Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2018 en net

Max Stoiber, Vienna, Austria Doing it for love + RS: I’ve been publishing and contributing open-source content for over a decade now, including nodemon, a node monitor script. Until relatively recently, I had never received any financial support from, or for, these open-source projects. Get supporters + However, if you install nodemon today, you’ll see a pledge for support on https://opencollective.com/nodemon. As much grief as I got for this, it does work. Nodemon now has supporters. Recently, I even invoiced a small fee for closing issues, landing fixes and maintaining the project. Extra motivation + Knowing that there’s a small amount of money coming in adds to my motivation for nodemon. I feel responsible to those supporters to show the project still lives. I don’t resent the time I spend…

INFO CLAIR BYRD job: Clair currently leads Enterprise GTM at Twilio. She guides programs that unify creative strategy, brand impact and demand generation. w: trymason.com t: @theclairbyrd Tell us what your side project does Mason easily and simply blends front-end design, development and software delivery into an easy to use, centralised software-management platform. It allows most users, technical or not, to create meaningful front-end experiences that can be delivered into any code base because of the on-demand nature of Mason-powered software elements. Additionally, the platform allows all users to maintain and manage software from a visual codebase, which enables anyone to make live production changes in the wild instantly and with no code (e.g. change button text, colours, layout). Why did you create it? For too long, businesses have had to…

Shopping online is commonly about finding the right product at the right price with minimal effort. However, when a product’s price point is higher than usual, the site you’re purchasing from needs to work a little harder. Having designed many luxury ecommerce sites over the years, there are a few age-old practices I keep coming back to, that have proven to convert site visitors into customers. VISUAL SOPHISTICATION It sounds obvious but it’s important for a premium product or service to be displayed in a premium way. Think of a luxury band. Now imagine what the brand’s physical store feels like. Busy, brash, difficult to navigate? Probably not. Chances are the brand you’re designing for feels clean, considered and sophisticated. Replicating this in the UI design with tasteful typography, good…

everandever.co INFO Location: London, England Designing since: 2016 Team size: 3 (plus our tight network of freelancers) Expertise: Strategy, branding, digital development Clients: Gap, Gymbox, The-Dots Awards: D&AD yellow pencil, multiple Awwwards Who really needs a studio? Ever & Ever has been in business since 2016 and its three partners have chosen to work remotely rather than sink money into an expensive London workspace – and it’s an approach that’s paying off. Agile, flexible and keen to face big challenges head-on, the company has tackled everything from straight web design to cryptocurrency and 3D-printed installations over the past couple of years. We spoke to the team to get the inside scoop. Hi guys! Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves? Simon Brown: Hey! I have a mixed background…

JavaScript There are lots of JavaScript jobs out there but the bar is remarkably low. Take the time to become better than the herd and you can quickly start commanding serious money 1 This might seem like a glaringly obvious place to start but we’re kicking off with JavaScript for a good reason: decent JavaScript developers are in surprisingly short supply. If you can demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of vanilla JavaScript then you’re immediately on a firm footing to find well-paying work. If you add some of the more popular frameworks to your armoury then you can start earning some serious money. James Huckle, head of technology at Mirum UK (www.mirumagency.com), suggests that you can get a long way on just React; however if React is all you know it’s…

Many options are available to sell new products and services. The most obvious is to sell your primary skills for what they are, but how can they be applied to serve other types of demand? Teaching Whether it’s your primary skill as a designer/programmer or a subset of your skill such as understanding maths, people want to learn them. Make money selling your expertise as tuition sessions and full-scale training programmes. Writing As with teaching, there’s a market for delivering the knowledge you have through written content. Write tutorials and interesting perspectives about what you do. Sell writing for SEO, social media engagement and magazines – or fund it through selling ads on your own website. Products Use your skills to create products that people would want to buy. These…

As you learn more about GreenSock, you will hear the word ‘tween’ used quite a lot. A tween is essentially a single movement in an animation. Here is a breakdown of the syntax: TweenMax.method(element, duration, vars) Method: This refers to the GSAP method you would like to tween with. When you’re new, the ones you’ll use most are set, from and to. set sets the vars object to the specified values without creating an animation. to animates the element from their current values to the values you set in vars. from animates the element from the values you set in vars to their current values. Element: This is the name of the element you want to animate. If you want to create tweens for multiple elements at the same time,…

JIM MCCAULEY Jim is a writer, dilettante and cat butler who contributes a lot more to net than you realise. On page 60, he explores the 10 skills that pay and shows how you can learn and earn even more from them. t: @JimMcCauley LEON BROWN Developer and author of e-learning content at nextpoint.co.uk, Leon makes complicated concepts easy to understand and fun to learn. He breaks down the best way to build your business’s finances on page 68. t: @_LeonBrown EMILY MELLING Emily is the digital marketing manager at Yes I’m A Designer, as well as a freelance graphic designer. Who better to profile some of the quarter’s best websites on page 40? w: www.yesimadesigner.com t: @YesIMaDesigner AHMED ABUELGASIM Ahmed is a front-end developer for Potato London with expertise in…

DARK PATTERNS AND AGGRESSIVE PERSUASION + It’s a sad fact that we’re all becoming accustomed to UI patterns that try to manipulate us into taking certain actions, whether it’s accepting advertising cookies or completing a checkout process. In this article Paul Boag presents the business case for avoiding these unethical design choices. https://boagworld.com/marketing/dark-patterns DESIGN SYSTEMS SURVEY + The people at Sparkbox have conducted a detailed survey of how and why organisations are using design systems, and the results make interesting reading for anyone looking to understand exactly what makes a successful design system and how to navigate the challenges of this way of working. https://designsystemssurvey.seesparkbox.com CULT OF THE COMPLEX + An over-reliance on bloated frameworks is creating a web full of redundant code deployed by people who have no idea…

WARREN CHALLENGER Senior designer at warch.io ICONJAR Whether I’m working on high-or low-fidelity designs, there is always a need for iconography. IconJar lets me upload sets I’ve downloaded or purchased. Through the app, I can search through the icons and drag them onto my artboard in vector format. geticonjar.com FONTBASE There are thousands of font families and font weights and choosing what to use in your design is a key milestone. I use FontBase to compare and see fonts in action without code or design tools. I’ve found this superior to other typography comparison tools. fontba.se GRAMMARLY I’m continually designing UI, writing up UX research or communicating with clients. It’s vital my content and designs make sense. With its browser / mobile plug-ins and app, Grammarly has saved me countless times…

As a nation, we’re living longer than ever before and, as a result, the number of older people in the UK is on the rise. However, despite technology playing an increasingly significant role in our society, we’re currently not doing enough to digitally engage this growing demographic. According to a 2018 Office for National Statistics statistical bulletin on UK internet users, the proportion of older people using the internet has risen rapidly since 2011, but there’s still a long way to go. As it stands, the Centre for Ageing Better found that the over-55 age group makes up 94 per cent of those who’ve never been online. As vital services become digitised, transforming the way we shop, manage money and pay bills, online will become a quality-of-life necessity, not a…

EMILY MELLING Emily is the digital marketing manager at Yes I’m A Designer, as well as a freelance graphic designer specialising in branding and identity. w: www.yesimadesigner.com t: @YesIMaDesigner SITE OF THE MONTH WEBGL, THREE.JS, 3D MODELLING OAT THE GOAT http://oatthegoat.co.nz/intl.html Paying a visit to Oat The Goat is a unique experience. This beautiful website was rendered using WebGL through three.js and is an interactive, animated storybook that will capture your imagination. Crafted by Assembly and FCB, both New-Zealand-based companies, it features fully rigged and animated 3D characters and combines illustration, animation, music, interactivity and storytelling to tell of Oat’s adventure. The aim was to teach young children about social interaction. Once the story gets started, you are sucked into rich colourful New Zealand landscapes. I was immediately impressed with the framing…

What’s on your desktop today? Laptop, the book Homo Deus, Wacom tablet, Moleskine, pen and a few plants. What do you have on the walls? A signed print from Mlui, an LA monotype print designer. What will you do for lunch? Jerk chicken, rice and corn. What hours do you work? 8am to 10pm – but I like to spread my hours in the day. What else do you do in the office? Well it’s my home, so pretty much everything. How often do you all hang out? A few times a week, we climb, play squash and party together. Describe your office culture in three words Digital, creative, techy.…

Mentoring When at the top of your game, it can be frustrating to work with junior colleagues who make all the mistakes you used to make. Rather than get annoyed, get into mentoring and help them on their way; it’s win-win for everyone and the time you spend mentoring will show you in a good light when grabbing a senior position. Events Organising events isn’t for the faint-hearted – booking venues and speakers, drumming up publicity and ensuring guests have a great time is a lot of work. If you’re prepared to put in the time and effort, however, you’ll not only raise your profile, you’ll also catch the attention of employers in need of staff that can set up events for them. Languages If you can speak another language…

The business model canvas is a planning tool that enables you to visually identify the components needed for a business strategy. Its layout means you can identify the most important categories for your strategy’s components, as well as how they relate to each other. http://qrin.uk/prl/1 Use this link to access an interactive business model canvas. Use the suggested items and then create your own for each of the categories. Use this tool as an exercise to learn about the types of components placed into each canvas category to define your business idea. Follow the onscreen instructions to drag suggested components to their associated categories – or create your own. Experiment with the tool to identify combinations that increase potential for a business strategy, along with those that cause conflict. What…

Three.js is a powerful WebGL library for web apps and sites The scene The scene is a container object that encapsulates the other objects and elements that we wish to show. Camera Three.js has a few different camera classes including a perspective camera, which we will use for 3D, and an orthographic camera, used for rendering 2D scenes or UI elements. Renderer The renderer handles the display of the 3D scene using WebGL. It targets an HTML <canvas> element to draw into. Typically you will call the renderer to render each frame. Materials Three.js comes with several materials, such as Normal, Basic, Lambert, Phong and Shader. Materials are used to texture the faces of an object’s geometry. Attributes include things such as texture maps, colour and opacity. Geometry Geometry defines…

Send your questions to netmag@futurenet.com QUESTION OF THE MONTH Working on open-source tools, while massively useful to the community, can suck up a lot of time. How do you keep going? Martin Peck, Reading, UK RS: There’s that age-old existential question: why? Honestly, every few months I hit an emotional rain cloud and find myself asking this very question. But, for myself, I do know why. A very small part of my public work generates paid work. I think it’s by reputation, and probably by the sheer amount of code and time I’ve put out to the web. But this isn’t the motivator. Sometimes it’s love (thinking of JSBin) but I’ve also fallen out of love with projects (again, thinking of JSBin). I do think a bit of love is…

Managers don’t always appreciate the extent to which good design impacts upon the success of their business, which can make things tricky if you’re trying to grow the design team or increase its profile internally. We asked @netmag’s followers how they demonstrate design’s value to their managers. USE DATA “Showcase the quantifiable data of how it impacts the bottom line. Not just feelings or qualitative feedback but specific data that makes them look great to their own management. It sells itself then.” @Candorem PAST SUCCESSES “Tell them about a past experience. When we revamped the design for the recruitment magazine, parents kept copies, students retained interest in stats about the college and @SimpScar showed greater brand recognition. This accomplishes [list top business goals]” @alainavirginia EDUCATE “Make sure that senior managers…

INFO job: Creative director and founder, You Know Who w: sazzy.co.uk t: @sazzy “[Using Facebook advertising] feels like a house of cards at the moment. If it’s not all lined up properly, the whole lot falls down” There’s no hiding it: we’re genuinely excited about the talk Sarah Parmenter will be giving at our Generate London conference on 19 - 21 September. Because she’ll be addressing a subject that’s increasingly important in our industry, yet not often talked about. “[I’m looking] at how everything we’re learning about social media at the moment needs to be wrapped into web design,” she explains. “I believe this is as important as learning about responsive web design was back in 2012 or 2013. Nowadays, we have to understand marketing strategies and there are loads of other…

SALLY LAIT Digital transformation consultant sallylait.com Starting out as a junior developer on a university year in industry, I wish I’d better understood what it feels like to work with a medium that never, ever stands still. Embracing changes in technology, user expectations and societal shifts – even my own interests – over time was something that I initially struggled with rather than welcomed. Change often feels scary and tiring but it’s also really exciting to naturally keep evolving on your own personal journey and keep finding new things that you enjoy. BILLY FAGAN Freelance developer billyandjames.co.uk When you first start out, especially if you’ve turned your hobby into your work, you want to put all the cool stuff into all the projects. However you’re not doing this as a…

BACKPACKER HOSTEL PROFILES JUSTIN MARCHANT Justin is designer and the owner of Black Bear Creative, a boutique design studio in Australia. w: blackbearcreative.com.au t: @B_BearCreative OLLIE MILLER Ollie is a product designer currently working at Crunch in Brighton, UK. w: omillerdesign.com t: @ollie__miller DARRELL ESTABROOK Darrell leads the design team at SingleStone, a tech consulting firm in Richmond, VA. w: singlestoneconsulting.com t: @DesignResponds JUSTIN MARCHANT THE BAY HOSTEL A site for a beach hostel aimed at younger travellers This site is aimed at 19- to 25-year-olds including festival attendees, students who have just graduated high school and international backpackers who want a taste of the Australian surf and beach lifestyle. To appeal to this target demographic, I created a design that is clean and includes an inviting and down-to-earth colour palette associated with summer, beach lifestyle and fun. Modern,…