Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/iDjb__0FbhY/fresh-new-brand-identity-sweet-films

Fresh New Brand Identity for Sweet Films

abduzeedo
Jun 26, 2018

 

Elvis Benício and Diego Bolgioni were invited to create a new brand identity for Sweet Films. The goal of this rebranding was to adapt to the new strategic position and vision of the studio and communicate the message to the market. Sweet Films is a Brazilian boutique studio specialized in video production for advertisements. The design solution that they created included dynamic visual elements made up of fresh components and a new typeface.

The final deliverables included a visual identity guideline book, website (UI/UX), stationery and animated signature.

Credits
Motion graphic: Rafael Fernandes /
Graphic Design: Elvis Benicio, Diego Bolgioni
Brand identity

Concept.

After going through many possible ideas about shapes and graphic concept Diego and Elvis realized that it could be interesting to build a metaphorical connection with a fly (as a client) and something that looks yummy (sweet). From this starting point, everything pumped up in their minds and the process began to be playful, upbeat and consistent. The project was approved with success by the client without any changes. (all in!)

Stationery.

Social kit

Visual elements

Website

Signature

Before / after

branding

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

The illusion of per-project profitability can be a tough mindset nut to crack. I’ll talk with digital agency owners that say things like, “I have a 70% profit margin!” What they are telling me is that they have a seventy percent gross profit margin. They sell a project for $10k and pay some offshore team $3k to deliver it.

What they fail to consider is their business’s fixed costs – or their competitive wage – into the equation. The reason these numbers are significant is that they happen every month, regardless of how many projects you bring in. Your mortgage doesn’t care how fat your per-project margins are, just that you have their dough every month, relentlessly for 360 months.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone say how profitable his or her work is, only to discover that his or her business is unprofitable. I will hammer this point until all agency owners understand it, or you decide to punch me in the face.

How This Works

The math to figure this out is simple. The problem I find when consulting with most digital agency owners, especially those with agencies less than a million dollars a year, is that they don’t pay themselves a fixed wage. They pay themselves whatever is left over at the end of the week or month (or they charge those plane tickets for their upcoming vacation to their business credit card because their personal account is broke – I speak from experience).

To figure out profitability, I always ask an agency owner to tell me what they should get paid every month. Thinking about their salary makes the math I’m about to show them more painful, but alas, more realistic. Let’s take a virtual agency of one as a baseline example. They sell $10,000 projects here and there, and the owner (should) makes a $60k per year salary with another thousand in fixed costs for hosting, internet and the like.

That scenario looks something like this:

 
Month 1
Month 2
Month 3

Revenue
$10,000
$0
$10,000

COGS/Labor
$4,000
$0
$4,000

Gross Margin
$6,000
$0
$6,000

Fixed Op Ex
$6,000
$6,000
$6,000

Net Profit
$0
-$6,000
$0

This business is now $6,000 in the hole. Since the owner isn’t paying themselves a fixed wage, they don’t pay themselves that second month and might still hold the illusion that the business is ok, they just are putting in sweat equity or something.

No, the business is not ok, and you’re not ok.

Wake Up Now

Before I showed this digital agency owner this math on the back of a napkin, they had proclaimed to me that their work was indeed profitable. My response is, “who cares, you’re not getting paid, and the business is redlining!”

At this point, I usually ask something like:

“How does it feel to know what’s going on in your business?”

Which gets a response of varying degrees of:

“It makes me depressed.”

Good. An unprofitable business makes me depressed too. However, now we know. And the more we know about what is going on, the more clear we are on the actual issues at hand. We can solve problems with better solutions than just not paying us.

“Deciding not to pay yourself to solve a business problem should be the last solution on the table. Not the go to each month because you are avoiding hard decisions.”

When people realize this injustice they are putting on themselves, I want them to go to bed fuming. I want them to think, “How have I let this happen?!”

We can put that energy and frustration to good use.

Channeling the Energy

If we run with the above example, we could make two relatively simple changes to this business and see lasting benefits.

The first would be a small update to their pricing model. I’m not talking about getting all hardcore by doubling their prices (which wouldn’t be wrong, but probably a bit reckless). In my head, I would be targeting at least a 15% net margin after paying themselves a wage. Since this example uses nice round numbers, month one and three operate at a 0% margin, so we can raise prices by 15% with everything else holding true we’d have the target margin.

The second would be to hammer into their head that they need to sell a $10k project EVERY month. If they told me that they didn’t get that many leads, then we’d solve that problem. If they said to me that they couldn’t deliver that much work, then we’d solve that problem. With enough time maybe we’d solve both problems.

With those two changes, here is how their situation changes:

 
Month 1
Month 2
Month 3

Revenue
$11,500
$11,500
$11,500

COGS/Labor
$4,000
$4,000
$4,000

Gross Margin
$7,500
$7,500
$7,500

Fixed Op Ex
$6,000
$6,000
$6,000

Net Profit
$1,500
$1,500
$1,500

Now we have true profit! The magic of pricing and volume.

Your Marching Orders

Getting clear on this issue in your business requires you to get clear on your financial numbers. I have been (unpleasantly) surprised at how many agency owners are not clear on this. This issue doesn’t affect the small shops as I illustrated in my example. I’ve worked with agencies with over $100k in monthly revenue that were unprofitable (but were convinced that shouldn’t be so because of the per-project illusion!).

The other thing that I demand of people is that they set a baseline salary for themselves and any other owner. The more this number equals a competitive wage for the position you fill in your business the more accurate our net margin number will be.

It’s just too easy for an agency owner to vary their pay and push this issue under the rug. Maybe it’s because we get beat around by our clients so much that we don’t think our salary is that important.

When in fact, it’s the MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER when running a business. When an airplane is going down, you put your oxygen mask on first. Then you take care of those around you. If your pay fluctuates, you lose respect for yourself. Your peers or spouse will think your business is not dependable. These views will seep into your mindset.

If you don’t pay yourself regularly, the chances of you going out of business go up significantly. Set a target wage. Get clear on your fixed monthly expenses. Make sure you track your company’s monthly performance.

How much margin you make on an individual project matters. Putting that number in the context of your month-to-month profit and loss statement is more important. I’d rather hear you say, “I have a 15% profit margin!” and for that to be real business profit margin after paying yourself a competitive wage than some 70% blasphemy.

If you don’t know this stuff, stop what you are doing, and figure it out RIGHT NOW. That client can wait. Your future depends on it.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/CI9_9MXM-Lc/

You can add some pretty crazy image sliders into your project with basic jQuery or even with free WordPress plugins.

They all have their own unique animations, custom interfaces and features. But if you can’t find what you want in a plugin, then you may be forced to build it yourself.

That’s what many of the developers featured below did when they built these incredible 3D-animated sliders. Here are 10 of my favorites from CodePen.

Slicebox

See the Pen Slicebox – 3D Image Slider by codefactory (@codefactory) on CodePen.

You’ve probably seen or heard of Slicebox before. This is a popular 3D slideshow plugin and it’s by far one of the most detailed.

This pen offers a live demo of the animated slider in action with most of the features still intact. It all runs on jQuery, while this specific demo works with just 50 lines of JavaScript.

But you can find an even more detailed example on the Codrops site. I’m a huge fan of this slider. If you’re looking for something with crazy 3D effects – this is your best bet.

Rotating Page Slider

See the Pen Rotating 3D Slider by Nikolay Talanov (@suez) on CodePen.

Developer Nikolay Talanov created this rotating slider with some very detailed JavaScript and even more complex HTML/CSS classes.

His code actually follows the BEM naming conventions for CSS, which use a double underline to separate blocks from containers. This makes it a lot easier to skim the code once you understand what you’re looking at.

But this slider may not work for everyone because it rotates the entire page rather than just a part of the page.

Still, it’s a really cool effect that would work very well on specific projects.

Smooth Perspective Slider

See the Pen Smooth 3d perspective slider by Alex Nozdriukhin (@alexnoz) on CodePen.

If you love parallax design on the web, then have a look at this slider created by Alex Nozdriukhin.

As you move your cursor around the page you’ll notice the slideshow element responds in kind. As you rotate your way through the elements, notice the custom animation effects.

This really is pretty smooth and it’s a darn creative use of web animation. However, you may have trouble finding a project that is a good fit for this type of slideshow.

3D Effects with jQuery

See the Pen jQuery 3D Effect Slider by victor (@vkanet) on CodePen.

This basic slider is proof that you can build something great with just a little bit of jQuery. It works on a timer interval, but can also be controlled with the included navigation arrows or dots.

It’s all pretty easy to customize if you’re looking to restyle the animation, as well. Just make sure that you’re up-to-date on the latest jQuery techniques before diving into this code.

3D Flipping Image

See the Pen 3D Flip Image Slideshow by Nik Lanús (@niklanus) on CodePen.

One interesting aspect of this pen is that it doesn’t work exactly like a slideshow. It’s built more to showcase the animation rather than a typical slider UI.

Still, I’d say that developer Nik Lanús has created an amazing design with a very attractive flipping animation.

You can force the images to flip by scrolling up or down on the page (this can all be controlled in jQuery). But it’ll take some work to move this animation effect into a full-blown image slider.

3D Cube Slider

See the Pen 3D Cube slider. Pure CSS. by Ilya K. (@fornyhucker) on CodePen.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this on the web – it has to be one of a kind.

With this 3D cube, you may be surprised how accurate and smooth the animations feel. Note that this script is a bit heavy, so you may have to give the pen a minute to load in.

But here’s the great part: this entire 3D cube animation works on pure CSS. No JavaScript required. How great is that?

Carousel Using TweenMax.js & jQuery

See the Pen 3D Carousel Using TweenMax.js & jQuery by John Blazek (@johnblazek) on CodePen.

You can build some incredible things with custom libraries like TweenMax.

One such example is this carousel, which works just like a typical 3D rotating album you’d expect to find in iTunes. The whole thing is controlled via JavaScript and it works with one of the many TweenMax animations.

Granted, this demo just uses placeholder text for each block – so it’s not all that pretty to look at. But you can easily swap out the text and create one heck of a custom carousel.

3D Slider in Pure CSS

See the Pen PURE CSS 3D SLIDER by Dmitriy Panfilov (@panfilov) on CodePen.

Here’s another radical slider with a super unique interface. This CSS3 slider is built on just HTML and CSS – making it even more impressive.

Creator Dmitriy Panfilov built this like an album stack where you click any of the lower elements to bring it into the foreground. It’s not your typical slideshow interface but it can work very well on websites with enough space.

But this really feels more like a practice project just to prove how much you can do with a little CSS ingenuity.

3D Image Gallery

See the Pen 3D images gallery by Bobby (@ImBobby) on CodePen.

If you’re looking for a rotating carousel with a smaller frame, check out this code snippet.

It works via CSS3 transforms and really does feel like it’s embedded into the page in 3D space. Note that the images may also take a few seconds to load, so it may require some patience on your part.

But what I like most about this snippet its portability. You can reformat the container element to whatever size you’d like – making this flexible and easy to add into any layout.

10. Carousel Cubed

See the Pen 3D Cube Carousel by Derek Wheelden (@frxnz) on CodePen.

Yup, another crazy cube carousel with some pretty whacky code.

This design created by Derek Wheelden relies on Sass and Bourbon mixins to simplify the animations. But all of the jQuery code is built from scratch, so you can easily reuse it without any preprocessing.

Again, this may not prove incredibly useful for every project you build. But the design is flashy enough to grab attention and certainly usable in the majority of modern web browsers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with 3D effects on the web. If you’d like to see more, have a peek in CodePen for plenty of awesome 3D snippets that you can work with.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/9lGDvEOeV1o/visual-design-inspiration-your-monday-morning

Visual Design Inspiration for your Monday Morning

abduzeedo
Jul 02, 2018

Monday is always the perfect day to spend some time to collect some visual design inspiration and set some goals for the week. With that in mind, there’s nothing better than getting tons of references. In the past, I used to go through books and magazines, but with the web now things are way easier. So for this post, I would like to share some of the UI design inspiration I have been collecting during the weekend for the upcoming redesign of Abduzeedo, which I will have more to share very soon. 

So for this post, I would like to share some references in web design, app design or simply put, pure design inspiration.

Visual Design Inspiration

visual design