennedy and Refinery29 respectively. The shop's site is big, bold and beautiful, announcing its arrival in style, with formidable design smarts. We love the multitude of logo designs for Joan, the intense colour scheme, and the general devotion to 'irregular thinking' behind this simple yet stylish site. 10. Zulu Alpha Kilo Inc. Idiotic campaigns and ridiculous buzzwords are among the agency website cliches sent up hereIf you're thinking this homepage looks awful, then fear not: this is not a real agency site but a parody of such (albeit launched by the real agency of the same name). In short, it's a hilarious sendup of the worst agency website cliches, from OTT inspirational posters to cringeworthy founder bios, with a ton of terrible jargon and buzzwords holding it all together. One case study describes how the agency created a viral video to promote condoms: "We sent out fake positive STD tests to influential college students and captured their reactions on hidden camera. Their reactions were priceless. Best of all, we never revealed it was a hidden camera prank, so they only learned the truth when they saw themselves crying on a national television campaign." Related articles: 7 tips for driving traffic to your portfolio website 9 brilliant freelance portfolios for 2017 8 big portfolio trends for 2017 View the full article

GnuPG recently patched cryptographic library Libgcrypt, preventing a local side-channel attack; something that could have allowed full key recovery for RSA-1024. View the full article

When painting ocean scenes, as with most of my painting projects, I start by gathering some marine photo references, to ensure that I've got a good grasp of the subject matter. I also find it useful to look at the work of great seascape painters from history, whatever artistic movement they belonged to. Marine waves are usually caused by wind that generates ripples across the sea surface. As the ripple effect increases, the sea surface starts to form a crest that then falls on itself in a shape that's more or less comparable with an irregular pipe. I have to consider this tubular shape when illustrating waves, so I paint the light and shadow as I would for a cylinder, with a soft shadow in the lower part and in the hollow body. I also bear in mind the transparency of the water. In the upper part of the wave, near the crest, the water will be thinner as it comes to a point – and it catches the light, too. This means the blue-green colour needs to be more vibrant and saturated in this area. Download Sara's custom brushes for this tutorial. 01. Start with a sketch Start by sketching out the wave's key elementsI begin laying down a quick sketch of the wave form, so I have an idea of its key elements: the crest and its hollow body. Sketching motion lines will also help me to keep in mind the flow of water, so I'm able to maintain a strong sense of dynamism and movement in the scene. 02. Take lighting into account The top of the wave should be lighter and more saturatedBecause the water's transparent, the top of the wave will be affected by light, so I apply a light blue and green that's more saturated than the tone I use for the surface of the sea. I then choose a hard brush and add some neat brush strokes that simulate the water ripples. 03. Build up the crest Finish your waves off with a lovely foamy crestI start painting the crest from the top of the wave that drops down. I choose a very light grey and use my custom brush, set to Scatter and with irregular edges. This will mimic splashes and spurts of water. I add areas of white foam to help emphasise the tubular shape of the wave. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 150; buy it here! Related articles: How to get started with oil painting Paint a portrait like the Old Masters The secrets to painting like Matisse View the full article

Business card specialist MOO has really cornered its market by creating beautiful products that people are proud to own and share. MOO's recent designs include business cards inspired by famous artists, but its latest range takes its lead from ancient papermaking methods. Created in partnership with long-term partner Mohawk Fine Papers, MOO's Cotton business cards are made entirely out of T-shirt offcuts. This material is a normal waste product of the garment industry that has found a new lease of life thanks to a technique that dates back thousands of years. Cotton paper makes printing lettering popTextile rags were once one of the primary materials for making paper, but fell out of common use when wood pulp grew in popularity and affordability. Recently, cotton paper has only been used for bank notes and legal documents, thanks to its strength and high production costs. But by using T-shirt fabric for its business cards, MOO has revived the lost art. The result is a naturally bright white paper that provides vivid contrast for images or lettering printed on it. Waste cotton is pulped and processed into strong and flexible paper“This paper’s really a hallmark of the relationship we’ve developed with MOO – we’re always working towards something that’s just beyond reach, and finding a way to get it done,” says Chris Harrold, VP creative director of Mohawk. “It was exciting to discover a way to bring cotton, rag-made paper back – there’s really nothing like it.” White cotton can be printed with your colour and message of choiceThe cards have the same premium feel as quality gsm paper, which stays true to MOO's devotion to great materials and innovative creative techniques. Get your name out there by ordering a pack of 50 cards for £19.19 (around $25) from MOO's website. You might also like these articles: 50 inspiring examples of letterpress business cards The 10 commandments of business card design 8 great business cards for marketing professionals View the full article

Typography can have a crucial impact on a design’s effectiveness, and choosing the right typeface can also have a big impact on a brand’s personality, introducing subtle variations in its tone of voice, depending on the font used. For instance, geometric, sans-serif typefaces with homogenised proportions feel pure, clean, slick and modern – which is why so many technology brands embrace them. High-end fashion brands, however, will often opt for timeless elegance, using high-contrast typefaces with smooth curves, hairline strokes and edgy, bracketed serifs. The 41 greatest free web fontsThese are two fairly extreme examples, but the fact remains that the details of a typeface – such as contrast, proportions and angles – can have a big effect on its emotional characteristics. To help you decide, here are five questions you should ask of any typeface you’re considering… Is it serif or sans serif? There are many varieties of serif and sans serif, all with their own distinct characterThis is a pretty top-level decision, being one of the most obvious at-a-glance differences between typefaces. Purely for practical reasons, serifs are considerably better for large bodies of text as they tie words and sentences together for a smoother, more legible reading experience. Their origins give them character, too. Serifs hark back to the days of carved inscriptions in ancient civilisations, giving them a certain gravitas, class and cultural weight. Sans serifs, meanwhile, are a considerably more recent invention, first emerging in the 19th century for commercial use in advertisements, and latterly on screens (which struggled to render the finer details of serifs until relatively recently). In very simple terms, whether you should choose a serif or a sans serif depends on whether you’re looking for cool, clean modernity, or timeless, classical authority. Is it high or low contrast? Bodoni is a high-contrast serif that’s beautiful at display sizes, but is illegible if used too smallContrast, in type terms, simply means the variation between thick and thin strokes in each letterform – a skill perfected by hand by calligraphers. As a rule, very high-contrast fonts suffer the smaller they get, with the thinner strokes disappearing altogether if they’re scaled down too much. This makes them almost exclusively the preserve of display fonts, where their distinctive attributes can be appreciated. At the other end of the scale, very low-contrast fonts are solid and uniform, again making for a strong statement when blown up large, but suffering for the opposite reason when used small, as individual letterforms lose definition and become blocky. When it comes to personality, high contrast fonts – similar to serifs – can help convey dignity, refinement and elegance, rather like the calligraphic script that inspired them. Low contrast fonts have more in common with sans serifs, and are solid, confident and powerful. While they share similar characteristics, they are not directly interchangeable. To achieve the nuanced character you’re looking for, a high-contrast sans serif or a low-contrast serif may be suitable. Does it have diagonal or vertical stress? Different stresses make a significant difference to the feel of a letterformHere’s where it starts to get a little more complicated. The stress (or axis) of a font refers to the angle at which contrast occurs in its letterforms – this is usually either vertical, or diagonal. The easiest way to determine this is by studying how the letter ‘O’ is drawn in the typefaces you’re considering. Is the bottom left thicker than the top left, or vice versa? If so, it has diagonal stress – another calligraphic throwback, with a traditional, wholesome heritage that feels warmth, friendly and inviting. Conversely, if the contrast of the ’O’ is split horizontally, so the sides are thicker than the top and bottom, that means it has vertical stress. These characters feel bold, modern and confident, particularly at display sizes. However, they do run the risk of feeling clinical and cold compared to their vertically stressed counterparts. What are its vertical parameters? This diagram from Computer Arts issue 267 demonstrates different aspects of a fontYou’ll often hear type designers talking about ‘x-height’ of a font. Combined with the height of its ascenders and descenders, this can have a significant impact on both legibility and personality. As a rule, the shorter or taller a font’s ascenders and descenders, the more distinctive it becomes, but also the more effort it takes to read. Fonts with a particularly tall x-height have clearly defined individual characters as a result, but often at the expense of word and sentence legibility. Short x-heights have the opposite effect. Although each character might lose definition by being squashed down, particularly in bolder weights, the overall shape of words and sentences flow more easily. So how do you achieve the perfect balance? That depends largely on the intended use, so consider this from the outset. The font needs enough x-height for lowercase letters to be defined clearly at the sizes you need it, particularly complex letters such as ‘a’, ‘e’ and ‘s’. Does it have open or closed counters? Open counters create ‘apertures’ (see ‘s’ or ‘c’), closed counters create ‘bowls’ (‘b’ and ’o’)As well as the vertical lines of a font’s ascenders and descenders, the curves that define its counters – the areas of letters that are entirely or partially enclosed, such as the inside or a ‘p’, ‘b’ or ‘d’ – go a long way to shaping its personality. Pay particular attention to whether these counters are open or closed. While the examples above are almost always closed, when it comes to a lowercase ‘g’, for instance, different variations have either two closed counters, or one open and one closed counter. Similarly, lowercase ’a’, ‘c’, ‘e’ or ’s’ letterforms may have tightly hooked outer loops that create almost entirely closed counters inside. This can bring a distinctive twist to a font, but often at the expense of its legibility – particularly at small sizes. An enlarged x-height can help here, as can more extreme contrast to make the definition between different parts of the letter clearer. In short, it’s only by balancing all five of the above factors that you’ll find the perfect typeface for your particular needs. Read more: 50 best free fonts for designers 5 ways type can define brands Smart typography tool generates font pairs in an instant View the full article

We’ve already brought you our favourite graduates from outside London, as well as from two opposite corners of the UK: Edinburgh and Falmouth. Now discover the rest of our picks of the very best graphic design, illustration and animation graduates from the capital's finest colleges. Whether you’re looking for new creative talent for your studio or collaborative opportunities, the talented graduates here boast exceptional final year projects that excel in both concept and execution – and are worth keeping an eye on. And don't forget to head over to D&AD New Blood at London’s Old Truman Brewery, Shoreditch, from 5-6 July to get a closer look at the work from the class of 2017 and meet the graduates in person. Want to search by university instead of scrolling through? Just hit the drop-down menu above to skip to: London College of Communication, Chelsea College of Art, Camberwell College of Art, Ravensbourne or Kingston University. First up, Central Saint Martins... Jiawei Yu University: Central Saint Martins Course: (BA Hons) Graphic Design Project: 30-Day Library An unassuming brief – the visual documentation of the usage of a graphic design bookshelf within the Central Saint Martins’ library over 30 days – yielded a spectacular Futurist eruption of geometry and colour, and was one of the standout pieces at Saint Martins’ show. Jiawei Yu modestly claims he simply wanted to "make people aware of the importance of using a library correctly", but his interactive book, shelf and poster demonstrate how the simplest of briefs often produce the richest rewards. Oliver Vanes and Kwan Chow University: Central Saint Martins Course: (BA Hons) Graphic Design Project: Transcendent Graphic Design VR is one of the year’s hottest trends, and Oliver Vanes and Kwan Chow set out to explore the crossover with graphic design. The duo created a series of posters, then transformed them into VR experiences. “We wanted to create a graphic, typographical experience, moving away from traditional ‘room’ or ‘world’ structures,” explains Vanes. “It has been fantastic to see people have such emotional reactions to it.” Noah Petri University: Central Saint Martins Course: (BA Hons) Graphic Design Project: Portrait Berlin-born illustrator Noah Petri begins all his work with a hand-drawn, time-intensive line image. “Often the lines in my initial drawings are so meticulous and refined, they are already mistaken for computer-generated elements,” he explains. “I then scan the image in and slowly start digitally manipulating it. A hybrid between classical hand-drawn elements, digital tools and photographic components develops.” Sharing the same highly distinctive style, the resulting portraits, environments and themes hail from a dark and mysterious world. “They are aggressive and dark, creepy, unsettling and, in essence, otherworldly,” says Petri. “I’m creating a coherent visual world for the viewer to explore.” Berta Valló University: Central Saint Martins Course: (BA Hons) Graphic Design Project: Paraphrase Originally from Hungary, Berta Valló is fascinated by human behavioural patterns and emotions, and her work often explores themes of identity and female sexuality in relation to consumerist culture. Having lived in London for three years, she was inspired by 15th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer to create two-metre-high digital print Paraphrase in an attempt to condense how she feels about the capital’s diverse and complex culture. Andrew Long University: Central Saint Martins Course: (BA Hons) Graphic Design Project: Letterpress Workshop Guide A proudly analogue designer in an increasingly digital world, Andrew Long returned to education after working as a plumber. Designed to encourage more of his fellow students to explore CSM’s letterpress workshop, his project is based around a series of beautifully produced prints highlighting some of the fonts from the collection. Next page: All the top talent from London College of Communication Get 5 issues of Computer Arts for £5! Computer Arts will be bringing you the cream of the 2017 graduate crop in a special new talent issue, on sale 21 July. Subscribe now to make sure you get your copy – and get five issues for just £5. Santa Cielava University: London College of Communication Course: (BA Hons) Graphic and Media Design Project: The Library of Babel Reimagining a short story by Jorge Luis Borges – The Library of Babel – Santa Cielava’s pop-up book is held within a 59-kilo bookcase, which was produced in Latvia by her father. The project demonstrates Cielava’s love of precision and minimalism, albeit disrupted by chaos and disorder. “I took every word from the story and categorised them into alphabetical order,” explains Cielava. “And to take it to another level, I chose to write the words by hand.” Inviting comparisons to German artist Anselm Kiefer’s work, Cielava’s sculpture perfectly expressed the multidisciplinary breadth and intellectual ambition that dominated this year’s shows. Christian Gyde University: London College of Communication Course: (BA Hons) Graphic and Media Design Projects: Ryoji Ikeda & Neu Utility Christian Gyde’s stunning posters advertise digital sound artist Ryoji Ikeda’s experimental installations, recreating the disorientating effect of the “incomprehensible amount of information” in his work via type. The otherworldly typeface Neu Utility was inspired by “the lexicon of pavement utility markings, used by local authorities as a way of remembering what actually lies beneath the ground.” Richard Underwood University: London College of Communication Course: (BA Hons) Graphic and Media Design Project: Physical/Visual System Inspired by Ryoji Ikeda’s 2014 installation Supersymmetry to explore the potential of live data, Richard Underwood’s project features ball bearings on a light box, which is mounted on two servos. A camera above is also connected to the servos and a Raspberry Pi. “Code, written in Python, calculates the position of the eight balls and moves the servos to balance the centroid of the balls in the centre of the light box,” says Underwood. The data was painstakingly recorded, then represented visually in four different ways to create background textures for the exhibition posters. Haruka Hochin University: London College of Communication Course: (BA Hons) Graphic and Media Design Project: The Lottery in Babylon Haruka Hochin’s reinterpretation of a Jorge Luis Borges story – The Lottery in Babylon – explored the role chance plays in life. It’s an intricate, experimental typographic system ruminating on the theme of illogical corruption, and is woven across three formats: type, image and a combination of both. The process involved continuous iteration and experimentation, but the resulting work has strengthened Hochin’s passion for creation. “I have come to re-appreciate the physical, traditional print and craft of graphic design,” she says. Hannah Martin University: London College of Communication Course: (BA Hons) Illustration and Visual Media Project: Self-deprecating Narcissism For her final project, Hannah Martin documented observations, occurrences, thoughts and emotions in the form of a daily art journal. “I hope people are inspired by the raw truths and honesty within my work, and find reassurance in knowing that they are less alone in the worries they have and struggles they face,” she says. “I found the project a therapeutic way to channel my negativity, and used it as an outlet for my self-deprecating thoughts.” Next page: Our pick of the talent from Chelsea College of Arts Jack Collis University: Chelsea College of Arts Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Communication Project: dot-draw.xyz Inspired by The De Stijl movement and “imagery created by reducing components to the essentials of colour and composition,” Jack Collis’ interactive project is a playful modular system that enables users to explore, create and submit images. “People have submitted everything from penises to typefaces, voting propaganda to signatures,” explains Collis. “It’s incredible to see just how differently one creative challenge can be approached.” Jeong Eun Yoo University: Chelsea College of Arts Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Communication Project: Regather Hangul South Korea-born Jeong Eun Yoo was tired of work from her native land focusing on North Korean propaganda, or the North–South divide. Inspired by the stories of families separated by the conflict, Regather Hangul has a message of unity and resolution. Her typeface was inspired by the traditional Korean art of Jogakbo – patchwork made from leftover clothes. Next page: The best student talent from Camberwell College of Arts Ellie Veale, Katy Everett and Jack Harness University: Camberwell College of Arts Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Project: Degree show identity Recent graduate Ellie Veale collaborated with third-year Graphic Design students Katy Everett and Jack Harness to create a stunning brand identity for Camberwell College of Arts’ summer show. “My work aims to create a physical experience incorporating both the designer and the user,” says Veale. “I find it interesting how the user can take part in the design process.” Using data collected from the third-year class, the trio built the startling typeface from a unique grid of their creation. The typeface was then printed in fluoro ink on signage, posters and even on cool plastic sleeves holding postcards for each designer on show. Next page: The best work from the Ravensbourne degree show Catherine Searle University: Ravensbourne Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Project: The Upbeat Project After reading a report that claimed over 80 per cent of young people in London often or always feel alone, Catherine Searle devised The Upbeat Project, a charity created by students for students to engage and connect people. “The work tackles the issue of chronic loneliness in a bold, spirited manner, with a vibrant, diverse set of illustrations printed on risograph,” explains Searle. “I’m pleased to have touched a subject that’s had an adverse effect on many of my peers in London.” Medeea Lascar University: Ravensbourne Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Project: Out of the Blue Out of the Blue is a campaign to raise awareness of the Horniman Museum’s exhibit: Photographs of British Algae – Cyanotype Impressions, a 1843 book by Anna Atkins. Using a Riso printer to replicate the vivid blue of the original cyanotypes, Lascar created a series of posters and leaflets that can be torn into individual postcards. Next page: Top design talent from Kingston School of Art Ruth Gardiner University: Kingston University Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Project: Londependence When a petition to make London independent gained over 180,000 signatures, Ruth Gardiner set out to explore what that could look like. Gardiner was initially excited about the idea, but changed her mind after looking at how the East-West divide affected German design. “The project aims to show people how important it is to stick together,” she says. Lauren Doherty University: Kingston University Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design Project: Skill Stickers Designed to “break the boundaries put up by laptop screens” in shared workspaces, Skill Stickers encourage communication by indicating a willingness to collaborate. Each of Lauren Doherty’s designs represents a skill: lecturing, photography, art direction, typography, writing, coding, film, making, and fashion. Get 5 issues of Computer Arts for £5! Computer Arts will be bringing you the cream of the 2017 graduate crop in a special new talent issue, on sale 21 July. Subscribe now to make sure you get your copy – and get five issues for just £5. View the full article

Icons may be tiny, but they can have a big impact. A great icon can catch a person’s eye and stick with them. If you need the ideal icons for your next project, grab a lifetime subscription to Icon8's great collection, on sale now for just $49 (approx. £37)! Icon8 is one of the best sources you'll find for professionally designed icons. You’ll find over 50,000 royalty-free icons – with thousands more added every single year – that you can use for any project you’re working on. These icons come ready to use however you see fit. And there are a variety of sizes and formats, so you can always find an option that works for you. You can get a lifetime subscription to Icons8 on sale for just $49 (approx. £37). That saves you 91 per cent off the retail price. For any designer, it’s an offer that is too good to pass up, so grab this deal today! View the full article

Beginners or those who have taken a break from web design for a few years may not know what Sass is, but we're here to help explain with this guide to those starting out or in need of a refresher. However, before jumping into this article, I feel like a quick public service announcement is in order: if you're new to CSS, I do not recommend using any preprocessors (like Sass). The same goes for any other extensions or frameworks. While it's true they offer many advantages, it's more important that you first understand the basics of CSS; please do not skip this crucial step of learning the core concepts. What is a CSS preprocessor? A CSS preprocessor is a scripting language that extends CSS by allowing developers to write code in one language and then compile it into CSS. Some examples of CSS preprocessor include: Sass, Less and Stylus. What is Sass? Sass is arguably the most useful of all CSS extensionsSass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) is an extension of CSS that enables you to use things like variables, nested rules, inline imports and more. It also helps to keep things organised and allows you to create style sheets faster. The only requirement for using Sass is that you must have Ruby installed. Users are also asked to follow the Sass Community Guidelines. Using Sass The following section outlines basic usage and uses examples from the official Sass website. See the Sass Documentation for additional references and examples. Syntax Sass includes two syntax options: SCSS (Sassy CSS): Uses the .scss file extension and is fully compliant with CSS syntax Indented (simply called 'Sass'): Uses .sass file extension and indentation rather than brackets; it is not fully compliant with CSS syntax, but it's quicker to write Note that files can be converted from one syntax to the other using the sass-convert command. Variables Just like other programming languages, Sass allows the use of variables that can store information you can use throughout your style sheet. For example, you can store a colour value in a variable at the top of the file, and then use this variable when setting the colour of your elements. This enables you to quickly change your colours without having to modify each line separately. For example: The following CSS will be produced: Nesting Nesting is a double-edged sword. While it provides an excellent method for reducing the amount of code you need to write, it can also lead to over-qualified CSS if not executed carefully. The idea is to nest your CSS selectors in such a way as to mimic your HTML hierarchy. The following shows a basic navigation style that uses nesting: The CSS output is as follows: Partials Partials are smaller Sass files that can be imported (see next section) into other Sass files. Think of partials as code snippets. With these code snippets, your CSS can now be modular and easier to maintain. A partial is designated as such by naming it with a leading underscore: _partial.scss. Import Used with Partials (see previous section), the @import directive allows you to import your partial files into the current file, to build one single CSS file. Be mindful of how many imports you're using as an HTTP request will be generated for each one. And the corresponding CSS output: Note: When importing partials, you don't need to include the file extension or the underscore. Mixins One of the advantages of using preprocessors is their ability to take complex, long-winded code and simplify it. This is where mixins come in handy! For example, if you need to include the vendor prefixes, you can use a mixin instead. Take a look at this example for border-radius: Notice the @mixin directive at the top. It has been given the name border-radius and uses the variable $radius as its parameter. This variable is used to set the radius value for each element. Later, the @include directive is called, along with the mixin name (border-radius) and a parameter (10px). Thus .box { @include border-radius(10px); }. The following CSS is produced: Extend/Inheritance The @extend directive has been called one of Sass' most powerful features. After seeing it in action, it's clear why. The idea is that with this directive you won't have to include multiple class names on your HTML elements and can keep your code DRY. Your selectors can inherit the styles of other selectors, and then be easily extended when required. Now that's powerful. Operators Having the ability to perform calculations in your CSS allows you to do more, like convert pixel values into percentages. You'll have access to standard maths functions like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Of course, these functions can be combined to create complex calculations. In addition, Sass includes a few built-in functions to help manipulate numbers. Functions like percentage(), floor() and round() to name a few. Read more: Understanding the CSS display property 5 of the best resources for learning HTML and CSS What CSS framework should you use? View the full article

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As the photographer and sound engineers set up for our interview on the roof of Aardman Animation, rain and vocal seagulls gather. In the midst of the bustle, cables, tripods and lights, Léonie Watson sits quietly, dressed in black, and sips from a cup of black, sugarless tea. A crew member attaches a mic to her collar. Watson is communications director and principal engineer at The Paciello Group. She also works with the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) and is a member of the W3C Advisory Board, and co-chair of the W3C Web Platform Working Group. She is, of course, best known for her work in the sphere of accessibility. “I’m blind, so for me personally, it’s about being able to do stuff,” Watson says, still sipping her tea. “If it weren’t for accessibility, I couldn’t do my job, I couldn’t do my shopping, I couldn’t do a whole bunch of stuff." Léonie Watson will give a presentation at Generate London in September to look at new accessibility JavaScript API and more "It wouldn’t surprise you that I’m a big technology fan. A lot of my life is spent in and around technology. If accessibility isn’t there, then my life either grinds to a halt or becomes a hell of a lot more difficult. “Professionally, it’s my career. Spiritually – if I can call it that without sounding too ridiculous – it’s about quality. In this day and age we’re talking about a huge audience of web and technology consumers and in some respects everyone is a niche. "You’ve got people using a particular tablet, you’ve got a number of people using a screen reader. You have people on laptops, desktops and phones. Our entire audience, as designers and developers, is all about niche audiences. So, accessibility is just one part of getting that experience right.” Sites can be accessible and beautiful Watson is a strong advocate for accessible techGiven the web’s trend-consciousness, is accessibility the enemy of beautiful? Watson’s response comes like a boxer’s jab: “Absolutely not. [Accessibility] is a creative challenge, not a challenge to creativity. We’ve come a long way since the late '90s and early 2000s, when the concept of an accessible website was probably a text-only site. "There are lots of companies making beautiful, creative and engaging websites that are completely usable by all sorts of people: people with and without disabilities, and people using different technologies. "To anybody now who thinks accessibility has to cramp their style, I suggest, ‘Take another look at it’. Put the talent you have as designers and developers to finding accessible solutions to the creative stuff rather than constraining creative stuff to make it accessible.” Watch Marcy Sutton's talk about accessibility and performance in web designWho's getting accessibility right? So who’s getting accessibility right? “In terms of productions, I was really privileged to be part of the new UK government website. They’ve rewritten the book on a whole bunch of stuff around web development – especially in the public sector. The thing they’ve done that’s been a real game changer is to put their audience, people, as their absolute top priority. That, of course, includes people with accessibility requirements. "It’s not perfect – nothing ever is – but each person working in that team understands that whatever they build and however they build it, it has to be done in such a way that anyone in the country, across an extraordinary demographic, can use it. “You know,” she continues, “accessibility can seem scary at first... really complicated. But it’s not rocket science. The rocket science is learning to do what we all do; it’s learning HTML, it’s CSS, it’s cross-browser compatibility and debugging. If you can do all that, you can get accessibility right – no question. "If you’re looking for advice, I’d say think about the quality of the stuff we’re designing. We want people to use our websites, our apps and our web applications. Design like you give a damn. That’s all accessibility is: giving a damn about what you’re building and who you’re building it for.” Making accessibility mainstream Responsive web design is perfect for accessibility, Watson tells usSo, accessibility and good design are easy bedfellows. What about accessibility and responsive web design? With all its breakpoints, finesses and maths, is it a frontier too far for accessibility? “No. Responsive design is brilliant for accessibility! In fact, it’s what accessibility, in some respects, is about in its very heart. [Responsive] is about creating different experiences for different audiences so, actually, it’s brought something [that has been] in accessibility for a long time right into the mainstream. “We can now build on that to make things even more accessible. [RWD has been] about looking at different platforms: mobile, desktop. You can take that on to great variations. CSS media queries [enable you to] present different experiences to different user agents. So, yes, responsive is brilliant for accessibility.” Is accessible, responsive web design harder? From a user outlook this is great, but from a design and development team’s perspective, responsive does have a reputation for making the nine-to-five more taxing. If we’re setting our sights on making products that are both accessible and responsive, are web pros facing a tougher future? “Bringing together two things like responsive and accessibility: that’s the wrong way to look at it. We all need to be doing that first ‘design and build’ part with accessibility built in. "I talk to designers around the world who just get it. There’s no concept of, ‘I’ve got to build this. Oh. I’d better stop to work out how to make it accessible.’ Accessibility is built into all they do. If you take that on to responsive, it’s inherently there.” How do browsers affect accessibility? With browser builders competing to build ever newer features into their products, how can assistive technologies keep pace? “It comes down to not wanting to separate accessibility from the stuff we’re doing every day. "Accessibility is also pretty dependent on the browsers. For example, a screen reader depends on the browser a person is using. The browser has an accessibility API and pushes out information about the content on a page. The screen reader picks it up and conveys this information to the user. There’s a real symbiosis. "The rapid changes taking place don’t cause any more of a headache because you’re thinking about accessibility. They cause a monumental headache simply because they’re changing so fast!” And which browser does Watson rate best from an accessibility point of view? “Firefox is good. It’s making a lot of information available through its accessibility API. The team working on it has put a lot of time and effort into it and deserves a lot of credit. "There are probably others doing good things in that space but, for the moment, Firefox and Internet Explorer are the two big players when it comes to screen reader support. But Firefox has to take the winning ticket on that one.” Assistive technologies There are some great screen readers and other assistive technologies available nowThe discussion shifts, to explore the assistive technologies themselves that are impressing her. “Jaws is a screen reader developed in the States by a company called Freedom Scientific. They’re doing good stuff in terms of ARIA support.” WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications), Watson explains, is a spec from the W3C designed to bridge gaps between assistive technologies and some of the components being built into websites. In essence, it’s a method of supplementing and extending some of the information available through the browser accessibility APIs, providing assistive technologies with more to work on. A simple example, Watson suggests, is “if you’ve got a link, you style it to look like a button, but to a screen reader it’s still a link though it looks like a button – there’s an obvious discrepancy. With ARIA, you can stick a role of ‘button’ on that link and, to a screen reader, the thing looks and behaves like a button.” Technicalities cleared up, Watson continues to list open-source screen reader NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access). “It’s brilliant to use in testing,” she says. “I’d probably have to include Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader, too, because it’s available on all Apple products. That was a game-changer in the marketplace, when a blind person could walk into an Apple store, pick up a device, and have it speak to you straight out of the box.” Accessible web strategy Finally, we arrive at content strategy and what accessibility experts need to think about. If you’re looking for a pithy summary of Léonie Watson’s professional quest, you’ll find it here. “This is a real passion of mine: we need to stop thinking about accessibility as a separate entity and make sure it’s part of everything we do,” Watson says. “[With] content, you need to think about the audience it’s going to target. Some people in that audience aren’t going to be able to see, hear, move around. To separate [your content] is going to make life a lot more difficult when it comes to putting that strategy together, let alone delivering on it.” This interview first appeared in issue 245 of net magazine. It was conducted before Léonie Watson's talk at the inaugural Generate London conference. We're thrilled she will be back to mark the fifth event this September. Generate London features 16 talks on web animations, performance, UX strategy, user interfaces, and much more. As Seb Lee-Delisle will be there, you can also expect lasers! And if you treat yourself to a workshop as well as the conference, you can save £95 by buying a ticket bundle. Related articles: The ultimate guide to Responsive Web Design What’s holding back accessibility now? Master accessible web typography View the full article

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In an ideal world, we would carefully, lovingly handcraft every graphic design asset ourselves. But in the real world of tight deadlines and squeezed budgets, there are times when it’s useful to have some downloadable assets to hand, to speed things up. It’s even nicer, of course, if they’re free. So in this post, we’ve rounded up 25 high-quality background, fonts and icon kits that have come to our attention recently. All free to download, they’ll hopefully provide just the right amount of aid to help you deliver your design project on time and on budget. We'll start with free backgrounds, then on the next page you'll find a selection of free fonts, followed by free icons. Use the drop-down menu above to navigate. Free backgrounds White space is the designer’s friend, but a plain white background isn’t always the best way to go. If you’re looking to add some colour and texture to your graphic designs, then check out these eight great texture and pattern sets, all free to download. 01. Organic Vector Textures Download these PSD vector elements for freeThis great set of hand-crafted organic textures, which come as PSD vector elements, can be used for business card designs, greeting cards, on mockups or logos or as background textures. 02. Jute Fabrics 10 high-resolution jute texture backgrounds for your projectsThis free texture pack includes 10 high-resolution jute texture backgrounds. They’ve been created from real jute fabrics in multiple colours and patterns, and can be used for photography, graphic design, textile design and other design projects. They're free to download for personal use only. 03. White Subtle Grunge Textures Add a touch of distress and depth to your designs with these free texturesThis pack of subtle grunge textures can add a touch of distress and depth to your designs. It contains 10 white, grainy, scratchy and speckled textures to be used for any design background, including logos, posters, cards, prints and more. 04. Material Design Tileable Patterns These patterns comes as PNGs and Photoshop and Illustrator filesA set of high-resolution tiled patterns for your graphic design projects, these patterns come as PNGs, Photoshop pattern files and Illustrator vectors so you can change the colours according to your needs. 05. Seamless Wood Patterns Tile these wood patterns into seamless backgroundsA pack of 10 wood patterns for Photoshop, these can be tiled into seamless backgrounds that are great for posters, flyers, wallpapers and more. Download the Photoshop PAT file, along with the patterns in 800×800px JPG images, for free. 06. Paper Pattern Backgrounds These paper pattern backgrounds serve a range of design needsThis set of six free paper pattern backgrounds features unique colours and patterns. These can serve a range of design needs, including textile designs, scrapbooks, pattern fills, surface textures, storyboards, wallpapers and more. Download them for free in PSD format. 07. Wood and Metal Textures Each of these textures is made from a real photoThis set of six high vector quality textures (4000x4000px) includes three wood textures and three metal textures created by Vlad Cristea. Each texture is made from a real photo to give a rough, realistic look. Use them to give an aged look to your logos, ads, posters, photos and other creative designs. 08. Noise and Grit Seamless Textures Apply some subtle noise and grit to your designs with these free seamless texturesCreated by British designer Tony Thomas for Medialoot, these free seamless textures are great for instantly applying subtle noise and grit to your designs. They’re free to download and use for both personal and commercial projects with attribution back to Medialoot. Next page: Free fonts for graphic designers We all love free fonts but there are so many around on the web these days, it’s hard to keep up. Here are 10 cool new fonts that have come to our attention in recent months, all of which are free to download for your design projects at the time of writing. 09. Olivia Script Font A unique and stylish calligraphy typefaceComplement your design work with this unique and stylish calligraphy typeface. Including 351 glyphs, you can use this font for wedding Invitations, greeting cards, posters, wall hangings, gifts and more. It’s free to download if you log in to the Font Bundles site via Facebook and give them a ‘Like’. 10. Miller Salt Font Duo Miller and Salt Script scripts can be used together or separatelyDesigned by Mellow Design Lab, Miller Salt is a set of two hand-written, dry brush scripts that can be used together or separately. They're ideal for branding, wedding invitations, logos, book covers, stationery, marketing, magazines and more. 11. Brownhill Script Font A handwritten font set to download for freeThis hand-written font set created by Faisal Tanjung contains a full set of lower and uppercase letters, a large range of punctuation, numerals, and multilingual support. To access the alternate glyphs, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Indesign or CorelDRAW. 12. Podriq Check out this fantastic free typefaceGraphic designer Matt Cole Wilson has created this modern typeface featuring A-Z in caps and lowercase, 0-9, punctuation and common glyphs, and three weights. It’s available as a free download via Google Drive. 13. Quantify V2 A free display typeface for personal use onlyIndonesian designer Saidi Alfianor is the creator of this display sans serif typeface. It’s free to download for personal use only. 14. Peenu A hand-knitted typeface for use in your design projectsThe creation of designer Nitish Kumar of India's Webkul HQ, Peenu is a 'hand-knitted' typeface inspired by Sharp Paper Cuts. It’s free to use in your design projects without the need for formal attribution. 15. Umhlanga Sans This font is free to download in exchange for your email addressBased on Interstate Regular Compressed, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones, Umhlanga Sans is Graham Paterson’s first foray into type design and is free for personal use. At present the typeface contains the regular font weight, all uppercase and lowercase characters and numerals. It’s free to download in exchange for your email address. 16. Akrobat This free font is perfect for headlines, logos and typographic compositionsDesigned by Plamen Motev, Akrobat is a modern sans serif font with condensed proportions. The typeface comes in eight weights with a geometric aesthetic. Its narrow proportions make it perfect for headlines, logos, typographic compositions and short paragraphs of text, and it contains more than 500 glyphs with a wide range of languages. It’s free for both personal and commercial use. 17. Monti Sans Serif This minimal font is ideal for logos and brandingMonti is a new sans-serif, minimal font that’s useful for creating minimal logos, branding, street signs, posters and more. Currently limited to lowercase letters (although there are plans to upgrade with uppercase alphabets soon), it’s free to download for both personal and commercial use as long as you register for free membership of the site. 18. Pole Numerals A numeric font designed for use in your poster projectsThis numerals-only font has been created to give maximum impact to your poster designs. The work of Portuguese designer Pedro Azedo, the shadow version of this font is free to download. Next page: Free icons for graphic designers Icons are everywhere these days, and not just on digital devices. Even in print, signage and other media, well-designed icons can convey an enormous amount of information quickly and easily, helping to keep your layouts clean and clear. Here are some of the best free icon packs that we've seen recently... 19. Fifty Mini Icons These mini icons are top quality, and free to downloadDesigned by Victor Erixon, 50 Mini Icons is a set of high-quality mini icons for use in your design projects. 20. Camping Line Icons These camping icons are free for personal and business useThese line icons on the theme of camping are the creation of illustrator Memed Nur. They’re free for both commercial and personal use. 21. Education Icons An icon set with an academic theme from Graphic PearCreated by Wassim, a Lebanese designer for Graphic Pear, this set of icons covers a range of academic and educational concepts, and is free to download for use in your design projects as long as you register for free membership of the site. 22. Ninety Free Line and Solid Icons From one of the makers of Marvel, a great set of 90 iconsMurat Mutlu Resources has teamed up with Budi Tanrim, one of the co-founders of Marvelapp, to provide you with this superb set of 90 line and solid icons for Sketch and Illustrator, for free. 23. Free Camcons These icons are perfect for a photography-themed designSpice up your designs with this set of 59 free photography-related icons, created by Davey Heuser, the interface designer for the Bundle iOS app. 24. Supermarket Icons Free These supermarket-related icons are available in PSD formatThis set of icons was created by The Eyecons exclusively for the Dribbble community. These supermarket-related icons are great for use in your design projects, and are available to download for free in PSD format. 25. Free Weather Icons Download these weather icons as either PSD or Sketch filesThis icon set from a calendar project has been open sourced for use in your own design projects. These weather icons are available as both PSD and Sketch files. View the full article

Well executed 3D art can seriously spice up a design portfolio. The extra dimension provides an added sense of depth that is very hard to recreate in 2D. With the introduction of more affordable and free 3D software in recent years, more and more artists are creating incredible 3D art – here are some prime examples... Click the icon in the top right of each image to see it full-size. 01. Aghori Portrait This stunning portrait took only two weeks to complete It's hard to believe that Aldo Martínez Calzadilla's Aghori Portrait, created using ZBrush, Maya and Mari, only took two weeks to finish. "I try to work as fast as possible," he explains. "In my experience, moments of inspiration don't last too long, so I try to go through the process of creating an image as efficiently as I can." The meticulous groundwork of modelling and sculpting was his favourite part of the project. "I knew that in order to do a good job with the Aghori, the forms and anatomy had to be good and accurate to the reference," he reveals. 02. Summer Reading This adorable picture is a 3D recreation of a piece by Fredrik Rättzén Arthur Gatineau's image is based on a concept by Fredrik Rättzén, a Swedish visual development artist. "I really wanted to keep all the features and details, including the camera angle, lighting and general mood," says Gatineau. "I did my best to match everything. As I'm faster on 3ds Max, I did all the modelling and UV work there, then I exported everything – including the camera as an Alembic – and switched to Maya." 03. Slug Race Slug Race was built using 3D spacial data from digital photos It may be a whimsical scene, but Slug Race is closely based in reality. Brazilian 3D artist Fabricio Moraes and his collaborator Guilherme Formenti used Agisoft PhotoScan to generate 3D spatial data from digital photos. "Photogrammetry was a technique that I had always wanted to try. So I scanned a lot of trees, rocks and ground to get a more realistic approach," says Moraes. The pair used 3ds Max and ZBrush for modelling and lighting, V-Ray for rendering and Nuke for compositing. "I normally use Photoshop to compose the final image," says Moraes, "but this time I gave Nuke a try. I was amazed at how powerful it is." 04. The Trade Lee's work is inspired by classical oil painting Jacky Lee's image, The Trade, took him two months to create, using Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Arnold and Photoshop. "I like the process of creating something from scratch, watching the gradual creation of the images, which become vivid and inhabit their stories and souls. This makes me very happy," he tells us. "I think the atmosphere and composition of a 3D piece of work is very important, as well as the story," explains Lee, who studies classic paintings for inspiration. "I really like classical oil painting, and often observe and analyse each painting's mood, colour and composition." 05. Dark Forest Javora's interest in weird phenomena informed this atmospheric scene Jakub Javora's surreal Dark Forest scene, with its glowing doorway contrasting with the natural scene, perfectly sums up the artist's eclectic and eccentric interests. "I'm mostly inspired by weird phenomena like chaos theory, sexual selection and various religious practices," he explains. Unusually for Javora, this scene was a pure 3D composition with no 2D techniques involved. "Some people are using the same tools and workflow without changing," he says. "I am always trying to do something extra to keep my creative spirit going and enjoy the work." 06. Chimpanzee Guimoneau sculpted this incredible 3D chimp in just two days This Chimpanzee sculpt was completed in two days by artist Damien Guimoneau, with a further two weeks of work going into the incredible 3D art to refine the textures and fur in Mari and KeyShot. “Since I didn’t have a lot of time, I decided not to use V-Ray and displacement like I have done in my old projects," says Guimoneau. "I was especially curious to see how far I could go with the SSS materials in KeyShot.” 07. Bed Monster This monster picked the wrong kid to mess with! Digital 3D modeller and animator Aamir is the man behind this brilliant 'You picked up the wrong bed, monster!' 3D art illustration. Specialising in character and creature creation, Aamir nails the stylised look, modelling and lighting in this inspiring scene. 08. Cambot – Memory Liang did things a bit differently to create the rain Dong Liang is a 3D surfacing artist based in Singapore. His personal project, Cambot – Memory, shows off his talents. “Every artwork begins from a story I try to tell,” he explains. “To start with, I usually do a bunch of concept sketches to explore the design and composition while also looking for reference images. Once there is a decent sketch, I start blocking in the low-poly geometries in 3D.” From here, Liang begins working on the detailing and lighting. This piece, however, posed a unique challenge. “The rain effect was done a little bit unconventionally,” he reveals. “I randomly instanced five different streak models onto a nParticle system to mimic the rain streaks instead of using motion blur to do so. Rendering noise-free motion blur is too heavy for my machine.” 09. Sanctuary Adekile created this landscape with tools including Nuke, Photoshop and V-Ray This sci-fi landscape was inspired by artist Akin Adekile’s Nigerian roots, and took him just under three weeks to complete. “I started off with a concept that I painted in Photoshop,” says the Gnomon graduate. “My favourite part was when I put my image into Nuke and Photoshop,” he says, because “I was able to take advantage of the render passes, adjust the brightness and contrast, and add additional textures and effects... All those trees and vegetation can slow my machine down, but this was alleviated by using V-Ray proxies and minimising polycount.” 10. Welcome to Paradise This final year project by 3D animation students at the University of Hertfordshire was created over eight months. “We spent the summer discussing the story and created some rough concept art, but it was only in the final year that the project took off,” says Veronika Epsteina. The animation is inspired by a piece of concept art created by the artist Gennaro Grazioso, which portrayed small nomadic people with big robots. “A storyboard was created, and based on that, a really rough animatic – where we filmed ourselves playing out the scenes. This helped with the editing, to get the timing and camera angles right,” says Epsteina. “One of my favourite shots to work on was the reveal of the alien planet. We knew it would be one of the most important shots in our film so we put a lot of time and effort into it.” Next page: 10 more great 3D projects 11. Muhammad Ali Salah says: “Anatomy has been the biggest challenge, but also the most enjoyable challenge.” This six-month Muhammad Ali project was completed during artist Mahmoud Salah's Think Tank mentorship programme in 2016. “To push myself to do my best, I had to choose the greatest role model in pushing oneself – Ali,” he says. In a breakdown of his approach, Salah says: “I started with modelling, sculpting, unwrapping and texturing in a T-pose. As soon as I got to the posing stage, I did a lot of sculpting again, particularly on the torso... I used 3ds Max and V-Ray for rendering and Hair And Fur for the hair.” 12. Apex the Robot Claver based Apex on artwork he found online Artist Alvaro Claver created Apex the Robot over four months, putting into practise the skills he learned from training with one of the world’s best texture artists, Justin Holt. The piece was based on artwork by Dan Jones. Claver pinpoints learning how to texture in Mari as the most challenging part of the project, but says that it was also very rewarding. “There is nothing you can’t do, combining [textures] with good, proper masks and baked maps,” he says. “My workflow involved creating multiple channels for every material including diffuse, specular, gloss, and bump.” Claver rendered in V-Ray and had “an HDR very similar to the location where I took photos of the sculpture.” As he edited the video in Premiere after comping, he says, “It was so nice to see Apex come to life!” 13. Hover Car Garage Suyang Wang poured lots attention to detail into this scene “I spent four weeks on this project – almost 100 hours of modelling and 50 hours of texturing,” says Rico Suyang Wang, from China, who’s studied at Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games & Animation in Hollywood. The concept was inspired by Alejandro Burdisio’s work: “He is one of my favourite artists and I have always wanted to bring his designs into 3D with a realistic style,” says Suyang Wang. The biggest challenge was making everything look convincing and functional in 3D, explains Suyang Wang. “I modelled the scene in Maya, textured in Photoshop and rendered with V-Ray. I spent a lot of time blocking the scene and defining the mechanical details. For the texturing, nuance is crucial and reference is key. My mindset is very simple: when I feel something is wrong, I know it must be wrong, so I change it very quickly.” 14. Waiting for the Bus (Leech Girl) Steiner's piece certainly does make you look twice “The goal for this project was to study and introduce Substance Painter into my workflow, and also to test Marmoset 3,” explains Mariano Steiner, a character artist and digital sculptor who created this piece in two months. “I wanted to provoke a weird feeling when the viewer sees it,” he reveals. With its realistic setting but unusual character, it’s certainly a piece that will make you look twice. “In my personal work, I always try to input a bit of what I’m excited about in that moment, and always try to push the level in some way,” he adds. With Steiner finding inspiration through movies, games and toys, as well as nature and space, it sounds like he certainly won’t be short of interests to fuel his imagination. 15. Fight Like a Girl Rocha Prates says that a good story inspires her work Self-taught illustrator and graphic designer Aliel Rocha Prates shows what it really means to fight like a girl with her boxer artwork based on an original concept by her friend Rayner Alencar. Taking 12 hours to create, Rocha Prates’ determined fighter was an exercise in getting the pose and character right. “I also enjoyed reproducing the lights and reflexivity of the slightly wet skin,” she explains. “The composition and post- production in Photoshop takes longer for me. I like to explore all the possibilities, you can completely change the mood of an image by just editing it in Photoshop." 16. D.va Maintenance Collignon says: “I create a Logline about an idea, then I brainstorm the idea, gather references, create all the assets, compose it, then I’m done!” Belgian illustrator and concept artist Antoine Collignon mainly works in the entertainment industry for films. Completed in just eight hours of his spare time, D.va Maintenance is a piece of fan art based on the Overwatch first- person shooter computer game. “I loved compositing this image to make it feel powerful,” Collignon explains. “The painting process was also super fun to do because it brought some life to a synthetic 3D base model.” 17. One is the Loneliest Number Morrell's awe-inspiring portfolio includes this beautiful, intricate piece This awe-inspiring, sci-fi 3D art scene was created by digital artist and designer Stefan Morrell. With a clear love of the genre, this talented artist's portfolio is full of beautiful, intricate sci-fi landscapes – but this gorgeous piece is our favourite. 18. Prom Night Riciotti captures this young lady's nerves and anticipation perfectly 3D generalist Mickael Riciotti lets the 3D art do all the talking in this inspiring illustration 'Prom Night'. Capturing this young lady's nerves and anticipation of her big night perfectly, Riciotti's brilliant piece is a far cry from (and refreshing change to) much of the busty female-inspired artwork you see. 19. Stroll in the Swamp Guebels created Stroll in the Swamp using 3ds Max, ZBrush and Photoshop Anthony Guebels specialises in creating promotional artwork, used for the marketing of the different brands of the studio. A personal project, Stroll in the Swamp was created with 3ds Max, ZBrush and Photoshop. 20. Magician Liu hopes to be a top CG artist one day, he says Chinese artist Ruiheng Liu took four months to complete Magician. With its realistic textures, excellent use of light and considered composition, this piece showcases Liu’s many talents as a 3D artist. A lot of work went into the face in particular. “I considered a lot of factors, like his experience and feelings,” Liu reveals. “I wanted an image where people could read a story from his face. I did several different versions and picked the one I liked the most.” Next: 10 more 3D masterpieces 21. Space Girl Space Girl took Gonzalez several months to complete Carles Gonzalez has worked for several companies and titles, in videogames and film. Gonzalez worked on this 3D art piece Space Girl in his spare time, with it taking him several months to complete. "My favourite part of the creative process is the sketching and initial stages," he says. 22. The story of courage, betrayal and love! Forget Godzilla – Fatzilla is here! In this inspiring example of 3D art, motion designer Yaroslav Primachenko used ZBrush to model this cool character, 3ds Max for preparing the rest of the scene and retopology, V-Ray for rendering and Photoshop for the scene's post-production effects. We also love his everyday renders collection, especially the gold female face, Shattered. 23. Level 10 A combination of 3ds Max, ZBrush, V-Ray and Photoshop helped to create this cool 3D image Toni Bratincevic is the senior environment modeller for a major videogame company, but has experience in all aspects of 3D, from rigging and animation to final compositing. This particular piece of 3D art took him around four to five weeks, working, on average, two to three hours a day on it. 24. Sunny Sunday Morning Alexandrino's room looks relaxing Tiago Alexandrino specialises in creating architectural visualisations for private clients. Taking just five or six days, he created this perfect, relaxing Sunday 3D art scene using 3ds Max and V-Ray. 25. Ebola Virus Kashpersky’s Ebola Virus is as beautiful as it is malignant Medical artist Alexey Kashpersky has won international competitions in scientific visualisation, and his beautiful 3D art rendering of the Ebola virus is a fine example of his skills. "I wanted to transform Ebola into something fantastic and something that had its own unique character," he explains. The image took him three months to complete, with everything modelled by hand. 26. Southern ground hornbill This ultra-realistic Southern Ground Hornbill was created using tools from multiple 3D software packages No, we haven't included a rogue photograph to trick you, this is really 3D art. The stunning Southern Ground Hornbill image was crafted entirely in 3D by artist Léandre Hounnake. The realistic render was achieved using a combination of Sculptris, 3ds Max, Mudbox, V-Ray, MultiScatter and Hair and Fur. 27. Rebuild Freelance 3D and concept artist Neil Maccormack created this cool character using Lightwave and Photoshop Neil MacCormack is a freelance 3D and concept artist based in Geneva, Switzerland. His online portfolio is full of awe-inspiring 3D art, but our favourite is this cool robot character, which he created using Lightwave and Photoshop. 28. Teacher's Nightmare We love the attention to detail in this scene – the target on the teacher's back is our favourite addition This pair of mischievous-looking characters were created by modeller Omer Messler and 3D generalist Adi Cohen. The entire scene was created using 3ds Max and Mental Ray renderer. Working together was a new experience for the duo, but as two minds are greater than one, they managed to complete the detailed piece of 3D art in just two months. 29. Far Far Away Peter Nowacki used 3ds Max, V-Ray and Marvelous Designer to create this image Two years in the making, Far Far Away is a celebration of children's imaginations created by Warsaw-based artist Peter Nowacki. "Children are now focusing on videogames instead of playing outside and I wanted to showcase a time when their imaginations were all they had," he explains. 30. Stan 'The Man' Hakim Lie created this ultra-realistic portrait of comic book legend Stan Lee From a comic book character to a comic book legend, this amazing 3D art portrait of Stan Lee was created by Andrew Hakim Lie. The talented 3D artist produced this image using 3ds Max, ZBrush, V-Ray renderer, and Photoshop, for the final part of an intensive CG course. Related articles: 22 mighty Maya tutorials to try today Behind the scenes on Transformers VFX This animator's walking reference video will make you laugh and learn View the full article

It’s no secret that software developers are in high demand around the world. The digital skills crisis has meant that good developers are not only hard to find, but often have the luxury of choosing from more than one job offer. So what makes a 'good developer'? As an IT recruiter, Cathcart Associates knows the skills employers that look for in a web developer. Here are four languages that just keep on cropping up… Not all programming languages were created equal01. C# C# is an incredibly popular language among developers and employers alike. It’s designed to be relatively easy and straightforward, and is primarily used to develop web, mobile and enterprise applications while supporting imperative, functional and object-orientated paradigms. There are a couple of reasons why C# developers are highly sought-after by employers. The first is because of the language’s flexibility and usability, which makes it a hit for businesses worldwide. The second is that it was developed by Microsoft to build apps on the Microsoft platform. As a result, it fits in with most common Microsoft IT infrastructure, which many companies have embedded at their core. 02. PHP Another hugely popular option is PHP, an open source, server-side scripting language. Millions of websites across the world are powered by PHP, including high-profile sites such as Facebook and Wikipedia. PHP is a language that is popular among employers because it’s all over the web and is used extensively in the development of open source projects, such as WordPress. There has been a marked increase in PHP’s popularity over the years, and now it’s so popular that many companies are competing against one another to get their hands on good PHP talent. The good news for PHP developers is that there are no signs of this demand slowing down. Cathcart Associates recruit developers for many IT companies03. Java Java is an old favourite among developers (and we use the word ‘old’ because it's over 20 years old). It’s popular because it’s relatively easy and versatile – an attractive proposition for corporations and developers. It also has many users, many existing applications and such a vast ecosystem. In 2015, The Daily Telegraph reported that of 105,000 IT jobs available in the UK, 13,000 of them were in Java-specific roles. Java also has a reputation for being a stable language, which is one key reason why the job market is showing sustained hunger for developers in this field. Furthermore, employers who have been on the block for a long time tend to seek Java developers because they have Java integrated into their systems. 04. JavaScript JavaScript’s popularity is unrelenting. It’s a versatile, object-orientated programming language that it is built into most major browsers, including Firefox and Safari. Despite having been around for a while, JavaScript has managed to hold its own against the onslaught of new languages that have emerged. Many would regard it as a ‘need to know’ language to help further a career. A significant number of developer jobs out there have some kind of requirement for JavaScript, which is why they are so popular among employers. But if you're a JavaScript developer, you shouldn’t get too comfortable. Its popularity and the fact that many roles have a basic JavaScript requirement means that you'll need to work hard to stand out from the crowd. Read more: 12 must-have code testing tools 5 online trends every web designer needs to know 20 JavaScript tools to blow your mind View the full article

Music legend Sir Elton John is famous for his dazzling stage costumes and performances, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that his new visual identity plays it safe and follows in the footsteps of 2017's biggest logo design trend. The rebrand, created by graphic designer George Adams and launched yesterday, aims to be a timeless piece of design that captures Sir Elton John's musical gravitas, energy and playful visual style. As far as the capital 'E' wordmark at the heart of the project goes, we have to say: mission accomplished. The star shape in place of the central arm is an instantly recognisable piece of design that effectively acts as a substitute for his name. (Think of Prince's famous 'Love Symbol' and David Bowie's Blackstar album cover.) The rebrand covers promotional material and merchandiseSpeaking to It's Nice That, Adams says that the distinctive wordmark references the musician's star-shaped glasses. "Elton always makes a big impact through his costumes, stage design and album covers," he explains, "so for a designer it provided a wealth of iconic images and associations to explore." He goes on to add that the black and white colour palette was inspired by Sir Elton's piano. Other colours such as a sparkling gold and bright magenta act as an eye-catching contrast to give the branding some variety. There's more to the star symbol than meets the eye, though. Its angles were used for grid layouts on posters and other promotional material (see the image above), giving the colours and textures the perfect reason to slice through the page in a dynamic way. The angles of the star shape are the foundation of the visual identityAs for the typography for the rest of the identity, Adams worked closely with typographer Miles Newlyn to develop a bespoke wordmark based on the font Verlag. The sans-serif font is hammered onto the design in uppercase, just as we've seen with plenty of other brands this year. From Fanta to Calvin Klein, and many more besides, it seems that all-caps typography is now the industry standard if you want to make an impact and get your name seen. Fortunately for this rebrand, Verlag is described as a crisp and 'fairminded' font that doesn't come across as too shouty in uppercase. Although, considering that Sir Elton has built a career on being bold, this in-your-face typography style appears to be a perfect fit. Expect to see the new identity on Sir Elton's new world tour, adorning everything from T-shirts to merch and more. Expect to see this logo on all things Sir Elton John in the near future[Via It's Nice That] Related articles: Typography rules and terms every designer must know The 20 best album covers from the 70s Artists redesign their top 10 albums of 2016 View the full article

Free fonts, updated for 2017 – all the best free fonts, and none of the dross. We have filtered out the diamonds in the rough from the thousands of free fonts available online that are suitable for you to use in your designs. This list represents the 50 best free fonts we've found in eight categories. We have many other articles covering specialist font types including handwriting fonts, graffiti fonts, web fonts and more, but we have sectioned our main list under these styles: Serif fonts (this page) Sans-serif fonts Handwriting fonts Vintage and retro fonts Brush fonts Tattoo fonts Graffiti fonts Unusual fonts You can use the drop-down menu at the top of the page to jump to the section you want. Most of the typeface collections listed here can be used in your projects, but please be sure to check the terms. Now join us as we present you with 50 of the best free fonts, which you can download and use today. Serif fonts 01. Butler Free font Butler brings a sense of modernism to the serifFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Inspired by both Dala Floda and the Bodoni family, Butler is a free font designed by Fabian De Smet. His aim was to bring a bit of modernism to serif fonts, by working on the curves of classical serif fonts, and adding an extra stencil family. The Butler family contains 334 characters, seven regular weights and seven stencil weights, and includes text figures, ligatures and fractions. It also suits many different languages with its added glyphs. De Smet suggests it would work well for “posters, very big titles, books and fancy stuff.” 02. Arvo A superior geometric slab-serif, Arvo is one of our favourite free fontsFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Arvo is a geometric slab-serif font family that’s suitable for both screen and print use. Designed for legibility, it was created by Anton Koovit and published in the Google Font directory as a free open font (OFL). Unlike many slab serifs on Google Fonts, Arvo contains normal, italic, bold and bold italic styles. 03. Crimson Text Crimson Text is a free font family inspired by old-time book typefacesFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Here’s a free font family created specifically for book production, inspired by old-time, Garamond-esque book typefaces. Crimson Text is the work of German-born, Toronto-based designer Sebastian Kosch, who says he was influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. It’s also favourite free font of Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based out of Utah, USA. "Crimson is a sophisticated serif that makes a nice alternative to traditional Garamond-esque typefaces,” he says. “It also has a very expressive italic, which pairs nicely with strong, geometric sans-serifs like Futura or Avenir." 04. Aleo Aleo is one of those rare free fonts that manages to balance personality with legibility perfectlyFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Aleo has semi-rounded details and a sleek structure, giving a sense of personality while maintaining a good level of legibility. This free font family comprises six styles: three weights (light, regular and bold), with corresponding true italics. Released under the SIL Open Font License, it was designed by Alessio Laiso, a designer at IBM Dublin, as the slab serif companion to Lato. 05. Cormorant Free font Cormorant was inspired by the Garamond greatsFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Cormorant is a display serif typeface inspired by the Garamond heritage. It was hand-drawn and produced by Christian Thalmann, aka Catharsis Fonts, who describes it as containing “scandalously small counters, razor-sharp serifs, dangerously smooth curves, and flamboyantly tall accents”. The font is best used for headlines and poster text at large sizes, both on screen and in print, but is also highly legible at smaller text sizes. 06. Brela Free font Brela works well in editorial designs, both for headlines and body textFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Brela is a humanistic serif font designed exclusively for editorial design. With a generous x-height, it’s very legible, even at tiny sizes, yet it works equally well in bold, large headlines. This free font was designed by Spanish creative agency Makarska Studio and comes in regular and bold weights. 07. Libre Baskerville Free font Libre Baskerville is optimised for reading body text on screenFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Libre Baskerville is a web font optimised for body text (typically 16px). It’s based on the American Type Founder's Baskerville from 1941, but it has a taller x-height, wider counters and a little less contrast, allowing it to work well for reading on screen. This open source project is led by Impallari Type, a type design foundry based in Rosario, Argentina. "I like to keep my eye on the Libre fonts, like Libre Baskerville,” enthuses Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based out of Utah, USA. He also recommends you check out its sister font, Libre Franklin, which is also free. “Libre Franklin hearkens back to strong, traditional typefaces, like Franklin Gothic, that have the declarative nature of something like a newspaper headline but are simple enough to set as paragraph text," he explains. 08. Jura Free font Jura looks good at both large and small sizesFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE A remarkably elegant font, Jura is characterised by its narrow proportions and distinguishing details, including its rounded, wedge shaped serifs. It looks good at large sizes, but reads well at small ones too. This free font was created by UK-based designer Ed Merritt. 09. Fenix Fénix is one of the best free fonts we’ve seen for long passages of small textFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Fénix is a calligraphy-inspired font that works well as both display text and body copy. Featuring strong serifs and rough strokes, it provides a lovely rhythm when reading long passages in small text sizes. It’s the work of Fernando Díaz, a designer at Uruguayan foundry TipoType. 10. Luthier Luthier is a free font that can be used for both large and small textFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Luthier is a contemporary typeface characterised by sharp serifs and high contrast, which comes in two weights plus italics. Good for both headlines and body text, it would suit designs focused on serious, intellectual topics. This free font was created by Barcelona-based designer Adrià Gómez. Next page: free sans-serif fonts... 11. Titillium Web Titillium is a free font that works best at larger sizesFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE While many of the lower-quality free fonts out there are the work of amateurs, Titillium has a far more respectable pedigree, born of a type design project at Italy’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino. Each academic year, a dozen students work on the project, developing it further and solving problems, and they ask all graphic designers who use Titillium in their projects to email them some examples of the typeface family in use, to help them develop it further. “Titillium has been a favourite font of mine for a few years now,” says Rob Hampson, head of design at The Bot Platform, a new platform for building bots on Messenger. “It’s sharp, contemporary and comes in a wide range of weights. In my opinion, it works best in larger sizes; for example, for titles. That said, with careful consideration, it could be used as a body font.” 12. League Gothic League Gothic is a new free font inspired by an old favouriteFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE League Gothic is a condensed sans-serif inspired by the classic typeface Alternate Gothic #1, originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903. The League of Movable Type decided to make its own version and, as ever, open source it, with contributions from Micah Rich, Tyler Finck and Dannci. 13. Chivo Chivo is one of the most eye-catching free fonts aroundFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Chivo is a grotesque typeface that’s ideal for headlines, and other page furniture where you want to grab attention. Both confident and elegant, it’s been released in four weights with matching italics. This free font is the work of Héctor Gatti and the Omnibus-Type Team. 14. Comfortaa Free font Comfortaa could work well in a logo designFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Comfortaa is a rounded geometric sans-serif type design intended for large sizes. Created by Johan Aakerlund, a design engineer at the Technical University of Denmark, it’s a simple, good looking font that includes large number of different characters and symbols. Part of the Google Font Improvements Project, the latest updates to the family include the addition of a Cyrillic character set and support for Vietnamese. David Airey, a graphic designer and occasional writer in Northern Ireland, is among its admirers. “A lot of free fonts need too much work cleaning up the points, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find good options,” he says. “For a recent identity project, I used Comfortaa as the base for a bespoke wordmark. The before and after are really quite different, but Johan’s work gave me a great foundation, and the client loves the result.” 15. Noto Sans Free font Noto Sans supports more than 800 languagesFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Noto Sans is a free font family designed by Google supporting more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. Noto fonts are intended to be visually harmonious across multiple languages, with compatible heights and stroke thicknesses. The family include regular, bold, italic and bold italic styles, and is hinted. It is derived from Droid, and like Droid it has a serif sister family, Noto Serif. 16. HK Grotesk Hanken HK Grotesk is one of our favourite free fonts for casting small textFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE HK Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface inspired by the classic grotesques, such as Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers, Trade Gothic and Gill Sans. It was designed by Hanken Design Co with the aim of creating a friendly and distinguishable font that’s suitable for small text. It has recently expanded its language support with the addition of Cyrillic characters (Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian). 17. Aileron One of our favourite hybrid free fonts, Aileron is a relaxed choice for on-screen reading Free for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Aileron is a versatile, neo-grotesque sans-serif that’s somewhere between Helvetica and Univers. Created by Sora Sagano, a designer at Tipotype, it aims to provide readers with a high level of visual comfort. It’s available in 16 weights, from ultralight to black. 18. Ubuntu Ubuntu is a custom-designed free font for screen useFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE This free font has been specially created to complement the tone of voice of Ubuntu, the Linux operating system for personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Designed by font foundry Dalton Maag, it uses OpenType features and is manually hinted for clarity on desktop and mobile screens. 19. Clear Sans Who knew Intel did free fonts?Free for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Clear Sans is a versatile font designed by Intel designed with on-screen legibility in mind. Suitable for screen, print, and web, this free font is notable for its minimised characters and slightly narrow proportions, making it a great choice for UI design, from short labels to long passages (it has, for instance, been adopted by Mozilla for the ‘Firefox for Android’ browser). Created by Daniel Ratighan at Monotype under the direction of Intel, Clear Sans supports a wide range of languages using Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, and includes medium, regular, thin, and light weights with upright, italic, and bold styles. 20. Source Sans Pro Adobe’s first foray into open source type, Source Sans Pro remains one of the design community’s most popular free fontsFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Released in 2012, Source Sans Pro was the first open source type family for Adobe, and has proved wildly popular. It was envisioned as a classic grotesque typeface with a simple, unassuming design, intended to work well in user interfaces. It was designed by Paul D. Hunt, who continues to work as a type designer at Adobe, and also designed the complementary free font Source Serif Pro. Source Sans Pro is one of the favourite free fonts of James Hollingworth, a senior-level digital designer and illustrator based near Bath, UK. “It’s such a solid, reliable font to use in design work,” he enthuses. “Being dyslexic myself, I find it a very easy font to read, and it works brilliantly in user interfaces.” Next page: free handwriting fonts... 21. Nickainley Nickainley is a free font based on vintage-style handwritingFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Nickainley is one of our favourite free handwriting fonts. This Monoline script with a classic, vintage feel, includes uppercase and lowercase characters, as well as numerics and punctuation marks. Offering a variety of possible use cases, including logos, T-shirt designs, letterhead and signage, this free font was created by Indonesian agency Seniors Studio. 22. Pacifico Pacifico is one of the most laid-back free fonts aroundFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Pacifico is a fun brush script handwriting font inspired by 1950s American surf culture. This open source font was one of the great contributions to the free software community by the late designer Vernon Adams, who passed away last year. 23. Cute Punk Cute Punk is a free font based on handwriting, but with a twistFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Cute Punk offers a vibrant, youthful and thoroughly modern take on the handwriting font. Infusing the style with a striking, almost geometric feel, this free font is the work of Flou, a designer and illustrator from Bratislava, Slovakia. 24. Futuracha One of the oddest free fonts based on handwriting we’ve seen, Futuracha could work well in the right designFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE An idiosyncratic take on the handwriting font, Futuracha is inspired by John Baskerville’s classic typefaces, as well as Futura Book. Created by Holy, this free font family includes numerics, symbol fonts, and Greek and Latin characters. Designed as a display font, Futuracha could work well when used creatively in headlines, logos or typographical illustrations. 25. Yellowtail Free font Yellowtail features a classic approach to handwritten, brush letteringFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Yellowtail is an old-school, flat, brush font that evokes classic 1930s typefaces like Gillies Gothic and Kaufmann. Designed by typography institute Astigmatic, its mixture of connecting and non-connecting letterforms gives it a unique look and ensures good legibility. Next page: free vintage and retro fonts... 26. Bauru Bauru is a free font with a lot of soulFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Bauru is based on the kind of lettering that instantly sums up the feeling of a bygone age. One of the best free retro fonts, this could work well in portraying a sense of nostalgia and timeless values within a wide range of branding, posters, advertising or logo design. It was designed by Brazilian art director and illustrator Pier Paolo. 27. LOT LOT is one of the fattest, coolest, retro-est free fonts aroundFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Reminiscent of the stylised block lettering of 1970s and 1980s advertising, posters and magazine design, LOT nonetheless provides a sleek new take on a vintage style with its collection of fat, geometric letterforms. Featuring 78 characters, this free font would work well in posters, logos and headlines. It’s the work of independent type foundry FontFabric. 28. Streetwear Free font Streetwear effortlessly sums up a retro feelFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Streetwear is a cool, retro-inspired script typeface that gives a big nod to 1960s and 1970s fashion and sport designs. Suitable for logo, poster, branding, packaging and T-shirt design, it’s the work of Indonesian studio Artimasa. 29. Paralines Font Anyone who remembers TV titles of the 1970s and 80s will recognise the style of this retro-futuristic free fontFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Featuring idiosyncratic use of parallel lines, Paralines takes inspiration from both decades-old design and modern-day typography. This free font would suit any project aiming to evoke the graphic design of the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s the work of freelance UK designer Lewis Latham. 30. Hamurz Free font Hamurz offers a hipster take on retro stylesFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Hamurz is a hipster-style retro typeface with rough edges and rounded shapes. Created by Bagus Budiyanto, it offers a multitude of potential uses, such as logos, headings, or designs for T-shirts, badges or letterpress printing. Next page: free brush fonts... 31. Playlist Free brush font Playlist is great for illustrated designs and merchandiseFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Playlist is a hand-drawn font with dry brush styles that comes in three varieties: Script, Caps, and Ornament. Ideal for illustrated designs, including posters, T-shirts and other merchandise, this is one of our favourite free brush fonts. It’s the work of Indonesian studio Artimasa. 32. Sophia Free font Sophie offers a decorative take on brush script handwritingFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Sophie is light, friendly and slightly off-kilter, in a fun way. Described as “a hand-lettered brush script with a sweet decorative bonus", the family includes multilingual glyphs, as well as left and right stylistic letter combinations. This free font was designed by Mats-Peter Forss and Emily Spadoni, of Finland and the USA respectively. 33. Reckless Free font Reckless has an upbeat feelFree for personal and commercial use (pay with a tweet) DOWNLOAD HERE Reckless is a handwritten brush font that includes uppercase and extended Latin characters. As shown above, it would work well with a watercolour-effect design, either in print or on the web. It was created by Russian designer Nadi Spasibenko. 34. Kust Brush fonts don’t have to be twee, as free font Kust showsFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Kust is a handwritten, all-caps font with a distorted, slightly corrupted look. This free font was based on letters drawn on hard paper, with a thick brush using pure black ink, by fashion designer and artist Leva Mezule. It comes courtesy of Wildtype Design, a studio based in Latvia. 35. Brux Brux takes an original approach to free brush fontsFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE While most brush-style free fonts are pretty laid-back, stylistically speaking, Brux is quite rigid and formal, almost evoking the feel of a stencil. This gives it a very fresh and original look. The free font includes Swedish, German and Spanish characters and is the work of Stockholm-based art director Marcelo Melo. Next page: free tattoo fonts... 36. Betty Free font Betty is inspired by old-school tattoo artFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE None of your hipster stars or tribal tattoos here. Betty is one of those free tattoo fonts that reaches back into the past to a bygone age, when every 'real man' had a sailor’s anchor and ‘I heart Mum’ inked on his bicep. This free font is the work of Athens-based designer Anastasia Dimitriadi. 37. Angilla Angilla is one of the best free fonts we’ve seen in the tattoo script styleFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE This tattoo script font draws on the spirit of calligraphy to create something extremely fresh and stylish. This free font is the work of Swedish designer Måns Grebäck. 38. Serval Free font Serval offers a scratchy style for tattoo letteringFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE Another calligraphic font that’s perfect for tattoo stylings, Serval is a wiry, scratchy beast of a design. This free font is the inspired work of Maelle.K and Thomas Boucherie. 39. MOM MOM is a font inspired by the old school tattoo lettering of the American traditionFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE MOM is a font inspired by the old-school tattoo lettering of the American tradition, and a tribute to the great tattoo artists of the past. This free font is the creation of Rafa Miguel, an art director based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 40. Original Gangsta Original Gangsta is a free font with uncompromising styleFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE Want a tattoo font that shows no mercy? Original Gangsta is a hard-edged script font that’s both stylish and uncompromising. This free font was created by Gilang Purnama Jaya, a designer from Indonesia. Next page: free graffiti fonts... 41. Ruthless Dripping One Ruthless Dripping One is one of the few free fonts in the graffiti space that’s keeping it realFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE Most free graffiti fonts are really just stylised cursives that lack the sense of art, style and playfulness that’s so central to the urban street art scene. Ruthless Dripping One by Swedish designer Måns Grebäck bucks the trend with this free font, which combines calligraphy with paint drips to create something more on the money. 42. Urban Jungle Distressed free font Urban Jungle conveys the look of street stencilling brilliantlyFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE Stencils are a big focus of modern day street art, for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Here, Urban Jungle draws on the stencil tradition and adds a distressed texture that instantly evokes the sweat and fury of the street. It’s the work of Canadian typographer Kevin Christopher, aka KC Fonts. 43. Blow Brush Free font Blow Brush is inspired by hip-hop and urban cultureFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE There’s a real energy and boldness to Blow Brush, a handwritten, marker-style font inspired by hip-hop and urban culture. Quirky enough to feel authentic, but formal enough to provide legibility and font functionality, this free font is the work of Petar Acanski, aka Raz, a Serbian multidisciplinary designer and frontend developer. It includes a full set of uppercase characters, numbers, 22 ligatures, a selection of special characters and some variations. 44. Sister Spray Free font Sister Spray brings together spray paint-style letters, numbers and splodgesFree for personal use only DOWNLOAD HERE Sister Spray is a beautifully messy, spray paint-style font that includes letters, numbers and a bunch of splatters, splotches and strokes. This free font is the work of French typeface design workshop ImageX. 45. Tag Type Free font Tag Type delivers just what the name suggestsFree for personal use and charity use DOWNLOAD HERE Tag Type is inspired by graffiti tags that contains upper- and lowercase letters, numerals and punctuation. Both Latin and Cyrillic characters are included in this free font, which is the work of Ukranian designer Andy Panchenko. Next page: free unusual fonts... 46. Jaapokki The ‘alternative subtract’ of Jaapokki experiments with removing elements of the fontFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Jaapokki is a beautiful sans-serif font featuring clean lines, two alternatives and large set of glyphs that’s great for headlines, posters, logos and more. And Rob Hampson, head of design at The Bot Platform, is particularly attracted to the more unusual elements of this free font family, which was created by Finnish designer Mikko Nuuttila. “I found Jaapokki around a year ago and instantly fell in love with it,” Hampson explains. “In fact, it’s the font I chose to use on my personal website. It has a range of choices, with some being more experimental than others. For example, ‘alternative subtract’ [shown above] experiments with removing elements of the font. This is definitely one to use at larger sizes.” 47. Carioca Bebas A fresh, fruity and colourful free fontFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Carioca is a fresh, fun and fruity creation, based on a morphological colour and pattern. This delightful free font was developed as part of a three-month experimental type project by Argentinian graphic designers Tano Veron and Yai Salinas. 48. Le Super Serif Le Super Serif is one of the few experimental free fonts that actually worksFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Le Super Serif is that rare thing: a typographical experiment that actually works. It’s described by its creator, Dutch designer Thijs Janssen, as “a fashionable uppercase typeface with a little modern Western flavour to it.” This free font features 88 ligatures and comes in the weights Regular and Semi-Bold. 49. Pelmeshka Free font Pelmeshka offers a new twist on the foode themeFree (pay with a tweet) for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Most food-themed fonts do what you’d expect; no more, no less. Pelmeshka, though, has gone the extra mile to become something truly unique. Perfect for any design aimed at children, this Bodoni-inspired serif is funny, friendly and oh-so original. This free font is the work of Russian designer Cyril Mikhailov. 50. Tiny Hands Yes, this free font is dedicated to the eccentric handwriting of Donald TrumpFree for personal and commercial use DOWNLOAD HERE Even though Buzzfeed is aiming to transform into a serious news organisation, it’s still managing to maintain its sense of fun. And here’s a great example: a free font based on US President Donald Trump’s eccentric handwriting style. It was created by typographer Mark Davis, and apart from being a very funny satire, it could actually work well as a cartoon or comic-book font. 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With each passing year, we see a surge in new tools and technology to make our marketing and creative lives easier. Just five years ago, maybe 100 pieces of technology could claim the title of ‘marketing technology’. Now, there are thousands. 15 tools every web designer needs in 2017In the creative category of marketing tech, UX tools also continue to grow in number and influence. Here are seven great tools and resources to add to your workflows. 01. UX MAP UX MAP takes the pain out of explaining user flowsIf you’re a designer or product manager struggling to convey your ideas and you’re familiar with Axure RP, then UX MAP is worth checking out. More often than not, trying to explain user flows and interactions with words just doesn’t work – especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved. With UXMAP you can bring ideas to life, add notes on mouseover as if you’re there to narrate, and more. 02. UX-App UX-App offers functional prototyping with HTML5I know what you’re thinking. Do we need another prototyping app? Yes. UX-App brings functional HTML5 prototyping to the table. It works via what it calls ‘logic blocks’, which enable designers to move past hotspots. The HTML prototyping allows fast sharing through HTML, without the use of special apps. If you’ve ever sat on the phone waiting for a client to load the viewing app on the other side, you’ll know the struggle is real. 03. HandrailUX HandrailUX simplifies the process conducting of user interviewsCreating user interviews, gathering feedback and sharing insights with others on your team can be a challenge. HandrailUX aims to simplify the whole process by providing a research platform for individuals and teams. HandrailUX simplifies user interview development with built-in guides and cloning functionality, allowing you to quickly replicate past interviews or questions, or build from an existing library. Interviews get translated into real-time results, which means you can iterate your design faster (full disclosure: I work with HandrailUX). 04. Personapp Create user personas quickly and easily with PersonappPersonapp takes the pain out of persona creation. It’s slick. So slick, that there should never, ever, ever, be another excuse why your project or organisation shouldn’t have user or buyer personas. Personapp provides a guided experience with prompts that explain, in beautiful detail, exactly the information necessary for product, design, development and marketing to be successful. And it’s free. 05. UX Project Checklist This simple checklist ensures you don't miss any UX basicsChecklists rock my world. Especially when things get hectic. They ensure that the foundation work gets done (the iterative, reactive things... that’s a whole different story). UX Project Checklist is exactly what it sounds like. It's a checklist for the core steps of the UX design process. Each section includes a link for some extended reading, and you can sign in via Google to share the checklist across your accounts. It’s straightforward, but sometimes less is more. 06. Hello Many Hello Many offers curated lists of tools and assetsWith so many new tools, resources and assets getting shared every day, anything that offers a curated source of these items is A++ in my book. Say howdy to Hello Many. It is a curated source of UI assets including themes, icons and kits. Check here for inspirations or to download resources for your next project and skip the time suck of internet searches. Also, if you do use Hello Many, be a good community steward and submit assets that you find elsewhere. 07. Product Hunt Product Hunt finds the newest resources so you don't have toIn the same thread as Hello Many, for helping to sort through the noise I have to conclude with Product Hunt. If the past is any indicator of the future, we’re only going to see more tools and resources emerge. Product Hunt is a fantastic place to find the latest and greatest. Its community helps the cream rise to the top so you know if it’s trending, it’s worth a look. A couple of my favourite lists to follow include: All Things UX and User Experience Design. I keep a list as well, among many collections. Related posts: The future of adaptive user interfaces 5 top UX design trends for 2017 10 essential tools for freelance UX designers in 2017 View the full article