Fall In Love With These Sites on 12/21/2017

Are You Ready For A Web Design Challenge?

This is not a normal Smashing Magazine post. I?m not going to teach you something new or inspire you with examples of great work. Instead, I want to encourage you to complete a Web design challenge. I believe this will help to address a weakness that exists in many of our design processes. If you complete this challenge, it will make it easier for clients to sign off on your designs, and it will improve the quality of your work.

8 Useful Methods To Become Successful With Twitter

Twitter is the big thing. With everybody from Britney Spears to Barack Obama now on Twitter, it is safe to say the social networking platform has gone mainstream. For many users worldwide Twitter has become a crucial tool for maintaining contacts, exchanging opinions and making new connections. But what does this mean for the service, and how can we, website owners, actually use it for our purposes? You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

Improving The Online Shopping Experience Part 2 Guiding Customers Through The Buying Process

Part 1 of ?Improving the Online Shopping Experience? focused on the upper part of the purchase funnel and on ways to get customers to your website and to find your products. Today, we move down the funnel, looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and to guide them through the check-out process. Ways to improve the online shopping experience and to reduce the drop in the purchase funnel.

JS Bin Built For Sharing Education And Realtime Rendering

This is our sixth article in a series that introduces the latest useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts. The fourth shared a free plugin called GuideGuide with us, and in the fifth we’ve announced Erskine’s responsive grid generator Gridpak.

Creating Wellbehaved Sites With The Page Visibility API

We?re all resigned to it: launching a browser reloads every tab you previously had open, blasting a cacophonous mix of sound and video. While browsers have made it easier to control this experience with tab icons and extensions like MuteTab, for most people this behavior presents a confusing and disorienting experience. As developers and designers it?s our job to make the web welcoming, not overwhelming. Doesn?t it make sense that sites should only be active when they are the primary focused tab?

9 Crucial Ui Features Of Social Media And Networking Sites

The main function of a good user interface is to provide users with an intuitive mapping between user’s intention and application’s function that manages to provide a solution to the given task. Basically, user interface describes the way people interact with a site and the way users can access its functions. In fact, usability is a biproduct of a good user interface and it determines how easily a user can perform all of the functions provided by the site.

Expand Your Development Skills With Creative Tech Projects

Even if you’re an experienced Web developer, your next project doesn’t have to be a website. Sometimes doing something outside of the usual Web developer’s box is more fun and can even be educational. We’ll try here to give you some inspiration on what to do on your next rainy day. You can learn a lot by doing something other than building or designing a website. And if you stick with techniques that you can learn in a couple hours, you won’t burden yourself either.

Figma Vs Sketch The Showdown

The past year has seen quite a rise in UI design tools. While existing applications, such as Affinity Designer, and Sketch, have improved drastically, some new players have entered the field, such as Adobe XD and Figma. For me, the latter is the most remarkable. Due to its similarity to Sketch, Figma was easy for me to grasp right from the start, but it also has some unique features to differentiate it from its competitor, such as easy file-sharing, vector networks, “constraints” (for responsive design) and real-time collaboration.

35 Incredible Retro And Vintage Photoshop Tutorials

We’ve scoured the Web to find some impressive vintage Photoshop tutorials that can help you achieve an “old-fashioned” look-and-feel in your designs. In this post, we go back to the 1900’s all theway to the 1980’s to showcase a variety of vintage- and retro-inspired designs that involve poster art, collages and graphical elements. Whether you’re into print design or web design, you’ll find something you can use or build upon.

There Is No Mobile Internet!

It?s time to stop thinking about the Internet and online communication in the context of a device, be it desktop, tablet or mobile. Advances by Google and Apple have heightened consumer expectations, which now require stricter focus from us to create seamless online communications ? communications that work everywhere and that get their point across. We need to embrace a device-agnostic approach to communicating with connected consumers and forget the idea of a “mobile Internet”.

My Favorite Bookmarks on Dec 18 2017

Limiting The Visibility Of Posts In Wordpress Via Usernames

Controlling who is able to view a post is a simple task once the system is established. Limiting access to certain users has several applications, such as enabling a design studio to distribute artwork to its various clients, or enabling a small school to arrange for homework to be posted online using a cheap and easy solution. The easiest method to get this system working is to make the recipients of the information ?subscribers? (since they need not be able to post) and the distributors of information ?authors? (since they should only be able to edit their own posts).

Are You Loosing Traffic By Poor Website Performance?

Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation. In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it.

Photo Retouching Tips And Tips In Photoshop

Two weeks ago we published the first part of Photoshop tips and tricks for photo retouching. Today, we’ll be presenting the rest of the article. We hope that these techniques will be quite useful for your workflow. You may know some of them, but hopefully not all of them. We have had articles on various tools in Adobe Photoshop but this one is focused more on the techniques rather than the tools provided.

When Your Code Has To Work Complying With Legal Mandates

Douglas Crockford famously declared browsers to be “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable,” and that wasn’t hyperbole. Ensuring that our websites work across a myriad of different devices, screen sizes and browsers our users depend on to access the web is a tall order, but it’s necessary. If our websites don’t enable users to accomplish the key tasks they come to do, we’ve failed them. We should do everything in our power to ensure our websites function under even the harshest of scenarios, but at the same, we can’t expect our users to have the exact same experience in every browser, on every device.

Responsive Web Design Techniques Tools And Design Strategies

Back in January, we published an article on responsive design, Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How to Use It. Responsive design continues to get a lot of attention, but considering how different it is from the ?traditional? way of designing websites, it can be a bit overwhelming for those designers who have yet to try it. To that end, we’ve compiled this round-up of resources for creating responsive website designs.

jQuery And Javascript Programming Examples And Top Practices

When used correctly, jQuery can help you make your website more interactive, interesting and exciting. This article will share some best practices and examples for using the popular Javascript framework to create unobtrusive, accessible DOM scripting effects. The article will explore what constitutes best practices with regard to Javascript and, furthermore, why jQuery is a good choice of a framework to implement best practices. [Last updated: Nov/15/2016] You may want to take a look at the following newer posts:

Guidelines For Successful Communication With Clients

OK, so this is a yet another article about dealing with clients. But let?s face it ? it doesn?t matter how well you can design or code; as a freelancer or if you’re running a digital agency, if you don?t get the client management right, it can spell disaster for your business. By getting it right from the very beginning, you?ll most likely see things flourish. In a previous article on How to Explain to Clients they are Wrong, I discussed one aspect of client management, but oh my, there are so many and that is why I would like to discuss yet another aspect in this article: how to maintain project productivity and momentum when working with clients.

Community Discussion How Do You Survey Your Readers?

As the end of the year nears, you might be thinking about plans for your blogging in 2018. One thing that will help inform that is a reader survey. On both ProBlogger and Digital Photography school I do an annual survey, usually around November. As we plan our surveys, I ...more

The post Community Discussion: How Do You Survey Your Readers? appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

Out Of This World Typography

Today, we will be showcasing outer space typography. This is probably my favorite style of design. There is so much that you can do with the outer space, galaxy style. While it is not really appropriate to use in most client projects, it is a very fun effect to implement on your own personal projects. Because I really enjoy this design style, this will be a two series post. Be sure to check out the following articles: 32 Stunning Outer Space Science Fiction Photoshop Tutorials Stunning Space Photography Space Wallpapers and Nebula Wallpapers It’s amazing what artists are able to create using this design style.

10 Places For Design Inspiration

When Leonardo Da Vinci attempted to build the world?s first robot in 1495, his inspiration had come from the ancient Greek texts of Ctesibus and Vitruvius. Likewise, Auguste Rodin cited Lorenzo Ghiberti?s ?Gates of Paradise? as the inspiration for his famous sculpture ?The Gates of Hell?. Designers and artists have traveled the world for centuries looking for those brilliant moments of inspiration. [Last updated: Oct/14/2016] Changing your surroundings is the easiest way to find new perspective on old ideas and common emotions.

Stuff The Internet Says on 12/05/2017

35 Crowdfund Campaigns For Designers This Black Friday

If huge discounts at the mall aren?t enough to drag you away from the turkey leftovers, then we?ve got the perfect solution for you: We?ve put together the 35+ best crowd-funding projects that are live right now, so you can spend your hard-earned green with the least effort possible. Crowd-funding sites are packed with tempting […]

Can Software Make You Less Racist?

I don't think we computer geeks appreciate how profoundly the rise of the smartphone, and Facebook, has changed the Internet audience. It's something that really only happened in the last five years, as smartphones and data plans dropped radically in price and became accessible ? and addictive ? to huge segments of

From Photo Manipulation To Beer Recipes Ai Is Finding Its Way Into everything

I think it?s safe to say that 2017 has been the year of artificial intelligence. It seems every day a new startup was entering the field to offer a new twist on marketing, photo manipulation, or voice assistants that utilized artificial intelligence technology. Add to that the fact that more and more business leaders see the next big thing being AI and you have an almost endless amount of startups and thought leaders looking into what AI can be injected into. While a lot of this in fields like machine learning for marketing and financial services, there are plenty of…

This story continues at The Next Web

Myths And Facts Of Business Cloud Computing Services That You Were Waiting To Find Out

Hackers may have been hiding in Equifax?s computer network for quite some time now. When they struck, and they struck hard, they stole the personal data of over 143 million people. It is almost half the size of the population of the USA. It was so easy for them to grab and run with their personal information that it left the rest of the world out of words.

While most are rightfully blaming the IT team, who had not updated and patched the Apache Struts. The lack of the patch and update served as a window for the attackers to gain access to the site and get all the data they needed. However, we must remember that this was a breach of the on-premise data center and NOT the cloud.

With at least one major data breach happening each year, people are becoming more concerned about the safety and security of cloud services NYC. We are hearing a lot of rumors, fears, and assumptions about cloud service providers in the city. It prompted us to compile the myths vs. facts about CSPs and seek out the reality of all compliance concerns that are wracking people right now.

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Password Rules Are Bullshit

Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules.

If we don't solve the password problem for users in my lifetime I am gonna haunt you from beyond the grave as a ghost http://pic.twitter.com/Tf9EnwgoZv

— Jeff Atwood

New Year New Book Smashing Book 2 Is Coming Preorder Now!

Update:(26.01.2011) The pre-order phase is over. The book is now available at full price. Update: (30.01.2011) If you are planning to write an article or review of Smashing Book 2, please feel free to use the Smashing Book 2 Media Kit (.zip, 7 Mb). The kit contains images, illustrations and photos that you might find useful for your article. Also, please don’t forget to tweet the link to the review with the hashtag #smbook2, so we can track it and add it to our list of reviews.

Nudging Clients In The Right Direction To Give Them What They Want

“How did you do that?” My colleague Leigh sounded impressed. He had been working with a problem client for weeks trying to get design approval. Then I came along and was able to get signed-off in a single conference call. “Can you teach me how you did that?” he asked. I mumbled something about years of experience, but the truth was I didn’t have a clue. It just seems I can find design approval easier than most.

Movie Website Designs Examples And Current Practices

It can be an interesting experience looking around at websites in particular industries to identify trends and see how they differ from those in other industries. In this article, we’ll take a look at the websites of major motion pictures to see what types of websites are being created. Movies are a big part of the entertainment industry, and in recent years their websites have become increasingly critical to their overall success.

How To Use Data And Research To Build A Better Mobile Web

The value you bring to any project as a designer or user experience professional isn?t only your ability to execute a series of tasks. Good clients will recognize and appreciate the guidance, recommendations and opinions that come with your experience. It?s up to you to be forthcoming and to position yourself as a valuable thinker from the start. It?s also up to you to base your recommendations on more than subjective opinion.