What is Web Design? The Definition Today

The post What Even Is Web Design in 2022? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

18 mai 2022/par Service comm.

Using AWS Lambda Function URL To Build a Serverless Backend for Slack

A combination of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway is a widely-used architecture for serverless microservices and API-based solutions. They enable developers to focus on their applications, instead of spending time provisioning and managing servers.

API Gateway is a feature-rich offering that includes support for different API types (HTTP, REST, WebSocket), multiple authentication schemes, API versioning, canary deployments, and much more! However, if your requirements are simpler and all you need is an HTTP(S) endpoint for your Lambda function (for example, to serve as a webhook), you can use Lambda Function URLs! When you create a function URL, Lambda automatically generates a unique HTTP(S) endpoint that is dedicated to your Lambda function.

30 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Side Hustles for Web Design Professionals: How to Make Some Extra Cash

A career as a web designer can be extremely lucrative. The average web designer in the US makes around $50-55,000 per year, equating to an hourly rate of around $25. Of course, not every designer will automatically get a full-time, high-paying job as soon as they earn their web design credentials.

Sometimes, you might need to generate a little extra cash, perhaps to supplement your part-time income or keep the lights on while you’re taking some new courses. You can even use your web design skills to earn some extra money on the side while working a standard 9-to-5.

Today, we will be looking at some of the most effective ways to make extra cash on your web design skills.

1. Freelance

Starting with the simplest option, working as a freelancer is one of the best ways to start making cash with your design skills. There are dozens of websites out there to help freelancers find clients these days. Some of the best options include:

Toptal: For web developers, designers, and software experts;
Upwork: For all kinds of design freelancing;
99Designs: Excellent for selling your designs whenever you like;
Dribbble: Display your work and find new clients;
Behance: Sell everything from animations to videos;
Envato Studio: Sell packages for web design.

As a freelancer, you’ll be able to choose which hours you want to work, and which projects to work on. You can make money from all kinds of design skills this way, from making pages for a website to designing widgets and applications.

However, you’ll also be responsible for tracking down potential leads, building your portfolio, and managing your own taxes, so keep this in mind.

2. Sell Design Assets

As a web design professional, you’ll end up with a lot of assets over the years. Whether you’re working freelance or full-time, not every asset you create is going to be picked up by your customers. Sometimes, you’ll end up with unused content sitting on your computer.

Fortunately, you can leverage these assets for some extra cash. You can sell things like icons, backgrounds, UI assets, and more. You can even sell themes on sites like ThemeForest if you’ve built something your clients weren’t happy with.

There’s a market out there for just about every asset, from icons and PSD templates to documents, fonts, UI assets, backgrounds, and brushes. You might even build your own website where you can sell assets in the future.

3. Design and Sell NFTs

Feel like getting in on the cutting-edge of a new marketplace? NFTs are probably one of the hottest topics in the digital world today. As concepts like Web 3.0 and the metaverse gain traction, NFTs will only become more valuable.

Countless companies and innovators are looking for people to design their NFTs for them these days. If you don’t mind dedicating some of your free time to creating digital graphics, you’re in for a significant amount of earning potential.

If you learn enough about the NFT landscape and blockchain, you could even create your own NFTs. However, this would probably require a lot of time and research. You can learn more about the NFT design and art landscape here.

4. Become a Consultant

Don’t have time to build endless new websites right now? No problem, just help other people build their sites instead. Consultants are people in any industry with expertise and insights they can share to support other people. As a web design consultant, you can offer your expertise to other upcoming freelance designers or business leaders.

You’ll need to invest some time into building your personal brand as a consultant. This means developing your social media pages (like LinkedIn) and creating a portfolio. It also helps to have an air of thought leadership. This usually means you’ll need to share at least some content online.

Consulting can be an excellent way to share your skills with other people without having to do all the work of building a design course.

5. Teach Web Design

On the other hand, if you like the idea of being a teacher, you can make money almost passively with web design courses and webinars these days. While you do have the option of selling one-on-one education to students, this will usually take up a lot of your time.

If your focus right now is on a side hustle to increase your earnings, it’s often much easier to use a site like Udemy or Skillshare. The great thing about teaching web design these days, it’s much easier than you might expect. The majority of solutions on the web allow you to drip content to your clients automatically. This means you only have to create the content once.

You can create a handful of videos, quizzes, and downloadable assets, and make money off your educational resources while you sleep.

6. Create a Web Design Blog

Blogging is still a surprisingly lucrative way to make money. If you have a creative streak and you know how to write about web design in a way other people can understand, you can turn this into an excellent side hustle.

Start by building your own website using your design skills, then start publishing regular blogs with the content you know your customers would be interested in. It’s a good idea to cover a range of topics, from Photoshop, to how to design widgets and more. You can even share reviews of various web design tools and add affiliate links to earn money that way.

Make sure you use SEO strategies to improve your chances of customers actually seeing your blog and promote your content as often as you can across social media. Once you have your blog, you can make money from it by:

Working as an affiliate and promoting design products;
Showing banner ads or sponsored posts on your website;
Selling digital products through your blog (like themes).

If you decide to take the affiliate route, here are some excellent programs to consider.

7. Contribute to other Websites

If you don’t have time to launch your own website and build a following for your blog, you can still make money from writing in other ways. Becoming a freelance web design writer means you can sell your blogs and content to other leading publications.

Many popular websites are constantly looking for new content to add to their blog. If you develop a strong relationship with some of these site owners, you could get yourself a regular gig.

Contributing to other sites as a writer helps you to develop your thought leadership. Many companies will even allow you to link back to your social media pages or profile.

At the same time, you get to earn some extra money writing about things you enjoy.

8. Sell Themes and Templates

A lot of web designers today rely on other themes and templates created for WordPress to help them build their websites. Access to themes and templates can make building a new website a much easier, straightforward process.

If you’ve got some excellent coding prowess, you can develop and sell a host of website themes and templates, and sell them wherever you choose. As mentioned above, there are a number of websites available for selling web design assets. Alternatively, you can sell your own packages and templates on your website, depending on your needs.

If you create a particularly valuable theme, you can actually earn a full-time passive income over time. Placing your themes and templates on marketplace sites will also get you a lot of attention from potential clients in the future.

9. Flip Websites

If you’ve ever seen one of those shows where someone buys a house, makes it look great, and then sells it for a higher price, you’ll understand the basic premise of flipping websites. The idea is to purchase an existing website for a low price (preferably with a good domain name), then fix it up to sell on a website selling directory.

If you want to earn a decent amount of money for your website, you’ll need to dedicate a decent amount of time to building traffic, improving the appearance of the site, and so on. However, it can be fun to take on these projects in your free time if you’re looking for a way to hone your skills.

You might learn some important lessons about how to make websites more profitable while you’re flipping your various sites, which could make you more appealing to customers in the long term.

10. Write a Book

Similar to flipping websites or producing an income from a high-traffic blog, writing a book isn’t something that’s going to give you a lot of extra income overnight. However, it can be an excellent source of passive income in time if you know how to use this strategy correctly.

If you have a specialist skill in web design, or you serve a specific niche, you can generate a lot of attention for an eBook or physical book sharing plenty of accurate and specific information. Remember, writing about web design, in general, will usually make it harder to earn money because there’s already a lot of competition out there.

Writing a book is a fantastic way to create a possible extra source of income as a side hustle, and it can also make you more credible if you decide to go full-time with your web design skills in the future. It’s definitely more impressive to present yourself to clients as a published author.

Remember to advertise your book whenever you can to improve your chances of additional sales.

Find Your Side Hustle

Web design skills are highly sought after in various parts of the digital world. If you’re willing to devote a little time and creativity to exploring the various avenues above, they can all deliver an excellent source of income to you and your potential business. All you need to do is figure out which side hustle makes the most sense for you.

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all. In some cases, you might even be able to run multiple side hustles at the same time, particularly if you’re using strategies for passive income, like writing your own book or selling your own course.

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post Side Hustles for Web Design Professionals: How to Make Some Extra Cash first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

27 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Scrum Master Anti-Patterns

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Read on and learn in this post on Scrum anti-patterns how you can identify if your Scrum Master needs support from the team.

19 avril 2022/par Service comm.

When UX Goes Bad (and How to Fix It)

Designing for user experiences is what all designers do. UX is often thought of as the preserve of app or web designers; however, even a print designer laying out a magazine anticipates reader reaction to the scale of type, the placement of adverts, and the art direction of successive stories.

Because all designers design user experiences, the role of UX Designer has come to mean someone focused on creating a product or service utilizing research and testing to guide decision-making.

To research and test anything, you need metrics: a baseline and a target against which to measure. No one set of metrics is suitable for all projects, but because UX tends to be for financial profit, the Pirate Metrics Framework — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — is a good starting place.

You might seek out very different metrics in some cases. For instance, a museum might measure the success of its education program based on how many students go on to study paleontology. However, those types of metrics are notoriously difficult to quantify. Excepting a few niche cases, successful UX increases user productivity, decreases errors, reduces the cost of support, and increases sales.

So if it’s as easy as counting dollars, why does UX go bad?

UX vs. Design Principles

To understand what UX is, you need to understand what UX is not.

One of the most straightforward design principles to understand is hierarchy: bigger is more important, i.e., a heading is visually stronger than a sub-heading, a sub-heading is visually stronger than the body text.

Design principles stem from one thing: human-centered design. At the most basic level, bigger is more important because the bigger a saber-toothed tiger appears, the more likely it intends to eat me.

The evolution of human beings is so slow that had a smartphone existed at the time, a neanderthal would have been able to tap a button with the same level of precision as me. Prehistoric man shares the same minimum button size as modern man: 48 x 48px. Design principles don’t change, don’t require research, and don’t need verifying with tests.

On the other hand, a neanderthal would not have understood a smartphone, let alone an app. You only need to step back by a single generation to find perfectly intelligent people baffled by a commonly employed design pattern.

Unlike design principles, user experience is a house built on sand. When the sand shifts, the walls crack. The bricks are still solid, but the rain gets in.

Because effective UX is temporary, so is the ROI.

Technology Breaks UX

Technology unfolds at a rapid pace. As technology develops, the user experience defined by that technology changes.

The classic example is the mobile revolution, but technological change does not necessarily mean hardware. One of the most significant shifts in UXD (User Experience Design) in my career has been the popularisation of AJAX — the process of using JavaScript to load new data without refreshing the page. This seamlessness has been around since the early 2000s, but it’s only in the last ten years, as the code to achieve it has simplified, that it’s been widely used.

Jakob’s Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites and, as a result, prefer your site to function like other sites by following familiar design patterns.

Even if your UX is rigorously tested and optimized, when other sites and services carry out their own research, they are testing against the background of younger technology, and the “other sites” Jakob Nielsen refers to begin to change. As a result, the UX of your site is gradually eroded.

The consequence of continual technological change is that user research is constantly invalidated. The UX of an app, site, or service begins to degrade as soon as it is created.

User-Experience Lifecycle

Human beings have two deep-seated motivations: survival and procreation. The most important, survival, depends on discovery — new food sources, new routes through dangerous territory, new ways to skin a mammoth. We are biologically programmed to seek out the new.

A typical user passes through three phases of a relationship with a site, app, or service: discovery > comfort > boredom. Churn, or drop-off, tends to occur in the discovery phase (if the comfort phase is too slow in developing) or the boredom phase. The sweet spot is the comfort phase. That’s the part of the business-customer relationship in which the customer requires minimal support and is least likely to drop off.

The most effective form of UX — meaning the one that satisfies most metrics — rapidly moves a user from discovery to comfort and then continually eases the user back to the start of the comfort phase without tipping back into discovery.

This can be achieved with numerous micro-discoveries, tiny chunks of new experience, from simple functionality tweaks to style revisions.

Summary

All UXD, regardless of the quality, level of investment, and skill of the practitioner, begins to degrade the moment it is created.

Design principles like simplicity are good indicators of successful UID (User Interface Design) and are timeless; comprehensive design systems, brand assets, and content offer good ROI.

The most effective UX is broadly familiar and continually refreshed in small ways, allowing users to enjoy the comfort of the familiar while also experiencing the excitement of discovery again and again.

Featured image uses photos by Wolfgang Hasselmann & Shainee Fernando.

The post When UX Goes Bad (and How to Fix It) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

18 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Differences Between Laravel and Yii

Ask any seasoned web app developer about their choice of programming language, and they are sure to mention PHP. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. As per Builtwith, 3,090,319 live websites are still using PHP. However, when it comes to developing massive projects without lag or stability issues, developers tend to use frameworks, and PHP has two remarkable frameworks: 1) Laravel and 2) Yii. Both frameworks have a lot of followers in terms of full-grown communities globally, and there may be questions arising about which to choose.

What Are Laravel and Yii?

Laravel is a simple PHP framework frequently used for web-based or web application development initially created as a better alternative to Codeigniter. It is known for MVC Support, articulated ORM systems, reliability, modularity, and uncomplicated coding rules. Some of the key features of Laravel Framework are:

17 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Case Study: Redesigning Todoist for Android

Todoist is a to-do list app that 25 million people rely on every day to keep their lives organized. As part of the Doist design team’s goals for 2021, we aimed to redesign the Todoist Android app to take advantage of the latest Google Material Design guidelines.

In this post, we cover the design decisions and processes behind redesigning the Todoist Android app for Material Design. We explore the Design and Android team’s collaboration practices that brought the app update to life, which resulted in winning the Material Design Award 2021 in the large screen category. Let’s get started!

Opportunity

When we started the project, our design implementation on Android was ready for a major overhaul. The last milestone redesign on Android was initiated after the release of the first Material Design guidelines in 2016. Since then the team successfully worked on continuous improvements to the Android app, but we saw the opportunity to improve Todoist on Android on a more holistic level.

We set out to clean up instances of older UI components, colors, and text styles and update them with the latest Material Design components. We observed that some interactions and navigational patterns had become inconsistent with what users were expecting on newer Android devices and were eager to modernize this experience. With new hardware and software changes in mind, we set out to make the experience on larger phones and tablets even better, so Todoist could take full advantage of the latest generation of devices. Material 2 and 3 provided an incredible new framework to rethink the current app experience. With this in mind, we set out to challenge what a modern Android app should look like and innovate on top of the default user experience.

Solution

The team set itself the goal of redesigning our Todoist Android app and aspiring to make it the best-designed productivity app on Android. The project was ambitious and scheduled to take several months to complete. We set ourselves the following targets while working on the project:

Review the current implementation and older design specs.
Study the latest Material Design Guidelines and assess what is relevant for our project.
Research great Material Design apps and case studies and learn from their execution.
Define the new Todoist Android app design language and document the changes.
Design and development work together to assess the proposed solution and implementation.
Test an early version of the new app internally to gather feedback and make adjustments.
Invite beta testers to the new app to gather feedback and make adjustments.
Refine the app and address core issues before launching to the public.

Review

The project was kicked off by reviewing the current Todoist Android app implementation, noting down what areas needed to be fixed and what was up to date. While reviewing, we took screenshots of the app implementation for reference. This way we could easily see the current state of the app and compare it to the new design proposals that would be created. Once the review process was finalized, we had a comprehensive overview of the current state of the app and the layout, component, and styling changes we wanted to make.

Study

We continued the project by studying the latest Material Design Guidelines, assessing the components and practices that were most relevant to Todoist.

When the project kicked off in February 2021, Material 2 was the most recent version of their design system. Since Material 2 had already been released for quite some time, we anticipated that design changes to Material would be announced soon at the Google I/O event in May 2021. Rather than wait, because we expected the changes to be iterative, we pushed ahead with our work.

We identified 25 components and UI patterns that we wanted to change across the app. The changes included buttons, forms, menus, sheets, navigation drawer, app bar, system bars, text and color styles, and more. We started by creating a table view in a Dropbox Paper document with the component changes and references links to Google’s Material Design Guidelines.

This components list was a starting point for discussion to plan the scope and complexity of the changes. Close async discussions between the design and development team in Twist and Dropbox Paper comments helped us make decisions about scope and complexity early on and set a solid foundation for the project.

Research

In the initial Material Design study, we also researched inspiring Material Design apps, Material studies, Play Store apps, and Google Workspace apps to learn from their execution.

We started out by studying the Material Design Award Winners 2020 and tested out the products that were showcased. The showcased winners struck a good balance between implementing the Material Design Guidelines while maintaining their own product’s brand within the system. This balance between Google’s guidelines and the Todoist brand was also key for us to get right and so we strived to find this mix across the work we created and implemented in the project.

Along with the MDA winners, we researched the Material Studies that Google produced to showcase what apps could look like with branding and Material Design guidelines applied. It was a great reference to see how far components could be customized while maintaining the core platform principles. The Reply case study in particular offered valuable insight to us as its content type and layout came closest to Todoist. It showcased how components like the app bar, navigation drawer, and large screen layouts worked while being customized.

We continued our research by searching the Google Play store for inspiring app examples. Google Tasks, Press, Periodic Table, and Kayak stood out to us as the level of polish and quality of the apps were on par with the experience we were aspiring to create.

Sometime later in the project when Material You was released (more on that later), we stumbled upon the Google Workspace apps blog post which previewed Material 3 changes that Google was introducing to their own products. It offered a great glimpse at what was to come before the Material 3 Design Guidelines were officially released. This post sparked new internal discussions and further design explorations that we considered for future Todoist Android updates.

Design Spec

As we started to define the new Todoist Android app design language and document the changes, we opted to create a design framework, focusing on creating components rather than designing every screen in the app. This allowed us to consistently apply the design system in the app. We did so by using the previously defined component list that we created during the review and study process.

Core screens from different areas of the app were chosen to demonstrate how the components could be applied. We chose to mock up the Todoist project view, navigation drawer menu, project view edit screen, settings, and project detail view, among others. These screens gave us a good overview of how buttons, forms, drawers, lists, and other components would work together and in different states; selected, pressed, disabled, etc.

During the project, we were transitioning our Doist design system to Figma and started creating our first components in the new Doist Product Android Library. We started by using some components from the Material Design UI kit – Components library from the official Google Figma resource file and added them to our Doist design system. We then continued to build up the Product Android Library file with our Todoist-specific components such as task list & board views, detail views, sheets, colors, typography, etc.

We continued by documenting color and typography changes that were based on the Material Design guidelines. The design team opted to implement a new Design Token framework that would share the same values between our design system and the development implementation. The development team would output the values they had in the current implementation and the design team would analyze which values were needed and which could be merged, changed, or deleted. This informed the new Design Token color and typography system which we then documented and discussed with the team to implement. Later in the project, we were happy to see a similar token system introduced by Material 3 in the latest guidelines which validated our thinking and principles behind the new design system.

The design documentation expanded to hold other edge-case mockups that could sit alongside the design system. We documented different responsive screen experiences between phones and tablets against the previous implementation. Additional sections were created to document the motion that should be used for certain components and screens by referencing existing Material Design guidelines examples or prototyping custom motion in Principle and After Effects. The design spec also touched on haptic feedback that should appear on touch targets, how dark mode should work across the new components, documenting Todoist themes within the new design language, and more.

Design Implementation

At Doist, the benefit of the squad is that cross-team collaboration is built into the make-up of the team. Designers, developers, support, and product managers work together in a squad to deliver the project. This close collaboration from the start is key to bridging the gap between scope, estimations, design, development, and delivery. The squad discussed their findings on a daily basis and came up with the best plan of action together.

Designers started by creating components in Figma and shared them with developers in Dropbox Paper. We used screenshots to document the current implementation next to the new designs and linked to the default Google Material Design components. This allowed the team to compare all references in one place. Developers shared their feedback, adjustments would be brainstormed together as the designs were iterated.

Designers on the project would share their work in progress on a weekly basis with the rest of the design team in a design review Twist thread. Here details about the designs were discussed, alternatives mocked up and bigger picture plans made. Design reviews brought up topics like FAB (Floating Action Button) placement, theme options, accent color usage on components, consistency with other platforms, navigation options, and shadow elevation. After thorough discussions and alternative mockups were presented, the design team aimed to find the right balance between Material Design and Todoist brand guidelines. The development team, also part of the design reviews, gave their feedback on the solution and raised technical complexities early on.

Eventually, the design was stabilized and consistencies updated across components and mockups. The design spec was kept up to date so the development team could always review the latest designs in Figma.

Testing

As soon as the development process started, the Android team provided early screenshots and videos in Twist threads while they were implementing the design spec. This practice allowed us to review the app implementation early and often. Designers could review the development work and share feedback in Twist, which resulted in getting the implementation to a high quality. Alongside Twist discussions, the team set up a Todoist project to track ongoing issues and fix bugs. Designers logged new issues, developers would solve them and share the new implementation for designers to review.

When the team had the first stable version of the Android app, we shared it internally at Doist to get more insight and feedback. Other Doisters could access the redesign via a feature flag that could be turned on in the app settings and test the new version for however long they wanted. The feature flag system allowed people to give us early feedback on the design decisions we made and report bugs. Feedback was submitted by the wider team through a dedicated Twist thread and designers and developers could discuss how best to address the feedback during the active project implementation.

After we refined the app implementation further and addressed early feedback we opened up the app update to our beta users. Here users had access to the new Android redesign and were able to give us feedback. Our support team gathered feedback and shared it with us in a dedicated Twist thread. The squad aimed to analyze every comment and looked for patterns where we could make tweaks and improvements to the user experience.

As part of these tweaks, we made changes to how the bottom bar and navigation drawer worked. Some users reported frustrations with the way the new bottom navigation and menu drawer worked. In its first implementation, the drawer was half raised when opened and had to be swiped up to be raised again to see the full content list. This was an issue for some users as it was slower to get to the content below the list. So we decided to fully raise the drawer by default when opening. We also made it easier to open the navigation drawer by sliding up from the bottom app bar. This was a small shortcut but it enabled users to get to their content faster.

Material You

While we were in the testing phase and about to wrap up the project, Google unveiled Material You, and sometime later the Material 3 Guidelines were published. With the newly announced resources, we went back to study the latest guidelines and references we could find to see where the Todoist Android app redesign fits in and which adjustments we might need to make now or in the future.

Dynamic Color was a big new feature that was announced as part of the Material You update. As Todoist supports many different themes the Material You Dynamic Color feature seemed like a good fit for our product. We decided to prioritize this feature and implement Dynamic Color light and dark themes as part of our Todoist theme settings options.

To implement Dynamic Color, the development team started off by creating a demo prototype that utilized the Dynamic Color system and showcased how we could select from a range of color choices that the system defined based on the wallpaper choice. From there, we tried to incorporate system behavior in our design mockups. We designed a range of different color mockups and components to see which ones could fit with which components. We then came up with a color system that worked for the Todoist app and the new themes. These new Dynamic Color themes would sit alongside our current theme options in the Todoist app settings. From here users could choose between Dynamic Color Light and Dark themes.

Along with Dynamic Color, the team also created a customizable bottom app bar, allowing users to set up the app in a way that’s most convenient to their workflow. The location of the Dynamic Add Button can be changed to the center, left, or right corner of the screen. The order of the Menu, Search, and Notification buttons can be rearranged to best fit the ergonomics of the user’s dominant (left or right) hand and optimize their navigation patterns.

Launch

As critical beta feedback was addressed and stability tweaks were made, the squad felt ready to release the new Todoist Android app to the public. The team logged the issues that could not immediately be addressed for future reviews and updates.

The design and marketing team readied the launch by creating What’s New banner artwork and copy that are displayed within the app when launching the update. The Doist marketing team also created release notes and shared the app update announcements on our social channels. The brand and product design team worked together to create custom image assets and copy that summarised the project work in a simple and beautiful way.

What’s Next: Material 3

After a successful launch of the redesigned Todoist for Android app, Google contacted Doist to announce that Todoist was selected as the Material Design Award 2021 winner in the Large Screen category. The team was excited to be recognized for their hard work and it felt like we achieved the goal we had set out to accomplish.

Internally, designers and developers continued to study and discuss the Material 3 updates. The design team started exploring mockups and design changes inspired by Material 3 and Google’s Workspace app updates. Some of our current Todoist explorations include changing the FAB styling, updating the app bar, further removing elevation shadows, and more. Here is a preview of what a future Todoist update could look like.

We hope these insights into Doist’s design process and collaboration practices have sparked your interest. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for future design updates!

Takeaways

Study the Material guidelines, Material Design winners, Material studies, and Google Workspace apps to make informed design decisions when designing your next product or app update.
Evaluate which Material Design components and practices are right for you and implement them into your product.
Carefully balance the Material Design guidelines with your brand guidelines to create a unique and consistent experience between your product and the platform it lives on.
Collaborate with your Android developers early and often to ship app updates efficiently and increase the design implementation quality.
Use design components and build a design system along with practical mockups to create an efficient design spec.
Consider how the latest Android features fit into your product and which have the most impact on your users before deciding to implement them.
Test and review builds with your internal team and external beta users to get valuable feedback and make adjustments before releasing them to the public.
Create announcement artwork to showcase your latest app or feature update along with a clear description to share in-app and on social media.

The post Case Study: Redesigning Todoist for Android first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

13 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2022

Bored with the same old design tools? There are plenty of new toys to experiment with, from fun divots to functional design tools that could become your new go-to’s.

Here’s what is new for designers this month…

Kosmo

Kosmo is a new project management and invoicing system designed just for freelancers. Designers and developers will love it because the interface is sleek and modern. The tool lets you send invoices, track time, manage projects, send proposals and contracts, and manage billing. You can customize everything from your brand to colors so that your invoices reflect your business style. The platform has a free option as well, making it easy to have the tools you need to run your business. (Plus, there’s a very affordable premium plan if you want more features.)

STUDIO

STUDIO lets designers layout and publish responsive websites, including the ability to connect to backend data, all with a low learning-curve GUI and no coding knowledge prerequisites. You can publish to a free URL with free hosting on the cloud. The free version also includes forms. STUDIO also has premium plans if you like the tool for websites of all sizes and bandwidth needs.

NFT.js

NFT.JS allows you to deploy an ERC721 contract that can perform all the required functions without writing a single line of code. Interact with the contract by calling functions and sending transactions to the contract with a couple of lines of NFT.JS. Provide the input file into the metadata object, and NFT.JS uploads all the files provided in the metadata to IPFS as well as uploads the metadata.json file to IPFS and mints the NFT.

Color Morph

Color Morph is a fun little tool to help you generate mesh gradients in SVG format, or generate CSS, that you can snag and use in projects. The patterns are trendy and fun to use.

Scripts Organizer

Scripts Organizer is an advanced code editor for WordPress. This premium tool helps you make workflow scripts work for you with scheduling, advanced functionality, live previews, safe mode, SCSS partials, code injections, import and export, and more.

Texture

Texture is a fun web project that creates generative art that you can use for backgrounds or pretty much anything else. Preview the textures, pull the JavaScript or CSS or even edit and continue to play with them on CodePen.

Avvvatars

Avvvatars are a set of unique placeholder avatars that are free. The tool is easy to use, includes 40 colors, is accessible and lightweight, comes with 60 shapes, and is customizable. You can grab it on GitHub or as a Figma file.

Epic Ruler

Epic Ruler is a premium design utility tool that measures distance, dimensions, position, pick colors, test contrast, and align on-screen elements anywhere on your screen. You can also create alignments, and it comes with a great color picker that helps you pinpoint hues down to the pixel.

Jotform Apps

Jotform Apps is a new set of app tools from the company you may know for form-building tools. The free no-code app builder lets you add forms, links, widgets, and branding to one fully customized app that can be downloaded onto any smartphone, tablet, or computer. Get started with a template to jumpstart projects.

Spruce

Spruce is an open-source, lightweight CSS design system that’s built on Sass. The tool, which is in beta, is designed to help you start with a solid foundation for projects. It includes structure and code, typography, tables, and buttons.

Yaade

Yaade is an open-source, self-hosted, collaborative API development environment. It’s made for those who want self-hosting in security – if you don’t know the password, there’s no way in! You can import OpenAPI v3 files, there’s data import and export, and a dark mode default.

Agnostic UI

Agnostic UI is one stylesheet that works with multiple frameworks. The user interface components work in React, Vue 3, Svelte, and Angular. It includes semantic and accessible HTML with unprocessed CSS so you can code on the platform to get ahead of web standards.

Turbulent Buttons

Turbulent Buttons is a button-and-hover animation that goes the extra mile. This is a fun button and animation that is anything but boring.

Never Install

Never Install is a cloud platform that allows you to run any application from the browser without installing it on your device. It is an alternative to traditional desktop application usage and enables people to stream applications over the web. The developers are working on a next-generation cloud platform to bring any GUI application regardless of the operating system, device, and system requirements to the browser. The tool is free to use.

Photoinsight

Photoinsight is a tool (free and paid) to manage digital assets, including photos, videos, and 3D elements, in one place. You can search, filter, and group views based on your preferences. Plus, there are tools such as batch renaming and statistics and trends to help you manage files.

Formspector

Formspector answers that nagging question – are my forms working? Use the tool to set automated tests that will notify you if anything stops working, from newsletter signups to contact forms to support requests.

Wikifox.js

Wikifox.js is a lightweight, powerful, and restful JavaScript library that connects to the Wikipedia API. This library can be used to get content from Wikipedia.

Lightning Builder

Lightning Builder is a free browser-based drag and drop website builder. You can design a mockup in minutes so that you can show developers or writers what you are thinking when you are planning a new design or website project. Use it to ease communication for teams with new project builds.

Waaard

Waaard is a tiny tool with a lot of practical applications. Use it to create a protected link or file that only people you want to access it can open. With plenty of verification methods, you’ll know your links are safe.

Doodle Ipsum

Doodle Ipsum is the lorem ipsum of illustrations. Customize doodles, grab the code, and use them on web prototypes, landing pages, or no-code tools.

FF Din Stencil

FF Din Stencil is a fun display typeface for just the right application with a distinct style. It comes in a variety of weights and styles and is part of a greater FF Din family.

Fontanella

Fontanella is a typeface designed by Coto Mendoza, which emerged from calligraphy and manual drawing exploring the skeleton and classic proportions of Roman capital letters. It has an easy-to-read style with interesting sans serif characters.

Sarlotte

Sarlotte is a statuesque typeface with long tails, swashes, and flourishes. From the type designer: It seduces your eyes with its curves yet still manages to maintain its classy serenity, it’s perfect for branding, logos, invitations, and more.

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

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

11 avril 2022/par Service comm.

10 AWS Services That Use SQL

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest cloud platform in the world, with over 200 features. In this article, we break down 10 AWS services that support at least some SQL syntax, talk about their use cases, and give examples of how to write queries.

Service	Description	SQL Support	Use Case
RDS	Postgres, MySQL, etc.	Full	Small-medium web apps
Aurora	Serverless databases	Full	Serverless apps
Redshift	Data warehouse	Full	OLAP, Petabytes of data, analytics
DynamoDB	NoSQL database	Some – PartiSQL	Ecommerce, building fast
Keyspaces	Managed Cassandra (key value)	Some – CQL	Messaging
Neptune	Graph database	Some – openCypher	Social networks
Timestream	Time series database	Partial	IOT, Logging
Quantum Ledger	Cryptographically verified transactions	Some – PartiSQL	Finance
Athena	Ad-hoc queries on S3	Some – CTAS	Historical data
Babelfish	MSFT SQL Server on Aurora	Full	.NET

The table above shows how SQL support varies between the services. A graph database cannot be queried in the same way as a classic relational database, and various subsets of SQL, like PartiQL, have emerged to fit these models. In fact, even within standard SQL, there are many SQL dialects for different companies like Oracle and Microsoft.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

8 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Using PGBouncer With CockroachDB Serverless

Given CockroachDB scales with vCPU, there’s a hard limit to how many active connections we can support per vCPU before a serious problem arises. PGBouncer stretches the limits a bit making it a cost-effective option. In serverless architectures, there is no client-side connection pooling, and using middleware like PGBouncer can alleviate the problem of connection storms. Please see my previous articles on the topic for more details.

Motivation

We’ve covered how to deploy PGBouncer with a self-hosted CockroachDB cluster. Today, I’m going to demonstrate how to run PGBouncer along with the Cockroach Cloud free-forever tier database. The overall concepts are identical, but we will highlight some of the major differences in deploying PGBouncer with a cloud product.