1. Bells Morten

In this month’s collection of the best new fonts, we’re going to see some fonts that test the limits of weight, height, and gravity. We’re also going to see font families that merge unexpected styles with one another.

1. Bells Morten

Bells Morten is a display font inspired by vintage signage. With high-impact lettering that’s easy to read, this font would be great for websites that are short on words and heavy on imagery.

2. Bold Tension

Bold Tension is a modern font designed for technology and science companies. While the font might not be ideal for pages that require a lot of reading, it would look great in logo and hero imagery.

3. Carino Sans

Carino Sans is an attractive sans serif font. All three styles — Regular, Semibold, and Bold — are all-caps, which means this will be a useful font for website headers, logos, and other branded materials.

4. Exposure

Exposure is a variable font, but not in the way most fonts offer variation. This one is inspired by the principle of exposure in photography. So the variation takes place in the axis, allowing you to control how much light is exposed to the lettering.

5. Garden Marker

Garden Marker is an interesting font family. It contains a serif font, which looks like something from a manuscript. It also has a brush variant as well as a textured clip art variant. You could realistically use the font pair anywhere on your site and it would look fantastic.

6. GT Planar

GT Planar is a massive font family containing 42 styles ranging from Thin to Black and with variants for Retalic (-45°), Upright, and Italic (+45°). This angular flexibility will allow you to move your lettering in all kinds of directions, giving your website an anti-gravity feel.

7. Historina

Historina is a delicately drawn handwritten font. It would work really nicely in logos, hero imagery, headers, and accent text for brands with a luxury offering.

8. Mallory

Mallory is a uniquely styled font. It’s meant for display placement, which is a good thing since legibility could be problematic at smaller sizes. To make the most of this font, use it to style logos or headlines with just a few words and in areas where you can make the font large.

9. Mogguine Asturias

Mogguine Asturias is a serif font with razor-thin edges that exudes old-world class and style. Use this high-contrast font to design logos, headlines, and even product packaging for luxury retail and fashion brands, restaurants, and more.

10. Mori

Mori is a sizable font family with 16 variants ranging from Extra Light to Extra Bold. It also includes character sets for circled and squared numbers, Latin symbols and punctuation, Japanese symbols and punctuation, as well as subscript and superscript numbers. If your website has a heavy numerical component, this would be a nice font to use for it.

11. Paterson

Paterson is an attractive retro serif font. It comes with additional glyphs and swashes so you can add extra personality if you feel it’s needed.

12. Phenomicon

Phenomicon looks a lot like the fonts used to style memes — especially when memes and GIFs first entered the pop culture lexicon. As such, this tall, condensed display font would be really effective on websites targeting Millennials and Gen Zers.

13. Spring Note

Spring Note is a fun and friendly duo font. It comes with an all-caps display font as well as a bouncy cursive font, so there’s no need to worry about font pairing when you use this font as it’s already been taken care of for you.

14. Summer

Summer is a calligraphy-inspired font. Its upright lettering and well-balanced characters make this an attractive and legible font. It would look especially nice on websites for service-based businesses or professionals wanting to exude a friendly and welcoming personality.

15. Writer

Writer is a graffiti script font that looks like it was drawn with a flat marker. Pair the alternate glyphs with all-caps text to give your site a grungy, graffiti-like design. Or keep it simple and use the regular character sets with mixed-case wording.

The post 15 Best New Fonts, June 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

30 mai 2022/par Service comm.

4 Founder-Led Brands That Are Done Right

When you hear the word “leadership,” do you think of a particular person?

If you’d been asked that question anytime before the 1900s, chances are you’d think of an accomplished politician or a battle-tested general. These were the people leading society for most of recorded history. Today, you might have someone else in mind.

Since the industrial era, the US has birthed a pantheon of founders who’ve arguably led our society as much as any statesman or president. We put Rockefeller and Ford right next to Lincoln and Jefferson. Think about it; these guys haven’t just changed the US; they’ve changed how the entire world lives and does business.

Founders of successful companies today command even larger amounts of capital and power than JD and Henry. With the rise of social media, they are often thrust to the forefront of their brands and the public, whether they like it or not. Some manage the responsibility better than others.

In my opinion, the best businesses use all that capital, manpower, and name recognition to do more than simply make a profit. By leading with authenticity, inspiring positive action, and influencing their brand’s vision for innovation – they try to make a change.

I wanted to take a minute to reflect on some modern founder-led brands I think are doing a killer job of creating unique, world-changing businesses and company cultures. I also want to discuss the lessons I have learned from them.

Elon Musk – Tesla

When talking about founder-led brands of the 21st century, it’s hard to pass over electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and its outspoken CEO, Elon Musk. Love him or loathe him, he belongs in any conversation on influential founders.

While Musk isn’t technically the founder of Tesla, he is one hundred percent responsible for the company’s direction over the past decade. I think two of the strongest leadership points for Musk are his focus on branding and innovation.

Tesla created showrooms and charging stations long before his business had the sales to justify the expense. People saw the name Tesla everywhere, got curious about it, and now that’s paying off big time. Tesla today is at the forefront of the EV industry while all the other car companies play catch-up.

Behind the scenes, Tesla was also early to create a vertically-integrated supply chain – giving it almost complete control over its product and logistics. That’s another feature with a hefty upfront price tag but paid off when the pandemic hit. Now the biggest automakers in the world are rushing to copy that model.

Musk arguably even convinced China to deregulate foreign ownership of automotive companies. That’s hard to prove. However, China changed its rules around foreign ownership of EV companies shortly after he refused to enter the country.

Arguably, Tesla today is one of the frontrunners in redefining how traditional companies run. Musk is known to hate bureaucracy and traditional hierarchies. He hires other people to take care of bureaucratic processes for him.

Musk is also known for hiring relatively young, hard-working employees into high-power management positions in the company and letting them prove themselves. That inspires extreme loyalty from his employees from an early age. Musk’s focus on efficiency and rejection of traditional hierarchies has sparked a small revolution in tech companies.

Finally, I respect Musk because he has goals beyond showing year-over-year growth to shareholders. That’s hard to do day in and day out.

Sara Blakely – Spanx

Sara Blakely is an example of a founder with her hands in every part of her business, from product creation to sales. Most importantly, she created an authentic company culture with values she felt the business world lacked.

For those who know her story, Spanx very nearly didn’t happen. Blakely pitched her slimming undergarment to multiple women’s brands run by men. Most told her it would never work.

It might seem silly now, but men used to think they knew women’s fashion better than women. It wasn’t until one executive gave Blakely’s product to his daughters to try out that he agreed to start stocking Spanx. It’s a great example of how businesses can make a lot of money by listening to their customers.

Besides founding a women’s clothing company that sells products women want, Blakely strived to bring “feminine energy” into the workplace. I saw this poignant quote from her in an article:

“Twenty-one years ago when I started Spanx, I ended up in the paper in Atlanta, and I was at a cocktail party and a couple of guys came up to me and they said, ‘Sara, we read about you. Congratulations! We heard you invented something.’ And I said, ‘Yes I did, I’m so excited.’ They said, ‘Business is war,’ and then they pat me on the shoulder and they kind of laughed at each other. I went back home to my apartment that night. I was 29 and I just thought, I’m not going to war. I’m going to do this very differently. I’m going to honor a lot of feminine principles — intuition, empathy, kindness. Just allowing myself to be vulnerable through this process. And of course, a lot of the masculine energy has helped me also — it was a balance. But I wasn’t going to do it by squashing the feminine.”

Blakely worked hard to create a sales-oriented company culture that was purposely welcoming from that point forward. She regularly scheduled “oops meetings” where employees could stand up and say how they messed up and turn it into a funny story. At Spanx, it was okay to make mistakes and learn from them.

Blakely wanted everything about her product to be fun, including the way it was sold. She created a mandatory boot camp for salespeople, which, among other things, requires employees to perform standup comedy. Little things like that resonated with people and made Spanx synonymous with “fun.” Even famous actresses were flashing their Spanx on the red carpet.

The lesson we can all learn from Spanx and Blakely is that fun and positive energy are great marketing tools for any business. Many companies try to push a fun culture publicly without any authentic leadership that genuinely exemplifies that narrative, they won’t have the same effect. Blakely’s story of Spanx is not just a story of the brand but a story of her life and the experiences that shaped her vision and goals.

Jack Dorsey – Block (FKA Square)

While better known for founding Twitter, Jack Dorsey has recently been in the news for his move to solely running payment processing business Block. I admire Dorsey because he radically encourages his teams to think differently about how they work.

Dorsey is known for optimizing ways to stay productive and focused throughout the day. He manages through unconventional tactics like communicating only through voice memos on his phone that he runs through transcription apps. He says this prevents him from being sidetracked by distractions on his computer. I think that kind of mindfulness is necessary now more than ever.

Dorsey tries to bring this level of focus to his interactions with his employees too. I saw a great quote from him in this article discussing computer-less meetings at Block.

“When phones are down and laptops are closed, the team can discuss any issue at hand without distraction. We can actually focus and not just spend an hour together but make that time meaningful — and if that time is 15 minutes, then it’s 15 minutes and then we move on with our lives.”

Besides limiting distractions, Dorsey is known to walk five miles to work daily, theme each day, and create detailed agendas and goals for each team meeting. In his former company, Twitter, the culture was frequently described as a space where employees could speak freely to management about things they wanted to change.

On that subject, Dorsey has been known to push hard for employee control in his companies. Perhaps ironically, he was also quoted saying he wants Twitter to break away from its co-founders’- vision and control, calling founder-led companies “severely limiting.” However, it still seems he has some sort of vision for the world that he wants to bring around via Block.

His business goals are visionary, pushing the boundaries of innovation in the financial world.

Dorsey is a known cryptocurrency enthusiast but had pushback from the Twitter team, including his CFO, about making a crypto-centric product. His move to payments processor, Block, seems to be a bid to follow his passion and exert his vision on the world.

Block has since made headlines for being extremely bullish on cryptocurrencies, while many have expressed doubts. Dorsey even changed the business’s name to Block to better reflect its focus on blockchain and famously purchased $50 million worth of Bitcoin in 2020. All the while, Dorsey has been quietly creating arms of his business in the hopes of improving BTC’s usefulness. That may pay off down the line.

Melanie Perkins – Canva

I identify strongly with Melanie Perkins, co-founder of graphic design SaaS, Canva. Besides being roughly the same age, we both came from nondescript beginnings with no background in entrepreneurship or tech.

Canva is an excellent example of a business created by becoming intimately familiar with a customer problem and executing. Perkins spent years teaching people how to use design platforms like Adobe Creative Suite because they were so complicated. Taking that knowledge, she started a simple product to help customers create high school yearbooks. That expanded into a super app covering every aspect of design.

This super-app has unlocked a way for millions to learn design and produce high-quality content at any skill level. The cost to use Canva is many times lower than anything else on the market.

While Canva is an amazing product, what I like most about Perkins is that she believes business serves a higher purpose than maximizing profits.

When she was suddenly thrust into the limelight with a $40 billion valuation, people were even more impressed by Perkins’ philanthropic goals. She vowed to donate a 30 percent stake in Canva to a charity dedicated to eliminating poverty (about $12 billion). She is also known to regularly fundraise for 25,000 different nonprofits through her app. She doesn’t just inspire people with words, but by actions, she’s actually taking.

Canva is very public about its ethos. I like their values because they are general yet avoid the jargon many companies fall into. They are:

To be a force for good and empower others;
Pursue excellence;
Be a good human;
Make complex things simple;
Set crazy big goals and make them happen.

Besides revolutionizing how modern businesses design and harness goodwill marketing, Canva was also one of the forerunners of the remote work trend.

Most of Canva’s “Canvanauts” worked from homes worldwide even before the pandemic. Canva showed a lot of tired old businesses that you could still run a successful company without having employees in the office 24/7.

How I Try to Learn From the Best

Finally, I want to talk about what I am trying to contribute to my team and society with my current business, startup acquisition marketplace, MicroAcquire.

As I’ve mentioned, I think it is very much on myself as a founder to set the tone of my business – and that starts with who I hire. When I’m searching for new employees to join the “#Micromafia” I not only look for productive workers, I look for people I genuinely enjoy spending time with. It’s the best feeling in the world to go to meetings where you leave thinking, “That was really fun.”

Besides creating a great team, I’ve tried to address another problem I see again and again at major tech companies: employee burnout. There’s a reason the average tenure of a tech employee is three years.

I love working on startups. It’s like playing a video game for me, and it’s probably why I’m a founder. That said, I know my employees don’t always feel the same way. As CEO, I make sure my team knows I want them to live their lives outside of MicroAcquire.

On the business side of things, I take cues from the best. Like Musk and Dorsey, I want to preemptively create features that I know our customers will love. I knew people wanted an easy way to sell their startups because I wished I’d had one back when I was doing it.

Like Spanx and Tesla, I also strongly believe in the power of innovative branding – and I make sure we spend in areas that will give us significant returns down the line.

For example, we’ve made it easy to get MicroAcquire merchandise online completely free. The extra exposure we get from tech people rocking MicroAcquire t-shirts is more than worth the cost. We also created our own media publication Bootstrappers.com to tell the founder stories we thought major publications had missed. That’s been a huge hit with our customers, who also happen to be founders. These people traditionally have had to spam inboxes and pay for press because they didn’t raise billions in funding.

Finally, like Blakely and Perkins, I also want to actively listen to customer feedback and make sure we create a necessary and desired product. That’s why I make sure we’re constantly engaging with our community both on our website and social media. Many of the features we’ve added are just things we’ve heard mentioned multiple times from customers.

So far, I love the community we’ve created online and in the office. I don’t claim to have the winning formula, but I feel we are making a real difference out there. We’re lucky to live in a world with so many smart people getting their ideas out and making a positive change in the world.

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post 4 Founder-Led Brands That Are Done Right first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

26 mai 2022/par Service comm.

Helvetica: Overused Cliché or Modernist Classic?

Few fonts in the world have become a part of the cultural landscape that they have an entire documentary film and a MOMA exhibition made about them. Helvetica, however, is different. It has been the go-to font for everyone from government agencies to hip pop-up shops whenever clean and modern text is called for. It has become so much a part of our daily lives that it has created a long list of detractors.

It is strange for a humble font to be so used and so hated at the same time. Is Helvetica the font that symbolizes hip, cool and modern? Or is it a ’60s anachronism loved by boomer designers that deserves to go the same way as the 8-track and gasoline?

Birth of a Legend

Helvetica is the Latin word for Switzerland, the birthplace of this font. It was created in 1957 in the middle of a boom of fonts created by Swiss designers that today is known as the International Typographic Style. It was the handiwork of two designers, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.

They designed this simple sans-serif font to be — ironically enough, given today’s divided opinions — a neutral font. It was modern, in the popular style, but simple, dense, and legible. It was something that could be put on a sign and easily be read from a distance.

Helvetica represented a clean break from the fonts that came before. The designers upended the more formal and intricate serif fonts of the 19th and early 20th centuries with bold, clean simplicity. Perhaps it was a product of a new era, maybe it defined a new era as it went, but Helvetica was a revolution in font design.

The new font was an enormous hit. One of its earliest fans was the United States Government, who put it everywhere from the sides of space shuttles to agriculture policy reports. The European Union went so far as to require its use on all health warning information. In addition, the font spread to languages as diverse as Khymer, Urdu, and Korean.

The font was initially cast in hot metal typeset and has been altered and redesigned as the world and printing technology have changed. There have been several updates, all modifying the original design to exaggerate or change the font for greater legibility, particularly on computers where many claim the font falls short. And as with anything popular in the design world, the number of imitators and ripoffs far exceeds the scope of the original.

Where Helvetica Stands Today

Today in the 2020s, despite now being old enough to qualify for a pension, this font is everywhere. Why, though, is something so ubiquitous so controversial among designers?

Any style that becomes the ‘next big thing’ will attract critics, particularly if that ‘next big thing’ sticks around longer than expected. For some, the International or Modern fonts era is simply a piece of history. Not unlike the art or architecture from those eras, the pieces are lovely to look at, but it has been done. To continue it now would be imitation, or worse, a lack of imagination.

Why the Haters Hate

For some critics, Helvetica has fallen victim to the banality of overuse. The day the US Department of Agriculture decides it loves a style, that style is officially uncool. Too many ‘squares with no taste’ have decided that Helvetica represents what must be cool, so the people in the know reflexively reject it. The trend makers define their role in the art world by being avant-garde and neophilic. They have to use the next new thing before anyone else or their tenure as a trend maker is finished. For these critics, Helvetica isn’t bad per se, just old and worn out.

Lastly, there is the ever snarky group of critics who have come to loathe Helvetica for what it represents: boring corporate design. Helvetica became the darling of every group of people who wanted to give the image of clean modernity. It’s a boring choice, uninspiring, damn near default. It makes designers look lazy, their work stale. Helvetica’s success in becoming a near-ubiquitous font has made it too much of a default to be cool.

Why Helvetica is Well Used and Well-Loved

There are an equal number of fans for every salty critic who has come to dislike Helvetica. Those who favor the font love that it is true to its design, simple and legible. For a government agency or large corporation, it is clean and efficient. It is stylish enough to give a little life and flavor to the publication but is subdued enough to show professionalism and erudition.

The font’s connection to the Modernist and International era can be appealing to others. Some styles retain their popularity throughout the years, seen as cultural hallmarks and high points of culture and expression. Helvetica was a product of an optimistic age where the dense, dark expressions of the past were replaced with light and airy styles. These looks have fluctuated in public opinion but have never totally gone out of style. This enduring appeal has kept Helvetica in many designers’ good graces.

Finally, many fans like it because they have been steeped in its use so long it has become part of their style. From the original modernist era designers to the students they taught, and now their students’ students, it was a look many incorporated into their own style. All designers are products of their education and stand on the shoulders of previous generations; Helvetica has been such a part of the design landscape that many people have made it their own. Perhaps this was conscious, perhaps unconscious, but either way, many cool new designers at the forefront of new styles still choose this font to express text in their works.

Cliché or Classic

Perhaps in a twist of ironic fate, the two designers of Helvetica aimed to create a font that would be, in their words, “A neutral font that should not be given additional meaning.” This clean neutrality was a goal worthy of anything named after Switzerland. And this might very well be the true source of division; it is a plain, clean font into which all designers can place some or no meaning. It is a blank canvas, and just as any blank canvas hung in a museum, it would attract positive and negative opinions by its very nature.

To call it a cliché, or classic, though, is Helvetic’s conundrum. It is undoubtedly classic, and its rampant overuse causes it to stray pretty far into cliché territory. The strange situation it finds itself in is that it seems to exist as both cliché and classic at the same time. It has become a default but a beautiful default.

Helvetica is everywhere, and like anything that is everywhere, it is both divisive and ignorable. Either way, love it or hate it; it isn’t going anywhere.

The post Helvetica: Overused Cliché or Modernist Classic? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

30 mars 2022/par Service comm.

SAP IBP permet au semencier Lidea de se recentrer sur la demande client

Actualités, ERP & Applications, SAP, Supply-Chain

Afin de mieux piloter sa production et répondre à la demande client, Lidea a mis en place un processus S&OP à l’aide de la solution SAP IBP. Un projet, mais aussi un challenge pour ce nouveau semencier issu de la fusion de deux entités.

Lidea est un semencier français issu du rapprochement entre Euralis Semences et Caussade Semences Group. Il se classe dans le top 10 mondial des semenciers grandes cultures. La société propose une offre étendue, allant des céréales aux légumes secs en passant par les plantes fouragères. Elle référence plus de 500 variétés de semences.

Lidea dispose de 8 sites de production situés en France, en Roumanie, en Ukraine, en Espagne et en Russie, avec une surface cultivée totale de 45.000 hectares. La société réalise un chiffre d’affaires annuels de 360 millions d’euros, pour 2100 collaborateurs. 73% de son activité sont réalisés à l’export.

Le rapprochement d’Euralis Semence et de Caussade Semences Group a doublé la taille de l’organisation, ce qui se traduit par un important effort d’intégration et de transformation. “C’est un choc des cultures, avec des processus, des méthodes et des stratégies différentes, explique Sébastien Monaco, CIO et CDO de Lidea. Notre challenge est de faire de cette fusion un succès, d’aligner les équipes, la culture et les processus, puis de préparer la croissance sur de nouveaux territoires. Nous voulons également poursuivre notre effort d’innovation continue, sur les produits, mais également sur les technologies numériques à destination des agriculteurs.”

Lidea souhaite ainsi se tourner plus largement vers ses clients, les distributeurs et fermiers, en adoptant un modèle consistant à ajuster ses plans de production en fonction de la demande.

Le besoin de se structurer… autour de solutions SAP

Si Euralis Semences disposait d’un ERP SAP ECC, l’outillage au niveau de la supply chain restait réduit à sa plus simple expression, avec de nombreuses tâches réalisées manuellement. Du point de vue IT, Caussade Semences Group partait d’encore plus loin. “Avec le doublement de l’organisation, nous ne pouvions plus laisser la situation en l’état”, constate Sébastien Monaco. De multiples projets ont donc été lancés, dont l’extension du périmètre de l’ERP d’Euralis Semences, ainsi que la mise en place d’un CRM et de SAP IBP.

L’utilisation de SAP Integrated Business Planning a comme objectif premier la mise en place d’un processus S&OPau sein de Lidea. “Un quick win était nécessaire sur ce projet, afin de montrer aux actionnaires que nous étions capables de concrétiser la fusion en menant à bien un projet d’envergure portant sur un processus clé de Lidea.” Ce projet est donc doublé d’un challenge stratégique.

“Notre objectif est de créer un core model qui puisse être déployé à l’échelle de Lidea (32 pays couverts) et qui puisse se connecter très facilement aux master data de nos briques financières et industrielles. Le choix de SAP IBP est assumé: nous voulions prendre une brique de la cartographie S/4 HANA de SAP, afin d’anticiper le futur, dont notre migration de l’ERP SAP ECC vers SAP S/4HANA. L’une des raisons du choix de TeamWork est qu’il dispose déjà de références clients dans notre industrie. C’est essentiel pour nous, car nous travaillons dans un secteur particulier et nous avions fixé un délai très court – 6 mois – pour mener à bien ce projet.”

SAP IBP adopté pour le processus S&OP

Le projet a démarré en avril 2021, avec comme impératif un démarrage de la solution en septembre de la même année, lors du lancement de grosses campagnes annuelles. Un délai très court, compte tenu des autres travaux réalisés en parallèle sur le système d’information du groupe (ERP, CRM, datawarehouse…). Afin de tenir ces délais, Lidea a choisi de rester au plus près des standards proposés par SAP IBP. Le projet a également été découpé en deux vagues, la première se concentrant sur la mise en place d’un processus S&OP élargi, la seconde abordant les aspects financiers.

“Notre processus S&OP réconcilie demande et offre, détaille Sébastien Monaco. Les données des commerciaux sont remontées, avec la prise en compte de particularités, comme la gestion des campagnes. Les marchandises disponibles sont réparties, par BU, puis à des niveaux plus fins allant jusqu’au client. Le demand shaping permet de pousser des offres ou de contraindre la demande suivant la capacité de production. Enfin, les données sont remontées dans l’ERP SAP ECC, afin de planifier la production.”

Un démarrage effectif en septembre 2021

La livraison du premier lot et la formation des utilisateurs ont été réalisés dans les temps permettant ainsi de mener les campagnes de rentrée avec SAP IBP.

“Ce projet ambitieux a été réalisé pour un coût très modéré. Sur le terrain du ROI, l’OTIF (on time, in full) est monté de 90% à 98%, améliorant ainsi la satisfaction client. Les gains de productivité internes sont également importants. J’estime que la solution SAP IBP devrait être rentabilisée d’ici 12 à 15 mois.” Le second lot se concentrera sur la finance : scénarios PIC, forecast P&L. Il devrait être livré en fin d’année.

Mais plus que tout, ce projet a permis de fédérer les équipes des deux coopératives autour d’un objectif commun, créant ainsi une dynamique d’appartenance au nouveau groupe. En quelques mois, un des processus clés de l’entreprise a été déployé sur plusieurs pays. “Nos différents sites sont les premiers bénéficiaires de SAP IBP, qui leur donne une vision globale des productions démarrées et de comment est servie la demande client. Le flux S&OP proposé par SAP IBP est le maître des ordres de fabrication de nos sites de production,” conclut Sébastien Monaco.

The post SAP IBP permet au semencier Lidea de se recentrer sur la demande client appeared first on SAP France News.

21 mars 2022/par Service comm.

3 Essential Design Trends, March 2022

This month all of our web design trends have a common theme – imagery. Whether it’s seasonal or just coincidence, there’s a shift in the styles and types of images on many designs right now. One thing that might push these design trends is a relaxation of COVID-spurred rules worldwide or even fatigue from the pandemic.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

1. Little Images Everywhere

The jury is still out on whether we love or hate this design trend – tiny images (and videos) everywhere.

The thing that’s nice is there is a lot to see and interact with. The thing that’s challenging is that these designs can feel a bit unbalanced and all over the place.

Most of these designs feature four or more images or videos at a time. That can be a lot for a user to digest when we are accustomed to having just one thing to look at in the hero area.

Those four or more images then include all of the other user interface elements that you would expect on the page – navigation, large headline, secondary text, scroll, or engagement interaction. It can be a lot to decipher.

Tokyu Garden City does it with a mix of still and moving images with sliders and other animations. The images are always changing and moving, and there’s constantly something new to look at with movement at the top and bottom of the screen.

Buro Jantzen takes the tiny image idea to an extreme with ten images on the homepage. And every one is smaller than a postage stamp. There is a cool effect that happens with each image though. On hover, the small image pops into the large black box at a size where you can really see the photo.

Oliver Guy uses a combination of video images on his website, which makes perfect sense for his industry of drone photography. There’s some interesting hover animation happening that allows you to see additional video clips without leaving the homepage. The contrast of small video on the white background makes this design easy to understand.

2. Big Detail Photography

Photographic details in all their glory. Images and elements that are so in your face that you can see every detail. That’s majorly trending in website design.

Big detail photography and videography is one of those image trends that can be so visually interesting that you can’t look away. It has other benefits, too, such as facilitating decision-making for e-commerce or helping someone better understand what an item is or the overall messaging.

Each of these examples shows something larger than life-size.

Karak creates ceramic tiles. The primary background image is so big and with such detail that it almost only serves as texture for the design. But it is paired with a smaller image and video that pull everything together for a complete understanding. The big detail image is beautiful and exciting and provides an extra layer of information.

Wuillemin Fleuristes features an off-balanced hero image with a large floral detail. What’s interesting about this design choice for a detail image is that it is the only image on the screen and partially obscured by a tinted box and text element. The overall design draws the eye but may leave the user wanting to see a little more of the image.

Horage pushes its watch in your face with motion in a video that zooms the product closer and closer into view. The combination of detailed video with very little text is a bold choice for e-commerce and might work because this item is still in the preorder phase. Detailed imaging is designed to help create a desire for the product.

3. Big Faces are Back

After two years of not having that many faces in design projects, designers are going big and bold and showing people again.

One of the reasons we haven’t seen as many faces in design projects is because there was concern over how to show people – masked or maskless, alone or in crowds – and it caused more concern than was worth just going another way.

But projects with big faces are back in a major way. And it’s refreshing to make virtual eye contact again.

There are plenty of ways to do it, as outlined in each of these examples.

Glassbox Media uses a full-screen oversized video on the homepage. You can see the subject’s eyes and feel engaged with the person on the screen. She seems happy, and the size and scale of the face make you feel almost like you are in a room with her, ready to have a conversation.

Reamarie uses smaller still images with tight crops to bring you into the faces on the screen. There are more, bigger faces throughout the scroll as well so that the user feels connected to the people and product. Even if an image isn’t super large, a tight crop can make it feel bigger and create the same level of engagement as something that has more size on the screen.

Recruit Holdings Co. uses a trio of people together, happy and smiling, to establish a connection with website visitors. The entire design features similar images throughout and makes you feel like you want to be a part of what they are offering. Note that the people are close together and without masks; that’s a culture shift we are starting to see in a lot of imagery.

Conclusion

Photography, videography, and image trends can be driving factors for website design projects. The types of images selected can set the tone for projects, relate to brand identity, and help engage users.

The post 3 Essential Design Trends, March 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

En savoir plus sur la valeur et les avantages du développement professionnel.

21 mars 2022/par Service comm.

SAP classée parmi les leaders de la formation informatique aux États-Unis et en Europe par IDC MarketScape

Actualités, ERP & Applications, SAP

Nous sommes entrés dans une ère de transformation numérique en accélération constante dans un monde des affaires très concurrentiel, et cela ne devrait qu’augmenter avec le temps.

Chaque entreprise travaille ardemment à la mise à jour de ses processus. Cependant, pour que les entreprises puissent soutenir ces évolutions rapides, leurs collaborateurs doivent constamment affiner leurs compétences pour répondre aux besoins technologiques croissants. Pour rester à la pointe des changements et des enjeux auxquels seront confrontés tous les secteurs d’activité dans les prochaines années, il est essentiel que les employés aient accès à une formation continue et à une évolution de carrière intéressante, pour parvenir à la fois à la rétention des talents essentiels et à une culture d’entreprise de l’innovation continue.

Pour relever ces défis, de nombreuses entreprises et personnes se tournent vers des ressources, des cours et des certifications facilement accessibles sur le site SAP Learning afin de combler leur déficit de compétences. SAP est classée parmi les leaders dans le rapport d’Évaluation des prestataires de formation informatique de l’IDC MarketScape U.S. et MarketScape Europe. Cette recherche porte sur l’analyse des entreprises de formation informatique les plus connues, dotées de portefeuilles de formation adaptés aux entreprises qui envisagent d’importantes initiatives de transformation.

Les formations SAP favorisent l’acquisition de compétences innovantes

Le portefeuille de formations SAP Learning aide à répondre aux besoins de formation individuels et à renforcer les aptitudes technologiques des entreprises. SAP estime que les ressources de formation et de certification sont de plus en plus nécessaires dans l’environnement de travail actuel. Selon le rapport d’Évaluation des prestataires de formation informatique de l’IDC MarketScape U.S. les points forts de l’offre SAP sont les suivants :

Les clients apprécient les services de formation supplémentaires.
Les clients apprécient l’offre de préparation des tests de certification.
Les clients disent qu’ils l’utiliseront plus souvent l’année prochaine.
Elle peut aider les clients à personnaliser le contenu ou les parcours.
Elle a un point de vue important sur l’utilité de la formation.
Elle dispose d’un excellent processus d’actualisation et de mise à jour de son contenu.
Elle contient des exemples concrets d’amélioration des processus client.
Elle intègre des travaux pratiques dans une bonne partie de son contenu.
Elle propose une gamme intéressante de tarification et de packages.
Les apprenants apprécient l’utilisation des quiz pour valider les apprentissages.

Prenons l’exemple de Neils Wijsbeek, spécialiste chez Deloitte Consulting B.V. Malgré ses sept années d’expérience des solutions SAP, Wijsbeek continue de se former en permanence et valide ses compétences en passant régulièrement les certifications sur les solutions SAP SuccessFactors. Wijsbeek constate que le fait de continuer à mettre à jour ses certifications est important pour sa carrière et permet de démontrer son expertise de manière très visible. «Le processus de certification, notamment sa préparation, vous oblige à approfondir le contenu et à développer rapidement vos compétences », dit-il. À une époque où il n’a jamais été aussi crucial de rester à l’avant-garde des évolutions dans le secteur numérique, il a également déclaré que le contenu delta obligatoire de la certification SAP exige des utilisateurs qu’ils se forment sur les nouveautés des versions et les derniers développements, ce qui implique un accroissement de l’expertise tant individuelle que de son entreprise auprès des clients.

Notre équipe chez SAP se consacre à la création d’expériences de formation épanouissantes telles que celles de Wijsbeek, qui permettent aux collaborateurs d’approfondir facilement et souvent leurs compétences. Les responsables de recrutement sont actuellement confrontés à des défis de fidélisation des collaborateurs, ce qui limite considérablement la croissance de leurs entreprises. Avec l’avancée rapide des progrès technologiques, les meilleurs talents sont constamment sollicités et débauchés, ce qui crée des ruptures au niveau des compétences et des collaborateurs surchargés de travail. Par exemple, bien que la plupart des entreprises soient devenues multi-cloud, 86 % des professionnels de l’informatique pensent qu’un manque de compétences ralentira les projets Cloud.

Chez SAP Learning, nous veillons à ce que les entreprises puissent facilement transformer et perfectionner leurs compétences, ce qui donne aux collaborateurs des opportunités de développement de leur carrière et participe grandement à leur motivation. Pour aider les entreprises à accomplir cette tâche et rencontrer les besoins des individus à chaque étape de leur parcours d’apprentissage, nous avons lancé un nouveau site SAP Learning qui devient le point d’accès unique et simplifié à l’ensemble des ressources de formation SAP.

Formation SAP disponible pour les apprenants quelque soit leur niveau

SAP Learning offre à tous des opportunités de perfectionnement, de reconversion et de validation de compétences SAP. Par exemple, avec notre récente version du site SAP Learning, nous offrons un accès gratuit à plusieurs contenus pour la mise à niveau des compétences sur la plateforme SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), y compris un tout nouveau parcours de formation axé sur le développement d’applications Low-code/No- code. Cela permet de garantir que des apprenants, quelque soit leur niveau, depuis les développeurs débutants jusqu’à ceux qui occupent déjà un poste de développeur confirmé, peuvent facilement acquérir des compétences SAP dans des domaines d’innovation clés et se préparer à une certification SAP gratuitement.

Afin de soutenir l’effort des entreprises pour consolider les compétences d’innovation de leurs employés, SAP fournit les ressources d’apprentissage nécessaires, permettant d’accroître la compétitivité globale de leur business. La mise à disposition de formations et de certifications SAP dans une organisation est devenue un élément essentiel d’atteinte des objectifs stratégiques.

Les solutions SAP Learning aident à valider les compétences et l’expérience SAP des utilisateurs et permettent aux apprenants tout au long de leur vie professionnelle, comme Wijsbeek, de rester à la pointe de l’évolution du secteur et de se présenter, ainsi que leur organisation, comme des leaders de l’innovation. « La façon dont les programmes de formation ont évolué au fil des années permet de trouver très facilement les supports nécessaires, notamment pour maintenir sa certification à jour grâce au contenu delta », explique Wijsbeek.

Alors que SAP Learning continue d’évoluer pour satisfaire les besoins des apprenants partout dans le monde, je suis extrêmement enthousiasmé par le dévouement de notre équipe pour faciliter la progression des compétences et de la carrière des apprenants SAP, alors que nous entamons cette année supplémentaire de transformation de nos formations en mode digital.

Jan Meyer est responsable des systèmes de formation pour SAP Learning.

*IDC MarketScape, Évaluation des fournisseurs de formations informatiques États-Unis 2021 (doc. #US47541121, décembre 2021)
^**IDC MarketScape : Évaluation des fournisseurs de formation informatique européenne 2021 (doc. #EUR148400521, décembre 2021)

The post SAP classée parmi les leaders de la formation informatique aux États-Unis et en Europe par IDC MarketScape appeared first on SAP France News.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

15 mars 2022/par Service comm.

Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022

We’re going to have some fun this month. There are so many new tools and resources out there for designers that make life easier, and others are simply enjoyable.

Here’s what is new for designers this month …

Polka Dot Generator

Polka Dot Generator is exactly what you think. Adjust colors, dot size, shadow, and fuzziness, and then export the CSS for use in your projects. This could make for fun effects or backgrounds.

Design Memes

Design Memes is just a lot of fun. It’s a collection of memes based on design culture updated daily. It’s a little silly and a little reflective. Yes, it’s completely ok to laugh at yourself.

Pppointed

Pppointed is an SVG arrow-making tool that helps you create cool pointers without a lot of effort. Just pick a color, shape, and style, and you are ready to go. Save your custom arrows as SVG files or copy the code and use them on the web whenever you want to point at things visually.

Open Source Color System

Open Source Color System is a set of palettes that include carefully picked colors to help you overcome interface challenges. For example, it is one of the only color tools out there that includes palettes for light and dark modes. It’s also designed with accessibility in mind to help you create a complete and usable system.

Cowsay

Cowsay is a nifty little web interface of the same name made with Svelte and HTML Canvas. Play with it and then copy your art as ASCII or an image.

Minze

Minze is a simple JavaScript framework for native web components. It’s tiny and fast, modern, shareable, framework agnostic, and uses TypeScript to scale your component library. Plus, you can get started with it right away.

Tally

Tally is a simple – and free – online form builder. You can use it without coding, and it works like a document file, so there’s no learning curve. You can create unlimited forms, integrate with other tools, set logic, collect payments, and more. There’s a pro version as well if you need even more features.

Hue.Tools

Hue.Tools is another color tool to help you maximize effort when creating palettes. Generate a color you like, see specs and values in all the different color spaces, inspiration from design sites, and colors that work with it. It’s fun and functional.

Sturdy

Sturdy is a low overhead code collaboration platform for fast-moving teams. With Sturdy, you work in the open with your team. Discover and interact with draft code as it is written. Those team drafts are like live pull requests (Figma or Google Docs) but using your local editor.

Mage

Mage is a tool that transforms your data into predictions. Build, train, and deploy predictive models in minutes with no AI experience required. This is a premium tool, but you can try it for free.

Huemint

Huemint is a machine-learning-based color scheme generator for websites, graphics, and branding. There are many options to play with, and you can generate some pretty interesting combinations that ordinarily you might not think of.

CSSUI

CSSUI is another tool you’ll love because it includes pure CSS interactive components without any JavaScript. It’s easy to customize, uses standard HTML, is easy for all levels to use, is tiny and fast, and supports pretty much all modern browsers. It’s an open-source tool that you can download and use immediately.

UI Icons Line – Free

UI Icons Line – Free is a set of 1,000 free vectors for use in your projects. Who doesn’t need a robust set of icons?

Skill Icons

Skill Icons is a set of icons to help you showcase your design and development skills on your resume or GitHub. They all look great and match.

Ambient Design

Ambient Design is a mobile app design market where you can get mobile UI kits for Figma. Purchase kits separately, or buy quarterly or yearly plans to access all current and future UI kits.

TextFrame

TextFrame lets you create animated tutorials for your users to get the help they need. It integrates directly with WordPress or any other website with just a couple of lines of code and includes plenty of customizable options to make it easy for you to help others understand how to use the website. The tool is free for one site and just a few bucks per month for additional sites.

Booqsi

Booqsi is a fun new social media network for book lovers. The platform is still in beta and lets you save and share books, create shelves for reading, and doesn’t force a connection to Amazon. It’s just all about the books. And there’s a bonus: every link from the site goes back to bookshop.org to help you find and support local bookstores.

Stylo

Stylo is an open-source WYSIWYG interactive editor for JavaScript. It is made to bring great user experience and interactivity to the web, for everyone, with no dependencies. It has an interactive design, is customizable, and is future-proof.

Tutorial: How to Favicon in 2022

How to Favicon in 2022 is an excellent lesson on the five icon files every website needs (plus one JSON file). If you are creating more than that, this is a must-read.

Tutorial: Creating Generative SVG Grids

Creating Generative SVG Grids is an in-depth, step-by-step tutorial for anyone who wants to create a more artistic SVG. It uses a handful of tools, including SVG.js, Generative Utils, TinyColor, and GSAP.

Fromage

Fromage is a new and beautiful premium typeface family from Adam Ladd. It includes 14 styles with an interesting serif and alternative sans option. The high-contrast design is great for a variety of projects.

HD Colton

HD Colton is a premium super sans serif typeface with a whopping 91 styles and family package options. It would make a bold statement as a display option.

The post Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

14 mars 2022/par Service comm.

The Case Against UX Testing

Actualités

Picture a dark office, blinds drawn. Picture a UX designer smoking a cigar. See the light filtered through the smoke whipped to fog by a spinning ceiling fan. Watch as the UX designer sits at a desk and considers the website.

The UX designer has devised a series of tests to determine if a green button is better than a red button. One of them involves tipping a tortoise onto its back. He looks the website over carefully and says, “Describe in single words, only the good things that come to mind about your mother.”

The website pauses, sweating under pressure, then replies, “Let me tell you about my mother…”

BLAM! The website pulls the trigger of an unseen gun, and the UX designer collapses, leaving the project to be rebuilt from scratch in Material by Harrison Ford, with overuse of Post-its delegated to Edward James Olmos.

Who Does UX Testing Actually Serve?

In the past’s bleak dystopian future (1982’s Blade Runner was set in 2019) no one benefitted from asking the wrong questions. And little has changed.

Designing any test to verify UX is fraught with as many complications as administering the test. Questions are skewed by bias, conscious or otherwise, and competing agendas. Even with something as apparently simple as a split test, the potential for distortion is immense.

When planned by a designer, a UX test offers little benefit to a client; the benefit is to the designer, who can then say their ideas are validated (or not).

Imagine hiring a developer to code a website, only to discover that the developer didn’t know CSS and expected to be paid to learn it before completing the work. You would hire someone else because that developer isn’t qualified.

From a client’s perspective, a UX designer should know, through experience, whether a green button is better than a red button. Designing an elaborate test to split-test the button color serves little purpose other than indemnifying the designer against mistakes.

The ROI of UX Testing

It’s widely accepted that there is substantial ROI (Return On Investment) from UX testing. We’ve all heard apocryphal stories about sites that split-tested their checkout and improved retention by 5%.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that without user testing, that site could have improved its checkout retention by 4.9% simply by hiring a competent, experienced designer. But what about the remaining 0.1%? Well, for most sites, 0.1% represents very little profit. And the cost of recovering it via testing far exceeds the benefits.

When a company the size of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google split tests a website, it can afford to allocate $25k for user testing because it stands to gain 0.1%, and that represents far more than $25k. To meet the same 0.1% improvement, a small business has to design and run the same tests, incurring the same costs. But in the case of a small business, $25k could eat up all of its profits.

UX testing almost always works. But it is only profitable at scale.

If a good UI designer with a grounding in UX can improve checkout retention by 4.9%, tripling the project budget for just 0.1% more is a tough sell. Bluntly, that $25k is better spent on advertising.

What UX Designers Can Learn From Psychiatry

We all have the tendency to think we’re unique. It’s a survival trait attributed to our prehistoric brain. That belief in uniqueness is particularly strong in highly competitive people. We all think our site, our side-project, our approach are original. And we’re all wrong.

When a psychiatrist sits down with a patient, they have two immediate goals: categorize that patient into an established diagnosis, and assess the severity of the condition. It may be that the patient is depressed or anxious or even suffering from a potentially more debilitating condition like schizophrenia. What the psychiatrist is not trying to do, is define a new illness.

Occasionally — perhaps once per decade — a genuinely unusual patient will present themselves, and a new form of illness is considered. New treatments are found and tested. These treatments are rarely developed on behalf of individual patients; doctors work with grants from governments, medical schools, or the pharmaceutical industry and publish their results.

The vast majority of websites face similar problems. They deal with similar demographics, work within a similar culture, and deal with similar technology. As such, they can be categorized in the same manner a psychiatrist categorizes patients.

The key to delivering successful UX solutions is not UX testing in individual cases, but rather UX research, examining similar projects, and cribbing their solutions. If you categorize a project accurately, you’ll find a solution readily available.

Replacing User Testing With UX Best Practices

Your client doesn’t need to pay for UX testing to benefit from it. Enterprise sites, government sites, and even personal projects will test UX patterns. Sites like Shopify or Stripe will user-test their checkout processes at scale and enable companies to benefit from the results by adopting their platforms.

If you’re currently testing designs for small business, one of two things is true: either you’re wasting your client’s money investigating a problem someone else has already solved, or you’re designing something so original that it has no precedent (and you probably shouldn’t be).

Designers should be opinionated. Designers should know UX best practices and how they apply to a range of scenarios. Designers should be capable of making an educated guess. Designers should be self-validating.

Once or twice in your career, you may find a legitimate need to test something. However, the vast majority of the time, the correct answer is to tip the tortoise back onto its feet and choose whichever color button has the higher contrast.

Featured image: Still of Brion James in Blade Runner. Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment

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