The Best Ways to Quickly Publish a Blog or Website

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Original Source: https://inspiredm.com/the-best-ways-to-quickly-publish-a-blog-or-website/

Every business needs an online presence. A blog or a website is necessary, and it is preferable to have both at once. Social media is optional, although some would have you think otherwise.

The principle purpose of your social media, if you have it, should be to help boost the profile of your blog or website. The opposite is not true.

The importance of having a website or blog is so determinative in terms of reaching the full potential your business can achieve that it’s really not something you should delay implementing for too long.

Before you can sell or persuade, people need to be able to find you. The easiest way to get found is to have a website telling people who you are, where you are, what you have, and why they should do business with you.

You need that online presence established now. So what’s the best way to achieve that goal as quickly as possible? That’s the topic of this article.

First, have some idea of what you want to say

Far too often business owners rush to get their website online without actually having anything meaningful to say. As mentioned above, the minimum your website should contain is:

Who you are – the company name, and optionally the names behind the name
Where you are – the physical location of your business (city, at least)
What you have – description and images of the goods and services you offer
Why people should do business with you – there are thousands of other businesses competing with yours for attention. You must have some competitive advantage to help you stand out from others, and you’ll need to make it as obvious as you can.

illustration courtesy of deomis ?

Those are the bare minimums you should include on your website or blog, but you can certainly include more information. You can never have too much content on your site, you can only have too little.

But quantity of content is not what you’re really aiming for. Quality is the most important factor, and that is in terms of:

The usefulness of the information to your audience
The presentation of the information
The user experience (UX) factor

Should you fail on any of these criteria, the success of your site will suffer, and in turn the success of your business will be affected.

The golden rule of business websites is you should publish quickly, but never without a plan.

Site should be adapted to fit the content

Another common mistake many people make is to choose pre-made templates and then massage their content to fit the style of the template. This is a wrong approach for many reasons.

The main reason is because it limits what you can show, which will diminish the usefulness and presentation of the information (two of our main criteria listed above). The other reason is because your site risks being too generic. It won’t stand out because it lacks sufficient customization.

If you’re not great at coding and design, go ahead and use a generic template, but choose one that is very open and easy to modify later. A template that is too complex may look “impressive” but it will make it much more difficult for you to update your site in the future.

illustration courtesy of DAN Gartman

Keep your focus on the content

Everyone wants a good looking website, but that should not be your priority in the initial stages. Your priority should be to get your content online so Google can start indexing your content as soon as possible.

Once your content is published, you can go back in and add things to make it look more beautiful. Getting page rank is more important because Google is more likely to see your page before any humans do, and the robots from Google care more about things like quality content and accessibility than they do about aesthetics.

In fact, they’ll possibly rank you higher initially for a website that doesn’t have a lot of background design because the page will load that much faster. After genuinely improving the look of the site, it’s unlikely you will lose rank.

Getting attention from Google early is good for you because apparently Google keeps the rank of a new site artificially low for some time after it is created. Once your site has been online for sufficient time, Google allows it to rank naturally. For some reason, Google equates longevity with trust.

In general it takes around six months for Google to stop thinking of your site as a “new” site, and at that point you will normally see some improvement in your page rank as long as you haven’t ignored any other SEO factors that would be detrimental to your rank.

Choose an appropriate publishing technology

There are plenty of different ways to publish a website, but remember that our goal is to get our site online as quickly as possible. You don’t want to rush it too hastily and publish without a plan, but you also don’t want to be waiting weeks to get online because every day counts.

With it taking approximately six months to attain rank, every extra day is costing you potential business and page position. So let’s cut to the chase.

You need to choose a publishing platform that will allow you to get up and running in the fastest time. Currently the two leading contenders in this category are SquareSpace and WordPress.

Rather than going through all the details of comparing them here in this article, we’ll just link you to a comparison that already exists. Go check out this excellent side-by-side comparison of SquareSpace vs WordPress and then come back to read the rest of this article to find out what to do next.

illustration courtesy of Kevin Yang

Build the site

Now that you’ve chosen an appropriate technology to help you get your site online quickly, and you have a solid plan of what you’re going to create, it’s time to actually build it.

This doesn’t have to be your final website design. In fact, what you create at this stage may look nothing like your eventual website will look. The important thing is getting your content online and indexed by Google. All the beautification can be done at a later time.

You’ll simply begin adding your content in an appropriate way to the site template you’re using. Ideally we think it should be the simplest and least feature-rich template possible, so you can come back later and customize it heavily (and you’ll avoid that generic website look), but it’s fine if you find some awesome template that you can’t resist.

Just remember to make it sufficiently different to what everyone else using the same template has done, or you’ll look like you don’t care about creating a good site.

If you have skills to design and code the site yourself, go right ahead and do it. If you don’t have much confidence in your skills, consider hiring people to help you out

You’ll save time by getting help, so your site will be online faster. You’ll also have the chance to use the time you save to learn the skills you need to learn, which could be valuable in the future.

Test the site

Launching without testing is a fatal mistake. This doesn’t just mean opening it up in a browser and looking at it. You need to actually have somebody read the site and give you feedback. The more people who do this, the better.

Take notes at this stage, but don’t do anything with them. That’s for your redesign stage that comes after launching your site.

illustration courtesy of Anton Fritsler (kit8)

Launch the site

Congratulations, you are ready for your site to go live. Remember this is not your actual site that you’ll be keeping in perpetuity. It is your early version site that you’re just publishing as quickly as possible for a robot to read.

Once you’ve launched the site, the clock starts ticking on your first robot read, and the six month wait to get a proper Google rank begins reducing from that point forward. But this is no time to rest on your laurels.

Start your redesign immediately after launch

This is the time you will return to the feedback you received and start making improvements. You’ll update the design, add new content, fix and extend the navigation, create internal and high value external links, and you’ll do all this while following the best practices to avoid the wrath of Google from descending upon you.

The three reasons you waited until now to do the redesign include:

You need the content up quickly. That’s the priority every time, as long as the content itself is correct and not full of errors. Do spend some time to craft that, and also consider hiring a professional copywriter to create compelling content for you.
Google rewards you for updating your content, and the more regularly it’s updated, the better. The exception is if you update your content with duplicate content that was lifted from another site. That will have negative consequences.
You have plenty of time now to relax and do the job properly, crafting an incredibly good design with no pressure. You’ll get the best result and you can easily slide that clever background design and extra functionality in behind your existing content.

Publishing your website quickly is a great idea, and if you follow the advice above, you’ll get the best results while avoiding the common mistakes that lead to failure.

header image courtesy of Sean Farrell

The post The Best Ways to Quickly Publish a Blog or Website appeared first on Inspired Magazine.

The Rise Of Intelligent Conversational UI

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Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/rise-intelligent-conversational-ui/

The Rise Of Intelligent Conversational UI

The Rise Of Intelligent Conversational UI

Burke Holland

2018-04-05T13:00:48+02:00
2018-04-05T15:49:05+00:00

For a long time, we’ve thought of interfaces strictly in a visual sense: buttons, dropdown lists, sliders, carousels (please no more carousels). But now we are staring into a future composed not just of visual interfaces, but of conversational ones as well. Microsoft alone reports that three thousand new bots are built every week on their bot framework. Every. Week.

The importance of Conversational UI cannot be understated, even if some of us wish it wasn’t happening.

The most important advancement in Conversational UI has been Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is the field of computing that deals not with deciphering the exact words that a user said, but with parsing out of it their actual intent. If the bot is the interface, NLP is the brain. In this article, we’re going to take a look at why NLP is so important, and how you (yes, you!) can build your own.

Speech Recognition vs. NLP

Most people will be familiar with Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri or Google Home, all of which have an interface that is primarily conversational. They are also all using NLP.

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Aside from these intelligent assistants, most Conversational UIs have nothing to do with voice at all. They are text driven. These are the bots we chat with in Slack, Facebook Messenger or over SMS. They deliver high quality gifs in our chats, watch our build processes and even manage our pull requests.

Getting workflow just right ain’t an easy task. So are proper estimates. Or alignment among different departments. That’s why we’ve set up ‘this-is-how-I-work’-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore features →

Smashing TV, with live sessions for professional designers and developers.

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Conversational UIs built on text are nice because there is no speech recognition component. The text is already parsed.

When it comes to a verbal interaction, the fundamental problem is not recognizing the speech. We’ve mostly got that one down.

OK, so maybe it’s not perfect. I still get voicemails every day like a game of Mad Libs that I never asked to play. iOS just sticks a blank line in whenever they don’t know what exactly was said.

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Google, on the other hand, just tries to guess. Like this one from my father. I have absolutely no idea what this message is actually trying to say other than “Be Safe” which honestly sounds like my mom, and not my dad. I have a hard time believing he ever said that. I don’t trust the computer.

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I’m picking on voice mail transcriptions here, which might be the hardest speech recognition to do given how degraded the audio quality is.

Nevertheless, speech recognition is largely a solved problem. It’s even built right into Chrome and it works remarkably well.

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After we solved the problem of speech recognition, we started to use it everywhere. That was unfortunate because speech recognition on it’s own doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. Interfaces that rely soley on speech recognition require the user to state things a precise way and they can only state the limited number of exact words or phrases that the interface knows about. This is not natural. This is not how a conversation works.

Without NLP, Conversational UI can be true nightmare.

Conversational UI Without NLP

We’re probably all familiar with automated phone menus. These are known as Interactive Voice Response systems — or IVRs for short. They are designed to take the place of the traditional operator and automatically transfer callers to the right place without having to talk to a human. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. In practice, it’s mostly just you waiting while a recorded voice reads out a list of menu items that “may have changed.”

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A 2011 study from New York University found that 83% of people feel IVR systems “provide either no benefit at all, or only a cost savings benefit to the company.” They also noted that IVR systems “score lower than any other service option.” People would literally rather do anything else than use an automated phone menu.

NLP has changed the IVR market rather significantly in the past few years. NLP can pick a user’s intent out of anything they say, so it’s better to just let them say it and then determine if you support the action.

Check out how AT&T does it.

AT&T has a truly intelligent Conversational UI. It uses NLP to let me just state my intent. Also, notice that I don’t have to know what to say. I can fumble all around and it still picks out my intent.

AT&T also uses information that it already has (my phone number) and then leverages text messaging to send me a link to a traditional visual UI, which is probably a much better UX for making a payment. NLP drives the whole experience here. Without it, the rest of the interaction would not be nearly as smooth.

NLP is powerful, but more importantly, it is also accessible to developers everywhere. You don’t have to know a thing about Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to use it. All you need to how to do is make an AJAX call. Even I can do that!

Building An NLP Interface

So much of Machine Learning still remains inaccessible to developers. Even the best YouTube videos on the subject quickly become hard to follow with subjects like Neural Networks and Gradient Descents. We have, however, made significant progress in the field of Language Processing, to the point that it’s accessible to developers of nearly any skill level.

Natural Language Processing differs based on the service, but the overall idea is that the user has an intent, and that intent contains entities. That means exactly nothing to you at the moment, so let’s work up a hypothetical Home Automation bot and see how this works.

The Home Automation Example

In the field of Natural Language Processing, the canonical “Hello World” is usually a Home Automation demo. This is because it helps to clearly demonstrate the fundamental concepts of NLP without overloading your brain.

A Home Automation Bot is a service that can control hypothetical lights in a hypothetical house. For instance, we might want to say “Turn on the kitchen lights”. That is our intent. If we said “Hello”, we are clearly expressing a different intent. Inside of that intent, there are two pieces of information that we need to complete the action:

The ‘Location’ of the light (kitchen)
The desired state of the lights ‘Power’ (on/off)

These (Location, Power) are known as entities.

When we are finished designing our NLP interface, we are going to be able to call an HTTP endpoint and pass it our intent: “Turn on the kitchen lights.” That endpoint will return to us the intent (Control Lights) and two objects representing our entities: Location and Power. We can then pass those into a function which actually controls our lights…

function controlLights(location, power) {
console.log(`Turning ${power} the ${location} lights`);

// TODO: Call an imaginary endpoint which controls lights
}

There are a lot of NLP services out there that are available today for developers. For this example, I’m going to show the LUIS project from Microsoft because it is free to use.

LUIS is a completely visual tool, so we won’t actually be writing any code at all. We’ve already talked about Intents and Entities, so you already know most of the terminology that you need to know to build this interface.

The first step is to create a “Control Lights” intent in LUIS.

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Before I do anything with that intent, I need to define my Location and Power entities. Entities can be different types — kind of like types in a programming language. You can have dates, lists and even entities that are related to other entities. In this case, Power is a list of values (on, off) and Location is a simple entity, which can be any value.

It will be up to LUIS to be smart enough to figure out exactly what the Location is.

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Now we can begin to train this model to understand all of the different ways that we might ask it to control the lights in a different location. Let’s think of all the different ways that we could do that:

Turn off the kitchen lights;
Turn off the lights in the office;
The lights in the living room, turn them on;
Lights, kitchen, off;
Turn off the lights (no location).

As I feed these into the Control Lights intent as utterances, LUIS tries to determine where in the intent the entities are. You can see that because Power is a discreet list of values, it gets that right every time.

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But it has no idea what a Location even is. LUIS wants us to go through this list and tell it where the Location is. That’s done by clicking on a word or group of words and assigning to the right entity. As we are doing this, we are really creating a machine learning model that LUIS is going to use to statistically estimate what qualifies as a Location.

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When I’m done telling LUIS where in these utterances all the locations are, my dashboard looks like this…

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Now we train the model by clicking on the “Train” button at the top. Do you feel like a data scientist yet?

Now I can test it using the test panel. You can see that LUIS is already pretty smart. The Power is easy to pick out, but it can actually pick out Locations it has never seen before. It’s doing what your brain does — using the information that it has to make an educated guess. Machine Learning is equal parts impressive and scary.

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If we try hard enough, we can fool the AI. The more utterances we give it and label, the smarter it will get. I added 35 utterances to mine before I was done and it is close to bullet proof.

So now we get to the important part, which is how we actually use this NLP in an app. LUIS has a “Publish” menu option which allows us to publish our model to the internet where it’s exposed via a single HTTP endpoint. It will look something like this…

https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/luis/v2.0/apps/c4396135-ee3f-40a9-8b83-4704cddabf7a?subscription-key=19d29a12d3fc4d9084146b466638e62a&verbose=true&timezoneOffset=0&q=

The very last part of that query string is a q= variable. This is where we would pass our intent.

https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/luis/v2.0/apps/c4396135-ee3f-40a9-8b83-4704cddabf7a?subscription-key=19d29a12d3fc4d9084146b466638e62a&verbose=true&timezoneOffset=0&q=turn on the kitchen lights

The response that we get back looks is just a JSON object.

{
“query”: “turn on the kitchen lights”,
“topScoringIntent”: {
“intent”: “Control Lights”,
“score”: 0.999999046
},
“intents”: [
{
“intent”: “Control Lights”,
“score”: 0.999999046
},
{
“intent”: “None”,
“score”: 0.0532306843
}
],
“entities”: [
{
“entity”: “kitchen”,
“type”: “Location”,
“startIndex”: 12,
“endIndex”: 18,
“score”: 0.9516622
},
{
“entity”: “on”,
“type”: “Power”,
“startIndex”: 5,
“endIndex”: 6,
“resolution”: {
“values”: [
“on”
]
}
}
]
}

Now this is something that we can work with as developers! This is how you add NLP to any project — with a single REST endpoint. Now you’re free to create a bot with some real brains!

Brian Holt used the browser speech API and a LUIS model to create a voice powered calculator that is running right inside of CodePen. Chrome is required for the speech API.

See the Pen Voice Calculator by Brian Holt (@btholt) on CodePen.

Bot Design Is Still Hard

Having a smart bot is only half the battle. We still need to account for any of the actions that our system might expose, and that can lead to a lot of different logical paths which makes for messy code.

Conversations also happen in stages, so the bot needs to be able to intelligently direct users down the right path without frustrating them or being unable to recover when something goes wrong. It needs to be able to recover when the conversation dies midstream and then starts again. That’s a whole other article and I’ve included some resources below to help.

When it comes to language understanding, the AI platforms are mature and ready to use today. While that won’t help you perfectly design your bot, it will be a key component to building a bot that people don’t hate.

Great UI Is Just Great UI

A final note: As we saw from the AT&T example, a truly smart interface combines great speech recognition, Natural Language Processing, different types of conversational UI (speech and text) and even a visual UI. In short, great UI is just that — great UI — and it is not a zero sum game. Great UIs will leverage all of the technology available to provide the best possible user experience.

Special thanks to Mat Velloso for his input on this article.

Further Resources:

“Principles Of Bot Design,” Microsoft Azure (Doc written by Mat Velloso, Kamran Iqbal, and Robert Standefer)
“Conversational Design Essentials: Tips For Building A Chatbot,” Anton Skorniakov, Smashing Magazine
“Language Understanding Tutorials,” LUIS, Microsoft Azure

Smashing Editorial
(rb, ra, yk, il)

How to Change macOS Screenshot File Format

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Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/change-macos-screenshot-file-format/

Learn how to change the default .PNG file format of macOS screenshots into any other format.

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Collective #403

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/FEbYiJbkAIo/

C403_designres

Public Design Vault

Public Design Vault is a curated directory of 500+ design tools and resources for public good.

Check it out

C403_Udemy

Our Sponsor
Ever find yourself thinking “I wish I could do that?”

With Udemy, you can. From web development to digital marketing to cooking courses, Udemy has something for everyone for as low as $10.99. Plus, each course comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee for risk-free learning.

Pick your course

C403_palette

Site Palette

A browser extension that extracts the essential colors of a website.

Check it out

C403_console

Consola

An easy-to-use console logger with a fancy output style.

Check it out

C403_logical

Understanding Logical Properties And Values

A great article by Rachel Andrew where she explains logical properties and values in CSS.

Read it

C403_Tensorflow

Introducing TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning in Javascript

Read about TensorFlow.js, an open-source JavaScript library for defining, training and running machine learning models in the browser.

Read it

C403_customprop

Contextual styling with custom properties

An interesting article that describes how to have multiple themes on the same page using custom properties.

Read it

C403_rssrevival

It’s Time for an RSS Revival

A nice reminder on how great RSS is by giving us updates on the content that we really care about.

Read it

C403_lineheight

Cropping Away Negative Impacts of Line Height

In case you missed it: Kevin Powell shows how to get rid of pesky space above and below HTML text.

Read it

C403_glitch

Glitch Opens Up: Welcome!

Read about the future of Glitch which is now out of beta.

Read it

C403_hackernewsapp

Building a HackerNews Clone in VueJS

Learn how to build a simplistic version of HackerNews in VueJS from scratch in this tutorial series.

Read it

C403_jsml

11 JavaScript Machine Learning Libraries To Use In Your App

Jonathan Saring shares some libraries which bring JavaScript, Machine Learning, DNN and even NLP together.

Read it

C403_instagram

Instagram Terminal Feed

A fun project made by Bill Cheng.

Check it out

C403_robots

The Famous Robots Icon Set

A fantastic freebie of 20 robot icons in AI, SVG and PNG. Designed by Iconshock.

Get it

C403_radial

Animated SVG Radial Progress Bars

Dave Rupert shows how to create a circular progress indicator.

Read it

C403_goo

Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

Read about Google’s plan to retire its URL Shortener service.

Read it

C403_font

Free Font: Riviera

Rachel Woodby designed this interesting display typeface.

Get it

C403_define

Define

A command-line dictionary (thesaurus) app with access to multiple sources, written in Go.

Check it out

C403_Backgroundcolor

Solved With CSS! Colorizing SVG Backgrounds

Una Kravets shares a CSS trick for coloring background images using filters.

Read it

C403_listmindmap

Text2MindMap

An online tool for making mind maps by writing indented lists.

Check it out

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From Our Blog
Expanding Grid Menu

A CSS Grid powered menu with a box look inspired by the effect seen in the “Ableton Live 10: What’s New” video.

Check it out

Collective #403 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

ES6 in Action: New String Methods — String.prototype.*

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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/es6-string-methods-string-prototype/

In my previous article on ES6 array methods, I introduced the new methods available in ECMAScript 6 that work with the Array type. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about new ES6 methods that work with strings: String.prototype.*

We’ll develop several examples, and mention the polyfills available for them. Remember that if you want to polyfill them all using a single library, you can employ es6-shim by Paul Miller.

String.prototype.startsWith()

One of the most-used functions in every modern programming language is the one to verify if a string starts with a given substring. Before ES6, JavaScript had no such function, meaning you had to write it yourself. The following code shows how developers usually polyfilled it:

if (typeof String.prototype.startsWith !== ‘function’) {
String.prototype.startsWith = function (str){
return this.indexOf(str) === 0;
};
}

Or, alternatively:

if (typeof String.prototype.startsWith !== ‘function’) {
String.prototype.startsWith = function (str){
return this.substring(0, str.length) === str;
};
}

These snippets are still valid, but they don’t reproduce exactly what the newly available String.prototype.startsWith() method does. The new method has the following syntax:

String.prototype.startsWith(searchString[, position]);

You can see that, in addition to a substring, it accepts a second argument. The searchString parameter specifies the substring you want to verify is the start of the string. position indicates the position at which to start the search. The default value of position is 0. The methods returns true if the string starts with the provided substring, and false otherwise. Remember that the method is case sensitive, so “Hello” is different from “hello”.

An example use of this method is shown below:

const str = ‘hello!’;
let result = str.startsWith(‘he’);

// prints “true”
console.log(result);

// verify starting from the third character
result = str.startsWith(‘ll’, 2);

// prints “true”
console.log(result);

A live demo of the previous code is shown below and also available at JSBin.

ES6 in Action: New String Methods on jsbin.com

The method is supported in Node and all modern browsers, with the exception of Internet Explorer. If you need to support older browsers, a polyfill for this method can be found in the method’s page on MDN. Another polyfill has also been developed by Mathias Bynens.

String.prototype.endsWith()

In addition to String.prototype.startsWith(), ECMAScript 6 introduces the String.prototype.endsWith() method. It verifies that a string terminates with a given substring. The syntax of this method, shown below, is very similar to String.prototype.startsWith():

String.prototype.endsWith(searchString[, position]);

As you can see, this method accepts the same parameters as String.prototype.startsWith(), and also returns the same type of values.

A difference is that the position parameter lets you search within the string as if the string were only this long. In other words, if we have the string house and we call the method with ‘house’.endsWith(‘us’, 4), we obtain true, because it’s like we actually had the string hous (note the missing “e”).

An example use of this method is shown below:

const str = ‘hello!’;
const result = str.endsWith(‘lo!’);

// prints “true”
console.log(result);

// verify as if the string was “hell”
result = str.endsWith(‘lo!’, 5);

// prints “false”
console.log(result);

A live demo of the previous snippet is shown below and is also available at JSBin.

ES6 in Action: New String Methods on jsbin.com

The method is supported in Node and all modern browsers, with the exception of Internet Explorer. If you need to support older browsers, a polyfill for this method can be found in the method’s page on MDN. Another polyfill has been developed by Mathias Bynens.

Continue reading %ES6 in Action: New String Methods — String.prototype.*%

14 magically meticulous design style guides

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/SQkekewhOro/great-examples-design-style-guides-3132070

This is heading directly into geek territory. But we are self-confessed geeks, particularly when it comes to logo design and typography. And that leads us to the meticulously regulated world of brand style manuals…

A style manual, or style guide, is a set of standards for the design of documents, signage, and any other form of other brand identifier. The reason for their existence is to ensure complete uniformity in style and formatting wherever the brand is used.

We've gathered 14 of the best to inspire you when you create your own brand style guide…

01. easyGroup

easyGroup’s brand guidelines try to keep things as straightforward as possible

It's hard not to love a brand identity that's based around the colour orange (Pantone 021 C to be precise) and Cooper Black, surely the most 1970s of typeface. 

Stelios Haji-Ioannou's easyGroup keeps things simple with its branding, but its brand manual still manages to run to 36 pages, covering matters such as the company strapline, do's and don'ts of using the logo, and a guide to easyGroup lingo.

02. Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters changes its logo often but has strict rules about its display

The average branch might look as though a bunch of squatters decided to hold a jumble sale in a derelict factory, but hipster bazaar Urban Outfitters takes its visual identity very seriously, as a quick flick through its brandbook will reveal.

The 42-page guide covers everything from Urban Outfitters' history and philosophy through to logo usage, typography, photography methodology and guidelines on the tone of voice to be used in communications.

03. I Love New York

We’re sure Milton Glaser approves of these cute treatments

Milton Glaser's I Love New York logo is a wonderfully simple and iconic piece of design, so you might not expect there to be a 50-page set of brand guidelines attached to it. However there's more to I Love New York than Milton Glaser's logo; that's just the most memorable aspect of a campaign launched in 1977 and refreshed in 2008. 

The scrupulously detailed brand guidelines cover all the bases for a campaign that represents the whole state of New York and not just New York City; there's a mission statement and brand pyramid, consistency and typography guidelines, plus a whole load of thematic logo treatments and logo usage guidelines to follow.

04. NASA 

style guides

This beautiful reissue is available to buy now

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Graphics Standards Manual was created by Danne & Blackburn in 1974 when NASA changed from its original crest-based logo to the 'worm' logotype that we are now familar with.

The manual has recently been revived thanks to a Kickstarter campaign to fund its reissue. Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth's glorious new 220-page version of the case-bound NASA document comes with 'static shielding' packaging and can be purchased over at standardsmanual.com.

05. British Rail 

Bring it back!

Certain members of the Creative Bloq team have spent hours poring over the British Rail corporate identity manual (okay, it's me) and it is easy to see why. Epic levels of obsessive behaviour abound in the guide, which dates back to 1965, and some of the pictograms are a delight. Want to own your own copy? You're in luck; after a successful Kickstarter campaign, designer Wallace Henning has created a high-specification recreation of the original manual that you can order now; find out more here.

06. Channel 4 

The Channel 4 style guide is simple, clean and uncluttered for ease of use

Channel 4’s comprehensive style guide leaves no room for confusion on how its brand is used. The guide is 46 pages long, each of which is clean and clear, stating a single guideline per page, often accompanied by a graphic for visual reference.

07. Skype 

The Skype style guide lets illustration do all the talking

The Skype style guide is brilliant for many reasons – its pages of cool illustrations being one of them. The communication network hasn’t filled its guide with pages of industry jargon, it simply employs easy-to-understand explanations and graphics to get its point across.

08. Apple 

The Apple style guide is made up of 48 pages detailing exactly how the company’s branding is to be used

One of the biggest companies in the world, Apple has a comprehensive style guide detailing how its branding is to be used. Clean, clear and concise, this 48-page guide explains exactly how to use Apple assets – even where to apply stickers to your Smart car.

09. Adobe 

Adobe’s style guide goes into great detail about how you can use the branding, with some strict rules

Adobe is one of the design industry's strongest brands, and protecting that cast-iron integrity is this style document. So beware – do not use the red tag logo, it is for Adobe use only. (We do love it when you're forceful, Adobe!)

10. New York City Transit Authority 

The images of the New York City underground standards manual are a frustrating joy

We love this collection of photos of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, designed by Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International, which feature a font that looks very much like Helvetica and some great pictograms. 

11. Barbican 

The Barbican has ultra-specific instructions for the use of its circle logo

The Barbican theatre’s identity “is not just a logo. It is a design scheme composed of a number of core elements that come together to create a distinctive look and feel that makes the Barbican brand instantly recognisable”. Which is why this guide is so important.

Having said that, the Barbican allows a degree of creative flexibility for designers tasked with using its identity, and takes you through exactly how to achieve that. Which is nice.

12. Firefox 

The Mozilla Foundation has introduced a new design language, Photon, for Firefox

Mozilla has ditched its old style guide for Firefox and introduced a whole new design language, Photon, to help designers create beautiful products for Firefox users. As well as useful guidelines and principles, the Photon Design System features reusable UI components, templates, and other resources for building consistent and recognisable products across all platforms.

13. Macmillan 

Macmillan’s guidelines focus on the charity’s brand values as well as style

Cancer charity Macmillan is another organisation that's dropped its brand document in favour of an online guide. So instead of having to comb through 67 pages, you're only ever a couple of clicks away from helpful identity design rules for everything from signage to infographics, as well as tips on how to use the brand's familiar green colours and which photos are best used as the image silhouettes you'll find in the charity's marketing material.

14. Boy Scouts of America 

No surprise that the Boy Scouts of America style document has strict guidelines for badge design

Dib dib dib! The quickest way to achieve your logo design badge is to follow the Boy Scouts of America's mildly militaristic manual. Just don't think of writing the scouts' tagline "Prepared. For. Life." without those all-important full-stops…

Related articles:

10 commandments of logo designHow to create a design style guide: 25 pro tipsSpeed up your web workflow with style guides

Incorporating Videos and Animation Into Your Website

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/yP_Mz1F2nyQ/

Do you feel like your website is static and boring? From small effects to gorgeous video backdrops, there are many ways to add flair to a still site.

But it isn’t to be taken lightly. Used incorrectly, you may bloat your storage, lock out users, or massively slow down loading times. Whether animation is meant to be the core design of your site or just a small decoration, this guide has a few tips and best practices for you.

Virtual Worlds

Types of Animation and Interactivity

There are many types of web animation, from fully interactive elements to simple hover animations or embedded gifs. With all these options, taking your website to the next level is easy.

CSS Animation

The most difficult part of CSS animation is knowing when to use it. It might be tempting to add a hover effect for every single button on the site. However, this can not only cause lag, but also serve as a distraction. Use small animations to draw the eye, help users navigate the site and find interactive elements.

Here are a few examples of animations you could incorporate – but it doesn’t end with these. The sky’s the limit!

Sliders, showcases and slideshows for photography, products or navigation
Hover effects such as buttons lighting up, text fading in, links appearing, etc.
Loading animations for large elements
Smooth animated side and dropdown menus
Welcome animations such as fading into the site or a greeting appearing
Transitions like elements sliding or floating in
Unique scrolling; scrolling may take you straight to different sections, move a layered background image or other parallax effects.

And you don’t need Flash, Silverlight or other plugins to run CSS animations. They’re very compatible and suitable for most websites. However, mobile users may not get to enjoy some effects, such as hovering.

FireWatch

Videos and GIFs

GIFs aren’t just for social media. A well-placed animation can look great even in a professional environment. Stock videos are gaining traction, so you don’t even have to take the videos yourself.

Videos and gifs can be used to showcase a product, tell a story or simply for design. You can embed videos into the website, have them play when interacting with certain elements, or even use it as a stylish background. A bit of movement can turn a static site into a fun, interesting one.

Just remember that large videos and GIFs can take up a lot of storage space. Run them through an optimizer if you encounter problems. And though it’s less fun, you may wish to use YouTube to display product videos. Avoid epilepsy triggers like flashing or repetitive patterns – especially for large elements. Finally, remember that overusing animation can slow down a webpage, so utilize videos sparingly.

Artist View

Full Animation

If you want your website to be an animated experience, you’ll need knowledge of JavaScript’s Web Animations API and CSS. And if you want to create interactive animations, things are going to get tough.

There’s also the issue that some browsers and older computers either won’t be able to run your animations, or will get overloaded when they visit your website. Interactive animations that are too taxing might even slow down modern computers.

If you’re a new animator, CodePen is a great place to experiment. An animation-centric website is a huge investment, especially if you have no experience, so think carefully before you make that choice.

Blues Design

Creating an Interesting User Experience

By now, you should have a good idea what sort of animations you wish to incorporate into your site. Remember to follow animation best practices, watch the CPU usage and you’ll be ready to make your webpage a fun and exciting experience – not a slow, choppy mess.


Analyzing Your Company’s Social Media Presence With IBM Watson And Node.js

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Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/analyzing-social-media-presence-ibm-watson-nodejs/

2018-04-04T13:00:50+02:00
2018-04-04T12:16:56+00:00
Analyzing Your Company’s Social Media Presence With IBM Watson And Node.js

If you are unfamiliar with Machine Learning (ML) technology, it has existed in science fiction for many years and is finally reaching its maturity in our society. One of the first ML examples I saw as a kid was in Star Trek’s The Next Generation when Lieutenant Tasha Yar trains with her holographic opponent that learns how to fight and better defeat in future battles.

In today’s society, China has developed a “lane robot” that is a guard rail controlled by a computer system that can direct the flow of traffic into different lanes, increasing safety and improving traveling time. This is done automatically based on time of day and how much traffic is flowing in each direction.

Another example is Pittsburg unveiling AI traffic signals that automatically detect traffic patterns and alter the traffic lights on-the-fly. Each light is controlled independently to help reduce both the commuting time and the idling time of cars. According to the article, pilot tests have demonstrated a reduced travel time of 25% and idling time by over 40%. There are, of course, hundreds of other examples of ML technology that make intelligent decisions based on the content it consumes.

To accomplish today’s goal, I am going to demonstrate (using Node.js) how to perform a search with Twitter’s API to retrieve content that will be inputted into the ML algorithm to be analyzed. This way, you’ll be provided with characteristics about the users who wrote that specific content so that you can get a better understanding of your audience. The example application will be written using Node.js as the server.

It is beyond the scope of this article to demonstrate how to write an ML algorithm. Instead, to aid in the analysis, I will demonstrate how to use IBM’s Watson to help you understand the general personality of your social media audience.

Getting the process just right ain’t an easy task. That’s why we’ve set up ‘this-is-how-I-work’-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works really well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore features →

Smashing TV, with live sessions for professional designers and developers.

What Is IBM Watson?

In 2011, Watson began as a computer system that attempted to index the (entire) Internet. It was originally programmed to answer questions posed in ordinary English. Watson competed and won on the TV show Jeopardy! claiming a $1,000,000 cash prize.

Watson was now a proven success.

With the fame of winning on Jeopardy!, IBM has continued to push Watson’s capabilities. Watson has evolved into an enterprise-level application that is focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which you can train to identify what you care about most allowing you to make smarter decisions automatically.

The suite of Watson’s services is divided into six high-level categories:

Conversation
The services in this category allow you to build intelligent chatbot’s or a virtual customer service agent.
Knowledge
This category is focused on teaching Watson how to interpret data to unlock hidden value and monitor trends.
Vision
This service provides the ability to tag content inside an image that is used to train Watson to be able to automatically recognize the same pattern inside of other images.
Speech
These services provide the ability to convert speech to text and the inverse, text to speech.
Language
This category is split between translating one language to another as well as interpreting the text to predict what predefined category the text belongs to.
Empathy
This category is devoted to understanding the content’s tone, personality, and emotional state. Inside this category is a service called “Personality Insights” that will be used in this article to predict the personality characteristics with the social media content we will provide it.

This article will be focusing on understanding the personality of the content that we will fetch from Twitter. However, as you can see, Watson provides many other AI features that you can explore to automate many other processes simply through training and content aggregation.

Personality Insights

Personality Insights will analyze content and help you understand the habits and preferences at an individual level and at scale. This is called the ‘personality profile.’ The profile is split into two high-level groups: Personality characteristics and Consumption preferences. These groups are further broken down into more finite components.

Note: To help understand the high-level concepts (before we deep dive into the results), the Personality Insights documentation provides this helpful summary describing how the profile is inferred from the content you provide it.

IBM Watson’s Big Five Personality Traits

Big Five Personality Traits. Image courtesy: IBM.com. (Large preview)

Personality Characteristics

The Personality Insights service infers personality characteristics based on three primary models:

The ‘Big Five’ personality characteristics represent the most widely used model for generally describing how a person engages with the world. The model includes five primary dimensions:

Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Emotional range
Openness
Note: Each dimension has six facets that further characterize an individual according to the dimension.

Needs describe which aspects of a product will resonate with a person. The model includes twelve characteristic needs:

Excitement
Harmony
Curiosity
Ideal
Closeness
Self-expression
Liberty
Love
Practicality
Stability
Challenge
Structure

Values describe motivating factors that influence a person’s decision making. The model includes five values:

Self-transcendence / Helping others
Conservation / Tradition
Hedonism / Taking pleasure in life
Self-enhancement / Achieving success
Open to change / Excitement

For more information, see Personality models.

Consumption preferences

Based on the personality characteristics inferred from the input text, the service can also return an indication of the author’s consumption preferences. ‘Consumption preferences’ indicate the author’s likelihood to pursue different products, services, and activities. The service groups the individual preferences into eight categories:

Shopping
Music
Movies
Reading and learning
Health and activity
Volunteering
Environmental concern
Entrepreneurship

Each category contains from one to as many as a dozen individual preferences.

Note: For more information, see Consumption preferences. For a more in-depth overview of a particular point of interest, I suggest you refer to the Personality Insights documentation.

To be effective, Watson requires a minimum of a hundred words to provide an insight into the consumer’s personality. The more words provided, the better Watson can analyze and determine the consumer’s preference.

This means, if you wish to target individuals, you will need to collect more data than one or two tweets from a specific person. However, if a user writes a product review, blog post, email, or anything else related to your company, this could be analyzed on both an individual level and at scale.

To begin, let’s start by setting up the Personality Insights service to begin analyzing a real-world example.

Configuring The Personality Insights Service

Watson is an enterprise application but they offer a free, limited service. Once you’ve created an account and are logged in, you will need to add the Personality Insight service. IBM offers a Lite plan that is free. The Lite plan is limited to 1,000 API calls per month and is automatically deleted after 30 days — perfect for our demonstration.

Create the Personality Insights Service

Create the Personality Insights Service. (Large preview)

Once the service has been added, we will need to retrieve the service’s credentials to perform API calls against it. From Watson’s Dashboard, your service should be displayed. After you’ve selected the service, you’ll find a link to view the Service credentials in the left-hand menu. You will need to create a new ‘Credential.’ A unique name is required and optional configuration parameters can be defaulted for this login. For now, we will leave the configuration options empty.

After you have created a credential, select the ‘View’ credentials link. This will display the API’s URL, your username, and password required to securely execute API calls. Save these somewhere safe as we will need them in the next step.

Testing The Personality Insights Service

To perform API calls, I am going to use Node.js. If you already have Node.js installed, you can move on to the next step; otherwise, follow the instructions to setup Node.js from the official download page.

To demonstrate how to use the Personality Insights, I am going to create a new Node.js project on my computer. With a command prompt open, navigate to the directory where your Node.js projects will be stored and create your new project:

mkdir watson-sentiments
cd watson-sentiments
npm init

To assist with making the API calls to Watson, I am going to leverage the NPM Package: Watson Developer Cloud Node.js SDK. This package can be installed via the command prompt:

npm install watson-developer-cloud –save

Before making the first call, the PersonalityInsightsV3 object needs to be instantiated with the credentials from the previous section. Begin by creating a new file called index.js that will contain the Node.js code.

Here is an example of configuring the class so it is ready to make API calls:

var PersonalityInsightsV3 = require(’watson-developer-cloud/personality-insights/v3’);
var personality_insights = new PersonalityInsightsV3({
“url”: “https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/personality-insights/api”,
“username”: “**************************”,
“password”: “*************”,
“version_date”: “2017-12-01”
});

The personality_insights variable is what we will use to interact with the API for the Personality Insights service. Let’s review how to execute a call and return a personality profile:

var fs = require(’fs’);

personality_insights.profile({
“contentItems”: [
{
“content”: “Some content that contains more than 100 words…”,
“contenttype”: “text/plain”,
“created”: 1447639154000,
“id”: “666073008692314113”,
“language”: “en”
}
],
“consumption_preferences”: true
}, (err, response) => {
if (err) throw err;

fs.writeFile(“results.txt”, JSON.stringify(response, null, 2), function(err) {
if (err) throw err;

console.log(“Results were saved!”);
});
});

The profile function accepts an array of contentItems. The ‘content’ item contains the actual content with a few additional properties identifying additional information to help Watson interpret it.

When this is executed, the results are written to a text file (the results are too large to write in the console). The result is an object that contains the following high-level properties:

word_count
The count of words interpreted
processed_language

The language that the content provided, e.g. (en).

Personality
This is an array of the ‘Big Five’ personality characteristics (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional range). Each characteristic contains an overall percentile for that characteristic (e.g. 0.8100175318417588). To ascertain more detail, there is an array called children that provides more in-depth insight. For example, a child category under ‘Openness’ is ‘Adventurousness’ that contains its own percentile.
Needs
This is an array of the twelve characteristics that define the aspects a person will resonate with a product (Excitement, Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure). Each characteristic contains a percentile of how the content was interpreted.
Values
This is an array of the five characteristics that describe motivating factors that influence a person’s decision making (Self-transcendence / Helping others, Conservation / Tradition, Hedonism / Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement / Achieving success, and Open to change / Excitement). Each characteristic contains a percentile of how the content was interpreted.
Behavior
This is an array that contains thirty-one elements. Each element provides a percentile of when the content was created. Seven of the elements define the days of the week (Sunday through Saturday). The remaining twenty-four elements define the hours of the day. This helps you understand when customer’s interact with your product.
consumption_preferences
This is an array that contains eight different categories with as much as a twelve child categories providing a percentile of likelihood to pursue different products, services, and activities (Shopping, Music, Movies, Reading and learning, Health and activity, Volunteering, Environmental concern, and Entrepreneurship).
Warnings
This is an array that provides messages if a problem was encountered interpreting the content provided.

Here is a CodePen of the formatted results:

See the Pen Example Watson Results by Jamie Munro (@endyourif) on CodePen.

Configuring Twitter

To search Twitter for relevant tweets, I am going to use the Twitter NPM package. From a console window where the application is hosted, run the following command to install:

npm install twitter –save

Before we can implement the Twitter package, you need to create a Twitter application.

Retrieving Twitter’s Access Tokens

Retrieving Twitter’s Access Tokens. (Large preview)

Once you’ve created your application, you need to retrieve the authorization keys required to perform API calls. With your application created, navigate to the ‘Keys’ and ‘Access Tokens’ page. Since we are not performing API calls against users of Twitter, OAuth integration is not required. Instead, we need only the four following keys:

Consumer Key
Consumer Secret
Access Token
Access Token Secret

The last two keys need to be generated near the bottom of the ‘Keys’ and ‘Access Tokens’ page. With the keys, here is an example of searching for Tweets about #SmashingMagazine:

var Twitter = require(’twitter’);

var client = new Twitter({
consumer_key: ’*********************’,
consumer_secret: ’******************’,
access_token_key: ’******************’,
access_token_secret: ’****************’
});

client.get(’search/tweets’, { q: ’#SmashingMagazine’ }, function(error, tweets, response) {
if(error) throw error;

console.log(tweets);
});

The result of this code will log a list tweets about Smashing Magazine. For the purposes of this demonstration, the following fields are of interest to us:

id
created_at
text
metadata.iso_language_code

These are the fields we will feed Watson.

Integrating Personality Insights With Twitter

With Twitter setup and Watson setup, it’s time to integrate the two together and see the results. To make it interesting, let’s search for #DonaldTrump to see what the world thinks about the President of the United States. Here is the code example to search Twitter, feed the results into Watson, and write the results to a text file:

var fs = require(’fs’);
var Twitter = require(’twitter’);

var client = new Twitter({
consumer_key: ’*********************’,
consumer_secret: ’******************’,
access_token_key: ’******************’,
access_token_secret: ’****************’
});

var PersonalityInsightsV3 = require(’watson-developer-cloud/personality-insights/v3’);
var personality_insights = new PersonalityInsightsV3({
“url”: “https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/personality-insights/api”,
“username”: “**************************”,
“password”: “*************”,
“version_date”: “2017-12-01”
});

client.get(’search/tweets’, { q: ’#DonaldTrump’ }, function(error, tweets, response) {
if(error) throw error;

var contentItems = [];

// Loop through the tweets
for (var i = 0; i {
if (err) throw err;

// Write the results to a file
fs.writeFile(“results.txt”, JSON.stringify(response, null, 2), function(err) {
if (err) throw err;

console.log(“Results were saved!”);
});
});
});

Here is another CodePen of the formatted results that I received:

See the Pen Donald Trump Watson Results by Jamie Munro (@endyourif) on CodePen.

What Do The Results Say?

Once we’ve analyzed the ‘Openness’ trait of the ‘Big Five,’ we can infer the following:

Emotion is quite low at 13%
Imagination is average at 54%
Intellect is very high at 96%
Authority challenging is also quite high at 87%

The ‘Conscientiousness’ trait at a high-level is average at 46% compared with the ‘Openness’ high-level average of 88%. Whereas ‘Agreeableness’ is very low at only 25%. I guess people on Twitter don’t like to agree with Donald Trump.

Moving on to the ‘Needs.’ The sub-categories of ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Structure’ are in the 60 percentile compared to other categories being below the 10th percentile (Excitement, Harmony, etc.).

And finally, under ‘Values,’ the sub-category that stands out to me as interesting is the ‘Openness’ to ‘Change’ at an abysmal 6%.

Based on when you perform your search, your results may vary as the results are limited to the past seven days from executing the example.

From these results, I would determine that the average person who tweets about Donald Trump is quite intellectual, challenges authority, and is not open to change.

With these results, it would allow you to automatically alter how you would target your content towards your audience to match the results received. You will need to determine what categories are of interest and what percentiles do you wish to target. With this ammunition, you can begin automating.

What Else Can I Do With Watson?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Watson offers many other different services. With these services, you could automate many different parts of common business processes. For example:

Building a chat bot that can intelligently answer questions based on a knowledge base of information;
Build an application where you dictate what you want written to Watson by using the speech to text functionality;
Automatically translate your content into different languages to create a multi-lingual site or knowledge base;
Teach Watson how to look for specific patterns in images. This could be used to determine if a logo is embedded into a photo.

This, of course, is a very small subset that my limited imagination can postulate. I’m sure you can think of many other ways to leverage Watson’s immense capabilities.

If you are looking for more examples, IBM has an entire GitHub repository dedicated to their Node.js SDK. The example folder contains over ten sample applications that convert speech to text, text to speech, tone analysis, and visual recognition to name just a few.

Conclusion

Before Watson can runaway with technological growth, resulting in the singularity where Artificial Intelligence destroys mankind, this article demonstrated how you can turn social media content into a powerful understanding of how the people creating the content think. Using the results from Watson, your application can use the categories of interest where the percentile exceeds or is less than a predetermined amount to change how you target your audience.

If you have other interesting uses of Watson or how you are using the Personality Insights, be sure to leave a comment below.

Smashing Editorial
(rb, ra, yk, il)

Web Designers That Use FreshBooks Have Much More Time for…Well, Designing

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/ZWmjjZbaz-M/

Starting and running a small business isn’t all fun and games, but you knew that it wouldn’t be. You love challenges and you’re up for facing them head-on, but like most business owners you also look for ways to make your life easier. The biggest problem is that you’re too busy to find time-saving solutions. Ironic right?

Accounting is one of the most time-consuming tasks you have to take care of on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Not every business person has a degree in accounting, and many have not even read a book on the subject, but it’s something that can’t be avoided.Unfortunately, a lack of experience or savvy can lead to mistakes and frustration.

Forget about hiring someone, Freshbooks accounting software is the solution you’ve been looking for.

1. FreshBooks Makes Billing Fast and Painless

FreshBooks does your billing quickly and efficiently. You already know how arduous, error-prone and time-consuming manual time-tracking, invoicing and expensing is, and the better solution is FreshBooks.

FreshBooks was created by web designer Mike McDerment, who needed a better way to handle the billing for his own freelance business. He knew he couldn’t avoid the billing process, but it was taking up so much of his time. That was the time he needed to be spending on other important aspects of his business. It didn’t take long before FreshBooks was created, and before he knew it over 10 million people worldwide were using it.

2. FreshBooks’ Major Benefits

Saves An Impressive Amount Of Time

FreshBooks users save an average of 16 hours a month thanks to the intuitive nature of the software and all of the available automation. That’s a cool 4 hours a week you can devote to other tasks when you let FreshBooks organize your invoices and send email payment reminders to clients and customers.

Your Professional Status Gets An Uptick

Creating invoices in spreadsheets and word processors takes a lot of time and doesn’t result in easy to use and professional materials. Beautifully-crafted FreshBooks templates allow you to simply fill in your information once and then automatically include your tracked time and expenses in specific invoices. What an easy way to impress yourself and your clients, and to save a ton of time.

Award-Winning Customer Support Is Yours to Enjoy

Since FreshBooks is super reliable and so easy to use, you may never have to give Customer Support a call. However, should a question or problem ever arise the Customer Support team stands ready to help out. Whether you’ve got questions about accepting online payments, automating your invoices, or just creating reports at tax time a friendly Customer Support Rockstar is your new best friend.

You’ve Got Enough Stress Already

FreshBooks is so easy to use and simplifies your billing process so much that all of your accounting stress will just disappear. Now you’ll have more time to deal with everything else in your business that might be a source of stress.

You’ll Always Be Ready for Tax Season

Doing your taxes will never be something you look forward to, but you no longer have to dread it. FreshBooks will help you justify every expense and every cent you take in, save you preparation time, and help you avoid costly mistakes.

3. FreshBooks’ Most Popular Features

Give Your Proposals a Professional Look

FreshBooks‘ style and formatting features will help you to better present your project outline, its scope, deliverables, and timeline – quickly and efficiently.

Expense Management

Come tax time (or any other time) you won’t find yourself shuffling through folders or boxes trying to organize and find your expenses. FreshBooks keeps your expense information in one place; plus, you can use the FreshBooks mobile app to add photos of expense receipts directly to your expense entries.

Custom Invoices

In FreshBooks, it takes 30 seconds for you to create and send an invoice. Choose a template, add your logo, choose fonts and colors, input the payment terms, and hit “Send”. Your clients get easy to read and well-designed invoices.

Take Credit Card Payments Online

The online payment feature is a win-win for you and your clients. They enjoy the extra convenience, and you won’t have to chase clients for money or deal with cash flow issues due to late payments.

Time Tracking

Time tracking helps you measure performance, but it plays a key accounting role as well. With this popular FreshBooks feature, you’ll always know the exact amount of time spent on a task and project and have the ability to instantly add it to an invoice.

Sales Tax Calculations

You’ll enjoy this feature if you’re tired of doing the math to figure out the tax on each of your expenses or invoices. FreshBooks does the math for you, every single time. Plus, all you have to do is click to get an invoice details report, expense report or tax summary report.

Project Management

Sharing files and messages with project stakeholders is key to successful project management but organizing and storing the information can be cumbersome and very inefficient. The FreshBooks Project feature ensures that information sharing is smooth and efficient, so stakeholders are always kept up to date.

Why You Should Try FreshBooks Now

If you’re not yet sure that FreshBooks is the right accounting solution for your business, give it a try. Your 30 day free trial allows you to evaluate all of the features of FreshBooks with no obligation. You don’t even need to enter credit card information, you just have to sign up and start building your business. Before you know it you’ll be saving tons of time and feel the accounting stress lift off your shoulders.

Start your free trial today, your business is accounting on you.


The 33 best photo apps

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/10yH2nekAxc/best-photo-apps-513764

Here is the definitive guide to the best photo apps around, covering iOS (that's iPhone and iPad) and Android apps. Some you won't have heard of, others you'll be more familiar with.

None are going to replace a great DSLR, mirrorless or compact camera (see our guide to the best cameras for creatives) and a couple of hours with a photo editor such as Photoshop CC, but they're all great at what they do.

Get Adobe Creative Cloud

Let's start off with apps to transform your current photo collection: photo editing apps. You'll also find apps for taking photos and artistic photo apps on the other pages of this article, so click through to those if that's what you're after.

The 5 best laptops for photo editing
01. Photoshop Lightroom CC for mobile

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Adobe Price: Free

Adobe makes a number of photo apps but if you’re serious about photo editing on your device, you only need one: Photoshop Lightroom CC for mobile. It's a free app that gives you a powerful yet simple solution for capturing, editing and sharing your photos. 

You can shoot raw photos (on compatible phones), or transfer from your camera onto your device, and easily organise and tweak them, then automatically upload them to the cloud so they don’t take up space on your device. It has presets to keep your edits quick and simple, but you can also go deeper and fine-tune images to perfection. 

Signing up to a Creative Cloud account – including the Lightroom CC plan, adds the ability to work across phone, tablet and desktop with instant synchronisation.

02. Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express app on smartphone

Photoshop Express offers the sort of professionalism you’d expect from Adobe

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: AdobePrice: Free

As you would expect from Adobe, the interface and user experience of the Photoshop Express photo app for Apple and Android devices is faultless. It fulfils all the functions you need for picture editing and will probably be the one you turn to for sheer convenience. 'Straighten' and 'Flip' are two useful functions not included in many other apps.

However, none of the filters really jump out, and some are surprisingly naff for an app that comes from the developer for designers. Ultimately, if you are looking for a more professional tool, look towards Lightroom CC for mobile, but the cut-down feel and familiarity of PS Express will suit some.

03. Photoshop Mix

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Adobe Price: Free

Photoshop Mix is an app that caters more for those looking to make big statements than those making subtle adjustments, and it’s none the worse for it. PS Mix enables you to cut out and combine elements from different images, blend layers and make adjustments to your creations on your device, and it majors in ease-of-use. 

Usefully, it live-syncs with Photoshop CC, meaning that when you make a change on your phone, it’ll show up instantly on your desktop – and you can take advantage of Creative Cloud benefits with an Adobe Photography Plan, which saves a fair bit of cash over a full subscription.

04. Photoshop Fix

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: AdobePrice: Free

With Photoshop Fix, you can make the most common image adjustments very easily, right on your smart device, without having to transfer your photos to a desktop computer and use expensive photo editing software. At your fingertips are the tools to liquify, heal, lighten, colour and adjust your images to perfection, plus you can experiment with painting tools and vignettes, control exposure, contrast, saturation and focus.

As with all Adobe mobile apps, having a Creative Cloud account opens up the ability to instantly share your work with other CC apps on desktop or mobile, but Photoshop Fix is probably best Adobe app for those just looking to make their smartphone photos better without requiring deep knowledge of editing tools.

05. Photo Editor by Aviary

Photo Editor by Aviary on smartphones says 'Create beautiful photos with over 1500 free tools' and 'Eliminate blemishes with a single tap'

Aviary strikes a balance between serious and playful
Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: AviaryPrice: Free

Aviary is a pleasantly designed app that strikes the perfect balance between serious photo editing and playful photo decoration functions, without looking bland or childish. Since it was first launched, the number of tools has exploded from 20 to 1500, giving you plenty of room to play.

The 'Strato' filter creates one of the most convincing vintage effects from all the apps tested.

06. Google PhotoScan

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: GooglePrice: Free

It's all very well being able edit photos on your phone or computer, but what about those old pre-digital prints you have lying around? If putting them all through a scanner's too much for you, there's an app that makes digitising your ancient snaps much easier. 

Google's PhotoScan enables you to scan photos with your phone in seconds, without unsightly glare and shadows; head this way for some great tips on how to get the best out of it.

07. Pixlr

Pixlr screenshots

Pixlr has such a huge array of effects and tools that you can get lost in it for hours

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Autodesk IncPrice: Free

Boasting over two million combinations of effects, overlays and filters, Pixlr contains enough tools to keep you busy for hours. You can also layer your images, add text captions, and it is also an excellent collage maker. Plus you'll also find an eraser to auto fix the colour and automatically adjust contrast. Not bad for a free app.

08. Fotor

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: EverimaginingPrice: Free

Looking for a flexible photo editing app that's easy to pick up and produces quality results? Fotor delivers all of this, and best of all you can download it for free. This versatile app enables you to edit, collage and share images, plus you can discover masterpieces snapped by other users.

Fotor also offers a focus feature, enabling you to control depth of field and clarity to simulate DSLR effects. Simply select a focal point, adjust the emulator to your preference, and create a high definition finish.

09. Qwik

Qwik photo editing app on phone screens

Qwik is crammed with filters, fonts and frames
Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Guillaume BabusiauxPrice: Free

Qwik describes itself as 'the fastest and easiest way to make pretty photos,' and with over 50 filters, plus tons of fonts and frames, it's hard to argue with it.

Edit your images in seconds with straightforward hands-on tools, and share them with Qwik's online community. With new filters and features being added every week, Qwik is constantly keeping itself fresh and exciting.

10. PicLab

PicLab photo editor on smartphones

Use the photo editor to quickly create trendy infographic images with this photo app
Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: MuseWorksPrice: Free

PicLab is a nifty app for creating those inspiring images that you get all over the internet these days. You know, the ones featuring a photo – probably with at least one retro filter applied – with a helpful aphorism layered over the top in an attractive, friendly typeface. Yeah, those – like the silly AI-generated ones we've featured, but better. PicLab HD makes them an absolute doddle to create, enabling you to either snap a photo or grab one from your photo library, then go to town on it.

As well as adding typography – lots of fonts and full control over size, positioning, opacity, rotation, and colour – you can also layer illustrations, ornamentation and other design elements on top of your image. 

PicLab features full layer-based editing and also packs plenty of tools for making your original photo look its best, with loads of lighting and film effects to choose from as well as preset photo filters and adjustment tools for fine tuning the brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation, and the blur level of your photos.

11. Handy Photo

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: ADVA SoftPrice: $2.99/£2.99 (iOS), $2.99/£2.89 (Android)

The selling point of photo editor Handy Photo is its interface, which uses the corners of the screen to cater for rotating menu options. It's all designed to keep the central area of the screen clear, allowing you to use swipe gestures to tone your effects up or down.

It's a powerful photo editor; the UI isn't for everyone, but this is an amazing price for the effects you get. The 'Move Me' tool enables you to clip out objects and move, resize or flip them.

12. Facetune

Facetune photo editor screenshots

Hide your blemishes, wrinkles and more with Facetune’s photo editor
Platform: iPhone, iPad, AndroidDeveloper: LightricksPrice: $3.99/£3.99 (iPhone), $5.99/£5.99 (iPad), $5.99/£3.99 (Android)

Embarrassed about your laughter lines? Feeling blue about those blemishes? Fear not, Facetune is here! Grab a photo from your Camera Roll and start your makeover; you can remove unwanted freckles, blemished skin or hide bags under the eyes with Smooth; reshape that wonky nose or misshapen jawline with, er, Reshape; and make subtle tweaks of colour using Tone.

The results of this photo editor are truly impressive. You can share results over Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr – if you dare.

13. PhotoWonder

Photo Wonder app screenshots

Photo Wonder has a good collage feature with multiple layouts and photo booth effects

Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Beijing Baidu NetcomPrice: Free

Excellent user interface makes Photo Wonder one of the speediest smartphone photo apps to use. It also has a good collage feature with multiple layouts and photo booth effects. The filter selection isn’t huge, but many are so well-designed that you’ll find them far more valuable than sheer quantity from a lesser app. The 'Vintage' filter works magic on photos of buildings or scenery. Combine with 'Sweety' for a dreamy retro effect.

14. Rakuga Cute

Rakuga Cute app screenshots

Look beyond the cuteness and Rakuga Cute has some interesting features
Platform: iOSDeveloper: Tatsumi ElectronicsPrice: Free

At first glance this iPhone photo app seems aimed at Japanese schoolgirls rather than discerning designers, but Rakuga Cute actually contains some unusual editing functions which makes it an interesting addition to your photo repertoire.

The 'Mosaic' option lets you selectively pixelate any part of a photo, quite useful for blurring out license-plates, identities or should you feel so inclined, body parts as well.

Next page: Camera apps

15. Halide

Best photo apps: Halide

Halide puts pro camera controls at your fingertips
Platform: iOSDeveloper: Chroma NoirPrice: £4.99/$4.99

If you love the convenience of mobile photography but miss the control you get with a full-on SLR, Halide is well worth snapping up. It'll work as a simple point and shoot, but with a swipe you can open up a whole load of lovely manual options, giving you tactile control over focus, ISO and shutter speed, as well as a live histogram to help you get the right exposure. 

You can review your photos Tinder-style, with a right swipe to add them to your favourites, and a left swipe to trash them, and Halide can even export as RAW to give you more flexibility when you edit your shots.

16. Camera MX

Platform: AndroidDeveloper: Appic Labs CorpPrice: Free

The Android exclusive photo app Camera MX combines powerful enhancement tools with a beautifully simple user interface. Thanks to intelligent image prcoessing you can take visibly sharper snaps, as well as cutting and trimming them to perfection in the edit.

In the latest version you can create dynamic photos with the ‘Live Shot’ feature. By saving the last seconds before you actually take the photo, this app lets users capture moving snaps that can be relived and shared.

17. Lensical

Platform: iOS (iPhone)Developer: Apptly, LLCPrice: Free

Lensical makes creating face effects as simple as adding photo filters. Lensical is designed for larger displays and utilises one-handed gesture-based controls making it the perfect complement to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S Plus’s cameras.

18. Camera+

Best photo apps: Camera +

Camera+ is adored by iPad users and has subsequently arrived on iPhone – hooray!
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: tap tap tapPrice: $2.99/£2.99 (iPhone), $4.99/£4.99 (iPad)

The Camera app that comes on the iPhone by default is not brilliant: yes, you can use it to take some decent shots, but it doesn’t offer you much creative control. This is where Camera+ excels. The app has two parts: a camera and a photo editor, and it truly excels at the latter, with a huge range of advanced features.

Camera+ doesn’t just limit you to editing new pics – you can quickly import your existing photos into the Lightbox so that you can breathe new life into them.

19. Clone Camera Pro

Best photo apps: Clone Camera Pro

Double up your images with Clone Camera Pro
Platform: iOS (iPhone)Developer: Peta VisionPrice: $1.99/£1.99

A smart photo-compositing app that allows you to double up on your images. Clone Camera lets you produce a ‘photo’ of a scene with the same person in it multiple times. It’s simply a case of taking up to four photos of the same person in a different location, and then selecting the areas you want to stitch together into the final photo. The app works best if you have a tripod, or can otherwise keep your device still.

20. Camera360

Best photo apps: Camera360

Camera360 offers a huge range of functions and no ads
Platform: iOS (iPhone), AndroidDeveloper: PinGuoPrice: Free

Camera360 is a remarkable smartphone photo app. It’s perfectly self-contained with a huge range of functions, no ads and no insistence in promoting paid content.

Touching the photo after applying a filter produces a nifty quick comparison of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions. One drawback is that the process of importing photos is slightly tedious, with one too many clicks involved. Tip: go to Enhancement>Night for a great filter to correct slightly dark or underexposed photos.

21. LINE Camera

Best photo apps: LINE camera

You can add text to your pictures in over 100 fonts and 20 colours
Platform: iOS (iPhone), AndroidDeveloper: Naver JapanPrice: Free

Sleek and easy-to-use, LINE Camera comes with a solid range of filters, borders, icons and stamps. You can also add text to your pictures in over 100 fonts and 20 colours, making this free smartphone photo app one of the best for typography. Check out Stamp>Heart Symbol>Shine for a nice selection of kitschy sparkle brushes.

22. Paper Camera

Best photo apps: Paper Camera

Paper Camera’s interface is quirky to say the least
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: JFDP LabsPrice: $2.99/£2.99 (iOS), £2.39 (Android)

Filter effects aren't exactly a new thing, but Paper Camera takes a different approach to the post effects found in the likes of Instagram. What does it do? Well, it displays effects in real time on your camera as you're using it. There are some neat effects on offer – including cartoon, half tone and sketch.

23. Lifecake

Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad), AndroidDeveloper: LifecakePrice: Free

Save and organise pictures of your children growing up with Lifecake. In a timeline free from the adverts and noise that clutter most social media channels, you can easily look back over fond memories and share them with family and friends.

Touted as ‘a time machine of your child’s life’, you can skip to select stages and compare different dates. You decide who can see your images, and because Lifecake is now a Canon company you can order a printed album of your precious photos.

24. VSCO Cam

Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad), AndroidDeveloper: Visual Supply CompanyPrice: Free

Connect with amazing photographers from around the world, and create your own stunning photography with VSCO Cam. Create your own VSCO Journal to join in with the community and find inspiration form other users. Unlike other social platforms, your followers and clout are not displayed, giving everyone an equal creative playing field.

VSCO Cam comes packed with top performance features, including high resolution imports, and before and after comparisons to show how you built up your edit. Introduce yourself to the community by downloading it for free.

Next page: Artistic photo apps

25. Prisma

Best photo apps: Prisma

Prisma uses AI to turn your snaps into works of art
Platform: iOS/AndroidDeveloper: Prisma LabsPrice: Free

Better than any filter-based photo app, Prisma can transform your photos into masterpieces in the style of famous artists such as Van Gogh, Munch, Mondrian and Picasso. It uses an AI technique called style transfer to do its artistic magic, and it's no longer restricted to still images; it now works on video as well.

26. Instagram

Best photo apps: Instagram

With a few simple edits, Instagram transforms photos into works of art
Platform: iOS, AndroidDeveloper: Instagram, IncPrice: Free

Even if you're new to the world of photo apps chances are you've heard of Instagram. Capable of turning the most everyday photo into something glamorous thanks to its range of custom-designed filters and editing tools, Instagram has won over a legion of fans and dedicated users.

Put simply, there is a reason Instagram is so popular. It's powerful, versatile, and best of all it's free. Thanks in part to its ownership by Facebook, Instagram has also become a social media platform in itself. Instagram Stories let you communicate a diary of images to your followers, and offshoot apps Boomerang, Hyperlapse and Layout help you create striking video and collages.

And – praise be! – Instagram has finally tweaked its feed to make newer posts more likely to appear near the top. But please just make it chronological again!

27. PixelWakker

Best photo apps: PixelWakker

PixelWakker transforms your pics into pointillist art
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: PixelWakkerPrice: £2.99

If you're a fan of pointillism then this is the photo app for you. PixelWakker breaks down your images into their component pixels and that's where the fun begins. You can apply one of four great effects – pixel image, dots, line, or colour rain – to your pics and watch in wonder as dot art unfolds before your eyes.

28. Sktchy

Best photo app: Sktchy

You’ll either love or hate sketch-based community photo editor app Sktchy
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: Sktchy LLCPrice: Free

Connecting with people around the world in a new way, here you can choose from a selection of photographs, uploaded by the Sktchy community and create a portrait from that image.

Sktchy co-founder Jordan Melnick comments: “Our community of artists is growing every day because Sktchy is the perfect place for them to find inspiration and share their art with the world, in part because of the neat way we layer portraits over the photos that inspired them.”

29. Photochop

Best photo apps: Photochop

Photochop – Chop Up and Distort Your Photos does exactly what it says on the tin
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: Big Bucket SoftwarePrice: $0.99/£0.99

We probably like this app for its name (in full: Photochop – Chop Up and Distort Your Photos) as much as for its function. It’s a cheap and cheerful little photo editor tool for mucking about with pictures. Simply pick a snap from your iPhone’s photo library, chop it up into a set of tiles and then go crazy.

You can either work directly with the tiles, dragging them around, rotating and resizing them to create a collage effect, or there’s a warp mode that works in the same way but results in a distorted image rather than a collage. Obviously it’s nothing you can’t easily do in any image editing app in a couple of minutes and you’ll be hard pushed to find a serious application for it, but it’s a fun graphical toy to have in your pocket.

30. Path On

Best photo apps: Path on

Add images to your text with Path On
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: Peta VisionPrice: $1.99/£1.99

Path On lets you add funky text to photos in unique ways. You draw the path you’d like the words to take, then type in your message – the text then flows along the path. The custom options are the real killer feature here, with you being able to adjust the font, the letter space, and the alignment. Although it’s a little fiddly, Path On is probably the best adding-text-to-photos tool around.

31. Geló

Best photo apps: Gelo

Persevere with Geló and the results will speak for themselves
Platform: iOS (iPhone)Developer: James MoorePrice: Free

A splash of colour can alter the look of an photo dramatically. Give your iPhone shots some extra oomph with this cool app for the iPhone. Gradients have become a lost art in iPhone photography, but Geló fills that gap in the market well. It needs a little more patience than your average photo app, but persevere and the results are excellent.

Once you’ve taken or imported an image, you see a carousel of ‘gels’. Cycle through to choose a colour, tap it, and then it’s applied to your shot. Using the sliders you can tweak how the filter affects your shot, and you can easily apply specific RGB values though, that might mimic your favourite tints in iPhoto or Photoshop, say.

32. Retromatic

Best photo apps: Retromatic

Retromatic can be frustrating at times but it portrays a great vintage feel
Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)Developer: Peta VisionPrice: $1.99/£1.99

1950s-inspired photo app Retromatic enables you to import your photos, cut them out using an instant alpha tool, and then apply vintage effects to them. It's quick and easy to use, and looks great, although expect frustration if you want to do anything more than the basics. The instant alpha tool works well, but you have to hold down on the screen to make it switch between a brush and pinching to zoom.

33. Tadaa

Best photo app: Tadaa

Tadaa is great for fine-tuning photos
Platform: iOS (iPhone)Developer: MenschmaschinePrice: Free

Tadaa lets you adjust the strength of all its filters, which is ideal for people who like fine-tuning their photos with subtle effects. This iPhone photo app tries to get you to use its own social network, but you can still use all features without a login.

Click on the frame icon to access a nice range of photo film borders. Unlike Instagram and Magic Hour, you’re not limited to a square and can apply the film border to a photo of any size.

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