Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/15-tools-and-resources-that-will-help-you-grow-as-a-designer/

This article was created in partnership with BAWMedia. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

It’s hard to stay in your web design comfort zone when trends and technologies are in a continual state of change. Many of your design and development tools might continue to serve you well for some time. The same may be true for the resources you rely on.

There will come a time however when a favored tool or a resource is no longer up to the task. Investing in new tools or resources is generally the easiest way to keep up with the changing times. This is especially when a tool or resource is easily affordable, and in some cases, free.

This might be a good time to take stock of what you have in your designer's toolkit. See whether some changes might be in order. This list of 15 of 2018's top tools and resources should get you off to a good start.

1. Mason

Requirements are always subject to change. These changes can be a headache to designers and developers as they usually involve repetitive cycles of work. Many of today's software tools are equipped to handle requirements changes only to the extent that they can repeat prior tasks.

Mason has a different approach.

Mason is a combination design/development, and maintenance/collaboration tool that can put an end to repetitive deployment cycles by relieving designers or developers the task of instituting changes or fixes they shouldn't have to be bothered with.

Mason has a wealth of software design features, including pre-packaged building blocks that address common requirements. What Mason does that is different is to allow downstream users (software maintenance individuals or teams, and even clients) to make changes in these building blocks in response to changing requirements or needs for fixes or product updates.

Mason's login and user registration protocols ensure that you always have total control over product changes, even though as a team leader or designer you're no longer required to make them yourself.

2. Mobirise

The ability to create mobile-friendly websites and apps is no longer a nice option to work with. In today's world it's mandatory. Some themes still treat device-friendliness as if it were a good design option to have. Mobirise on the other hand, was created with mobile devices in mind.

Not only does Mobirise contain everything you need to build device-friendly websites and apps, but it does so without any cost to you and without any restrictions whatsoever. Mobirise is free to use for both your personal and commercial pursuits. It's simply a matter of downloading it now and getting started.

Mobirise is an offline app, so you'll have total control over product design and hosting. It's also an excellent choice for smaller projects such as small websites, portfolios, landing pages, and promo sites.

3. Elementor

If you don't believe Elementor is the #1 WordPress page builder on the market, you might take a close look at the numbers. 900,000 or so users downloaded this free, open source and feature rich page-building platform in a little less than 2 years.

Performance and ease of use account, in part, for Elementor's popularity, but its users also love its superior workflow features, visual form builder, custom CSS, and the menu builder.

Things are only going to get better for this product's users — and for you as well if you choose to download it. The Elementor 2.0 release, with a wealth of powerful new tools is already underway and will continue in increments throughout the rest of the year.

New features include enhanced WooCommerce shop product pages, single post page builders, new eCommerce page-building options and more. Users still can enjoy their favorite features of 1.0 version, too.

4. Goodiewebsite

Goodiewebsite has helped hundreds of clients with website development. This is a platform, which specializes in websites on the order of 1-10 pages in size, design to code conversion (PSD, Sketch, Figma, XD, etc.), and simple WordPress sites.

Goodiewebsite services are cost effective and the tasks assigned to them are always performed professionally and reliably.

5. monday.com

Whether you’re a team of two, or a team of 20,000 scattered around the globe, and whether it is tech on non-tech oriented, if you're looking for a high-performance team management tool, monday.com will suit your needs to perfection.

This team management tool allows you to accomplish tasks without spreadsheets or white boards and avoids any need for scheduling an unending series of meetings. monday.com promotes project transparency and empowers team members.

6. A2's Fully Managed WordPress Hosting

A2 Hosting adjusts to your specific hosting requirements instead of the other way around. You can expect to receive precisely the hosting experience you want and need at an affordable price other services simply cannot match. Site staging, automated backups, blazing fast servers, 24/7 Guru support – it's all there!

7. The Hanger

Whether the plan is to create an online presence for an existing clothing retailer or open a strictly eCommerce business, you might as well do it with a touch of pizzaz to draw the customers in.

The Hanger is a modern-classic WordPress theme that's just the cup of tea for building a high-quality online store in no time at all and customizing it to fit your brand or your client's.

The post 15 Tools and Resources That Will Help You Grow as a Designer appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/06/monthly-web-development-update-6-2018/

Monthly Web Development Update 6/2018: Complexity, DNS Over HTTPS, And Push Notifications

Monthly Web Development Update 6/2018: Complexity, DNS Over HTTPS, And Push Notifications

Anselm Hannemann

2018-06-15T12:32:58+02:00
2018-06-15T13:49:35+00:00

We see complexity in every corner of a web project these days. We’ve read quite a bunch of articles about how complex a specific technology has become, and we discuss this over and over again. Coming from a time where we uploaded websites via FTP and had no git or anything comparable, now living in a time where we have a build system, transpilers, frameworks, tests, and a CI even for the smallest projects, this is easy to understand. But on the other hand, web development has grown up so much in the past 15 years that we can’t really compare today to the past anymore. And while it might seem that some things were easier in the past, we neglect the advantages and countless possibilities we have today. When we didn’t write tests back then, well, we simply had no test — meaning no reliable way to test for success. When we had no deployment process, it was easy to upload a new version but just as easy to break something — and it happened a lot more than today when a Continuous Integration system is in place.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an interesting article on the matter: “The Cult of Complex” outlines how we lose ourselves in unnecessary details and often try to overthink problems. I like the challenge of building systems that are not too complex but show a decent amount of responsibility (when it comes to ethics, privacy, security, a great user experience, and performance) and are working reliably (tests, deployments, availability, and performance again). I guess the problem of finding the right balance won’t go away anytime soon. Complexity is everywhere — we just need to decide if it’s useful complexity or if it was added simply because it was easier or because we were over-engineering the original problem.

News

The upcoming Safari version 12 was unveiled at Apple’s WWDC. Here’s what’s new: icons in tabs, strong passwords, as well as a password generator control via HTML attributes including two-factor authentication control, a 3D and AR model viewer, the Fullscreen API on iPads, font-display, and, very important, Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 which is more restrictive than ever and might have a significant impact on the functionality of existing websites.
The headless Chrome automation library Puppeteer is now out in version 1.5. It brings along Browser contexts to isolate cookies and other data usually shared between pages, and Workers can now be used to interact with Web Workers, too.
Google released Lighthouse 3.0, the third major version of their performance analyzation tool which features a new report interface, some scoring changes, a CSV export, and First Contentful Paint measurement.
Chrome 67 is here, bringing Progressive Web Apps to the Desktop, as well as support for the Generic Sensor API, and extending the Credential Management API to support U2F authenticators via USB.
We’ve seen quite some changes in the browsers’ security interfaces over the past months. First, they emphasized sites that offer a secured connection (HTTPS). Then they decided to indicate insecure sites, and now Chrome announced new changes coming in fall that will make HTTPS the default by marking HTTP pages as “not secure”.

Desktop Progressive Web Apps are now supported in Chrome OS 67, and the Chrome team already started working on support for Mac and Windows, too. (Image credit)

General

In “The Cult of the Complex”, Jeffrey Zeldman writes about how we often seem to forget that simplicity is the key and goal of everything we do, the overall goal for projects and life. He explains why it’s so hard to achieve and why it’s so much easier — and tempting — to cultivate complex systems. A very good read and definitely a piece I’ll add to my ‘evergreen’ list.
Heydon Pickering shared a new, very interesting article that teaches us to build a web component properly: This time he explains how to build an inclusive and responsive “Card” module.

UI/UX

Cool Backgrounds is a cool side project by Moe Amaya. It’s an online generator for polygonal backgrounds with gradients that can generate a lot of variants and shapes. Simply beautiful.

Tooling

Ben Frain shares some useful text editing techniques that are available in almost all modern code editors.

Security

As security attacks via DNS gain popularity, DNS over HTTPS gets more and more important. Lin Clark explains the technology with a cartoon to make it easier to understand.
Windows Edge is now previewing support for same-site cookies. The attribute to lock down cookies even more is already available in Firefox and Chrome, so Safari is the only major browser that still needs to implement it, but I guess it’ll land in their Tech Preview builds very soon as well.

Lin Clark created a cartoon to explain how you can better protect your users’ privacy with DNS over HTTPS. (Image credit)

Privacy

The ACLU discovered that Amazon now officially teamed up with law enforcement and provides a mass-face recognition technology that is already used in cities around the world.

Web Performance

KeyCDN asked 15 people who know a lot about web performance to share their best advice with readers. Now they shared this article containing a lot of useful performance tips for 2018, including a few words by myself.
Stefan Judis discovered that we can already preload ECMA Script modules in Chrome 66 by adding an HTML header tag link rel=“modulepreload”.

Accessibility

It’s relatively easy to build a loading spinner — for a Single Page Application during load, for example —, but we rarely think about making them accessible. Stuart Nelson now explains how to do it.
Paul Stanton shares which accessibility tools we should use to get the best results.

JavaScript

JavaScript has lately been bullied by people who favor Elm, Rust, TypeScript, Babel or Dart. But JavaScript is definitely not worse, as Andrea Giammarchi explains with great examples. This article is also a great read for everyone who uses one of these other languages as it shows a couple of pitfalls that we should be aware of.
For a lot of projects, we want to use analytics or other scripts that collect personal information. With GDPR in effect, this got a lot harder. Yett is a nice JavaScript tool that lets you block the execution of such resources until a user agrees to it.
Ryan Miller created a new publication called “The Frontendian”, and it features one of the best explanations and guides to CORS I’ve come across so far.
The folks at Microsoft created a nice interactive demo page to show what Web Push Notifications can and should look like. If you haven’t gotten to grips with the technology yet, it’s a great primer to how it all works and how to build an interface that doesn’t disturb users.
Filepond is a JavaScript library for uploading files. It looks great and comes with a lot of adapters for React, Vue, Angular, and jQuery.
React 16.4 is out and brings quite a feature to the library: Pointer Events. They’ll make it easier to deal with user interactions and have been requested for a long time already.

Inspired by the parallels between basic astrological ideas and push notification architecture, the team at Microsoft explains how to send push notifications to a user without needing the browser or app to be opened. (Image credit)

CSS

Oliver Schöndorfer shares how to start with variable fonts on the web and how we can style them with CSS. A pretty complete summary of things you need to consider as well as possible pitfalls.
With the upcoming macOS Mojave supporting a ‘dark mode’, Safari will begin to automatically set the background color of websites to a black color if no background-color is explicitly set. This is a great reminder that browsers can set and alter their default styles and that we need to set our site defaults carefully. I’m still hoping that the ‘dark mode’ will be exposed to a CSS Media Query so we can officially add support for it.
Rafaela Ferro shares how to use CSS Grid to create a photo gallery that looks not only good but actually great. This article has the answers to many questions I regularly get when talking about Grid layout.
Marcin Wichary explains how we can create a dark theme in little time with modern CSS Custom Properties.

Work & Life

Anton Sten wrote about the moral implications for our apps. A meaningful explanation why the times of “move fast and break things” are definitely over as we’re dealing with Artificial Intelligence, social networks that affect peoples’ lives, and privacy matters enforced by GDPR.
Basecamp now has a new chart type to display a project’s status: the so-called “hill chart” adds a better context than a simple progress bar could ever do it.
Ben Werdmüller shares his thoughts about resumes and how they always fail to reflect who you are, what you do, and why you should be hired.

I hope you enjoyed this monthly update. The next one is scheduled for July 13th, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you like what I do, please consider helping me fund the Web Development Reading List financially.

Have a great day!

— Anselm

(cm)

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/_g3o5Ei4lgY/

Textures are an all-but-necessary component in web design. They can give a webpage depth, draw the eye to key elements, serve as great backgrounds and just look great when used well! If you’re looking for free textures to enhance your projects, you’ve come to the right place. Here are ten free websites where you can download high-quality textures.

Free Stock Textures

Created by two photographers and artists, this website hosts a ton of textures all licensed under Creative Commons Zero. From nature, to concrete, to abstract – there are all sorts of images to find here. You can also sort by tags, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

There’s a download limit of 5 per day for anonymous users and 50 for registered users.

Pexels

Pexels is a free stock photography resource, which has a textures section that contains tons of gorgeous, high-quality images. Images are user-uploaded and licensed under CC0. And there’s no download limit, so you can get as many as you want!

Unsplash

Unsplash is a free photography website supported by a large community of photographers. There are tons of textures and patterns, all available for personal and commercial use under CC0.

Textures.com

Textures.com is a versatile site that comes with basically every kind of textured graphic you can think of. Need photos? 3D scanned surfaces? Panoramas, decals or brushes? You can find them here. The robust search feature allows you to search for specific textures as well as tags like “seamless” or “scanned”.

You can download up to 15 images a day with an account. From there, you’ll need to purchase credits or a subscription. You’ll also need credits to download larger files.

Vecteezy

Need textured vectors? Vecteezy is the place to find them. There are tons of beautiful, clean vectors available for download. Some are free while others require credit. You can sort by license, which is really helpful if you only want to see the free images.

Wild Textures

Wild Textures has textures of all kinds, but where the website shines is in its sorting system. You can sort by categories, tags and even by color! This makes it super easy to find the perfect texture. There’s also some auto-generated previews of the pictures used for different functions.

Stockvault

This vault of stock photos and textures contains everything from grungy patterns to the abstract. Simple or complex, you’ll find a high-definition picture that fits your needs here. Users who upload can choose from commercial or non-commercial use, or public domain – so make sure to check the license.

Freepik

Freepik has a massive library of vector textures that come in .ai and .eps format. Without buying a plan, you’re limited to 5 anonymous and 30 registered downloads a day. There are also a few commercial stipulations.

Texturelib

A small-but-robust library, Texturelib is free for personal or commercial use. Most of the images are inspired by nature, but there are also quite a few architecture textures – such as photos of roads, windows and doors.

TextureKing

TextureKing has a variety of grungy, nature-like textures, available for use in almost any commercial project. While the site features about 400 images and doesn’t appear to be updated very often, there are a few categories to pick from, and the high-quality textures can be downloaded for free without an account.

Textures in Web Design

When used correctly (and perhaps sparingly), textures are a great design choice. Use them to call attention to important elements, to craft a rough, grungy atmosphere – and to add depth and beauty to a flat design! With so many free resources, you should have all the tools you need to craft deep, gorgeous websites.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/improving-performance-perception-pingdom-gtmetrix/

This article is part of a series on building a sample application — a multi-image gallery blog — for performance benchmarking and optimizations. (View the repo here.)

In this article, we’ll analyze our gallery application using the tools we explained in the previous guide, and we’ll look at possible ways to further improve its performance.

As per the previous post, please set up Ngrok and pipe to the locally hosted app through it, or host the app on a demo server of your own. This static URL will enable us to test our app with external tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools.

We went and scanned our website with GTmetrix to see how we can improve it. We see that results, albeit not catastrophically bad, still have room for improvement.

The first tab — PageSpeed — contains a list of recommendations by Google. The first item under the PageSpeed tab — a warning about a consistent URL — pertains to our application outputting the images randomly, so that is an item we will skip. The next thing we can do something about is browser caching.

Browser Caching

We see that there is a main.css file that needs its Expires headers set, and the images in the gallery need the same thing. Now, the first idea for these static files would be to set this in our Nginx configuration:

location ~* .(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ {
expires 14d;
}

We can simply put this inside our server block and leave it to Nginx, right?

Well, not really. This will take care of our static files, like CSS, but the /raw images we are being warned about aren’t really that static. So this snippet in our Nginx configuration won’t exactly fix this issue so easily. For our images, we have an actual controller that creates these on the fly, so it would be ideal if we could set our response headers right there, in the controller. For some reason, these weren’t being set properly by Glide.

Maybe we could set our Nginx directive in a way to include the raw resources, but we felt the controller approach to be more future-proof. This is because we aren’t sure what other content may end up with an raw suffix eventually — maybe some videos, or even audio files.

So, we opened /src/ImageController.php in our image gallery app, and dropped these two lines inside of our serveImageAction(), just before the line return $response:

// cache for 2 weeks
$response->setSharedMaxAge(1209600);
// (optional) set a custom Cache-Control directive
$response->headers->addCacheControlDirective(‘must-revalidate’, true);

This will modify our dynamic image responses by adding the proper Cache Control and Expires headers.

Symfony has more comprehensive options for the caching of responses, as documented here.

Having restarted Nginx, we re-tested our app in GTmetrix, and lo and behold:

The post Improving Performance Perception with Pingdom and GTmetrix appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/773RgqUqLSs/refreshed-visual-identity-and-motion-graphics-sportv

Refreshed Visual Identity and Motion Graphics for SPORTV

abduzeedo
Jun 28, 2018

BEELD Motion invited Danilo Gusmão Silveira to help them create a new visual Identity for SPORTV, one of the most prominent Sports Channels in South America. They experimented with several different graphic styles and forms to find a new image for the channel. The result is simply beautiful. The move from the old style which was very 3D with some chrome and other old style broadcast design style is very welcome. I used to watch the SPORTV channel and I can say that this looks much more modern and professional. I especially love the end to end solution which includes typography, grid system, pattern, textures and of course motion.

For more information make sure to check www.danilosilveira.com

Visual Identity

After working in several composition, type and color tests we’ve chosen one direction to go through and we’ve started building grids that support the ID and the all content. The grid was built as an extension from the logo, expanding its form, creating blocks that support the image and content. 

Grid system

We have also created a large gallery of patterns, textures, and color palette that gives personality to each segment of the channel. 

Patterns, textures, and color palette

Here are the final frames we have delivered for the channel so they could produce all the rest of the ID.

Motion Graphics

REEL and Motion Graphics videos made by Diego Galluzo e Julio Marcello. Video made by SPORTV speaking a little bit more about the creative process and introducing the new brand. 

branding