Archive for month: July, 2020

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/our-gatsby-redesign/?utm_source=rss

We knew we had a problem.

In 2019, SitePoint was getting Lighthouse Speed scores under 10 on mobile, and between 20 and 30 on desktop.

Our efforts to control UX bloat were failing in the wake of a publishing business environment that sprang new leaks just as we’d finished temporarily plugging the last one. Our reliance on advertising, controlled by external parties, was a major obstacle to improved site performance. Our traffic growth had turned into decline.

On a site that provided people with a place to come and learn to code with best practices, this was not a good look. And it wasn’t a site we could feel proud of, either.

To make matters worse, operational bottlenecks had arisen that made adaptation a tricky logistical business. Our team was struggling to make changes to the site: having focused on our Premium experience for several years, we were down to one developer with WordPress and PHP experience. To test out code changes, the team would have to wait in a queue to access our staging server.

It wasn’t energizing work for anyone, and it certainly wasn’t efficient.

It was time to make some changes, and we set out to look for a solution. After a lot of research, we decided that Gatsby would be a great fit for our team. It would play to our talent strengths, help us solve all of the issues we had identified, and allow us to keep using WordPress for the backend so the editorial process wouldn’t need to change.

Why We Moved to Gatsby

The end result.

Early in the research process, Gatsby started to look like a serious frontrunner. SitePoint isn’t a small site, so we knew that the tech we chose had to be able to handle some pretty intense demands. Gatsby checked all of our boxes:

We could code everything in React, a tech that every member of the front-end team knows and uses daily.
Gatsby is super fast at its core — performance was at the heart of this project, and we could start from a good footing.
The entire site is rendered as static, which would be great for SEO.
We could build it as a new project, which meant no worrying about the existing codebase, which brought a huge amount of legacy code with it.
We could use Gatsby Cloud, allowing the team to get feedback on the build at any time just by pushing the branch to GitHub.
DDoS attacks on WordPress wouldn’t cause us issues, as the front-end is completely stand-alone.

More Maintainable CSS with styled-components

Since we were going to rebuild the site from scratch, we planned to make some design changes at the same time. To help with this work we decided to use styled-components.

styled-components keeps the site’s styling easy to maintain, and we know where to look when we want to change the style of something — the style is always with the component.

How We Made the Build Happen

We started by following Gatsby’s basic docs and pulling in our posts with the gatsby-source-wordpress plugin.

This was a big initial test for us: we had to see if it was even possible to use Gatsby for our site.

After 20 years of blogging, we have over 17,000 posts published. We knew the builds would take a long time, but we had to find out if Gatsby could deal with such a massive amount of content. As you’ve probably figured, the test delivered good news: Gatsby works.

A quick tip for other teams working with large sites: to make development a better experience, we used environment vars to prevent Gatsby from fetching all of the site’s posts in development. There’s nothing quite like a 60 minute hot reload to slow progress.

if (hasNextPage && process.env.NODE_ENV != “development”) {
return fetchPosts({ first: 100, after: endCursor });
}

From this point, we ran into some limitations with the WordPress source plugin. We couldn’t get all the data we needed, so we moved to the WordPress GraphQL plugin.

We use Yoast to set our metadata for SEO, and had to ensure we were pulling in the correct information. We were able to do this with WordPress GraphQL. By doing it this way, the content team could still edit metadata the same way, and the data would still be dynamic and fetched on each build.

During the build, we would have three or four people in the team working on parts of the new blog. In the past, if they wanted to get feedback they’d have to push to our staging server and make sure nobody was already using it.

We found that Gatsby Cloud was a great solution to this issue. Now when someone pushes to a branch in GitHub, it creates a build in Gatsby Cloud along with a preview link. Our developers could share this link and get immediate testing and feedback much more effectively than before.

This faster feedback cycle made it easy to have multiple people on the team working on the build and put an end to a major bottleneck.

Launch Day Fun

On the big day, we launched the new site and ran through our initial tests. The new blog was flying — every page load felt instant.

We ran into some problems on SitePoint Premium, which started running into slows and even crashes. The culprit was a new element on blog pages that pulled in the popular books people were currently reading. It would do this via a client-side API call, and it was too much for Premium to handle due to the amount of traffic we get on the blog side.

We quickly added some page caching to the API to temporarily solve the issues. We realized we were doing this wrong — we should have been sourcing this data at build time, so that the popular books are already loaded when we serve the page to the user.

This is the main mindset shift you need to make when using Gatsby: any data that you can get at build time should be fetched at build time. You should only use client-side API calls when you need live data.

Once we’d re-written the API call to happen during the build, the first load of a blog page was even quicker — and Premium stopped crashing.

What We Still Need to Solve

While it’s hard to overstate how much better our on-site experience is today, there are still a few pain points we need to solve.

If a new article is published, or if content is updated — as it is multiple times per day — we need to re-run the Gatsby build before these changes show up.

Our solution for that right now is a simple cron job that runs at pre-scheduled times over the course of a day. The long-term solution to this is to add a webhook to the WordPress publish and update button, so that a new build is triggered once pressed.

We also need to get incremental builds running. Right now, the entire site needs to be rebuilt each time, and given our content archive, this can take a while. Gatsby just introduced incremental builds as we went live, and we’re working on implementing this on our site. Once that’s set up our builds will be much faster if the only thing that has changed is content.

Our speed score is still not where we want it to be. While the site feels subjectively very fast, we are still not getting consistent scores in Lighthouse. We want to get both mobile and desktop into the green zone (scores of 90+) for optimal user experience and SEO.

Would We Do It Again?

A launch of this type would normally be a pretty nerve-wracking event, and take a lot of work from the team on launch day.

With Gatsby, our launch was really easy. We just had to move WordPress onto a new domain, and point sitepoint.com at the Gatsby version of the site.

Then we sat back and watched the numbers to see what happened to our traffic. Within a few days, the data was starting to come in and we were seeing a 15% increase in traffic. User engagement metrics were up across the board. And we hadn’t even removed our ads yet (which, you may have noticed, we’ve since done).

It’s not hard to figure out why the effects were so immediate. We had better SEO running on static HTML and CSS pages, and massive speed improvements made possibly by the move to Gatsby.

Since we made the move, we’ve increased our Lighthouse speed scores from 6-15 on mobile to the 50-60 range, and from the 30s on desktop into the 70s. We wanted to ensure speed remained top of mind with this change, so we’re using a great tool called Calibre that runs speed tests over a number of top pages each day and alerts us to the scores. We are using this tool to continue to improve our score, so I hope to have another article for you in three months when we get everything to stay in the 90+ range.

The team loves working in Gatsby. The blog codebase was something that nobody wanted to work on. Now, everyone wants to take those cards thanks to the great developer experience.

If you’ve been eyeing a move to Gatsby and wondering if it’s ready for prime time, take our advice — it’s worth the switch.

Continue reading
Why We Moved a 20-Year-Old Site to Gatsby
on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/IhPdK7g8Iq4/fork-surreal-journey-interrogating-our-perception

FORK – Surreal Journey Interrogating our Perception

abduzeedo07.07.20

In a museum, a woman looking at a Fork exhibited as a piece of Art let her imagination run wild. The film is a surreal journey interrogating our perception of objects. What happens when you take an object from daily life and move it outside of its original context? What is left of an object when it loses its function? An abstract shape, a sculpture? Can we deconstruct this object into simple elements and create variation of this object? Can those objects be combined to form a larger structure? Can those objects become alive to break free from human ownership? That’s the synopsis of FORK, a really cool film and motion design project created by the amazing people over at Optical Arts a creative studio based in London. With an experimental approach and a collective spirit we explore new ways to tell visual stories, applying innovative techniques to live action, digital and print.

Director Fabrice Le Nezet:

We choose to work with simple objects, some iconic items everyone could easily recognize. A fork, a stool, a Mug. Because we wanted to play with sculptural forms, we chose objects that are beautiful and elegant with clear volume and silhouette.

Behind the Scenes:

Most of this project was completed in lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic. This presented its own unique challenges, working remotely for the CGI elements was fairly straightforward, but we had to delay the live action element of the shoot until Government restrictions eased. We kept the crew to a minimum and implemented a strict social distancing of two meters and masks and gloves were worn by all. Planning an extra prellight day to the schedule allowed us to set up the different shots with only essential lighting and camera crew, creating a much less demanding, more efficient and most importantly safe shoot day.

Technical Considerations:

The film has been made using a combination of Maya and Houdini and was rendered in Redshift. All shots were then composed in Nuke and Flame and graded using Resolve.

The procedural approach of Houdini made it the perfect tool to create this project. 

While developing some R&D we were able to quickly sketch ideas and seamlessly test dynamic behaviour. Animation was achieved through a mixture of physic based simulation alongside some more manual bespoke procedural setup.

Credits

Creative Direction & Production: Optical Arts
Direction & Design: Fabrice Le Nezet
Music & Sound Design: Niccolò Chotkowski at Smider
VFX Supervisor: Fabrice Le Nezet
2D Supervisor: Miguel Wratten
3D Artist: Max Johnson
Colourist: Martin Pryor
Live Action Producer: Caroline Kinch
Live Action DP: Joe Jackson
1st Assistant Camera: Elliott Lowe
Set Assistant: Jamie-Lee Harding
Model: Emma Norodom at W Models
Clothing: Studio Nicholson

For more information and to read the full making of I highly recommend that you check out https://opticalarts.studio/fork/

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/EotLqcOYkKg/excellent-ideas-to-make-money-as-a-graphic-designer

Image source: Burst.Shopify.com Given the current situation in the world, a lot of people have more time to spend at home. Some take this opportunity to be with their families, while others are looking to make extra money. While there are a lot of industries that have to stop or become limited, those who work […]

The post Excellent Ideas to Make Money as a Graphic Designer appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/7ZY0fekA3eo/zenbook-pro-duo-3d-artists

If you are a 3D artist, chances are your studio will include at least a large workstation, multiple monitors and a graphics tablet. The hardware required to create show-stopping 3D art doesn’t exactly lend itself to working on the go. Until now. 

Introducing the blisteringly powerful, dual screen Asus ZenBook Pro Duo laptop. 

The foundation of any workstation is the processing power, and this is where the Zenbook excels. Under the hood of this amazing device you’ll find an Intel Core i9 CPU and NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU, providing all the power to support the most complex of 3D tasks at speed. 

A creative game-changer

But all the processing power in the world is next to useless unless you can harness it properly, and this is where the ZenBook Pro Duo really shines. This laptop has been specifically designed to help 3D and digital artists make the most of the immense power that lies beneath its equally impressive-looking exterior. 

Built into the ZenBook Pro Duo are not one but two 4K screens, both of which are touch sensitive and colour accurate. The glossy main OLED display is beautifully crisp, but it’s the second screen that really makes this device a game-changer for digital and 3D artists. 

Located at the top of the lower half of the device, the second screen boasts a paper-like finish that works wonderfully with the stylus included. A 3D artist’s workflow will often involve working with multiple palettes and keyboard shortcuts. In this case the second screen is ideal for docking these palettes for easy access and to free up the main screen for the perspective viewport.

The extra screen also means the keyboard has moved to the front edge of the laptop’s body and the trackpad to the right. A huge ergonomic improvement over centralised trackpads, the ZenBook Pro Duo puts an end to reaching over the chassis when typing or using keyboard shortcuts, and offers a much more natural workflow. To use the second screen will, however, mean leaning over the keyboard. But Asus has all bases covered with this design, adding an in-built function to simply lock the keys.

Highly portable power

The ZenBook Pro Duo’s unique design and rich feature set makes for a highly intuitive user experience on a truly mobile workstation that doesn’t compromise on power, and, in many cases, excels over that of a desktop experience.

If you are a 3D or digital artist who needs uncompromised power and portability, the Zenbook Pro Duo is the best solution.