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Picking the top 50 studios out of a pool as rich and diverse as the UK design industry is no mean feat, and putting them in a meaningful order is trickier still. Computer Arts' method for deciding its annual UK Studio Rankings is simple enough: it’s all about peer reputation. The Players’ Player Award, if you like. And judging by the feedback the team has received, it genuinely means something to have the rest of the industry agree that you’re on the top of your game. Buy Computer Arts issue 272 now! The newest issue of CA boasts the magazine's fourth UK Studio Rankings, providing a fascinating snapshot of UK design over that period. It features the steady performers, risers and fallers, and the occasional young pretender out of left-field that wows everyone. Industry titans The Partners and Pentagram occupy fourth and fifth place respectivelyAs in previous years, stalwarts such as Pentagram and The Partners rub shoulders with smaller boutique outfits, such as previous winners Graphic Thought Facility, Made Thought and North. Studio Sutherl& tops 2017's UK Studio RankingsThis year’s rankings-topper, Studio Sutherl&, is one of the smallest and youngest: a two-person outfit, three years old, powered by wit and ideas. Collectable glow-in-the dark cover This venture may be fresh, but Jim Sutherland himself is a veteran – cutting his teeth at The Partners and HGV before co-founding the multi-award-winning hat-trick. Studio Sutherl&'s beautiful execution of the cover for CA 272 proves the power of a simple, smart idea that doesn’t need a big agency behind it. You can watch the making of the stunning collectable cover – with glow-in-the-dark varnish applied by CA's print finishing partner Celloglas – above. Make a successful transition into freelance life, whichever path you chooseNo doubt many of you would kill to land a job at one of the studios on this year’s list. But if you’re eying up a freelance career instead, our other main feature this month charts four possible routes into self-employment, and is packed with advice for getting the most from whichever one you choose. Also in Computer Arts issue 272 CA issue 272 is packed with insight and inspiration as ever, including: Studio Sutherl&'s design for 2017's D&AD Annual is featured in the Showcase section Behind the scenes with Dalton Maag on the creation of the BBC's brand new typeface CA's junior designer manual series continues with a guide to smarter artworking Studio Output and SomeOne discuss the fine art of resource management, in association with Resource GuruSubscribe to CA today from just £16/$37 Buy Computer Arts issue 272 here. And to make sure you never miss an issue of Computer Arts, subscribe here today! View the full article

If you work in any area of design then you'll know it's an industry where you never stop learning. There's always a new technique or piece of technology to master, but picking up these skills can often be expensive and time consuming. Thankfully, this list of Udemy course coupons is here to take the edge off the price tag that's often linked to career-progressing classes. Posted on Reddit by user commandrbond, this list of 250 Udemy course coupons covers a range of topics, including web development, video production, motion graphics, photography, marketing, video editing and much more. The list of coupons is dead easy to use. All you have to do is choose which Udemy course you like the look of on the list, click on it, and then you're taken to a landing page where you can enrol for free. You need to be quick, though, as this list of coupons is time-sensitive and will expire soon. The list was only posted yesterday (12 October), so most of them should still be working properly. The full list of coupons was compiled by Reddit user commandrbond The list of coupons has gone down a storm on Reddit, with plenty of users eagerly exploring the free courses on offer. Some users were keen to point out that Udemy is good for providing a basic understanding of a subject, so you might want to choose a topic you've always been interested in but never had the time to investigate before. Keep in mind that these coupons aren't first come first served either, so there's no rush to grab a discount. Users can sign up to as many courses as they like, so if you've been looking to expand your skill set on the cheap, this could be the time to do it. Related articles: 16 top online coding courses How to press start on your game art career 10 of the best free Udemy courses for designers View the full article

For filmmakers, product placement is an increasingly lucrative sideline to hike up those all-important profit margins. It’s like the movie equivalent of native content, slotting the sponsorship right into the action and getting the ultimate endorsement from the silver-screen heroes themselves. Treated with a deft hand, it can feel relatively seamless and give brands a boost by subtle association. But as the Truman Show expertly parodied back in 1998, when it becomes too blatant we suspend our disbelief and have a chuckle at the brand’s expense, or perhaps even get frustrated by the disruption to the action. Read on as we name and shame five movies that took things a little too far. 01. The Bond franchise There was an uproar among Bond purists when he chose a bottle of Heineken over a vodka Martini"Leave Bond alone!" you may cry. This seemingly immortal franchise, gearing up for its 25th outing in 2019, has forged some truly iconic associations with luxury goods, from fast cars to flash gadgets to premium booze. Nor does it try to hide it: take a look at the Partners section of 007.com and you’ll find a long list that includes Aston Martin, Bollinger, Heineken, MAC Cosmetics, Tom Ford, Belvedere Vodka, Gillette, Jaguar, Omega, Land Rover and Sony. Bond’s overt link with the luxury watch brand Omega is certainly not classifiedSure, you might turn a blind eye to the camera lingering a little too long on the badge on a car’s grille; close-cropping on a smartphone screen or carefully placed laptop lid; maybe even our hero swapping his signature vodka Martini (shaken, of course) for a bottle of beer. It’s understandable that brands are falling over themselves to be associated with Bond’s effortless cool. But when it strays into the dialogue itself, the heavy-handedness breeds hilarity. A case in point, the exchange between Bond and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale: “Rolex?” “Omega.” “Beautiful.” 02. The Transformers franchise To demonstrate how ‘transformium’ can morph into literally anything, Stanley Tucci chooses… a Beats PillYou get the feeling that Michael Bay and the Transformers production team go into every product placement negotiation with dollar signs in their eyes. While Bond trades off class and sophistication – albeit treading a fine line between savvy and sell-out at times – Transformers is essentially a giant, explosion-filled toy box. For a movie franchise packed with vehicles of all shapes and sizes, it’s no surprise that the most ubiquitous product placement comes from a car brand: General Motors. And the badge shots are the subtle bit. At one point, in response to a disparaging comment about Bumblebee’s current form as a battered old Camaro, our hero defiantly transforms into the very latest model, straight off the production line and into the on-screen showroom. After a conveniently placed Bud Light truck is smashed to pieces, the distinctive blue bottles are strewn everywhereTransformers: Age of Extinction already boasts the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the series at 18 per cent, but alongside some fairly unsubtle centre-frame inclusions for Victoria's Secret and Beats By Dre, there’s that incredible scene in which a Bud Light truck is smashed to pieces, scattering its distinctive blue bottles all over the road. Of course, Mark Wahlberg can’t resist a quick swig mid-chase, although the fact that he then chucks the rest of the bottle on the floor doesn’t say much about the taste. 03. Jurassic World OK, this Jurassic World battle Merc is pretty cool, we’ll grant youTo be fair, Jurassic World clearly has its tongue firmly in its cheek when it suggests that Verizon Wireless could sponsor ferocious cross-bred predator the Indominus Rex, and you could certainly argue that the movie’s increasingly in-your-face product placement is wittily self-referential. After all, Spielberg’s iconic 1993 film was all about the danger of trying to harness and commercialise the unpredictable, terrifying side of nature – and once again, the lesson was not learnt and utter chaos ensues. Beats By Dre and Mercedes Benz get plenty of airtime in the 2015 movie, keeping the kids entertained through prominent headphones and zipping our heroes at breakneck speed through the dino-infested jungle respectively. Jurassic World, proudly brought to you by Samsung. Just don’t let them provide security for your dino cagesBut perhaps the most amusing – or unfortunate – brand association is with Samsung, which has seemingly kitted out the entire park and all its residents via Jurassic World’s very own Samsung Innovation Center. This includes the security system, which features front and centre as the bloodthirsty prehistoric antagonist breaks loose. Oops. 04. I, Robot Audi created a special concept car worthy of the streets of 2035 Chicago for I, RobotFilms set in the future can be a difficult sell for specific product placement, since no brand wants their most cutting-edge wares to look outdated in the context of a visionary world. Luckily for Audi, the dystopian universe of I, Robot was the perfect arena to take its specially designed concept car for a spin. With spheres instead of wheels and reverse butterfly doors, the Audi RSQ got free range of Chicago in 2035, with Will Smith at the wheel – garnering a healthy chunk of screen time in the process. That’s investment, and positions Audi as a future-thinking brand. We can’t quite see them, Will – can you raise your foot a little higher?But the scene in which Smith awkwardly hoists his foot onto a chair and proudly declares he’s wearing “Converse: vintage 2004” is a step too far by any standards. Again, when product placement enters a main character’s dialogue it immediately jars. 05. Cast Away Tom Hanks lives off FedEx boxes in Cast Away, and Landor’s much-lauded logo gets its fair share of airtimeIt’s testament to Tom Hanks’ acting prowess that he can carry the vast majority of Cast Away’s screen time single-handedly. Of course, Hanks is not marooned entirely alone on the island – he has some brands for company. First of all, he’s a FedEx employee, on a FedEx plane, filled with FedEx packages. Branding aficionados certainly have plenty of chances to fawn over the ‘hidden’ arrow in Landor Associates’ much-loved FedEx logo, as it’s almost as ubiquitous as the sand on the beach that he calls home. Wilson! Wilson! Wilson!And then there’s the other main ‘character’, and probably the most-spoken single word in the whole script: Wilson, the Wilson-branded volleyball. While some of the other brands on the list manage to find their way into the script, not many have the privilege of being bellowed at full volume by an Oscar-winner. However, director Robert Zemeckis has insisted that neither FedEx nor Wilson actually paid for their products to be shown – although they were provided free of charge, of course. So although a FedEx plane was seen crashing, and a Wilson volleyball got pretty badly battered, both brands did pretty well out of it, all told. Liked this? Read these: 10 things designers say that normal people don’t 10 top design-related movies 8 things you didn't know about design for film View the full article

You need an image for your design quickly. But sometimes you don’t know quite what you’re looking for. You want something offbeat, unusual or just plain weird… but you have a feeling you won’t know what it is until you find it. In such cases, it helps to be able to browse a load of images to give you ideas and inspiration. Here are some places you can go. 01. Stock image libraries These days, stock libraries are less about airbrushed models than authentic shots of real peopleYes, we know. Many designers think ‘stock image’ and they think ‘polished’, ‘airbrushed’ and ‘anodyne’. But actually, the stock business has come a long way in the last few years. As creatives have demanded more down-to-earth, realistic images that represent real-life, not some idealised version of it, it’s responded in kind. And now you can expect to find the kind of images that look more like something you’d have art-directed yourself than “obviously stock”. For example, check out this ‘Gritty Women’ collection by iStock by Getty Images. To hone in on the good stuff, try adding search terms that fit the kind of you’re looking for: ‘authentic’, ‘real life’, ‘’individuality’, ‘standing out from the crowd’, ‘offbeat’... whatever fits with your brief. 02. The British Library This image was taken from page 13 of 'Round the Hearth [and other verses] ... Edited and arranged by R. E. Mack', and comes with “no known copyright restrictions”Want to bring imbue your designs with the spirit of the past? Well one solution might be to recycle some of the most evocative images of centuries gone by, and do something creatively original with them. And the good news is, The British Library has made a surprisingly huge amount of such imagery available to download online. Its images collections on Flickr Commons offer access to millions of public domain images, including maps, paintings, photographs, advertisements and illustrations, which they encourage you to explore and re-use. With categories including everything from flora and architecture to ghostly scenes, there’s bundles of inspiration on display here, whether you actually incorporate it into your designs or use it as a springboard for your own photographic or illustrative ideas. 03. SpaceX Concept art of sending Dragon to Mars, one of the many public domain images on the SpaceX Flickr accountSpaceX is at the forefront of the new wave of commercial rockets and spacecraft. And its official Flickr account provides a ton of official images to the public and news media with no copyright restrictions. Most of these, naturally, involve rockets taking off, as well as space flight mockups. So whether your project is literally centred around a space or sci-fi theme, or you just want to associate a brand with concepts like futuristic thinking and the breaking of boundaries breaking, there’s a lot of great imagery here that might help bring your designs to life. 04. Jay Mantr This image by Jay Mantri comes with the hashtags #parking and #dtla and is free to download and use in your projectsJay Mantri is a designer based in Santa Monica who releases seven new photos every Thursday under the Creative Commons CC0 license. (This is basically an updated version of public domain, which means you’re free to use them in both personal and commercial projects without charge.) You’ll find a lot of cool landscapes and architectural details amongst this collections, including some quite abstract images like the above. 05. Realistic Shots The free photos from Realistic Shots show a less airbrushed side to lifeRealistic Shots is a project founded in 2014 by Henry Reyes @henryreyes9, a web developer and founder of Commit 2 Design. As part of the backlash against airbrushing and overuse of Photoshop, it provides exactly what it promises: a range of stark photography showing the nitty gritty of life, warts and all. Subscribe for free and you’ll get seven high resolution photos for personal and commercial use, every week, on constantly changing themes. Reyes just asks that you “make something creative” with them in return. 06. Life of Pix This shot of French fries in New Caledonia by Slike is free to download for use in your projectsEvery week Leeroy, an advertising agency in Montreal and its network of photographers, adds a bunch of high-resolution photos to its ‘Life of Pix’ library. These range wildly in subject but are all professionally shot and often offbeat and interesting. Not to mention they’re all public domain and can be downloaded for free and used in both commercial and personal projects (with the exception of mass distribution). Life of Pix also offers a great way to discover new photographers: every week it puts forward a new ‘Photographer of the Week’ and highlights 10 of their images on the site and its social media channels. 07. PicJumbo Prague Metro Subway Public Transport Station by Viktor Hanacek “I just want to make the internet a more beautiful place,” says Viktor Hanacek, a 22-year-old living in the Czech Republic. “I was a web designer, photographer and WordPress developer, and a few years later there were no free high-resolution images.” So he set up Picjumbo, which now houses more than 1,500 of his images in high resolution, for designers, bloggers and entrepreneurs to download and use for free. Hanacek has quite a unique style and take on the world, and his site is full of fun and quirky shots, such as ‘Feeding Fallow Deer by Hand’ and ‘Woman Holding an Ice Cream in Front of Her Face’. Related articles: 5 tips for using stock imagery in your designs The 16 best websites to download stock art The 5 biggest myths about stock imagery in design View the full article

Equifax has temporarily taken down one of its consumer-facing credit report services after the webpage was compromised and serving adware via a phony Flash Player download. View the full article

This WebGL tutorial demonstrates how to create a 3D environmental simulation that shows what happens to the world as CO2 levels change. (You can see more WebGL experiments here.) The user controls the levels using a HTML input range slider. As the user adds more CO2, more smog will appear in the scene, the water levels will rise as the increase in temperature melts more polar ice caps, then trees will disappear as they become immersed in water. The elements are animated in and out using a tween library and dragging the slider in the opposite direction will reverse the effects. If only it was that easy in real life! 01. Display elements The basic layout of the page is shown here before the 3D scene has been added. The image is a transparent PNG at the top of the screen and there is a range slider at the bottomTo start the project, open the 'start' folder in your code IDE. Open up index.html and you will see there is a basic page scaffold there with some code already. In the body section, add the display elements here that will be used as the interface to the 3D content. 02. Linking up the libraries The 3D content is being displayed through three.js, which is included here. A Collada model will be added to the scene later. The extra library to load this is included, along with a basic tween library. The next lines all link up to post processing effects that will add the finishing polish. 03. Post processing shaders After the scene has rendered each frame, a number of post process effects will be added. These are the libraries that empower the film grain effect, a tilt shift blur at the top and bottom of the screen, then finally a vignette to fade out to the edges of the screen. 04. Adding the variables Some of the code has been completed for you. You will see a comment where to add the rest of the tutorial's code. A number of variables are used in this 3D scene, which look after screen resolution, various 3D models and post processing. Two important variables are the waterHt for the water height and the lastVal, which remembers the last position of the slider. 05. Initialising the scene The init function is a large part of the code, ensuring the scene is set up with the right look at the beginning. A container is added to the page, and this is where the 3D scene will be displayed. A camera is added and some background fog to fade out the distance. 06. Setting the renderer The renderer is given a background colour and the resolution is set to the same size as the pixel ratio of the screen. Shadows are enabled in the scene, and it's placed on the page in the container element. A hemisphere light is added, which has a sky and ground colour. 07. Shader variables The variables that will control the shader post process effects are given their values here. These variables will be used later to add values that will control the look. If you look in the params function you will see this already completed for you. 08. Composing the effects The effects have to be stacked up in something called an effects composer. This takes each effect and applies the styling to it. Then it is all displayed as a final scene on the screen, which you will see when the render function is added later. 09. Loading the cloud image The params() function is called in step 9, which sets the parameters for the post processing vignette and film grain effectThe params function is called and this sets the individual parameters for the post effects. A new group is created and this will hold all of the scene content within it, to make it easy to rotate the group of objects. A transparent PNG image is loaded as a cloud material to be used as a sprite within the scene. 10. Double for loop Eight groups are created inside the first for loop. These eight groups all get 35 clouds added to them in the second for loop. Each cloud is placed in a random location above the scene. The groups will be turned on and off with the slider by the user to show smog being added and removed in the visualisation. 11. Scaling the cloud The first group of clouds can be seen in the scene. The others are hidden and will be visible when controlled from the slider by the userThe cloud is scaled up to a size that allows it to be visible in the scene. Every group of clouds after the first group is scaled down so that they are virtually invisible to the renderer. This is how they will be made visible later by scaling them back up to their full size, as this will give a good tweening effect. 12. Loading the model Now the Collada Loader is set to load the scene.dae model. When it finishes loading, the model is scanned and any object that happens to be a mesh is made to cast shadows and receive shadows to give some extra depth to the scene. 13. Finding specifics in the scene As the model is now ready for display it is set to the right size to fit the scene. The code needs to specifically control the height of the water so the water model is found in the scene and passed into the global variable. Similarly the main light needs to be found so that it can be set to project shadows. 14. Light settings The model has been added with the main light set to emit shadows onto the scene. There is something substantial to look at in the scene so the tilt shift blur effect can be seen at the front and back of the sceneNow as the spotlight is found the specifics that make it cast shadows into the scene are set up. The fading of the light at the edges of the spot is also set here. Finally, as the model is the biggest element to load in, the rest of the scene will be set up before this code is run, therefore the render function can be called each frame. 15. Last initialising code With the mouse and touch events set up, the scene becomes reactive to the mouse movement, zooming in and out while being able to tilt the scene up and downThe final part of the init function sets various mouse and touch inputs that will move the camera based on their position. An event is also registered to listen for if the screen is resized and this will update the rendered display. 16. Rendering each frame The render function is set to be called as close to 60 frames per second as the browser can manage. The group, which contains all the models, is set to rotate by a small amount each frame. The camera's position is updated from the mouse or touch input and it continues to look at the centre of the scene. 17. Updating the display The shader time is a variable that just goes up by 0.1 each frame and this is passed into the filmPass so that the noisey film grain can be updated. The effects composer is updated and rendered to the screen. Finally the tween engine is updated too. 18. Getting user input The input range slider, added in step 1, calls the showVal function, which is defined here. When the user clicks on this it just checks that the slider has been moved. If it's moved up then the next cloud group is scaled up with a tween over 0.8 seconds. The water height is updated and this is also tweened up to the new height. 19. Grabbing the trees The temp variable finds the current group of trees it should eliminate from the scene and here it scales them down with a tween on the y axis only. An elastic easing is used so that this springs out of sight on the screen for a pleasing effect. As more water and clouds are in the scene, the trees disappear. 20. Opposite input The first content checked if the slider was slid upwards, or to the right. Now the code detects the user sliding to the left. The clouds are scaled down with a tween and so is the water level to show a cooling effect on the earth. 21. Finishing up With everything working, you can see the background fog clearly as you move the mouse so that the camera gets a higher vantage point on the sceneThe final step is to bring the trees back, so they are scaled back to their original size with an elastic tween. Save the scene and view the web page from a server either hosted locally on your own computer or on a web server. You will be able to interact with mouse movement and the slider to change the scene display. This article originally appeared in Web Designer issue 265. Buy it here. Related articles: How to code an augmented reality marker 20 amazing examples of WebGL in action 9 brilliant uses of 3D in web design View the full article

For many designers and artists, the process of creating something can be a great way to escape from the world and focus the mind. However, that doesn't mean we're immune to stress – there's nothing like a client breathing down your neck and a looming deadline to pop your meditative bubble. Can pro artists achieve mindfulness through art?These mindfulness tools are all designed to help you focus your mind, channel your creative energies, and escape when it all gets a bit much. 01. Headspace The headspace app is hugely popularLaunched by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, Headspace now has millions of users in oner 190 countries. Comprising a website, app and book (Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day), Headspace offers plenty of resources, including themed meditation sessions on everything from stress to sleep, short 'SOS' exercises for emergencies, and tips for a mindful living approach. 02. The Art of Breathing This book aims to help you find peace and take time to breatheAward-winning author Dr Danny Penman has produced 'The Art of Breathing: The Secret to Living Mindfully' as a guide to letting go and finding peace, simply by taking the time to breathe. "Escapism, to me, is escaping from the ‘here and now’, whereas mindfulness is being fully connected to the present moment," he explains. "Lots of clinical trials have shown that connecting to the present moment using mindfulness dissolves anxiety, stress and depression." 03. Wherever You Go, There You Are The guide offers ways for you to incorporate mindfulness into your own lifeJon Kabat-Zinn is an internationally known meditation teacher. In this easy-to-follow starter book for new meditators, he includes practical explanations on mindfulness and awareness. It promises "Brief, humourful chapters full of stories and poetry, [that] convey the heart and the spirit of mindfulness practice and encourage you to find your own ways to incorporate mindfulness into your life." 04. The Power of Now The Power of Now aims to free you of your own ego'The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment' is a manual for anyone who’s ever wondered what ‘living in the now’ means, or how to free yourself of your ego. Written by spiritual teacher Eckhart TolleIt, the book is a number one New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 33 languages. 05. WildMind The WildMind site contains plenty of mindfulness resourcesThis Buddhist meditation website offers free guides, news articles, online classes and resources for practicing mindfulness. Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author, launched the website back in 2000, and it's packed with tips for getting more from meditation. 06. Mindfulness for Creativity This book is especially aimed at artist and designersThis is a guide to help creatives 'adapt, create and thrive in a frantic world'. In it, Dr Danny Penman outlines three simple mindfulness techniques that artists can enhance their creativity, problem-solving and decision-making skills: open your mind to new ideas; consciously notice these ideas and their relevance; and follow them wherever they might. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 151. Buy it now. Read more: Making art can reduce stress – no matter how good (or bad) you are Following this creativity cycle could save you from burnout 10 stress relief gadgets for designers View the full article

Drawing with ink produces vast possibilities. There are simple yet effective ways to create beautiful, organic textures, using only one colour of ink, which we'll explain in this workshop's text and in the video at the end. The theme of this black and white drawing is nature – an incredible source of inspiration. Use real objects for your artworks as often as you can. Collecting various natural objects – such as sea shells and snails' shells – make it possible for you to take a closer look, to touch and feel the surface. If you don’t have a real object, it’s great to use reference photos. Gather as many visual materials as you feel necessary, since they will nourish your artistic imagination and give you useful information about the texture and details. Exploring real natural objects, such as these shells, will help you understand their texturesYou could use these reference images and objects to create samples of textures before proceeding to the clean copy drawing. This is an excellent exercise for developing your artistic skills and power of observation. Ink liners are convenient because they are portable and clean, but if you would prefer, you can also follow the steps in this tutorial using nibs and liquid inks, because the principles are similar for both materials. Follow these 13 steps to create your own organic textured ink drawing. 01. Make an underdrawing Sketch your composition in pencil first [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] We'll begin this ink artwork with a pencil underdrawing. This method enables you to build the composition thoughtfully. Start drawing with light pencil lines and general shapes, then add the smaller features. As soon as you feel confident with your sketch and detailing, it’s time to start inking. So to create a pencil underdrawing, first mark the hill and add rough shapes for the snail’s body and shell. Then draw the leaf and the acorn. The peculiarity of this composition is that the snail is looking at the acorn, as if with curiosity. As a final touch, refine the snail, adding the spiral of the shell and the horns. 02. Outline the contours Vary the width of your lines with the soft brush pen [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Using an SB brush pen, outline the contours with organic lines, varying the width from thin to thick (SB means ‘soft brush’ and provides a thin, flexible brush-like tip). Let your hand be relaxed and have fun. There is no need to draw all the contours with this tool, so leave some pencil lines uncovered. We will come back to them very soon. 03. Work on the shell Use long rounded lines to accent prominent parts, and short hatches to convey a 3D shape [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Use a small (0.3mm thick) ink liner such as this Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen, size S, to reveal the relief of the snail’s shell. On the image above, you can see two types of ink strokes: long rounded lines accent the prominent points of the shell, and groups of short hatches unobtrusively emphasise the three-dimensional aspect of this object. 04. Draw the moss Use short hatches for the moss [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Begin the work on the texture of the moss that the snail is crawling along. With the S ink liner again, add groups of short hatches and dots to the hill area. The layering of hatches creates interesting effects and increases the contrast in the drawing. The closer you get to the bottom part of the artwork, the fewer hatches you should apply. This trick helps to create a beautiful fading effect. 05. Create the texture on the snail Add the texture of the snail’s body using an ultra-thin liner such as this 0.05mm Uni-Ball Pin Fineliner. This texture consists of small oblong elements that are closely adjacent to each other. Also add thin hatches to the area of the snail’s body under the shell. By carefully accenting the shadows like this, the drawing starts to look more realistic. 06. Add dots Groups of dots make the texture on the shell more interesting [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Draw dots onto the shell using an ink liner like the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen F liner. The groups of big dots will make the texture more interesting and credible. Then accent the sides of the shell and the borders of the spiral to give it more contrast and make it varied in terms of value (this means that you have darker and lighter objects). 07. Finish the shell marks Use contour hatching for depth [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Add rounded hatches to the sides of the shell and near the spiral line, using the 0.05mm ink liner again. This type of hatching is also known as contour hatching, and it works perfectly for accenting the three-dimensional aspect of objects. 08. Refine the snail's body Drawing shadows with hatches works well in black and white ink drawings [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Using the 0.05mm ink liner again, work on the snail’s body. Thin hatches help to reveal the relief of the animal and emphasise its three-dimensional qualities. The groups of parallel lines can go in different directions to form layers of hatching. This way of creating shadows is particularly good for black-and-white ink graphics. 09. Draw an acorn Leave a thin white edge around the acorn to help it stand out [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] With the S liner again, add dots and rounded hatches to the acorn, accenting the sides of the object. It is important to leave a thin white line on the edge because that will separate the acorn from other objects in the drawing. Having this in place guarantees that the artwork will look realistic and three-dimensional. 10. Develop the acorn Add a few strokes at a time to avoid overdoing it [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Add thin hatches to the acorn, using the 0.05mm liner. The goal is to give the acorn some contrast but to leave the highlights. Drawing with ink is a process of gradually raising the value and contrast, so it is better to apply fewer strokes at a time than too many of them at once. 11. Create a leaf texture Add small dots to create a velvety texture [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Now work on the leaf. With the S liner again, add some dots to create an organic, velvety texture. Dots always work well when it comes to natural objects and smooth surfaces; you can also use dots of different sizes in your artwork to achieve amazing graphic effects. 12. Accent the leaf Add a shadow under objects to separate them [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Using the 0.05 liner, mark all of the dark places of the leaf. It is important to separate the leaf from the acorn with a distinct contrast shadow. Trust your eyes and hand; they will suggest the direction of hatching and the level of value in your drawing. 13. Refine the mossy texture Make sure each object in your ink drawing is separate [click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image] Lastly, work on the relief of the mossy hill. Hatch with the 0.05 liner to create darker spots. Especially accent the shadow from the acorn and ensure that the borders between the objects in the drawing are clearly visible. Once that's done, the artwork is complete. Watch the video of this snail artwork coming together below. This article originally appeared in Paint & Draw issue 10. Buy it here. Related articles: 17 stunning examples of ink drawings Get started with ink drawing How to draw and paint - 100 pro tips and tutorials View the full article

There are no shortage of jobs out there for the tech savvy. You just need the skills to get the position, and you can get just that from the OSTraining Developer Courses. Get a lifetime access to thousands of tech courses on sale now for just $59.99 (approx. £46). Whether you want to explore a new career as a developer or just want to pick up some new skills that you might be able to put to work at your current job, then you need to go through the professional courses offered by OSTraining. You'll learn to build and launch amazing websites and apps using languages like JavaScript, HTML, Drupal, Joomla and more. There’s over 3,000 videos to teach you everything you need to know. The OSTraining Developer Courses usually retails for $2,000. This comprehensive course that could land you a new job can be yours for just $59.99 (approx. £46). Don’t miss an opportunity for a new career, get this deal today! Creative Bloq deals This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life. We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more. Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com. View the full article

Responsive web design and web accessibility have come of age, and new modes of presenting text to online users have emerged. As a result, accessible type selection is more important than ever. The plethora of information regarding accessible type design, application and code methodology is quite staggering, but one thing is clear: readability of content is the main goal for almost every website. Fontsmith has worked with Mencap to research, test and design accessible typefaces for those with disabilities. Here are some of our findings. 01. Typeface design Legibility vs readability Legibility is concerned with questions like: Can you recognise this letter or word? Can you interpret and comprehend this word? Readability is concerned with: How comfortable is the reading experience? Accessible type design is both legible and readable. Serif vs sans Our research with Mencap indicates sans-serif fonts are the most accessible style, as the detailing within serifed letters is considered complex by those with reading disabilities. Sans fonts have a simplified structure; they sit closer to our learned handwriting. Mono-linear sans forms display clearly and in a more robust fashion at small pixel sizes, even in the harshest rendering environments. Fontsmith’s FS Untitled makes a clear distinction between I (eye) and 1 (one)Letter shapes Choosing a typeface with strong character recognition qualities aids legibility. Those with visual impairments can find certain letters confusing, so it is important those letter shapes are clearly defined. Common offenders are the ‘I’ (capital eye), ‘i’ (lower-eye), ‘l’ (el) and ‘1’ (one). A closed ‘C’ can look like an ‘O’. Open counter shapes aid reading. The combination of ‘r’ and ‘n’ can read like an ‘m’. Long ascenders and descenders are important, too. They help to define outer word shapes that the eye can scan and interpret swiftly. Font proportions A large x-height and moderate-to-wide proportions are most accessible. A larger x-height often infers a greater white space inside a letter, which can aid definition and clarity. Often, condensed and compressed width styles are promoted as enabling a fluid and more responsive layout, but it is important to realise that by using a condensed font where space is limited (eg on mobile) you could also be reducing accessibility. Hinting Hints describe the degree by which pixels should be turned on or off to improve the quality of a letter at a specific pixel size. Despite improvements in screen resolution, font hinting is still an essential type design process. Most foundries automate hinting and achieve very good results, but keep expectations in check: no amount of hinting will make a heavy weight look good at 12px. 02. Type application Size is important. Be mindful that actual sizes can vary hugely between fonts Weight Establish a hierarchy by assigning roles for each font. A hierarchy enables the eye to break down information into a clear experience. Use open, midrange weights for subheads and body. Set up a test to evaluate across browser platforms – weight can change dramatically from one environment to the next. If desired, implement Type Rendering Mix to balance out appearance. Size Size is important. Be mindful that every font sits at a different scale on the type-body, and actual sizes can vary hugely between fonts: 14px in one font can be equivalent to 18px in another. The average size for body ranges from 14px to 16px. As a general rule, 16px-plus is considered the most inclusive. Font size can also impact on rendering quality. Find the sweet spots that deliver the best rendering results for your primary platforms. Line-height and length Give type room to breathe. Your eye needs to be able to track from one line to the next with ease. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommend a line height of 1.5 for body copy. Evaluate, reduce or increase as necessary. Scanning long lines of text is testing for your eyes. Research indicates that the average online line length is around 70-80 characters. Limit lines to no more than 16 words. Colour Like all visual elements, type must have adequate contrast. Grey type on a white background can be difficult to read if the greyness and font weight is too light. Fontsmith’s FS Untitled has finely ‘graded’ weights to help users balance its appearance. White type on a dark background will ‘glow’ on-screen making it appear tighter, and some fonts may require letter-space adjustments. 03. Type technicals Fontsmith’s FS Untitled has finely ‘graded’ weights (click the arrows icon top-right to enlarge this image) Font loading strategies Slow connections and large font files make for slow text load times. A single WOFF file with a full European character set will size 36-50KB. The states of FOUT (flash of unstyled text) or FOIT (flash of invisible text) need consideration. FOIT is the predominant browser default and in aesthetic terms FOIT is desirable, but in accessibility terms FOUT is certainly the way to go. That's because seeing some content is better than no content at all. Aim to show text in a fallback font until all web fonts load, which avoids any ongoing juddering of multiple elements on the page. Implement with Web Font Loader and set a cookie, as this minimises FOUT further into the site. Fallback fonts Selection is limited particularly on mobile. Jordan Moore’s mobile fallback compatibility table illustrates the problem. When selecting a fallback, shoot for similar weights and proportions. Tweak fallback metrics to match your chosen font size. Inform your selection decision by overlaying an accessible font on the fallback and judge. Text-rendering Use optimiseLegibility to enable kerning and improve rendering quality. This setting also enables ligatures, which you can disable if necessary by setting .classname { font-feature-settings: "liga" 0; } . Protecting fonts It takes years of effort and investment to develop a high-quality typeface. It’s only fair, given the important role that type has in all web projects, that you take steps to protect the investment in them. Use CORS to deploy fonts, ensuring only permitted sites have access to the files. We aim to make type as accessible as it can be. We have worked with signage and environmental groups to create a 21st century wayfinding typeface, FS Millbank, aiming to aid navigation in busy environments. With FS Untitled we aim to create a more readable web, ensuring that accessible typography is open to all. This article was originally published in net magazine issue 286. Subscribe here. Related articles The 40 best free web fonts Get started with web accessibility 10 essential tools for freelance UX designers View the full article

That portal effect in Dr Strange was very special. It was pretty much the only effect in the movie that didn’t lean more towards motion graphics than visual effects so, in this Maya tutorial, we’re going to recreate that amazing look. We’re going to start by talking about nParticles in Maya. It’s hard to underestimate how amazing nParticles are, especially due to their Nucleus node, which brings all simulations on the same node, be it particles or cloth or anything else, into the same physical realm. This means the same rules and attributes of physics will apply to all of them, which is a thing of perfection. We’re going to start by generating simple particles and setting up a working physics system, that is in the Nucleus node. Later, we’re going to change the particles to look and act like sparks, as seen in the movie. Then, we’re going to make the emitter orbit a point to create the same sort of portal that we saw in the movie. We’re also going to talk about instancing particles with custom geometry to replace them for an artistic or rendering reason. In addition to all of that, we’re going to cover orienting particles in the correct way. So enough of the talk, let’s get started… 01. Set up the scene It all starts with a simple circleThe first thing that we’re going to do is create a curved circle. Rotate it by 90 and increase the radius if you need to. This will later serve as a path for our particles to be generated from. Think of this as the shape of the portal. If you want to go really crazy, you can also do a polygon of some sorts, but that’s obviously not what they did in the movie. 02. Initial particles It's time to experiment with wind and gravityChange the interface module to FX in order to get access to the particles and dynamics-related menu bars. Go to the nParticle menu and select Create Emitter. Now you’ve got an initial emitter. Play around with the Nucleus node, and turn on the ground plane to get the particles to interact with the ground. Experiment with some other settings like the wind and gravity as well. This, however, isn’t the final particle setup so don’t worry about the look of the particles. 03. Motion path for the particles We need to send these particles spinning!Change the interface module to Rigging. Select the emitter first, then the path, go to the Constraint menu, select Motion Paths and then Attach to Motion Path. This will give a single loop, which is a very good start but not what we want. So select the circle, now the motion path, and in the Channel Editor go the motionPath1 node and select the UValue. This is the position of your emitter at the current frame. Animate or use an expressions loop (like fast and forever). 04. Create the sparks Change the Line Width attribute to see sparksYou should have an emitter emitting spheres while orbiting a circle. Click the emitter, in the Attribute Editor, go to nParticleShape node. Go to Shading, change the particle render type to Streak. You probably won’t see much difference until you change Line Width attribute. Below these are the colour settings. Change gradient to red-orange and the colour input to Age. 05. Reorientate the particles Tweaking Lifespan and Opacity will make your sparks shineAlso play with settings such as Lifespan and Opacity. Use these to make it look like sparks. At this point, you might have an issue – the particles aren’t generated in the right orientation. Use an expression on your emitter’s rotation (X or Z, based on your setup) and tie it to the UValue of the Motion path. 360 * UValue is the basic logic. 06. Play with physics Change Mass for realistic spark movementThings should be shaping up now. Let’s move to nParticleShape node and change Mass (0.3, in this case) under the Dynamic Properties tab. This should make your particles light so wind can displace them, the way real sparks behave. Move to the Nucleus node and under the Gravity and Wind tab, change the Wind Speed, Wind Direction and Wind Noise (2.747, all to 1, 50, in this case). 07. Duplicate the emitter A single emitter just won't cut itA single emitter, in this case, just wasn’t very effective, even if we bumped the particle rate all the way up to a high amount. So we decided to duplicate the emitters, which can be a bit tricky. Create a new emitter, it’ll ask for the nucleus node you want to use, give it the nucleus you have already. Now, to copy an attribute from the existing emitter, all you need is to select the node, click Presets in the top-right corner, save the preset and then load it to the new emitters. 08. Instancing the geometry Instancing might take out the colour, but you can put that back in laterIf you’re using Maya 2017, which ships with Arnold, you might’ve noticed it doesn’t work well with some nParticles. So you can either use another renderer or use geometry instancing. It’s a simple process. Just create a geometry, select it first and nParticleShape later and in the nParticles menu, select Instancer. This’ll take out the colouring effects but at least you’ll be able to render. 09. Rendering Instance motion blur before you renderTo render this out, we suggest using V-Ray. We got the best results from V-Ray but if it’s out of budget, to render just the particles, try and use Maya’s software renderer or any other built-in renderer. That is fine for just the particles and you can deal with the rest in post. You can’t render motion blur with just the particles so instance it before you do, or add it in post. 10. Compositing It's time to bring all the elements togetherCompositing this is fairly simple. You only have to add some motion blur to the particles, some glow and roto on the footage inside the portal. We would suggest duplicating the portal. Make one on them white, using something like a choker to cut it on the edges and the other one orange and then adding a lot of glow on it with high radius. However, this might not work if you’re rendering using V-Ray. This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 226. Buy it here. Related articles: How to sculpt in Cinema 4D How to simulate explosions in Maya Build a custom Maya interface View the full article

You're reading Block Reveal Effect, a New Design Trend for Entrances and Exits, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! For all those who adore the beauty of simplicity obtained by regular geometric shapes and modular layouts, there is an excellent solution. It is the block reveal effect and it is pretty trendy. It ideally refines interfaces as well as adds a subtle dose of interactivity. Being blocky, a bit rigid and in some way […] View the full article

There are hundreds of paid-for and free fonts available online. We've got details of all sorts here on Creative Bloq – including tattoo fonts, cursive fonts and handwriting fonts. But for this article, we're going to focus on retro fonts. Get Adobe Creative CloudRetro designs have the ability to transport audiences back in time so it's important to choose a typeface that reflects the era that you're representing. With the right font you can add age, texture and depth. Here, we've selected some of our favourite retro-style font designs that won't cost you a penny! 01. West Side West Side has a playful 1980s cartoon lookInspired by handmade poster designs and illustrations from the 1980s, with maybe just a hint of Saul Bass, West Side is a block-styled, handcrafted display font created by Artimasa Studio. Big and bold with sharp edges, it's free for both personal and commercial use. FORMAT: OTF 02. Palm Canyon Drive Palm Canyon Drive is a stunning mid-century inspired monoline scriptYou can get a free sample of premium monoline script Palm Canyon Drive – designed by Amy Hood, co-founder of Hoodzpah Design Co, in conjunction with retro and vintage design elements crafter RetroSupply – by signing up to the RetroSupply newsletter. (You'll get a bunch of other retro and vintage-themed design elements, too.) Inspired by mid-century Southern California, the retro font is perfect for adding some old-school west coast goodness to your designs. It’s as comfortable on a Tikki bar matchbook cover as it is on a Hollywood movie poster, and the sample weights are free for personal use. FORMAT: OTF 03. Billionaire Medium Grunge Billionaire Medium Grunge is dripping with decadent charmFor an art deco look that's pleasingly rough around the edges, Billionaire Medium Grunge is just the ticket. It's just one of six fonts that make up the full Billionaire typeface by JumboDesign, and you can pick it up for free from Deeezy to give your work a bit of slightly faded sophistication. 04. Noir Add a touch of elegance and style to your designs with NoirAdd a touch of elegance and style to your designs with this beautiful retro font Noir, by designer Matthias Guggisberg. FORMAT: TTF 05. Frontage Condensed (Outline) Created by Swiss art director Juri Zaech, Frontage Condensed is a beautiful family of retro fonts. Perfect for any vintage-style designs, Frontage Condensed is available in a variety of weights, one of which, Outline, Zaech offers as a free download. FORMAT: TTF 06. Say It Fat Designer Timo Titzmann is behind free retro font Say It Fat. A bold, slab typeface, Say It Fat is great for creating eye-catching retro-style posters and much more. FORMAT: TTF 07. Portico Portico is a display typeface, which includes an urban and rough versionCreated by designer Mehmet Reha Tugcu, Portico is a display typeface, which includes an urban and rough version – perfect for any retro-style designs. FORMAT: TTF 08. Monthoers Add a touch of vintage style to your designs with Monthoers typefaceRetro-style typeface Monthoers was created by graphic designer Agga Swist'blnk. She comments on Behance: "Monthoers is the latest version of Rochoes typeface, which I made almost a year ago. It is free for personal and commercial use." FORMAT: TTF 09. Hamster Hamster is a cursive typeface inspired by brush lettering and traditional sign paintingHamster is a cursive typeface inspired by brush lettering and traditional sign painting. Crafted carefully to equalise its dynamic flow and legibility, Hamster is free to download for both personal and commercial use. FORMAT: TTF 10. Lazer 84 Transport your designs back to the 80s with Lazer 84Transport yourself back in time with Lazer 84. Created by art director Juan Hodgson, 80's-inspired Lazer 84 is a retro-style brush font that comes complete with numbers, symbols and accents. FORMAT: TTF 11. Ansley Graphic designer Kady Jesko created typeface Ansley after being unable to find a retro font that suitedGraphic designer Kady Jesko created typeface Ansley, after searching for a free retro-style font and couldn't find one that suited. Jesko now generously offers it as a free download for both personal and commercial use, with donations, as ever, gratefully received. FORMAT: TTF 12. Berlin Berlin is inspired by classic geometric typefacesBerlin was created by Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator Antonio Rodrigues Jr. "Berlin is a group of display fonts, inspired by the classic geometric typefaces from early last century," he explains. So far Rodrigues Jr has created four versions – Berlin, Berlina, Slaberlin and Uberlin – all of which are available in regular, bold and x-bold. FORMAT: TTF 13. Sabo Need an arcade-themed font? Give Sabo a goSabo, by graphic designer Philippe Moesch, is a striking pixel-style font. Available in two styles – inline and filled – Sabo is great for any retro arcade-themed design. FORMAT: OTF 14. Bobber This slab serif is inspired by bobber motorcyclesLooking for a unique typeface, designers Lucas Almeida and Dmitry Goloub decided to create their own. Inspired by bobber motorcyles, the duo developed this slab serif. With a cool, vintage design, this grid-based font is free to use for both personal and commercial projects. FORMAT: .AI 15. Glasoor Sergiy Tkachenko's Glasoor is perfect for posters and logosCreated by type designer Sergiy Tkachenko, Glasoor is an experimental font with a playful retro design that's perfect for posters, logos and more. FORMAT: TTF, OTF 16. Zebrazil Zebrazil's elegant forms and bold serifs give it a wonderful 1920s feelZebrazil was created by Burmese graphic designer Zarni. This deliciously retro font features lovely thin letterforms married to bold serifs, and is one of many created by Zarni, who generously offers his design as a free download. FORMAT: TTF 17. Unique A retro-contemporary offering from designer Anna PociusUnique was created by designer Anna Pocius aka Artmaker. She describes her design on Behance as 'a display hybrid typeface, which is a little bit flashy, retro but still contemporary font designed specially for headings and logotypes'. FORMAT: TTF 18. Canter Canter is perfect for headlines and titlesDesigned by New York-based creative Christopher J. Lee, Canter is an all caps, condensed typeface available in six different weights. It was designed as a display type for titles, headlines, and posters and will work well with any retro execution. FORMAT: TTF 19. Alt Retro This free retro font comes in five different weightsAlt Retro Typeface is a free five-weight typeface that channels all the art deco inspiration you can muster. Perfect for eye-catching creations, Alt Retro is a playful font that will serve as a brilliant experimental offering. The intricate design makes it a stand out retro font. FORMAT: TTF 20. Rispa This retro font is inspired by the designer's hometownThis retro typeface was inspired by designer Konrad Bednarski's new hometown. The free test version is available to download for free, with a corrected and extended version with more weights soon to be available. Like this font? You can also get Rispa Regular T-shirts, prints, tote bags, pillows and much more from Society6. FORMAT: TTF 21. Betty Noir One of our favourite free retro fonts, Betty Noir is definitely worth checking outThis typeface was developed Blambot, a company 'proudly provide comic fonts and lettering'. You have to pay for many of its brilliant designs, but the team generously offer Betty Noir free for use in personal projects. One of our favourite free retro fonts, it's definitely worth checking out. FORMAT: TTF 22. White Rabbit Inspired by eras gone by, this is one of the coolest free retro fonts we've seen in a whileInspired by eras gone by, this is one of the coolest free retro fonts we've seen in a while. Developed by Alice Creative, this typeface is available free for personal use, with donations to the author, as always, greatfully received. FORMAT: TTF Next page: 21 more free retro fonts... 23. Andes The gorgeous vintage-style font is available in two stylesLooking for retro fonts to use in your personal project? Then you can download this baby for free. The gorgeous vintage-style font is available in two styles, with letters featuring both a curved design (as seen above) and more basic approach. FORMAT: TTF 24. Sesame Sesame wouldn't look out of place on any vintage poster designAn old-school-style of retro fonts, Sesame wouldn't look out of place on any vintage poster design. Developed by designer Dieter Steffmann, the font comes with a full set of uppercase letters, numbers and selection of special characters. FORMAT: TTF 25. Arwen Arwen is one of the most beautiful retro fonts we've foundArwen is not just the name of a Lord of the Rings character, it's also one of the most beautiful retro fonts we've found – and it's totally free to download. Created by Keystrokes, the typeface includes a full set of uppercase characters for you to incorporate into your designs. FORMAT: TTF 26. Highlands This charming slab-serif draws inspiration from National Park posters of oldThis cool retro typeface was created by web and UI designer Tyler Galpin. He describes the font as "a charming slab-serif that draws inspiration from National Park posters of old". It's available as a free download, with any donations to its creator gratefully received. FORMAT: TTF 27. Bazar Olinda Martins developed this vintage-style font from a selection of commercial signage in and around the city of PortoDesigner Olinda Martins developed this vintage-style font from a selection of commercial signage in and around the city of Porto. Collecting several samples, Martins reinterpreted them into this stylish design, which she generously offers as a free download for all to enjoy! FORMAT: TTF 28. Quid Pro Quo Quid Pro Quo is an old-fashioned handwritten scriptQuid Pro Quo is an old-fashioned handwritten script created by designer David Kerkhoff. The typeface comes complete with a full set of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and a selection of special characters. Free for personal use only, with the option to donate to the author should you wish. FORMAT: TTF 29. Pricedown Ray Larabie of Typodermic Fonts is the man behind this bold, game show-inspired fontRay Larabie of Typodermic Fonts is the man behind this bold, game show-inspired font. Larabie comments on his creation: "Pricedown is based on a late-Sixties font called Pinto Flare; famous for its use in the titles for the TV program The Price is Right." The font is free for personal use only, but donations to the author are much appreciated. FORMAT: TTF 30. Pompadour Numerals This stylish, retro set of numerals and punctuation was inspired by the 1950s Rockabilly HairdoThis stylish, retro set of numerals and punctuation was developed by designer Andy Mangold. Offered online by Lost Type Co-Op, the website describes the design as "a chunky, display numeral sets inspired by the 1950s Rockabilly Hairdo. The numbers, which each fit perfectly inside of a square, are best used in large sizes." Available as a free download, with any donations to the author gratefully received. FORMAT: TTF 31. Riesling Transport your designs back to the 1920s with this beautiful Riesling fontTransport your designs back to the 1920s with this beautiful Riesling font, created by Bright Ideas. The elegant typeface includes a full set of upper and lowercase letters, numbers 0-9 and special characters. FORMAT: TTF 32. Carnivalee Freakshow Carnivalee Freakshow would fit in perfectly to any Western-inspired designCarnivalee Freakshow typeface would fit in perfectly to any Western-inspired design. Created by Christopher Hansen, this popular font has amassed over 1m downloads since its release. Free for personal use only. FORMAT: TTF 33. Top Speed This cool retro font has a definite hint of 1950s Chevrolet to itThis cool retro font has more than a hint of 1950s Chevrolet to it; you can virtually smell the rubber and gasoline. Designed by Jason Vanderhill, Top Speed comes in these three different variations. To link letters, simply use the underscore key. Free for personal use. FORMAT: TTF 34. Echo Deco Echo Deco is perfect for retro-style music poster designsPerfect for a retro-style music poster, typeface Echo Deco was created by GreyWolf Webworks. Free for personal use only, this font comes complete with a full set of uppercase letters, numbers and special characters. FORMAT: TTF 35. Deftone Stylus Deftone Stylus is a structured, industrial script from the late 20th centuryThis beautiful script, retro-style font is another by Ray Larabie of Typodermic Fonts. Larabie comments on his typeface, "Deftone Stylus is a structured, industrial script from the late 20th century. It was rebuilt in 2011 and now features custom letter pairs to make words flow." FORMAT: TTF 36. Bellerose This elegant typeface Bellerose is a popular choice, having been downloaded almost 1.5m times since its releaseThis elegant typeface Bellerose is a popular choice, having been downloaded almost 1.5m times since its release. The sophisticated design was created by James M. Harris, includes a full set of upper and lower case letters and numbers and is free for personal use only. FORMAT: TTF 37. Airstream This is just one of many retro fonts designed by Nick's Fonts but Airstream just pipped it as our favouriteThis is just one of many retro fonts designed by Nick's Fonts but Airstream just pipped it as our favourite. The designer has over 100 designs to choose from, which collectively have been downloaded over 13m times. Free for personal use. FORMAT: TTF 38. Parisish Parisish has the feel of old Paris about itThis elegant font by type designer George Williams has the feel of old Paris about it. One of 57 fonts created by the designer, this is one of his most popular, having received over 200,000 downloads. This font is free for both personal and commercial uses. FORMAT: TTF 39. Kilogram Kilogram font was based on Nick Curtis' font AnagramThis Kilogram font was created by KalleGraphics and based on Nick Curtis' font Anagram. The bold design includes a full set of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Free for personal use. FORMAT: OTF 40. Budmo This flashy marquee font wouldn't look out of place on posters at the Moulin RougeThis flashy marquee font wouldn't look out of place on posters at the Moulin Rouge. Another creation from Ray Larabie of Typodermic Fonts, this set includes four font files, all different variations of the same design. Free for personal use. FORMAT: TTF 41. Akura Popo Akura Popo is bold, strong and tough-lookingAkura Popo from Twicolabs Design. The team comment on the typeface on Behance: "Akura Popo is a vintage and classic condensed serif font with a bold, strong and tough-looking style. It's best suited for logos, headlines, letterheads and sport-themed designs." FORMAT: TTF, OTF 42. Zorus Serif Zorus Serif's antique glyphs have a French feel to themCreated by Canadian designer Jérémie Dupuis, Zorus Serif's antique glyphs have a distinctly gallic feel to them, and we think it'd be a perfect fit for a print project that needs a quirky, old-fashioned look. It's available in standard and italic versions. FORMAT: TTF, OTF 43. Streetwear Streetwear captures the spirit of American sports logos of the 60s and 70sA bold and stylish retro-inspired script font, Streetwear is suitable for logos, posters, branding, packaging and much more. Available from Behance, the website states: "Streetwear looks like 1960s and 70s fashion and sport-related typeface, unique and fun at the same time." Streetwear is free for both personal and commercial use. FORMAT: OTF Related articles: 30 free font resources The secrets of custom font development 20 perfect font pairings View the full article

A popular ecommerce platform sold in 60 countries suffers from a SQL injection vulnerability privately disclosed in April that has yet to be patched by the vendor. View the full article

Last week saw the reveal of a rebrand for the Science Museum created by consultancy North. The new look (on the right in the picture above, next to the old logo) is the first visual shake-up for the Science Museum in seven years, and upon being unveiled the rebrand stirred up some controversy in the creative community. The biggest name to chip in with a negative response was Johnson Banks – the agency behind the old branding scheme – which Tweeted that the rebrand was "a bit of a clunker". Cue Twitter storm and a deluge of designers slamming the Science Museum's new look. How to choose the right typeface for a brandMuch of the negative response was levelled at the new typography, which slims down as the lettering pans from left to right. 'Generic', 'cheap' and 'nasty' were amongst the insults thrown at the rebrand, but are these comments overstepping the mark? Was it, in fact, the right time for the Science Museum to bring in a new identity? Now the dust has settled and the full identity has been unveiled by North, the idea behind the rebrand has found an unlikely supporter in the shape of the very studio that loudly opposed to it: Johnson Banks. The new Science Museum branding includes animated typographyTime to change On the Johnson Banks blog, the design consultancy took the time to reflect on the Science museum rebrand and more in a post called "Why brands change". It opens with an oblique reference to its Tweet ("[t]he change of an organisation’s brand or logo brings many strong feelings to the surface") before going on to examine when and why it's time to update an identity. Kicking off its list of reasons looking at when it's a good time to rebrand is the idea that a new identity should tie into a "fundamental change in business circumstances – a merger, or a takeover, for example". In the case of the Science Museum rebrand, Johnson Banks explains that this seems to be the underlying reason for the revamp. The rebrand brings together different Science Museum Group membersThis is because the rebrand is part of a larger branding change that includes other institutions in what was NMSI – the National Museums of Science and Industry. London's Science Museum and the Science and Media Museum in Bradford are the first institutions to undergo the umbrella rebrand with others in the group expected to follow suit in the future. North creative director Sean Perkins echoed these ideas when he spoke to Design Week about the Science Museum rebrand. “This is about sharing the assets around the country rather than just focusing on London,” he reveals. “From York’s railway museum to visitors travelling to Bradford to see rockets, this is about helping people continue their journey through science. "There are strategic reasons and rationales behind this. It’s not about a logo or what it looks like, it’s there to do a job – it will bring the group together under one visual language." If it ain't broke... As well as talking about when the time's right for a rebrand, Johnson Banks also looks at when an identity should stay put. It explains that boredom is usually a motive for change, which often sets in after about three years. "Yet, paradoxically, about two-to-three years in is precisely when a new brand has just started to seep into the public consciousness, and arguably that’s exactly when a brand should become more consistent, not less," it points out. Gradient shading is at the heart of the new Science Museum brandThe next big reason a rebrand gets pushed through is simply because new directors have joined a team and they want to leave their mark by tinkering with a design. This isn't as accidental as it might sound though. "Every new business manager for every major branding company in the world keeps an eye out for changes at the top of major organisations," Johnson Banks explains, "because this is when existing branding schemes are at their most vulnerable, new brooms are brought in, and the sweeping starts." How designers should react Rounding off the blog post is a look at how brand designers should react when they see their work replaced by a new identity. "Going straight onto Twitter and saying ‘this is a bit of a clunker’ (as we did last week about the Science Museum’s change) is NOT to be advised. Whoops," Johnson Banks admits. In Johnson Banks defence though, it has put its hands up and delivered a constructive apology we can all learn from. It didn't even delete its Tweets in attempt to run away from the situation, so hats off to the team for that. We'll never know if Johnson Banks old brand could've worked on a larger scaleAs if that wasn't magnanimous enough, Johnson Banks has even reappraised the work by North. "We can see the ‘idea’ of the fading type working more successfully with the longer blocks of type, rather than the two-word version," it admits. "Our logo had become quickly recognisable as the Science Museum’s – but how would it have coped as the visual link across the group of museums? We’ll never know." It's tough, but trying to move on seems to be the best course of action. Although, as Johnson Banks confesses, this can be easier said than done. The branding blog post also covers other examples of when brands changed for the right reasons, so we recommend you head over and read the full article. In the meantime, just think before you Tweet. Related articles: 20 perfect font pairings Is no branding the best way to get attention? How to craft a brand voice View the full article

RubyGems patched an unsafe object deserialization vulnerability this week that could have allowed attackers to remotely execute code on vulnerable systems. View the full article

Learning how to draw hands can be difficult. In fact, most artists find drawing hands to be a challenge. But, much like knowing how to draw a face, it's a useful skill to have. The human hand is a complex and amazing piece of anatomy, and one of the most recognisable features in the whole of the animal kingdom, which is why it's crucial that we study to how to draw hands accurately. How can we begin to coordinate the odd tube-like fingers with the flattened palm and fleshy pads? It seems like when we begin to learning how to draw hands the perspective and volumes get tangled up. The human hand is one of our most recognisable features, so it's crucial to study them accurately In this tutorial, we'll learn how to draw a hand by looking inside to see the skeletal view and how the flesh lays over top. From here I will draw in simple shapes to describe the main forms of the hand. I'll explore how we can begin to break our simplified hand into a planar view using 3D shapes like cylinders and spheres. By breaking the hand into simpler forms and using contour to explore volumes, we can start to arrange the hand in a variety of poses without worrying too much about detail. In creating this tutorial, I found myself looking at my own two hands quite a bit. It's great to use your own hands as reference while trying this exercise out! I'm working digitally here but the same principles can be used with any drawing medium. If you're working traditionally, be sure to start out light and gradually build up volume and forms with heavier lead only toward the end of your study. 01. What's inside? Look at anatomical views so you're aware how the mechanism works The hand is comprised of bone, tendon, and lots of connective tissue as well as muscle and fat. It’s a very strong and flexible appendage. It can be helpful to sketch out skeletal studies of human anatomy in general but, when learning how to draw hands, a lot of the form we are used to is lost at the skeletal view. If we then overlay a surface view over top of the skeletal view, we can begin to appreciate where the skeleton sits inside our own hands. It's worth looking into anatomical views of the hand so you become aware of how the mechanism works. 02. Break it into shapes Simplifying forms will help you make sense of the basic shapes You can use my image as a base to draw this step over (hit the icon in the top right to enlarge it). From our skeletal view, we can lay in broad shapes to build the hand. We can use a flattened wedge like shape for the palm; rectangles for the digits and a teardrop shape for the thumb. When figuring how to draw hands, simplifying the forms like this will help take away the pressure of rendering out a perfect hand from the beginning. From here, we can begin to fill out the shapes into 3D forms to help us build the hand and pose it in perspective. 03. Build it in 3D and then observe Pay attention to finger proportions to keep hands looking naturalNow we can begin to turn the forms to make the hand feel more 3D! Our flattened wedge for the palm gains another dimension, the fingers become cylinders and the joints become spheres. We're going to call this view the planar view. By drawing through our forms, we can also show volume as I've done here with the palm pads. This is also a good time to work on proportion and placement. Notice how the palm is about as long as the middle finger (the green lines indicate this). Remember that the fingers are never the same length or perfectly straight. What sells this is imperfection. Note the blue lines indicating the angle at which the fingers end. We can also see that the middle finger stems straight from the middle of the hand. Paying attention to these proportions will help you ensure your hands look natural and accurate. 04. Pose the shapes Use 3D shapes to represent the fingers at this stageOnce you've drawn out the 3D version of our first hand, you can try out some poses of your own! As you need your own to learn how to draw hands, why not ask a friend or family member to help out? I've used my own hands as reference here, but used the planar view to help keep it simple. This way I can quickly draw out poses of hands without worrying too much about detail. Note the small diagram of the cylinder and sphere. Fingers can be unruly at times – it's best to keep them very simple and utilise 3D shapes to represent them at this stage. 05. Start with planes Concentrate on capturing proportion, perspective and volumeNow that you've had some fun with posing, pick a pose that you like and, using your own hand as reference, draw out your hand in the planar view. I've drawn in little cones that help indicate which way the cylinders are traveling. It can be helpful to do this so you're able to keep a grasp on where the curves of the cylinders need to bend. Again, I'm mostly concerned with keeping it simple at this stage and I’m not worried about detail. I want to capture proportion, perspective and volume. It's important to work lightly at this stage if you're using pencil. 06. Begin to find gesture and forms Use the planar view as a guide to help lay the forms Since I'm working digitally here, I will knock back the opacity of the planar drawing to begin to find the forms I see on my own hand. If you're working traditionally, simply begin to press harder with your pencil. From here, I can use the planar view as a guide to help me lay the forms of my hand as I look at it. I'm careful to take note of how the forms curve around each other and I'm also mindful of the silhouette of my hand. You can see where I've deviated from the pink line and instead used it as a guide to find where the forms turn in space. 07. Begin to lay in detail Now you can start to place details like creases Now we can push back the first two layers, or switch to a heavier lead to begin to lay in those details. You can see how helpful the construction of both the planar view drawing and the gesture drawing really help me place details like wrinkles and creases in the hand. I can also begin to place fingernails and render out the side of the palm. Read more: Draw a figure in under five minutes 20 phenomenally realistic pencil drawings How to draw a face View the full article

The art of typography, at first, looks pretty straightforward: choose a typeface, fiddle with the size and perhaps alter the colour, right? Wrong. The truth is, there's so much more to effective typesetting than that. Typography is an almost invisible art form; if successful, the care and attention put into setting type on a page will melt away effortlessly, leaving the content front and foremost in the eye of the reader. As a discipline it's really an act of facilitation – that is to say that it exists to help make the words and meaning the focus, providing a platform for it to shine through. The best 100 free fonts for designersIn other words, typography has to achieve a lot without all the bells, whistles and applause. So it's hardly surprising that it's often misunderstood and abused by designers who haven't been trained specifically in how to handle and set type. Here we've listed some of the biggest mistakes designers make when it comes to type, and how to avoid them in your own work... 01. Insufficient leading If leading is too tight, it makes the copy appear bunched upLeading is the space between two lines of type, and is named after the strips of lead used in original metal type press to ensure an adequate gap between the lines. In word processing software such as Microsoft Word, and on the web, it's referred to as line-spacing. Put simply, too little line-spacing makes the copy feel bunched up and hard to read. Similarly too much leads to a feeling of disconnection between the lines of type. There's no absolute hard-and-fast rule to choosing the right amount of leading, but an aesthetic judgement can be made based on how legible the text itself is. 02. Too much positive tracking Too much tracking can reduce readabilityTracking refers to the space between letters across an entire word or phrase. The greater the tracking, the more the characters that form a word will have space to either side. Designers commonly use tracking to adjust type so that it fits a particular line length perfectly, and while small adjustments are okay in these circumstances, adding too much tracking can reduce the legibility and readability of the copy. In general terms, leaving tracking (referred to as letter-spacing on the web) at the default value will provide the best legibility for a specific font. If you're using a font as a headline or display face, it's not uncommon to reduce the tracking to a value of up to -20 in order to make it appear heavier and more like a headline than it would untouched. 03. Confusing tracking and kerning Tracking and kerning are similar but not the sameDesigners can spend hours poring over the tracking and kerning of their typography. It's important, however, to understand that the two things are not synonymous. Tracking, as we've already mentioned above, deals with the spacing between characters across an entire word or phrase. Kerning is an adjustment of the specific space between two characters in particular. Kerning is often used to bring characters that naturally have a lot of white space around them closer to their neighbours. A good example is the combination of the letterforms W and A, which can sit closer together than most fonts will naturally place them, due to the complementary angles that make up their shapes. 04. Using too many faces and weights Too many fonts can make your copy appear cluttered and confusingOne of the biggest mistakes made by designers, especially those new to the discipline, is a tendency to use too many fonts and weights in a design. As a general principle, it's best practice to limit a piece of work to containing a maximum of three different fonts. Of course there are occasions where you'll need many more than three, but by introducing too many typefaces you'll unsettle the reader, and make the design feel disjointed. This effect can also be felt when using to many different weights within a specific font, although using the same font with different weights is a little more forgivable. 05. Failing to set reasonable line lengths Print titles normally limit their content's lines to a maximum of 75 charactersThis is another legibility issue that many designers fall foul of: excessive line lengths make it difficult for a reader to find their place on the next line, and can hamper understanding. In general it's worth taking a cue from newspapers and magazines, limiting your content's lines to a maximum of 75 characters. Of course there are times when this simply isn't possible, but if your content wraps to more than a couple of lines, you should make every effort to restrict the line length. 06. Inadequate contrast Insufficient contrast can make text difficult to readAs with many of the possibilities that modern software provides, just because you can do something, it doesn't mean that you should! One such example is where copy is rendered with insufficient contrast against its background, leading to difficulties reading and understanding the text. This can either be because the type is set using a colour that's too tonally similar to the background colour, or because it's placed on top of a tinted semi-transparent background that sits above an image. Either way, this mistake is easily avoided by scrunching up your eyes and checking that you can still make out the characters of your type (as this reduces your colour perception and makes it easier to discern the underlying tonality of different colours). 07. Centering text universally Only ever centre text if you have a good reason for doing soOne of the first things you'll often hear a designer say is that you should never centre text. We don't fully agree with that sentiment; there's definitely a time and place for centred text, and used wisely it can enhance a design significantly. However, novice designers often centre all their text in an attempt to create a sense of balance in their design. This is a critical error as the symmetry is both unsettling and difficult to read - especially in longer passages of text. Avoid centring text universally, and embrace the asymmetry of a design which features ragged lines, or use justified text where you need a solid block of copy. 08. Two spaces after a full stop The double-space after punctuation is an outdated conventionIn truth this isn't typically the fault of the designer, but it's worth highlighting simply because so many of these creep through into production. The double-space after a full stop (aka period or full point) is a hangover from the days of typewriters, and was (apparently) necessary to avoid placing the next character too close to the stop. Modern word processing software, desktop publishing tools, and web browsers all take this into account and can happily render type correctly without the need for this vestige of a bygone era. Let your copywriters know! Related articles: 40 free retro fonts 13 calligraphy fonts every designer should own Calvin Klein reveals new logo design View the full article

How're you coping with the daily demands of the Inktober? The challenge, which asks for artists to create ink drawings every day throughout October, is a popular task amongst illustrators. However, many people can find the medium and the pace of the challenge difficult. To help artists power through Inktober and make sure they get the most out of the medium, award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu has been sharing tips for how to draw in ink on her Instagram page. 14 fantasy artists to follow on Instagram"For me, doing this as a career, I ink pretty much every day of the year," Shimizu tells Creative Bloq. "But for the rest of us, it’s a great excuse and incentive to enjoy, and get better at the craft. It’s something you have to put time in, but when you are having fun, the learning process is not daunting. More power to Inktober!" We've rounded up five of Shimizu's ink drawing tips below, but be sure to follow her on Instagram for more illustration advice as the month progresses. Or, if you're after more guidance, take a look at our 7 tips for smashing Inktober 2017. 01. Do an underdrawing first Shimizu likes to create underdrawings with an HB pencilShimizu's first piece of advice for ink drawing is to hold fire on the inking itself. Instead, she recommends that artists put down an underdrawing to provide a basis for their work. "I find HB the best pencil for the purpose," she reveals on Instagram. "Anything harder than HB may leave scratch marks even after erasing, and anything softer would be easier to draw but harder to erase out completely and often leaves dark marks." If it's taking a while to create a sketch you're happy with, Shimizu suggests drawing on a separate piece of paper and only tracing over what's necessary onto a fresh sheet with the help of a light box. "This way, the underdrawing is light and clean, makes it easier to see the ink lines you are making, and easier to erase the underdrawing completely," she adds. 02. Ink from left to right Shimizu's careful hand ensured this intricate piece wasn't smudgedSeasoned veterans of ink drawing are sure to be familiar with this tip, but you're never so experienced you can't benefit from brushing up on the basics. By working from left to right, artists can prevent wet ink from smudging and create beautiful, crisp illustrations. While this tip is aimed at right handers, it can be easily adjusted for left handers, too. "If you are a lefty, move the other way around," says Shimizu. "This way, you have less chance of making an inky mess on your paper." 03. Keep underdrawings loose Aim for style and energy, not perfectionThis tip is a follow-up to Shimizu's first piece of advice about underdrawing. "f you have pretty advanced drawing skill, my advice is to go as loose as possible on underdrawing, and let the inking stage figure out each line you are putting down," she explains. "This makes the final ink drawing have a lot more energy and motion. The less you trace, the more energetic the result becomes." But what happens if you make a mistake when you're drawing? Don't worry, small errors can be worked out later, says Shimizu. "Move on, and revisit after the drawing is done, then you know your mistake is not that big of a deal," she says. "Some artists prefer perfection, but it is also true that it’s more charming when something is slightly off and imperfect." 04. Don't be afraid to start over Let's say you do make a big mistake, though, what should you do then? It's hard, but Shimizu recommends that you take the plunge and start over from scratch. On Twitter she demonstrated how this can improve your work by posting two versions of a similar image. The one on the left is the one that worked, while the one on the right was thrown away. "I liked how the faces and hair turned out, but I wanted all the kids to be wrapped in one scarf, and the wrap flow didn’t quite work," she said on Instagram. "I kept trying to fix it, but at some point, I had to give up. This was a tight deadline, and I honestly didn’t have much time to waste. I would have loved it if I didn't have to start over. But then, when things don’t work, they really don’t work. I just have to give up." When it came to the second attempt, though, Shimizu found the inking process much faster and smoother. This is because she already knew what wouldn't work, and how to fix any mistakes along the way. "Even the facial features that already worked in the first one, the second one worked even better!" she says. "So, don’t get scared of starting over. It’s a good thing!" 05. Watch Shimizu's ink drawing class for free You've got until Friday to watch Shimizu's ink drawing tutorial for freeFor a complete look at how Shimizu works, be sure to watch her Ink Drawing Techniques video series on Skillshare. In these videos you'll see how to select the best materials, as well as finding advice on how to work with textures, different types of nibs and paper. The series is made up of 14 videos that total over an hour of footage, so there's plenty to dig into and enjoy. Not only that, but until 13 October, the series can be yours to watch for absolutely free. You will have to sign up to Skillshare, but watching the videos won't cost you a penny. This is a rare chance to catch the advice of a master illustrator for nothing, so be sure not to miss it! Related articles: 10 amazing Inktober 2016 artists 18 illustrators to follow on Instagram The 23 best Illustrator brushes View the full article

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Ever had the feeling your project was just missing that final piece? Or maybe you're having trouble getting started on a new idea. When you need inspiration, you'll be able to find it in the ByPeople Premium Design Bundle. You can get a lifetime subscription now for just $39 (approx. £30)! There is no such thing as having too many assets to work with when you're in the design business. You can be armed with as many assets as you could possibly need with lifetime access to the ByPeople Premium Design Bundle. This bundle provides designers with unrestricted access to all the contents of Designshock, Iconshock and TemplateShock – all top, trusted sources that designers love. Get all the icons, logos, avatars, cartoons, templates, and brushes you need for any project in this massive bundle. Lifetime membership to the ByPeople Premium Design Asset Bundle is valued at $129, but you can save 69% off the retail price. That means you'll pay just $39 (approx. £30) for this bundle. It's a must-have for any designer, so grab it today! Creative Bloq deals This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life. We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more. Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com. View the full article

When you start using Adobe Photoshop, it can be a complex and time-consuming tool to get to grips with (subscribe to the Creative Cloud here). However, the more you use it, the more time-saving shortcuts you learn to use to improve your workflow. We decided to speed up your learning process with this Photoshop shortcuts cheat sheet; an infographic that is packed with shortcuts for all manner of image editing functions. And it just happens to be a useful memory-jogger for experienced Photoshoppers, too! To find out exactly what each shortcut does, head to our more detailed Photoshop shortcuts article. Why not pin our infographic to your Pinterest board so you have instant access to all the PS shortcuts you'll ever need? Click on the image to see the whole infographic Click on the image to see the full-size infographic Designer: Jo Gulliver Related articles: 5 best laptops for Photoshop How to manage colours in Photoshop 95 top Photoshop tutorials View the full article

eCommerce has become so popular in recent years it's now hard to imagine a future without it. The power of the internet has made connecting with customers a breeze for businesses and brands, and eCommerce, for the most part, is the easiest way to deliver products to their audience. Foundation's Building Blocks library of coded UI components are designed to make it easier to reach a final product faster. Unlike templates, Building Blocks don't dictate how your site should look or be structured. They simply provide you the tools to build up your own custom look and feel much faster. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to build a static eCommerce website from scratch using the eCommerce Kit, a curated collection of Building Blocks that are designed to help you build specific kinds of websites. Though this scaffold is a prototype, the Building Blocks we're using and layout we end up with can be applied to any system. Getting started Building Blocks don’t dictate how your site should look The first thing we need to do is set up an environment to build the site. For this tutorial, you'll need to first download node.js. Once that's installed, you'll want to install the Foundation CLI using the command npm install -g foundation-cli. Now that you have Foundation installed on your system, let's start up a new Foundation project by using the command foundation new ecommerce-site. In the list that follows, select the first option, 'A website (Foundation for Sites)', type in our project name 'ecommerce-site ', and then select 'ZURB Template'. This will start up a Foundation template and development server so that we can easily begin building our website. Run npm start in the terminal to run the project. Next, let's take a look behind the code of our new project by opening it up in a text editor. In here, you'll find a sample page in 'src/pages/index.html' containing some default template material. We're going to remove all of the code here. Installing a Kit Before we write any code, we're going to pull in Foundation's eCommerce Kit with Foundation's CLI. Head to your terminal and use the command foundation kits install ecommerce. If this command doesn't work, double-check that your Foundation CLI is updated to 2.2.3. To check which version you're on, run foundation -v in your terminal. If you need to update, simply uninstall the CLI with npm uninstall -g foundation-cli and reinstall it with npm install -g foundation-cli. This just downloaded all of the Building Blocks inside of our eCommerce Kit! Any time you install a Building Block, it will appear in src/partials/building-blocks. You'll know that your Kit installed correctly if all of the Building Blocks have been automatically imported into your app.scss file. Some of these Building Blocks include icons from Font Awesome, so you'll want to either manually install them or add their CDN to the <head> of your site. To do this, navigate to src/layouts/default.html and add <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.7.0/css/font-awesome.css" rel="stylesheet"> between the <head> tags. Scaffolding the site Mix and match blocks to achieve your ideal eCommerce layout Let's get to building! With our Kit installed, these next couple of steps will feel a bit like playing with LEGO: in your own projects, you can choose to use all of them, or you can use just a selection. Feel free to mix and match Building Blocks to achieve your dream eCommerce layout. For this tutorial, the first two Blocks we'll start with are header and promo hero. To do this, we're going to use the Handlebars partial mechanism. In our empty index.html file, let's throw in the partials {{> ecommerce-header}} and {{> ecommerce-promo-hero}}. With just these two Building Blocks, our eCommerce landing page already looks about half-way done. Next, we'll throw in some product cards below our hero section. To use the product card Building Block, we'll use Foundation's block grid so that the cards sit evenly within a grid. This will also make it easier to change the layout of these cards later. Let's start with <div class="row small-up-2 medium-up-5">. Inside this div, throw in ten columns with the product card inside of each column <div class="column">{{> ecommerce-product-card}}</div>. We want to give our customers a way to get to more of our products, so let's add a callout button beneath our product cards. First we need to create our <div class="row column text-center"> so that our button will be centred on the page. Next, we'll use the Foundation button component to create our callout. Add a <button class="button">Shop All Products</button> inside of the .row.column. The page feels almost complete now, but let's also add a header between our hero and product cards to give a little bit of context. Under the hero, add a <div class="row column"> to contain our header <h1>Newest Arrivals</h1>. Most eCommerce home pages have more promotional content below their products. Let's use the Building Block {{> ecommerce-hero-slider-small}} here. To prevent the slider from spanning the width of the page, we will wrap it around a <div class="row column">. Since eCommerce sites typically consist of many pages, most will require a mega footer with lots of links to handle the volume of pages. Our eCommerce Kit comes with a footer for this exact use case. To wrap up this scaffold, let's drop in the {{> ecommerce-footer}} at the very bottom of our HTML. Check for responsiveness These days, it's hard for any site to get by without being mobile-friendly. This is especially true for eCommerce sites. Now that online shopping has become the norm, we don't want to lose that percentage of users who do this through their mobile phones. Following our motto of mobile-first, Foundation's Building Blocks are built to be naturally responsive. A quick check on a smaller screen shows that our site is still looking pretty good. However, when we click on the hamburger menu, our off-canvas hasn't been properly hooked up. This part gets a little tricky, but don't worry! We'll break down what's happening in this off-canvas menu and then walk through how to hook it up. If you take a look into the ecommerce-header.html file, you'll notice that this header has an off-canvas built into it. So, why didn't it work? When we clicked on the hamburger menu, the only thing that was 'pushed' was the header. The rest of the page remained in view, causing some strange overlapping. This is because this header was built to work on its own, but in reality it needs to work with the entire page. In other words, it needs to push all of the content on the page over when the off-canvas menu is triggered, not just the header menu. This ecommerce-header was written like this because setting up an off-canvas requires diving into your src/layouts/default.html page, which is beyond the Building Block's reach. This is what we’re currently seeing because the off-canvas hasn't been hooked up yetTo fix this, all we need to do is take everything inside of <div class="off-canvas ecommerce-header-off-canvas position-left" id="ecommerce-header" data-off-canvas> and move it into src/layouts/default.html. Next, we're going to wrap the {{> body}} of our site inside of a <div class="off-canvas-content" data-off-canvas-content>. This will push the body of our site when off-canvas is triggered. Now when we click on our hamburger, the entire site moves over for the off-canvas menu! The body of our default.html page should look like this: Conclusion We've shown you how to jump-start your eCommerce site with Foundation's eCommerce Kit, but don't stop there! There are over 100 Building Blocks that can be used to help enhance your pages. In a matter of minutes, we've scaffolded a static eCommerce site with Building Blocks. This saves you a great deal of time that you can now use to layer in the visuals and style the site to fit your brand. Even if you're taking this further and using a back-end system, different partial mechanism or have another way of getting your data into the site, the given workflow with Building Blocks will really save you time and therefore money. Foundation's Building Blocks are a great way to get started because they're meant to be extended upon, fit into your existing styles, and be used in any application system. This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 266. Buy it here. Related articles: Build a card-based UI with Foundation 10 beautiful new ecommerce sites you must see How to improve the performance of ecommerce sites View the full article

Being a creative student is a weird, topsy-turvy feeling. On the one hand, you feel like you’re a success already. After all, you got on the course, which is no mean feat in itself. You’ve worked hard, and you earned the respect of your peers and your teachers. At times, you’re feeling good about your prospects, and ready to take on the world. But then there are those darker moments, when you get The Fear. Maybe you’re not as good as you think. What if nobody wants you? When you go for a job, will you be outclassed by rivals? Will your future be full of disappointment and bitterness? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Swinging between optimism and pessimism is just part of the student experience, so if your ambition is to work at a top creative agency, don’t let it put you off. Instead, put all your emotional energies into taking practical action, and confidence and certainty will eventually come as a result. Here, we lay out seven steps to achieving your dream... 01. Interrogate your motives Is working at a big firm like W+K London really your dream, or is it other people’s?Before you devote yourself to landing a job at a top agency, you first need to work out whether you’re fully committed. Be honest: is this truly your dream, or that of your parents, teachers or friends? Would you be better off working at a smaller, less well-known agency, where you’d probably get given more responsibilities right off the bat? In fact, you don’t even have to work at an agency at all: there are many great opportunities working as an in-house designer. Or if you’ve already got a flow of freelance work going, you could even just go freelance full-time. If you decide that working at a top agency is your undying goal, then great. But it’s a tough road ahead, so you really have to be sure you’re genuinely committed, and willing to put in 100 per cent… or it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed. 02. Do your research Top agencies like Pentagram have a ton of information and case studies on their sites, so take advantage and read everything thoroughlyThere’s one thing you must know about the seniors with the power to give you a job at a top agency: they have busy schedules and are constantly short of time. So if they give up vital minutes to read your CV, design portfolio or covering letter, or to chat to you in a job interview, they’re making a big sacrifice. And if you give the impression that you couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to properly research or understand the company you’re applying to work at… well, they’re not going to be happy, to say the least. The good news is that, by definition, a well-known agency should be a doddle to research. So hoover up all the information you can glean from its website, its LinkedIn page and its social media accounts. Scour any mentions or press coverage of them on Google. Seek out insightful nuggets of info you might be able slip into conversations where relevant. That said, if you do get a job interview, don’t spit out facts like a machine: that’s just embarrassing. It’s not about showing off your knowledge of the company; it’s about being prepared for anything they ask you. And even if they don’t test your knowledge at all, that preparation will give you an inner sense of confidence that will be just as impressive. 03. Work on your passion projects Gavin Strange combines a full time job with Aardman with being a dad and completing multiple side projects. So what excuse do you have?You’ll find plenty of advice on Creative Bloq about the mechanics of applying for a job, from the things employers are looking for in your portfolio to 20 tips for design interview success and how to create the perfect resume. But when you’re applying for a job at a top creative agency, you have to assume that your biggest rivals will have nailed all these areas too. So what is it that will get you noticed, and truly swing the jury? Ultimately, when it comes to students and graduates, top creative agencies are looking for one, all-compassing thing: high-quality work. But at this stage in your career it’s unlikely you’ll have worked on many, or any, real-world client projects, so this is really going to fall down to your passion projects. What have you been working on, on the side, that conveys what you’re about, gives a sense of your personal style, and shows the kind of work you enjoy doing? (Conversely, if you don’t have any passion projects to show, then it’s basically a sign you have no passion, which is not going to get you very far at all.) So think about what really inspires you, and get moving. Can’t find time? Cancel your Netflix. Visit the pub less. Get up two hours earlier. You’re creative, so find creative ways to manage your schedule and create more time for what you enjoy doing. For more advice on this, check out our guide to Why you should make time for passion projects. 04. Enter competitions Winning a D&AD New Blood award can be a huge boost to your careerCreating impressive side projects is only one side of the coin. You need to let the world know about them, and hopefully get them liking and sharing them. The obvious way to do that is via an online platform like Behance or Dribbble, as well as on your own portfolio site and social media accounts. But one thing students often forget about – or lack the confidence to enter – is student design competitions. There’s no real downside to entering, because even if you’re not successful, nobody’s really going to know. And if you are successful, it’s a great way for you to get on the radar of top creative agencies, either because they’re following the contest themselves, or because the winners’ work gets shared by the design press and social media. Not all student design contests are equal, of course, and many lie on a spectrum between time-wasters and out-and-out scams. But others, such as the annual D&AD New Blood Awards, are well established and highly respected. Your tutors should be able to advise you on the best contests to enter for your discipline and skillset. 05. Network, network, network Design conferences, such as our own Generate event, can be a great way to network in the physical world It won’t surprise you to hear that jobs at top design agencies aren’t always awarded to the person who wrote the best covering letter, or even to the person with the best portfolio. A lot of it comes down to ‘cultural fit’: a vague, nebulous term that essentially means they like you on a personal level and think you will interact well with others in their team. Convincing them that you can do so is a lot easier if they know something of you already. So the more you can get your face out there and network, the better your chances. And that applies to both online and physical networking. So if there’s someone you really admire and would like to work for, why not send them a polite email asking for advice? Or check the conferences they’re attending on LinkedIn, and stroll up to introduce yourself in person? It’s important not to become too stalker-y, of course, but you’d be surprised at how often busy people appreciate the direct approach. 06. Be confident but not cocky Confidence will help you stand out, but cockiness is a turnoffFollowing on from that last point, when you’re seeking a job at a top design firm, you need to be direct about what you want. It’s unlikely that your passion project will be so brilliant that they will come to you and beg you to take a job. So at some point, you’re going to need to ask them for it, whether that’s through a formal application process, a chat in a conference bar, or somewhere in between. But being direct doesn’t mean being cocky, and being humble and friendly works better than being aggressive and pushy, in the creative industries at least. Steam in thinking you’re the big I-am, then, and you’re heading for a fall. Instead, balance self-belief with a recognition that you have a lot to learn (and are keen to do so). Hit that sweet spot, and people will be interested. For more advice, read How to thrive as a young designer. 07. Celebrate your mistakes Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes, use them to your advantageWhen you’re at student or graduate level, you’ll have had more design failures than successes. So your natural inclination when interviewing will be to bend the truth and make out that you’ve achieved more than you really have. But that can be hugely counterproductive. Your employers have been around the block a few times, and will be able to sniff out exaggeration and false claims at a thousand paces. After all, they were once in the same seat as you, and as the saying goes, you can’t BS a BSer. But the good news is, design is not just about results, it’s about process. And if you can demonstrate that you’ve not only made design mistakes, but can identify how you would do it differently next time, that can be pretty impressive in itself. We’re not saying put terrible design work in your portfolio, of course; that would be dumb. But just remember that we all make mistakes – at senior level as well as junior – and an ability to demonstrate that you can learn from them shows a level of maturity that will set you apart from many a graduate. For more advice on getting work as a graduate, read our 5 golden rules for getting your first design job. Read more: 5 design agencies that do things differently 5 uses for stock images you might not have thought of 6 rock-solid ways to improve your graphic design portfolio View the full article

You're reading Explore and Share Your Skills with Skillshare, the Learning Platform for Creatives, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! Two years ago, I became a subscriber to Skillshare, a community of learners and creators. The creative director of a project I’ve been working for sent me an invite. Since then, I’ve been a loyal follower. Why? Because “the future belongs to the curious.” Designmodo readers can also enjoy two months of premium learning, which […] View the full article