BellSoft issued a new version of Liberica Native Image Kit (NIK), 22.0.0.2, so in this short article, I will provide a tutorial on how to use it with the Quarkus framework.
Liberica NIK is based on the open-source project GraalVM (Community Edition) and is compatible with many platforms, including lightweight musl-based Alpine Linux. Liberica NIK in essence is a utility that converts JVM-based applications into native executables (AOT compilation).
Creating and sending business proposals can be a lot of work. However, if you have the right tools and knowledge, you can quickly create and send high-converting proposals that your clients will love.
This article will explain how to create a fantastic business proposal that looks great and gets signed quickly. Although we’re focussed on design, our tips apply to every industry and type of business.
One of the most common mistakes people make is starting the proposal by talking about themselves.
You might be surprised to know that clients spend the most time on the introduction chapter, so it’s essential to use it right. You need to set the right tone by explaining to your clients how your solution will help them achieve their goals.
They want to hear the benefits and feel assured that you’re the best choice for them. If you start the proposal by talking about your company and the values you believe in, you’ll lose the attention of your clients.
In most cases, the clients have already researched you and know the points you make in your PR releases.
Once you explain your process and the time scales, you can introduce your team and talk about the company. Just make sure it’s short and sweet.
Sending a one-page proposal will only confuse your clients and won’t incentivize them to reach out. The best way to format your proposal is to create six sections.
This should include:
You need to showcase what their future could look like if they work with you, listing all the benefits as well as explaining the next steps. You need to write down what happens if they don’t agree with some parts of the proposal, what will happen when you reach an agreement, how much they have to pay, and more.
Be clear on your follow-up process to speed things up.
If you’re someone who fires up MS Word and hopes for the best, your proposals probably don’t get a lot of traction. That’s because you’re spending too much time reinventing the wheel. The best jumping-off point for your proposal strategy is choosing the right app. It will help you automate and speed up the whole process.
Different solutions suit different people, but some of the features you might want include:
The digital signature option helps you get your proposals signed faster and turns your proposals into legally binding documents. This significantly reduces the agreement time since your clients no longer have to print out your documents, scan them and send them back.
Speed up your payment process by choosing the proposal software that has a payment option that allows clients to pay as soon as they agree to your terms and conditions. It can significantly decrease the time it takes to get paid.
For an even more straightforward sales process, select a proposal tool that has native integrations with your sales CRM and other sales tools.
Proposal analytics can help you in the follow-up process. They show when your proposal was opened, on which device, and how much time the client spent on each of the sections.
The content library lets you save any part of the content (text, pictures, videos, terms and conditions, pricing table) for easier access in the future—no more copy and pasting huge chunks of text.
In order to be able to create any documents with your proposals software, their editor needs to be very easy to use. If the editor requires design experience, look for a better one.
When it comes to the price section, there are two significant things you need to look out for: the name of the section and the format of your price.
Naming your pricing section pricing, expenses, or something along those lines cheapens your proposals and makes it seem like a regular invoice. Try naming the section ROI or Investment. It will evoke positive feelings with your clients because if they think of working with you as an investment, they will know that a return on investment is a part of the deal.
The way you format your prices won’t make or break your deal but can help you speed up the proposal process. Firstly, you need to figure out if you’re going to charge by the hour, based on the value of the project, based on the commission, or something else.
Once you reach a decision, you have to format the prices in an easy-to-understand and short way. Many companies try to upsell their clients at the very start of their business relationship and create proposals with three different packages.
We believe that the way you present your prices should be the same as the way doctors prescribe medicine. You need to be the authority on your prices and tell the client what type of package fits their needs. If you leave it up to your client to pick the right package, it will just lead to confusion, and you’ll have to do the extra work to explain the difference to them.
Web-based business proposals speed up the signing process. If you make your proposals printable, it will lengthen the time your clients take to agree to your terms and sign them. Make sure your proposals are web-based and have a digital signature option.
Another tip is to send your proposal as quickly as possible. As soon as you meet with your client and hear them out, start working on your proposal.
Our last tip is to send your proposal at the beginning of the week. If you send it on a Friday, it will negatively impact the time it takes to get your proposal signed.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 4 Tips For Getting Design Proposals Signed Faster first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As we move closer to spring, we’re going to see a change in typography styles come with it. While we always need new serifs and sans serifs to design with, in the spring, it’s not uncommon to use more nature-inspired and whimsical fonts to usher in the warmer temps, wedding season, and holidays like Earth Day and Mother’s Day.
As such, the following list of best new fonts offers up a good range of fonts, from spring-inspired styles to more evergreen selections.
Alti is a geometrical sans serif font with a single style. Inspired by modernism and Art Deco, Alti combines extra-tall ascenders (see the lowercase “d”) with eccentric angles (the lowercase “e”) and balance (the capital “H”).
Antodits is a handwritten font that looks similar to something we might scribble on a Post-it note, a moving box, or a label. If you want to give logos, hero images, social media banners, and other graphics a casual hand-drawn feel, this would be a fun one to play with.
AW Conqueror Sans is a combination of geometric and humanist sans serif styles. There are 16 styles available, and the font designer recommends using them for different moods or tones. The AW Conqueror Sans family could be the one you use for various brands while giving each a unique style of their own.
Birra is an interesting family of fonts. Unlike the usual typography styles and weights we’re accustomed to (e.g., Thin, Heavy, Italic), Birra’s styles are inspired by different types of beer and the breweries they’re found in — Stout, Saison, Pils, and more.
Boby Marlyn Script is a delicate cursive font in just one style. The designer suggests using it for romantic themes, so it would go nicely with matters related to wedding planning, florist shops, relationship retreats, and parenting blogs. It could also work well on marketing images and banners around holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
The release of Delvard has brought us three new fonts: Delvard Serif Display, Delvard Serif Subhead, and Delvard Serif Text. There are 24 styles in this collection of art nouveau-inspired serifs, so there’s a lot you can do with this creative and legible font.
Evoque Text is a humanist serif family of 14 fonts. While there are bold styles that would work effectively in headlines, this font was explicitly designed to give website visitors a comfortable reading experience over long passages.
Forme Grotesque and Forme Grotesque Arabic is a sans serif font inspired by 19th century British Grotesque font styles. Forme Grotesque is a beautiful multilingual font that would be a great addition to various websites.
Gamer Station comes in two styles: Regular and Outline. This cartoon-inspired typography would be a good one to use on websites that sell kids’ products and experiences — books, toys, entertainment centers, etc. It could also be instrumental in gaming app design.
Hyperpolar is a retro all-caps font inspired by 1950s crime stories. While the gritty vibe is most obvious in the Brush styles, the Regular and Outline styles take a more subdued approach. If you’re looking to add drama or intrigue to your logo, headers, or marketing graphics, you have obvious and subtle ways of playing it up with this font.
LargePoint is a bold sans serif font in two styles — Sharp and Rounded — with eight weights apiece. While the font was initially designed for a sports brand, it looks great in editorial headlines. So, if you’re designing a news site, blog, or literary publication that pushes out high-impact stories, consider using this font to style your headlines.
Monttocks Script Font is an elegant handwritten font that comes in two styles. The tight cursive lettering looks authentic, which could be an excellent way to add a personal touch to websites representing female entrepreneurs or small business owners. (Check out Marie Forleo’s site, and you’ll see what I mean.)
Räder is a sans serif font inspired by vintage road signage. Unlike today’s signage, old road signs prioritized both beauty and clarity of message. Because of its roots, this font and its 16 weights would be an effective way to design attention-grabbing headers.
Rosales is a versatile humanist font. It comes with eight weights, eight italic variants, and two alternative sets of capital letters if you prefer something more stylistic than the basic sans serif. Because of the great variety in character sets and styles, Rosales can be used to improve the look and legibility of text in any part of your website or app.
Yellow Sunflower is a calligraphy font that exudes warmth and friendliness. There’s only one style available, and it would work best in display settings and in conjunction with a neutral sans serif.
The post 15 Best New Fonts, March 2022 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: February 21, 2022 – February 27, 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
MySQL semi-synchronous is a plugin mechanism on top of asynchronous replication that can offer better durability and even consistency. It helps in high availability solutions, but can in itself reduce availability. In this article, we will look at some basics and follow up to present scenarios requiring higher-level intervention to ensure availability and avoid split-brains.
As a quick recap, semi-synchronous replication is a mechanism where a commit on the primary does not apply the change onto the internal table data and does not respond to the user until the changelog is guaranteed to have been persisted (though not necessarily applied) on a preconfigured number of replicas. We limit our discussion to MySQL 5.7 or equivalent.
Have you been feeling a little unproductive lately? Well, you are not the only one. Of course, we all want to be as productive as possible at work, but that’s not always the case.
According to recent research, we are fully productive for less than 3 hours a day. Stress and poor planning are just two of the reasons why. And this is true in all work environments. No one is exempt from this problem, from employees in central offices to freelancers or managers working from home.
That’s why we have researched and selected the eight best ways to increase your productivity at work. In our search for solutions to boost creativity, we have come across numerous promising approaches and tips that you can use. Here are the best tips you can follow to get the most out of a workday:
I can safely say that there is nothing more important than efficient task planning. Planning your tasks can free you from stress and procrastination. Planning everything before the day even starts is probably the best approach.
This is also where time management comes into play. Think about it. How often have you been more productive after setting a specific time frame for a task? You need to plan for the project at hand and then map each workday.
The more you plan your projects and workdays, the more productive you will be. However, it would help if you tried not to spend hours and hours planning.
So you have successfully planned your tasks. That should be enough to be productive, right? Well, unfortunately, no. Whether you work in the office or from home, numerous things can distract you daily.
Distractions are ubiquitous, from a colleague wanting to chat about last night’s game to TV at home. When you minimize such distractions, you become better at what you do.
Of course, it’s not always easy to resist temptation. But if you do, you’ll spend more hours focused and engaged in your task. The same goes for leadership positions. You can ask your employees to turn off their cell phones and minimize chats.
We all feel the need to check our phones or chat with our colleagues. This is precisely why the next tip is crucial to your productivity.
According to psychologists, taking regular breaks at work will help you minimize stress and thus improve your performance. Whether you work from home or at headquarters, relaxing and social breaks are necessary. But that’s not all.
As we mentioned earlier, regular breaks are a smart way to avoid distractions. If you know your next break is coming up, you will not need to chat or look at your phone.
This will help you maintain a high level of concentration. On the other hand, if you do not take regular breaks, your performance will continue to decline throughout the day.
Once you have scheduled your tasks and breaks, it’s time to think about the actual work process. Contrary to what many believe, multitasking does not make you more productive.
Conversely, multitasking can decrease your performance, drain your energy faster, or even damage your brain. This is another reason why planning is so important. You should always try to engage your brain with one task at a time.
This is one of the most efficient but often underestimated ways to increase productivity. Ensuring that the working temperature is between 20-24 degrees C (68 and 76 degrees F) will help you stay concentrated for more extended periods.
This will also save you a lot of time, whether at home or in the office. On the other hand, if you feel cold or hot, you will be distracted. Therefore, you should think about the working temperature before you start working.
It’s not news that sleep deprivation can affect our performance. And that’s not just it. Lack of sleep leads to a massive decrease in:
So sleep is crucial to our overall well-being. According to the National Sleep Foundation, you should try to get between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night (for adults between 18 and 65).
It becomes evident that getting enough sleep is one of the best ways to increase your productivity at work.
Communication is essential, especially for those of you who work from home. You should always have a conversation with the people you live with during your breaks. This can also help you avoid distractions during your work hours.
Try to make everyone around you (including yourself) understand what closed, and open doors mean. This will help you increase your productivity while communicating sufficiently with your loved ones.
The same goes for people who work in offices. You should always try to engage with your colleagues during breaks. Remember that feeling part of a group and sharing your experiences is the key to increasing your productivity.
Our last tip is one of the hardest to follow, especially working from home. You may think that this is not a problem for you. Recent studies show that we spend an average of 145 minutes on social media every day. Of course, it’s not a bad idea to cut down on that time.
But, even if you do not, you should try to keep any engagement with social media outside of your work hours. This will help you focus on your tasks and get you one step closer to your goals.
Keep in mind that we all get stuck at times when working on a project. The more you worry about it, the more stressed you will be. It’s essential to take care of yourself and your mental health. In any case, we hope you will find it easier to increase your productivity now that you have read our tips. All you have to do is follow them.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 8 Proven Ways to Turbo-Charge Your Productivity first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
When we build a microservice architecture and the number of services keeps growing, we face the problem of debugging and tracing requests through our entire system. What happened when a user got a 500 error on his request? What service incorrectly processed his request? All these questions can be solved by the Distributed Tracing System. Let’s take Spring Cloud Sleuth as an example.
To trace a request through a distributed system, the concepts TraceID and SpanID are introduced. TraceID is generated when a request enters our system and remains unchanged throughout its path. SpanID changes as the request passes from one service to another. If necessary, it is possible to generate new spans within one service to distinguish business processes.
In a previous article, I described a way to organize low-latency products as multiple code bases which are bound together with a Maven Bill of Materials (BOM). Understandably, this requires setting up continuous integration and deployment for a large number of similar projects. Maintaining such a setup manually in the face of change while ensuring its consistency will take a lot of effort. In this article, I will describe how the team at Chronicle Software has tackled these issues in different projects by writing code that does this for us, in the form of Kotlin DSL for TeamCity.
This guide will show how to configure the same set of CI/CD builds for multiple Maven project repositories of similar layouts programmatically, following the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle. Following it will require a base knowledge of git, Maven, and TeamCity but would not require knowledge of the Kotlin language, since all of the displayed code is self-explanatory.
The email channel is known for multiple advantages. It is convenient to implement practically, offers many options, and has a fantastic ROI of up to 4200%.
But we also face problems, the most disappointing of which is people ignore emails, not performing the desired action, or worst of all unsubscribing. Why does it happen?
The web is constantly progressing. It offers many tools like modern HTML template builders, ESP services, and other digital assistants that help us at all stages. But even the best tools are not enough; the secret of success still rests with us.
In this post we’ll cover the 7 cardinal sins of email marketing, to help you avoid them.
I can define this mistake as probably the worst. It’s worse than broken links, incorrect dates, or prices. Even more harmful than ugly design.
We lose a lot when postponing email strategy implementation. Beginners often focus all their attention on the content, social media activities, SEO issues… All that is important, right. But ignoring email campaigns is a hard fail.
Thousands of visitors never come again to your website. In other words, they leave the very first levels of the marketing funnel. While regular emailing keeps them engaged and prevents churn.
So delays here are only profitable for competitors. Don’t wait until you collect “enough” contacts. Start as soon as possible.
Frequency matters too. Don’t bomb people with emails; it annoys and causes unsubscribes. Email frequency is an individual parameter depending on many factors.
A fundamental axiom: people unsubscribe when emails are irrelevant. The same goes for neglected expectations. Even the best content with next-gen features won’t save the situation.
I mentioned the email frequency a bit above. Notice that if you announce the weekly emails but send them every day, this is an example of ignoring expectations. Be honest with readers.
Another typical issue is off-topic. If your subscribers are waiting for content related to smartphones, send them newsletters about smartphones, not dresses or domestic turtles :)
But in some cases, getting off-topic can be good. It all depends on the target audience, actual situation, and communication style.
Once again, relevance is vital. So we must avoid generic emails. Instead, especially if your contact list is extensive enough, apply all the possible parameters: age, gender, location, customers history, etc.
Where to get the respective data? A typical solution is to use update preferences forms in emails or on the website. Let clients choose the topics that are interesting for them.
Use surveys, sign-in forms, AI-based techniques of segmentation… Smart algorithms are great helpers that track clients’ behavior and then process the data for segmentation purposes.
The better we know our subscribers, the deeper we segment the contact list. It allows sending precisely targeted newsletters to respective segments.
As Hubspot stats say, personalized emails’ open rate is 26% higher, and their click-through rate is 14% better. But even besides index data, poor personalization is just nonsense today.
Clients are looking for content that matches their preferences, so marketers have to consider these expectations. Segmentation and dynamic range are essential here, but they are not the only techniques.
Everything is much more sophisticated here, in addition to personalized subjects and content. Another solution is to generate recommendations that include the previously browsed products.
AI-powered automation comes to help. Machines will upgrade the classical personalization to the next level called hyper-personalization.
It’s simply unacceptable to send non-responsive emails today. With so many people opening email on different devices, this is a huge fail.
The modern world is full of gadgets and devices. Email has been opened on smartphones more frequently than on desktop PCs and notebooks in recent years. Up to 70% of readers will read messages on mobiles very soon. No wonder that responsivity turned into a mobile priority.
Regarding layout and design, there are no problems: modern template editors are featured with automated responsivity. But mobile-first means not only layout/design adjustment for mobiles, full-width buttons, or larger fonts. We have to work with content too. Don’t overwrite text remember that recipients read inbox emails on the run.
Just imagine yourself reading emails in the cafe or cab. And ask yourself: is everything convenient? Would you take the desired action on the run?
People are quite skeptical of new brands. We need to do our best to attract them. So everything must be done professionally.
The best solution: be a perfectionist. If newsletters look amateurish, they are likely to repel.
Being amateurish will also ruin your brand identity and reduce customers’ trust. Pay close attention to design, stick to your corporate style, analyze each detail in the context of overall harmony.
Testing is vital. Before sending an email campaign, check it via Litmus or Email on Acid to be sure that message looks just as planned. These tools allow testing email rendering by +90 combinations of email clients, devices, and OS.
Knowledge is power. Always try and test your marketing strategies. Are you satisfied with your actual performance? Run A/B tests and focus on the most significant wins and failures.
Of course, threats are not limited to these seven failures. The last piece of advice: never ignore trends.
Accessibility? Don’t forget about clients with special requirements. Get whitelisted and incorporate these technologies in your campaigns.
And constantly strive for perfection. With this doctrine, you’ll win!
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 7 Worst Fails in Email Marketing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Yulia: Hi, guys! Thank you for agreeing to meet me today. Let’s start with a simple question. How would you describe Reface in a few words?
Ivan: Everything started with a face-swap. We created state-of-the-art technology and made it possible to provide it to more than 180 million people. Reface is an app that allows users to swap faces in images, GIFs, and videos in seconds and with high accuracy. Moreover, in 2021 we developed more AI tools for personalized content, which allow us to animate faces, place faces on objects, and voice over them), empowering users to generate completely new and viral content.
