If you’re publishing a lot of content, then high-quality images are vital to keeping readers engaged and coming back for more. But contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to resort to cheesy stock photos (like the one with the matchstick metaphor that jumpstarted my quest for a better process). In this article, Lauren Jung will walk you through how to do just that, as well as provide you with a starter kit of tools to kickstart your foray into the exciting world of quick-and-dirty image creation. Having a streamlined process for creating eye-catching images is imperative and imperative to online publishing because, if done right, it will speed up your efforts by far.
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While animations may have great visual appeal, they also make app experiences more intuitive and engaging. Animation can make an app feel more fluid and responsive by providing feedback on user interaction. This means that, for designers, creating authentic animations is increasingly becoming a part of the job description. Whether you’re a designer, product manager, developer or anyone else working on a product, Keynote is a great way to communicate ideas quickly. The speed, gentle learning curve and quality of output all make it an ideal tool for your arsenal.
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In this second part, Yury Vetrov will show you how he made his “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. A framework like this has many benefits, but the main result is a transition from large redesigns every couple of years to constantly updated designs. We can spend more time evolving a product rather than doing endless design maintenance. Moreover, product designers stop thinking in screens and become less like “Photoshop/Sketch people”.
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Now is a great time to start a podcast. It’s an authentic and intimate way to demonstrate authority in your niche and to grow your client base. Kyle Racki recently started his first podcast, Agencies Drinking Beer, with his cofounder, Kevin Springer. When starting out, he was a bit lost with the technical logistics of actually setting up the podcast. Here is all of the best advice, information and resources Kyle can offer you. This way, you can spend less time on the technical side of setting up your podcast and more time creating killer content. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to regularly deliver new content, but the reward is more than worth the effort. Ready to start? Let’s go!
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As developers, we know how important it is to sharpen our tools and continually add new ones to our workflow. The command line is one of the best tools you can master as a developer. With tools like Grunt, Gulp and Bower leveraging the increase in productivity that comes with working in the command line, we are seeing it become a much more friendly and comfortable place for beginners and experts alike. In this article, Wes Bos provides insight into some of the best tools to use in your day-to-day workflow in the command line and gets you started with a totally customized setup.
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Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting!
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Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy. The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time. In this article, Daniel Pataki will show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make. While all this seems complex, beginners should be able to follow along easily, including the “create your own server” section, which is a cinch!
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Responsive images have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. As designers and developers, we have an enormous amount of power to shape how the web works. One of the biggest impacts we can have is to make our websites more performant, which will improve our users’ experiences and even make our content available to whole new markets. Cutting image weight is a relatively simple and hugely impactful way to increase performance, and I hope the information outlined above helps you make a difference to your users.
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Unless your project is structured beautifully, certain animations are a pain to tweak. Just let the client know what your intentions are for the animations, and let the tweaking and finetuning happen in the code of the final product. Until then, you are simply painting a functional and visual picture for the client and developers, giving them a clear view of your vision. Web design transitions and animations are great to prototype in After Effects. In this article, Matt Reamer will be scratching the surface of how to fit After Effects into your UX Workflow, and he’ll share details, advice, experience and links that you could use as influence and thought starters in your next project.
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The extend directive can produce undesirable side effects if it is not carefully implemented. Thankfully, there are many strategies for using extend effectively that can prevent these side effects and produce clean, organized CSS. Understanding how extend works and keeping the guidelines above in mind will enable you to use @extend to its full advantage — reducing CSS output and keeping relationships intact, no matter what exported selectors (classes, attributes, etc.) you use. Make wise use of both the @mixin and @extend directives — they’re meant to coexist in your well-organized style sheets.
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