Threat modeling is the ultimate shift left approach. It can be used to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities before a single line of code is written. Employing threat modeling methodologies should be your first step toward building networks, systems, and applications that will be secure by design. STRIDE is a model of threats that can be used as a framework in ensuring secure application design.
This is the second in a series of blogs on data-driven microservices design mechanisms and transaction patterns with the Oracle converged database. The first blog illustrated how to connect to an Oracle database in Java, JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Go as succinctly as possible. The goal of this second blog is to use that connection to receive and send messages with Oracle AQ (Advanced Queueing) queues and topics and conduct an update and read from the database using all of these same languages.
Advanced Queuing (AQ) is a messaging system that is part of every Oracle database edition and was first released in 2002. AQ sharded queues introduced partitioning in release 12c and is now called Transaction Event Queues (TEQ).
The year’s winding down as everyone segues into a much-needed holiday R&R. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some awesome new tools and resources for website design projects.
Check them out, and hit the ground running in January. Here’s what’s new for designers this holiday period. Enjoy!
Fancy Border Radius Generator is a fun tool that allows you to create exciting shapes for elements. Use the included templates or create your own border shapes and then export the CSS/HTML for a variety of uses.
Pulsetic answers the question: “Is your website down?” Get website downtime alerts by phone call, SMS, email, or Slack. Create beautiful status pages and incident management reports and keep visitors (and your team) updated.
Ffflux SVG Generator makes it easy to generate fluid and organic-feeling gradients. You can use the resulting graphics as backgrounds to elements on a page to give a colorful fluid look to page elements. Choose colors and styles, then save or copy your SVG for use.
Fable is a web-based motion design platform to help you tell moving stories. It’s designed to be easy enough for beginners to use but has tools that even the most experienced motion designers can appreciate. This is a premium tool, but you can try it free.
Modern Fluid Typography Editor takes the guesswork out of sizing and scale for type sizes on different screens. Set a few preferences and see ranges your type styles should fall in. This typography calculator is visual and easy to use.
Emoji to Scale is a fun look at emojis in a real-world relationship to each other. Make sure to also note the Pokemon to Scale project, which is just as much fun.
Page Flip Text Effect is a fun and straightforward PSD asset that adds a nice element to design projects. Everyone can use some fun, colorful animation, right?
Nanonets is a practical tool for automated table extraction. You can snag tables from PDFs, scanned files, and images. Then capture relevant data stored in tabular structures on any document and convert to JSON Excel, or CSV and download.
Browsers.page shows browser name and version, matched with a list of the browsers you support as a company or project. It’s a visual reminder to update if you are working with some browser lag. It’s a free tool and includes a frontend API.
UKO UI is a Figma dashboard and design system bundle packed with components and pages to build from. It’s free for personal use.
Floating UI is a low-level library for positioning “floating” elements like tooltips, popovers, dropdowns, menus, and more. Since these types of elements float on top of the UI without disrupting the flow of content, challenges arise when positioning them. It exposes primitives, which enable a floating element to be positioned next to a given reference element while appearing in view for the user.
Style-Dictionary-Play lets you experiment with a style dictionary in your browser with a live preview and mobile and desktop views. It’s an open-source tool and allows for URL project sharing, and you can use it without logging in or signing up.
Airplane Runbooks makes it easy to turn small amounts of code into complex internal workflows. Model onboarding flows, admin operations, cron-like schedules, and more and share with your team. It’s like Zapier but for first-party operations that touch prod data.
Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components that works with any framework. It’s fully customizable – and has a dark mode. It’s built with accessibility in mind, and the open-source tool is packed with components.
Coloring with Code is an excellent tutorial by the team at Codrops that will help you create beautiful, inspiring, and unique color palettes/combinations, all from the comfort of your favorite text editor. It’s practical and easy to follow along as you work through the steps on your own.
Stytch is a full-stack authentication and authorization platform whose APIs make it simple to seamlessly onboard, authenticate and engage users. Improve security and user experience by going passwordless with this premium tool.
Highlight keeps web apps stable. With pixel-perfect session replay, you’ll get complete visibility into issues and interactions that are slowing down users. You can start using this premium tool in minutes, and it works on every framework.
The post Exciting New Tools For Designers, Holidays 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: December 6, 2021 – December 12, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
At this time every year, Pantone announces its choice for Color of the Year for the coming 12 months. The last year has been uncertain, to say the least, and although a tentative optimism seems to be piercing the general gloom, it’s difficult to see how that can be expressed in color.
On this occasion, for the first time, Pantone has elected to create a brand new color for its Color of the Year. Normally colors are chosen from Pantone’s extensive swatch books, so this new shade either reflects new beginnings or Pantone’s design team has been underemployed in the last year.
In either case, the shade created for 2022 is Very Peri. It’s a lilac — a bit more blue than violet, but still on the warm end of the spectrum.
The color feels a little retro — like the color of one of Jerry’s shirts in Seinfeld — and also spring-like — fields of bluebells leap to mind.
Pantone describes the color as having a “courageous presence,” but for that, I tend to think of neons; something with a little more saturation.
In fact, looking back over the past few years of Pantone colors, a soft purple (or adjoining shades) has traditionally been a safe choice for Pantone. 2014 was Radiant Orchid (lilac), 2016 was Rose Quartz and Serenity (pastel pink and blue respectively), 2018 was Ultra Violet (purple).
If Pantone was looking for a genuinely “courageous” choice, it should perhaps have reissued 2020’s Classic Blue, and called a do-over on the last couple of years.
Occasionally the Pantone Color of the Year has hinted at something more than a single shade. 2019’s Living Coral felt like attention was being drawn to the horrifying state of our ocean. Designers didn’t adopt the shade en masse, but environmentally conscious design has certainly become more prominent.
As we complain about homogenous design, is it right to even nominate a single color of the year? If what we’re lacking in the design industry is diversity, shouldn’t we ignore a color trend? (The irony of that question is not lost on me.)
In that spirit, rather than dishing out another bland lilac for 2022, Pantone should have presented us with Pure White #FFFFFF. A blank page to do with what we will. That would have been courageous.
The post Pantone Color of the Year 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
When you are a developer newbie, the realistic start may seem more like a bumpy ride to build the next great app which is still far from a Silicon Valley story. What do you do then?
There are now tons of great low code or no-code development tools like drag and drop app builders that empower experts and people with little to no technical background to enter the digital market and transform it entirely.
Are you tired of using the same old Google fonts from website to website? You’re in luck!
In this month’s roundup of the best new fonts, we’re showcasing the latest and greatest fonts from independent type foundries and designers worldwide.
Astronef Super is a retro-futuristic font collection with seven styles that are meant to be mixed and matched. While the font is modular in design, there are wild variations in weight that you can have a lot of fun with.
Auguste Serif and Auguste Sans Serif were originally drawn as a single stencil font that combined serif and sans serif styles. They ultimately became two separate fonts, with four weights apiece, that can be scaled up and down in size based on your needs.
Bartok is an exciting font as it breaks with the concept of creating a family of unified styles. Instead, each of the four styles uses different structures and weights, meaning this font can be repurposed for a wide variety of brands and styles.
Cardone is a type of serif known as Scotch Roman, designed for functionality and legibility. With its sturdy and brutal design, this serif is perfect for editorial content.
Champ is a fun and friendly font with nine weights. Because of its bold footprint, this serif performs best in branding and headlines.
Columba is modeled after old-style printing press typefaces. With its narrow, legible serif forms, Columba is most useful in text-heavy environments — both on the web as well as for printed brand materials.
Deia is a bracketed serif font with seven fonts. Thanks to the curved stroke transitions in Deia’s character set, this font is full of personality and would work great in product packaging and website branding.
Garton is a 19th century-inspired typewriter typeface that would look great on literary and editorial websites. This uniquely elegant font has three weights with italic companion sets for each.
Halisa is an extensive font family with 60 styles, five widths, and six weights (plus italics). The designer drew inspiration from 19th-century factory signs to come up with this legible semi-constructed grotesque typeface.
Helvetica Now Variable is an upgrade on Helvetica Now and the original 1957 Helvetica design. This one, however, adds over a million new Helvetica styles to the fold (all in one font file), which designers can use to create all kinds of digital and print content, including typographic animations.
Palast is a type system that consists of three sub-families: Palast Text, Palast Display, and Palast Poster. Designers can use this carefully crafted serif font family pretty much anywhere they want — from clients’ websites to promotional print graphics.
Parco is part of the new wave of humanistic typographic design. With Parco’s compact spacing and tall characters, this font will help designers craft eye-catching and highly legible headlines and branding.
Right Gothic is a huge font family, containing 98 styles — seven weights, seven widths, 20-degree italics, and an adjustable contrast axis. While this contemporary font is a sans serif, it draws upon typical serif anatomy with its high contrast between thick and thin strokes.
Rund Text is a geometric sans serif that looks both stylish yet comfortable. It also has a companion Display family available to designers who want to bring the same type of functional design to larger headlines or branding.
Sculpin is another variable font to make this list of the best new fonts. This sans serif font was designed as if a chisel and brush had been used, giving it a structured, hand-crafted feel.
The post 15 Best New Fonts, December 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: November 29, 2021 – December 5, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
A few days ago, the big tech news was that Jack Dorsey was stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO to focus on Square, the payment processor he founded in 2009.
Two days later, it was announced that Square will now rebrand under the umbrella of Block. Like Meta and Alphabet, Block is a parent company — Square will remain Square, just as Facebook is still Facebook. The only actual product name change is that of Square Crypto will now be known as Spiral.
The move has reportedly been in the works for over a year. However, despite the marketing team’s best efforts to spread around the reference, it’s reasonably clear that Block is a reference to blockchain, the technology that powers cryptocurrency.
Dorsey has been a longtime advocate of cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. With PayPal and Mastercard entering the crypto space, it was only a matter of time before Square’s focus was redirected away from legacy money.
The recent Meta rebrand was much scorned, but the new Block brand has been received with considerably more positivity. So what’s the difference?
Typically corporate rebrands, especially those in fintech, are detestable exercises in cowardice, where all trace of personality is driven out in favor of a nice safe sans-serif and a logomark as some form of tick or wave. Not so the Block branding, which feels like a cross between an Apple store and a hardcore night out in Berlin.
Yes, the logotype is sans-serif — it’s Pilat, to be precise. But the characters are pleasingly wide, and the overall shape of each is a rounded square. So much so that the ‘K’ feels a little out of place due to the rounded characteristics of the other letters. Most obviously of all, it’s uppercase, which in itself is nothing new, except that it breaks from the recent trend for lowercase. It’s incredibly refreshing to look at a brand that doesn’t mimic everything else in the space.
The logotype is crowned with a pleasantly brave mark; a morphing, twisting cube across the surface of which rainbows of gradients dance and play as it flips and spins. Interestingly, the logomark’s animated form is considered the primary version, with static versions only to be used when required.
The logo isn’t perfect — clearly, a design so dependent on color lends itself far better to dark mode than anything else — a good logo should be robust enough to work well in any context. However, I really like the design’s ambition to define itself, and the playfulness with which it does it.
The post Square Rebrands As Block first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As a UX designer, you get to work on creative, rewarding, even life-changing projects. It’s an industry with flexible working and countless opportunities. All this, and you get paid well too.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not a creative prodigy, or a tech grandmaster; you can learn to become a UX designer with the right mindset, a few tools you pick up along the way, and some committed learning.
By the time you’ve finished reading this post, you’ll be well on your way to designing your new career.
You can do this, let’s get started…
Every career is different, but generally speaking, a UX designer works on making a user’s interaction with a product or service (normally websites) as intuitive as possible.
Just as a golf architect designs the layout of a golf course to flow through greens, tees, and holes, with buggy paths for access, and the odd bunker to add a challenge; so a UX designer creates the optimum experience for a site. A golf architect doesn’t need to reinvent the game of golf, and neither does a UX designer need to reinvent websites.
A golf architect will not design a course with a 360-degree sand bunker surrounding a tee (well, they might, but they really really shouldn’t), or a hole too small for a golf ball. In the same way as a UX designer, you’re not going to design an ecommerce site with a cart in the bottom left, a non-existent search feature, or hidden pricing.
The best thing about being a UX designer is that you don’t need to spend years in formal education to get qualified. The flipside is that if you want to be a great UX designer, it’s not a walk in the park.
Every designer is different, but some of the main traits of successful UX designers are: an enjoyment of problem-solving; good listening skills; curiosity; open-mindedness; attention to detail; creativity; communication skills; process-driven; and adaptability.
Before committing to this career path, check out a few podcasts, and read a few blog posts, to dip your toe in the water.
Still interested? Excellent, the next step is…
UX design is a practical skill. It’s all well and good knowing the theory, but without practice putting the theory into action no one will give you a chance to prove what you can do. So how do you get practical experience? You get certified, and there are three popular options: online, in-person training, or self-taught.
A good UX syllabus will include portfolio-building projects, tool mastery, networking opportunities, and even 1-2-1 mentorship. As well as learning the fundamentals of UX, you’ll cover user research and strategy, analysis, UI design, and more.
Online courses tend to be much easier on the bank balance, as well as being flexible, which means you can fit them around your current job. You can work at your own pace, and in many cases choose modules that interest you, once you’ve completed the basic introduction.
There are many online course providers, including Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, and Career Foundry.
Whatever option you choose, it is a good idea to get as broad a perspective as possible, so consider following more than one course — perhaps mix and match a paid course with a free one.
This could be a university course, or a local boot camp where you physically sit in with an instructor and classmates.
This is more expensive, but it provides benefits that nothing else does. Firstly, you’ll have classmates you can bounce ideas off, collaborate with, keep motivated, inspired, and accountable. You can also get real-time, intensive coaching and advice from someone who’s been there, done that, bought the T-shirt (and redesigned it so it fits better).
Seach local boot camps and workshops, check out workshops at local conferences, and ask your local college what courses they offer.
Being self-taught is the cheapest of all options. Work at your own pace, where, and when you want to. Watch YouTube videos, read blogs, garner information anywhere you can find it.
This option involves a lot of stumbling around in the dark. The biggest challenge is that you don’t know what it is that you don’t know. For this reason, it can pay to follow the syllabus of a local college course, even if you’re not enrolled and don’t attend lectures.
In reality, all education is self-taught to an extent, even the most prescribed courses need self-motivation.
Some of the most in-demand UX designers in the world are self-taught, so why not? Start exploring UX blogs like Nielsen Norman Group articles, Google Design, UX Planet, and UX Matters.
Recruiters and hiring managers will seek your technical ability and your experience using popular tools from user research, to wireframing, to prototyping. When you get your first job in UX, the tools you use will be determined by your project manager, so it’s a good idea to have a passing familiarity with the most popular. These will include Maze, Userzoom, Sketch, XD, Figma, Marvel, and Hotjar.
If you’re following a guided course you should get an introduction to at least a couple of important tools. Once you understand one, you can probably pick the others up quite quickly… because, after all… they should be intuitive.
You do not need to know how to code, but understanding the roles, and restrictions of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is very beneficial. When you get your first UX job, you’ll need to be able to talk about how technologies fit into the plan.
Your portfolio is your résumé. The golden ticket. The silver bullet. Amassing a content-rich portfolio is paramount. You don’t need a real-world job to build your portfolio, and you should already have content to add from your course.
You need to demonstrate knowledge of UX tools and processes (what future employers will look for). Case studies that incorporate research, problem-solving, strategy, imagination, and (if possible) results are the best way to do this.
There are a variety of ways of building a portfolio, but the best is taking a real website, and redesigning it. Don’t worry if your first few projects aren’t the best; as long as you demonstrate improvement and growth, that counts for something.
You can showcase your portfolio on sites such as Behance, Dribbble, or preferably create your website.
Start combing the job boards to see which companies are looking for UX designers. There’s a global shortage of qualified UX designers, so if you can’t find anything you’re looking in the wrong place! Make sure your whole network, from your Mom’s hairdresser to the barista at your favorite coffee place know that you’re looking; you never know where a good lead will come from.
Some companies are looking for UX skills as part of other roles. Others are looking for full-time UXers.
Don’t be disheartened if “Junior UX Designer” positions require 2 years of experience; HR just throws this in as a pre-filter. If you think you can do the job, apply anyway, if your portfolio’s good you might get an interview regardless, and if you get an interview they think you’re worth taking the time to meet.
If you don’t get the job, don’t be downhearted. Remember: every time someone else gets a job, that’s one less person you’re competing with for the next job.
So, now you know what it takes to get into the field, it’s time to start applying yourself to this newfound and richly rewarding career. As the great writer Anton Chekov said, “Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.” So get out there and practice, practice, practice. Add and add and add to your portfolio.
To become a UX Designer, enroll in a great course, build your portfolio, network, apply for roles, and always be learning. Always be open to new ideas and suggestions. There’s a lot of leg work, but the juice will be worth the squeeze.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post How to Kickstart Your UX Career in 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot
_____________________________________________
Another excellent guide to help people to prepare for job interviews to give them the best possible chances of success and not make some common mistakes can be find here : https://www.ireviews.com/interview-resources/
