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8 Ways To QUICKLY Spot a Fake Website

November 30th, 2018 No comments
Spot a fake website

The Internet has made life and shopping convenient.

A little… too convenient, perhaps.

Yet at the same time, it has given modern-day con artists a versatile tool for ripping off the unsuspecting and unwary. Today’s internet scammers, just like the charlatans and snake oil salesmen of yesteryear, are after one thing: your money. New research from Bromium reveals that cyber crime in 2018 is projected to yield criminals more than $1.5 trillion.

During the holiday season, the number of fraudulent websites will increase. Cyber criminals are unscrupulous, but they’re also creative. They excel at making fraudulent websites look like the real thing.

If you plan to shop online (who doesn’t?), pay close attention to the following and you can start detecting a fake website in about five seconds.

1. Poor Grammar and Spelling

Major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, and Best Buy spend millions of dollars annually on marketing. This includes spending money on experienced copywriters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar are checked and rechecked by editors before it goes live.

Typically, cyber criminals do not have the time, resources, or mastery of the English language to avoid these errors. If a website has odd phrasing, questionable punctuation, or incorrect spelling throughout its copy, alarm bells should be going off in your head. Chances are that the site is fraudulent.

2. If the Deal Is Too Good to Be True…

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are some of the best days to get deep discounts on the products you have wanted all year. Retailers offload goods from the current year to make way for the next year’s models.

But they are still in the business of making money. If you visit a site and see the latest iPad Pro on sale at a 95% discount, know that you have a 99% chance of never seeing the thing after you pay for it..

3. Look at the Website’s Connection Type

A website with the “HTTPS” tag is more secure and trustworthy. A site that has the “HTTP” tag is not. It’s that simple. With the former, a site has gone through security certification that the majority of illegitimate sites ignore. There are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Sites with “HTTPS” connections can still be unreliable. Use the connection type in conjunction with other forms of verification to determine if the site is trustworthy or not.
  • Verify that the payment page is a “HTTPS” page.
  • Click the padlock on the upper left corner of the URL to verify the details of the site, such as the encryption used.

4. Check the Domain Name

A favorite tool of scammers is to create website addresses that are close but not exactly the same as large brands or companies. They hope that you will not notice that yahoo.com has been replaced by yah00.com or that Amazon.com has been replaced by Amaz0n.net.

They are betting that you’re going to skim over the address bar and the domain name. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to double check your address bar if you are redirected to a commerce site from another page.

5. How Old Is the Domain?

Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994 in Seattle, Washington. Its website Amazon.com was founded on October 31, 1994. This information is easily available using the Whois Lookup domain tracker https://whois.domaintools.com. Any site founded in 2018 claiming to be Amazon.com is fraudulent. The same is true with other websites.

Cyber criminals hope that their victims either do not know how to or simply will not research the age of the last-minute fraudulent sites they put together around holiday time. They hope that their real-looking websites will be enough to trick people into handing over their personal information.

When you look up a website and see how long it has been in business, you get a good overall sense for its veracity.

6. Run a Virus Scan

A website that has more pop-ups than legitimate content should be viewed suspiciously. While the mere presence of ads on the site shouldn’t be taken as positive proof of fraudulent intentions, this could be an indication that viruses, malware, or phishing attempts lie in wait.

Make sure you’ve had a recent virus scan and don’t be shy about running another one just for kicks. It’s easier to stop malware at the gate than try to root it out after it’s in your system.

7. Only Use Secure Payment Options

Legitimate e-commerce websites should offer standard payment options, including major credit cards and PayPal. If you are being asked to purchase your new iPad using a money order, a wire transfer, or some other form of unsecured and non-refundable payment, run away. This is true even if the rest of the site looks legitimate.

Look for approval by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) or similar organizations. While hackers often think to include a shoddy replica sticker proclaiming their safety, rarely do they bother to link it back to the actual issuer. Hover your cursor over the sticker and see where it leads.

8. Take Basic Steps To Secure Your Computer

Even cyber security professionals find themselves inadvertently visiting fraudulent and potentially dangerous websites, so it’s reasonable to expect that the same thing will happen to you. However, there are some basic measures you can take to secure your computer and its contents.

For example, keep up with system and software security updates. Updates can seem like an annoyance, but they are designed to cover security holes that cyber criminals have found. This includes keeping your OS and all other software that runs on your computer up-to-date.

Choose a strong, no-logging VPN service to keep your data private when surfing the web. Through data encryption, It prevents cyber criminals from learning information such as your location and internet usage habits. It allows you to safely navigate the web anonymously.

Keep your firewalls enabled. They serve as a barrier between your computer network and the Internet. They protect your computer by stopping threats from entering the system and preventing threats from spreading between your devices.

Adjust your browser settings. This allows a high level of privacy while you browse and will prevent websites from tracking your movements by blocking cookies. Many safety options are disabled by default. You may be unwittingly exposing yourself more than you think each time you browse.

The Bottom Line

Online shopping is an awesome experience as it allows you to search for what you want from the privacy and comfort of your home. Millions of online transactions are made yearly with no issue.

Don’t be afraid of shopping online, and don’t be afraid of fake websites. Simply empower yourself by knowing what to look for and use common sense. If it doesn’t feel right, run away.

By doing these things, you will be able to take control of your online experience.

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Blue Beanie Day 2018

November 30th, 2018 No comments

Another year!

You better not cry, you better not shout, I’m telling you why: @BlueBeanieDay is coming Nov. 30! Start sharing your #bbd photos, links, articles, and videos now: https://t.co/3US4vHBsDR#a11y #WebStandards #InclusiveDesign #ProgressiveEnhancement pic.twitter.com/AiV3ktRqka

— zeldman (@zeldman) October 24, 2018

I feel the same this year as I have in the past. Web standards, as an overall idea, has entirely taken hold and won the day. That’s worth celebrating, as the web would be kind of a joke without them. So now, our job is to uphold them. We need to cry foul when we see a browser go rogue and ship an API outside the standards process. That version of competition is what could lead the web back to a dark place where we’re creating browser-specific versions. That becomes painful, we stop doing it, and slowly, the web loses.

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Nesting Components in Figma

November 30th, 2018 No comments

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been building our UI Kit at Gusto, where I work, and this is a Figma document that contains all of our design patterns and components so that designers on our team can hop in, go shopping for a component that they need, and then get back to working on the problem that they’re trying to solve.

There’s a couple things that I’ve learned since I started. First, building a UI Kit is immensely delicate work and takes a really long time (although it happens to be very satisfying all the while). But, most importantly, embedding Figma components within other components is sort of magic.

Here’s why.

First, it’s important to note that I’ve tried to break down our components into the smallest, littlest chunks. So, for example, our Breadcrumbs, Tabs, and Progress Bar components are all separate from one another and I’ve dumped them all into a Symbols page.

Here’s an example of how I’ve started to build our form elements:

From what I can tell, this is how a lot of UI Kits are designed — there’s a welcome page that introduces what this document is and how to use it; there’s a symbols page that the design systems folks will maintain that has everything from buttons to forms inside it as symbols or components; and then there’s typically another page that has examples of these symbols that represent the final application.

Shopify’s design system, Polaris, does also this with their Sketch file, but so do a lot of examples I’ve seen from other big design teams:

But anyway, going back to my design in Figma — notice below that a forward slash (/) is used in the name of ProgressBar/Two and ProgressBar/Three components.

Well, that’s Figma’s naming convention for identifying Instances. What this means is that when a designer drags in the ProgressBar component from the UI Kit, they can switch between different options, like this:

That’s nifty! But once I broke up our UI into these tiny components, I started to wonder how I might combine these pieces together to make things even easier for our design team. I soon realized that in our app we have navigation items like breadcrumbs or progress bars but they always have a title associated with them. Once I figured that out, I started a series of new components called Header/Default, Header/Breadcrumbs, Header/ProgressBar, etc., which have all these components embedded within them.

So, now when a designer drags in the Header component into their mockups, they can do the following:

We’re switching between the different Header instances there and that doesn’t look like much, yet. But! Since we’re nesting components within our Header component, designers can jump down into the subcomponents, like ProgressBar and update that, too:

How neat is that? And again, this doesn’t look particularly useful just yet but nesting components within larger components means that you can start to use them in clever ways.

Where this gets interesting is here: at Gusto, we have two different UIs for our types of customers. We have admins that run payroll and then their employees that can access their account to see how much they’ve been paid. There’s different navigation and options for both, so I created two components for them: Frame/Admin and Frame/Employee.

These two components have the sidebar and navigation items but are then placed into a separate component called Layout/Default where we’ve placed our Header component. But since these components are instances and nested together, we can begin to click-clack bits of the UI together to get the precise interface that we want.

Now, whenever designers need to switch between different UIs, they can use these nested components and instances to toggle between them super fast. I’ve only just started experimenting with this but the idea is that by using these nested components you give folks a way to toggle between the different variants inside them whilst also providing a nice API for larger layouts.

If you’re using instances in Figma, Sketch, or another design tool — let me know! I’m constantly on the lookout for improving things here, but I think this is certainly a good start.

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Embed a Blog Onto Any Website With DropInBlog

November 30th, 2018 No comments

With DropInBlog, you can embed a blog into your site in only three minutes. A quick JavaScript/HTML widget, or a full-featured JSON API, is all it takes.

A headless blog you can take anywhere

Ever been working on your existing static site or anything that wasn’t built with WordPress, wanted to integrate a blog, but then couldn’t find a clean solution?

DropInBlog to the rescue.

Now you can quickly integrate a full featured blog into any existing site. Actually, any existing page. Drop it right into your existing template. It’s so easy you can be up and running in just a few minutes. Check out this live example:

See Project

Blogging is simple with the full-featured editor

You’ll feel at home with the simple admin panel. Effortlessly create posts, categories, and authors. Tweak the blog output settings and enable features like share buttons, Disqus or Facebook comments with a couple of clicks.

Try it Free

Embed your blog in no time

You can embed your blog on a site in about three quick minutes. From there, you have a ton of control to customize and even put a variety of widgets to use, like Author List, Recent Post List, Category List… and more!

Check out this short video to see how quickly you can get up and running:

Need help getting setup? Hit up their friendly support on Messenger.

Simple JavaScript or JSON API… it’s your call.

There are a few integration options ranging from the drop-dead simple JavaScript method to the super flexible JSON API. You get to choose what works best for you.

Ready to give DropInBlog a try? Get started for free.

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The Web Can’t Go Home Again

November 30th, 2018 No comments

It’s far too easy to look back and imagine that everything was better then than it is now. God knows I miss being a skinny teenager, but I don’t want the acne back. The hormones can just shove right off, too.

Even so, there are things I miss about being younger, and frankly a bit naïve.

Lately, there has been conversation about the nature of the Internet, and many people seem to feel much as I do about my teenage years: that is to say, they miss the relative innocence. Though once reviled, dancing baby .GIFs and elements seem like high art compared to the click-bait, the passionate-yet-incomprehensible comment wars, and the desperate attempts of corporations to look “hip”. We’d be hard-pressed to look around and say, “Yes, this really is better.”

We even miss Tom, and his kind of desperate-feeling attempt to be everybody’s friend

We miss the utopianism of the early Internet pioneers. We miss the creativity of people just learning HTML, from the days of the first pages, to the days of the customized MySpace page. We even miss Tom, and his kind of desperate-feeling attempt to be everybody’s friend; because at least he was trying to be friends, not tell you how your every opinion was wrong.

And so here we are, in a new world of our own making, and we wish we’d made it differently. Some people blame corporations, and their focus on profit over community. Others more or less blame the blog format, and the press of people who all want to be a little bit famous. There are more than a few who blame social media.

None of these people are entirely wrong, of course. We could have done better. We can do better. We can make a friendlier Internet that promotes creativity. What we cannot do is go back.

“You can’t go home again.” For those unfamiliar, it’s an old saying based on the idea that once you leave a place, you can never truly return to what once was. Even if the place you left has stayed the same, you will have changed. The you that comes back is not the you that left.

We can do better. We can make a friendlier Internet that promotes creativity.

We can’t go back to the old Internet because we have changed. Like Adam and Eve in the proverbial garden, we now have knowledge of both the good the Internet can do, and the evil. Businesses have seen how much money can be made. The near-monopolies of the Internet have no reason to give up their advantages.

Elsewhere, communities have seen how, when there are not enough rules, or when the rules are not enforced, the loudest and most violent voices will oppress the rest. We have also seen that with too many rules, and inflexible enforcement, the bureaucrats will become the oppressors.

Knowing what we know now, we cannot go back to the wild west days of the Internet, because it’s unlikely that most of us could ever embrace that sort of potential without the fear born of our experience. Whatever the Web becomes next, I hope it has the better qualities of the Internet of the past, but it will not, perhaps cannot, be the same.

Okay, that’s quite enough mourning of our collective innocence. There are things we can reasonably do to help improve the state of the Internet, and after all that, I’d like to include a few I thought of.

Get Political

Now I don’t mean that you should tweet at your ideological opponents more, and I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. What I am going to say is that most politicians in most governments are sorely ignorant what what the Internet truly is, and how it works. Watching Mark Zuckerberg getting questioned was one of the more painful things a nerd could ever watch. Don’t even get me started on the mess that was/is the EU’s attempt to redefine copyright law. Articles 11 and 13 are nightmarish concepts.

Watching Mark Zuckerberg getting questioned was one of the more painful things a nerd could ever watch

If we’re going to bring back some of the fun to the Internet, we need to make sure our politicians are better educated about it. I’m not an expert on political activism; but perhaps we could all stand to reach out to our local politicians more, and not just when they’re about to take away half of our online rights through ignorance.

Make Alternatives More Attractive

For example: many video creators are feeling stifled under YouTube’s arcane and sometimes arbitrary sets of rules, and many a creator has lost their source of revenue overnight. You see, YouTube has become so massive that many video creators wouldn’t even think of putting their content elsewhere, which makes the platform even bigger. That centralization gives YouTube massive power over millions of creators, and their algorithms more or less define what many would-be artists create.

So on top of controlling smaller creators’ revenue, one website is having an out-sized impact on entire cultures. That is antithetical to the spirit of the Internet as it was intended to be. Some smart cookies have decided to try to alleviate this problem, and other crises caused by corporate near-monopolies, by creating decentralized versions of YouTube, decentralized social networks, and even decentralized versions of the Internet itself.

Alternatives to massive sites need more tangible, immediate benefits

These alternatives face one major problem (besides plain old logistics): attracting a user base in the first place. This is normal for any business breaking into a crowded market, but many of these projects advertise themselves by saying things like, “We’re not corporate and evil like Google.” The problem is that this is not something the average user cares about. We already give away our information freely, so privacy isn’t going to sell it either. Alternatives to massive sites need more tangible, immediate benefits.

Support Efforts That Lower the Web’s Creative Entry Requirements

We, as people who love the Internet, need to each make our own efforts to improve it. But we should also remember that there are plenty of people out there already doing what they can, and they need some love.

One of my favorite examples is that of NeoCities, which we’ve previously discussed here on WDD. Basically, it’s a place where anyone can create a basic HTML/CSS site about anything they like, for free, in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites. The idea is to encourage more people to try making sites for themselves with the lowest possible barrier to entry.

Projects like these need ongoing support, and frankly deserve free advertising. So that’s why NeoCities is getting a link.

Be Kind, and Forgive

If the Web is going to change (again), people will have to change (again). And as people change, we’ll need to be ready to forgive. We’ve all made mistakes in the past, from simply saying rude things online, to building tools that might have had a part in making the Internet a less friendly place. What’s worse is that the Internet has a better memory than we do.

as people change, we’ll need to be ready to forgive

If we’re going to make massive, sweeping changes to make the Internet more fun, and weird, and friendly, we need to be fun, weird, and friendly. More importantly, we’ll need to be kinder. We may find ourselves needing to be kind even to those who took part in making the Internet the unfriendly place it is now. People can and do grow and change, and if we’re going to make a better world, we can’t hold their past mistakes against them (so long as those mistakes are truly in the past).

Ultimately, the people on the Internet are the Internet, and we can’t go home again. We can build a new home, though.

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like… December (2018 Wallpapers Edition)

November 30th, 2018 No comments

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like… December (2018 Wallpapers Edition)

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like… December (2018 Wallpapers Edition)

Cosima Mielke

2018-11-30T09:01:00+01:002018-12-02T12:47:19+00:00

What are you looking forward to in December? Spending time with family and friends during the holidays, watching the birds gather in your snowy backyard, or celebrating “Bathtub Party Day” maybe? These are just some of the things that inspired artists and designers to create their desktop wallpapers this month.

All wallpapers in this post come in versions with and without a calendar for December 2018 and can be downloaded for free — as it has been our monthly tradition since more than nine years already. To cater for an extra bit of December joy, we also collected some wallpaper favorites from past years at the end of the post. Happy December and happy holidays!

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

Please note that:

  • All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
  • You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

Christmas Wreath

“Everyone is in the mood for Christmas when December starts. Therefore I made this Christmas wreath inspired wallpaper. Enjoy December and Merry Christmas to all!” — Designed by Melissa Bogemans from Belgium.

Cardinals In Snowfall

“During Christmas season, in the cold, colorless days of winter, Cardinal birds are seen as symbols of faith and warmth! In the part of America I live in, there is snowfall every December. While the snow is falling, I can see gorgeous Cardinals flying in and out of my patio. The intriguing color palette of the bright red of the Cardinals, the white of the flurries and the brown/black of dry twigs and fallen leaves on the snow-laden ground, fascinates me a lot, and inspired me to create this quaint and sweet, hand-illustrated surface pattern design as I wait for the December 2018 snowfall in my town!” — Designed by Gyaneshwari Dave from the United States.

Cardinals In Snowfall

Cozy

“December is all about coziness and warmth. Days are getting darker, shorter and colder. So a nice cup of hot cocoa just warms me up.” — Designed by Hazuki Sato from Belgium.

Cosy

Sweet Snowy Tenderness

“You know that warm feeling when you get to spend cold winter days in a snug, homey, relaxed atmosphere? Oh, yes, we love it too! It is the sentiment we set our hearts on for the holiday season, and this sweet snowy tenderness is for all of us who adore watching the snowfall from our windows. Isn’t it romantic?” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Sweet Snowy Tenderness

‘Tis The Season Of Snow

“The tiny flakes of snow have just begun to shower and we know it’s the start of the merry hour! Someone is all set to cram his sleigh with boxes of love as kids wait for their dear Santa to show up! Rightly said, ’tis the season of snow, surprise and lots and lots of fun! Merry Christmas!” — Designed by Sweans Technologies from London.

'Tis The Season Of Snow

Bathtub Party Day

“December 5th is also known as Bathtub Party Day, which is why I wanted to visualize what celebrating this day could look like.” — Designed by Jonas Vanhamme from Belgium.

Bathtub Party Day

Cold Days, Warm Feelings

“Everything that reminds me of the cold days of December. I’ve tried to put everything in one illustration, the snow, hot coffee, mountains, snowman. Also my illustration is blue, it’s a cold color, so this give the illustration more of a winter effect.” — Designed by Dennis van den Heuvel from Belgium.

Cold Days, Warm Feelings

Oh Deer, It’s Cold!

“December brings more than Christmas only. It brings Winter. It brings the cold.” — Designed by Ellen Theuwen from Belgium.

Oh Deer, It's Cold!

Portland Snow Globe

Designed by Mad Fish Digital from the USA.

Portland Snow Globe

Another Christmas

“‘Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.’ (Norman Vincent Peale)” — Designed by Suman Sil from India.

Another Christmas

A December To Remember

“Of all the months of the year, there is not a month so welcome to the young or so full of happy associations as this last month of the year. A month of giving, celebrations, and holidays. Christmas month is here. Make this last month of the year special for you and the ones around you.” — Designed by Procurement Software from India.

A December To Remember

December Music

“Have you ever noticed how people have characteristic (or weird) poses playing instruments? It was my inspiration for drawing very simple and funny stick-figure musicians. Over the years I have drawn everything from violinists to pipa players (Chinese instrument) and from electric guitarists to tubaists. I never get bored of drawing new instrumentalists, ensembles or, in this case, a Christmas band. I wish you a very happy December with lots of music!” — Designed by Franke Margrete from The Netherlands.

December Music

The Mountains Shout Freedom

“December is that time of the year where snows starts to fall. It’s from this moment that we can go skiing and snowboarding again. It’s the best time of the year.” — Designed by Jasper Bogaert from Belgium.

The Mountains Shout Freedom

Meeeh

“December is when winter begins, so I decided to go for some nice, cold, pastel colors and a wintery scenario. The ram is a family-related symbol and it’s cute, so I named it Meeeh.” — Designed by Ana Matos from Portugal.

Meeeh

Snow & Flake

“December always reminds me of snow and being with other people. That’s why I created two snowflakes Snow & Flake who are best buddies and love being with each other during winter time.” — Designed by Ian De Lantsheer from Belgium.

Snow & Flake

Midnight Aurora

“I was inspired by beautiful images of the Aurora that I saw on the internet.” — Designed by Wannes Verboven from Belgium.

Midnight Aurora

Enlightened By The Christmas Spirit

“Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year! Once we’ve had our fill of turkey and welcomed the holiday season, we’re constantly encouraged to get into the spirit of the festive season.” — Designed by Mobile App Development from India.

Enlightened By The Christmas Spirit

All Of Them Lights

“I created this design in honour of the 9th of December, the day of lights.” — Designed by Mathias Geerts from Belgium.

All Of Them Lights

Brrrr…!

Designed by Oumayma Jamali from Belgium.

Brrrr...!

Christmas House

Designed by Antun Hiršman from Croatia.

Christmas House

Christmas December

Designed by Think 360 Studio from India.

Christmas December

Separate Holidays

“My parents are divorced so I don’t really like the holidays because it feels like I always have to choose between my mum and dad.” — Designed by Micheline Van Looveren from Belgium.

Separate Holidays

Human Rights Month

“December is Human Rights Month, so I decided to design a wallpaper for this special month.” — Designed by Jonas Vanhamme from Belgium.

Human Rights Month

Winter Morning

“Early walks in the fields when the owls still sit on the fences and stare funny at you.” — Designed by Bo Dockx from Belgium.

Winter Morning

Homeless Christmas

“December automatically brings to mind the Christmas spirit, the smell of delicious food, and the joy of opening beautiful presents. A couple of years ago I volunteered in a homeless shelter for a while. I even spent New Years’ Eve at the shelter. And ever since, Christmas also reminds me that a lot of others are much less fortunate than me…” — Designed by Kim Haesen from Belgium.

Homeless Christmas

Christmas Feelings

Designed by Lieselotte Philips from Belgium.

Christmas Feelings

Merry Christmas

“‘Christmas gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us.’ (David Cameron)” — Designed by Pinki Ghosh Dastidar from India.

Merry Christmas

International Tea Day

“December 15 is International Tea Day, so I thought to design a cup of tea, which also represents the cold weather during the winter.” — Designed by Hannah De Wachter from Belgium.

International Tea Day

Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees

“I wanted to emphasize people who do not have enough money to celebrate Christmas like everyone else in the world.” — Designed by Angelique Buijzen from Belgium.

Money Doesn't Grow On Trees

Explore The World

“‘We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.’ (John Hope Franklin)” — Designed by Dipanjan Karmakar from India.

Explore The World

Oldies But Goodies

Ready for a trip back in time? Here’s a collection of December goodies from past years that are too good to be forgotten. Please note that these wallpapers don’t come with a calendar.

‘Tis The Season To Be Happy

Designed by Tazi from Australia.

'Tis The Season To Be Happy

Christmas Cookies

“Christmas is coming and a great way to share our love is by baking cookies.” — Designed by Maria Keller from Mexico.

Christmas Cookies

The House On The River Drina

“Since we often yearn for a peaceful and quiet place to work, we have found inspiration in the famous house on the River Drina in Bajina Bašta, Serbia. Wouldn’t it be great being in nature, away from the civilization, swaying in the wind and listening to the waves of the river smashing your house, having no neighbors to bother you? Not sure about the Internet, though…” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

Christmas Wallpaper — The House On The River Drina

Christmas Woodland

Designed by Mel Armstrong from Australia.

Christmas Woodland

Getting Hygge

“There’s no more special time for a fire than in the winter. Cozy blankets, warm beverages, and good company can make all the difference when the sun goes down. We’re all looking forward to generating some hygge this winter, so snuggle up and make some memories.” — Designed by The Hannon Group from Washington D.C.

Getting Hygge

Joy To The World

“Joy to the world, all the boys and girls now, joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.” — Designed by Morgan Newnham from Boulder, Colorado.

Joy To The World

Winter Wonderland

“‘Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.’ (Edith Sitwell) — Designed by Dipanjan Karmakar from India.

Christmas Wallpaper — Winter Wonderland

December Through Different Eyes

“As a Belgian, December reminds me of snow, cosiness, winter, lights and so on. However, in the Southern Hemisphere it is summer at this time. With my illustration I wanted to show the different perspectives on December. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!” — Designed by Jo Smets from Belgium.

Christmas Wallpaper — December Through Different Eyes

‘Tis The Season (To Drink Eggnog)

“There’s nothing better than a tall glass of Golden Eggnog while sitting by the Christmas tree. Let’s celebrate the only time of year this nectar of the gods graces our lips.” — Designed by Jonathan Shears from Connecticut, USA.

'Tis The Season (To Drink Eggnog)

Gifts Lover

Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium.

Gifts Lover

The Southern Hemisphere Is Calling

“Santa’s tired of winter (and the North Pole) and is flying to the South part of the globe to relax a little bit. He deserves a little vacation, don’t you think?” — Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Sweden.

The Southern Hemisphere Is Calling

Have A Minimal Christmas

“My brother-in-law has been on a design buzzword kick where he calls everything minimal, to the point where he wishes people, “Have a minimal day!” I made this graphic as a poster for him.” — Designed by Danny Gugger from Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

Have a Minimal Christmas

Christmas Time!

Designed by Sofie Keirsmaekers from Belgium.

Christmas time!

Happy Holidays

Designed by Bogdan Negrescu from the United States.

Happy Holidays

It’s In The Little Things

Designed by Thaïs Lenglez from Belgium.

It's in the little things

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Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

Thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month!

Categories: Others Tags:

DevTools for Designers

November 29th, 2018 No comments

This is such an interesting conversation thread that keeps popping up year after year. The idea is that there could (and perhaps should) be in-browser tooling that helps web designers do their job. This tooling already exists to some degree. Let’s check in on perspectives from a wide array of people and companies who have shared thoughts on this topic.

Ahmad Shadeed wrote for us last year about how DevTools can be useful to designers in a number of ways, like changing state, content, colors, variables, etc.:

Editing things visually like that will give [designers] more control over some design details, they can tweak things in the browser and show the result to the developer to be implemented.


In a post titled, “A DevTools for Designers”, A.J. Kandy wrote that, just because you’re a designer, it doesn’t mean you don’t know how to code — but you might not be production-level and might be faster elsewhere:

I can edit front-end markup; I’m just way faster at drawing rectangles and arranging them into user interfaces. I’m technical, but not a coder.

It sparked a lot of responses and thoughts back when we originally shared the post:

It’s one thing to augment the existing DevTools to be better for designers. Firefox has done great work in that area with stuff like their animation tooling, flexbox and grid inspectors. At the same time, it’s also nice to see entirely fresh takes on how we can approach it! For example, Google dropped VisBug, an extension with designers squarely in mind. The video is only 30 seconds:

There have been a lot of opinions about browser extensions that allow design editing over the years. Check out options like Stylebot (Chrome store link).


There is another visual design browser plugin called Visual Inspector:


Don’t forget this classic trick:

My favourite trick to do in devTools is probably `document.designMode = “on”`. Turn it on and start editing text on any element on a website. Super cool! https://t.co/bdV9yONayT pic.twitter.com/rkC0ZsTCcD

— Simon Vrachliotis (@simonswiss) November 14, 2018


Oliver Williams wrote the following in “The ultimate web design tool: a browser”:

Browser dev tools were traditionally useful for debugging JavaScript and inspecting network requests. More recently, we’ve seen browsers add graphical interfaces for manipulating CSS. Most browsers offer a color picker and eyedropper tool for selecting colors. In Chrome, this tool will helpfully display a color-contrast ratio. Chrome also offers a GUI for adding or tweaking text-shadow and box-shadow.


Perhaps design tooling will lead us in this direction in a big way?

?isual
? evelopment
? nvironments

??Just like most code-based developers use IDEs to develop software today, we’re going to start seeing multiple new VDEs emerge that enable a primarily-visual way of designing and shipping software.

— Vlad Magdalin (@callmevlad) November 16, 2018

Vlad works with Webflow, so you can see where he’s coming from with that.


Jye SR chimed in with his post, “5 Ways DevTools Made My Life Easier”:

… it’s possible to use Chrome DevTools to investigate competitors, see what’s not working with add-ons, change your viewport, understand page load timings and edit the web; all of which can help digital marketers, product managers or anyone working with a website to do their job more efficiently. It’s a tool which I use every day and I hope that you will too!


Hard to look at all that and not see this is where tooling is headed.

The post DevTools for Designers appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Preventing Content Reflow From Lazy-Loaded Images

November 29th, 2018 No comments

You know the concept of lazy loading images. It prevents the browser from loading images until those images are in (or nearly in) the browser’s viewport.

There are a plethora of JavaScript-based lazy loading solutions. GitHub has over 3,400 different lazy load repos, and those are just the ones with “lazy load” in a searchable string! Most of them rely on the same trick: Instead of putting an image’s URL in the src attribute, you put it in data-src — which is the same pattern for responsive images:

  • JavaScript watches the user scroll down the page
  • When the use encounters an image, JavaScript moves the data-src value into src where it belongs
  • The browser requests the image and it loads into view

The result is the browser loading fewer images up front so that the page loads faster. Additionally, if the user never scrolls far enough to see an image, that image is never loaded. That equals faster page loads and less data the user needs to spend.

“This is amazing!” you may be thinking. And, you’re right… it is amazing!

That said, it does indeed introduce a noticeable problem: images not containing the src attribute (including when it’s empty or invalid) have no height. This means that they’re not the right size in the page layout until they’re lazy-loaded.

When a user scrolls and images are lazy-loaded, those img elements go from a height of 0 pixels to whatever they need to be. This causes reflow, where the content below or around the image gets pushed to make room for the freshly loaded image. Reflow is a problem because it’s a user-blocking operation. It slows down the browser by forcing it to recalculate the layout of any elements that are affected by that image’s shape. The CSS scroll-behavior property may help here at some point, but its support needs to improve before it’s a viable option.

Lazy loading doesn’t guarantee that the image will fully load before it enters the viewport. The result is a perceived janky experience, even if it’s a big performance win.

There are other issues with lazy loading images that are worth mentioning but are outside the scope of this post. For example, if JavaScript fails to run at all, then no images will load on the page. That’s a common concern for any JavaScript-based solution but this article only concerned with solving the problems introduced by reflow.

If we could force pre-loaded images to maintain their normal width and height (i.e. their aspect ratio), we could prevent reflow problems while still lazy loading them. This is something I recently had to solve building a progressive web app at DockYard where I work.

For future reference, there’s an HTML attribute called intrinsicsize that’s designed to preserve the aspect ratio, but right now, that’s just experimental in Chrome.

Here’s how we did it.

Maintaining aspect ratio

There are many ways to go about the way we can maintain aspect ratios. Chris once rounded up an exhaustive list of options, but here’s what we’re looking at for image-specific options.

The image itself

The image src provides a natural aspect ratio. Even when an image is resized responsively, its natural dimensions still apply. Here’s a pretty common bit of responsive image CSS:

img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height: auto;
}

That CSS is telling images not to exceed the width of the element that contains them, but to scale the height properly so that there’s no “stretching” or “squishing” as the image is resized. Even if the image has inline height and width attributes, this CSS will keep them behaving nicely on small viewports.

However, that “natural aspect ratio” behavior breaks down if there’s no src yet. Browsers don’t care about data-src and don’t do anything with it, so it’s not really a viable solution for lazy loading reflow; but it is important to help understand the “normal” way images are laid out once they’ve loaded.

A pseudo-element

Many developers — including myself — have been frustrated trying to use pseudo-elements (e.g. ::before and ::after) to add decorations to img elements. Browsers don’t render an image’s pseudo-elements because img is a replaced element, meaning its layout is controlled by an external resource.

However, there is an exception to that rule: If an image’s src attribute is invalid, browsers will render its pseudo-elements. So, if we store the src for an image in data-src and the src is empty, then we can use a pseudo-element to set an aspect ratio:

[data-src]::before {
  content: '';
  display: block;
  padding-top: 56.25%;
}

That’ll set a 16:9 aspect ratio on ::before for any element with a data-src attribute. As soon as the data-src becomes the src, the browser stops rendering ::before and the image’s natural aspect ratio takes over.

Here’s a demo:

See the Pen Image Aspect Ratio: ::before padding by James Steinbach (@jdsteinbach) on CodePen.

There are a couple drawbacks to this solution, however. First, it relies on CSS and HTML working together. Your stylesheet needs to have a declaration for each image aspect ratio you need to support. It would be much better if the template could insert an image without needing CSS edits.

Second, it doesn’t work in Safari 12 and below, or Edge, at the time of writing. That’s a pretty big traffic swatch to send poor layouts. To be fair, maintaining the aspect ratio is a bit of a progressive enhancement — there’s nothing “broken” about the final rendered page. Still, it’s much more ideal to solve the reflow problem and for images to render as expected.

Data URI (Base64) PNGs

Another way we attempted to preserve the aspect ratio was to inline data URI for the src. as PNG. Using png-pixel.com will help with the lift of all that base64-encoding with any dimensions and colors. This can go straight into the image’s src attribute in the HTML:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAMAAAACCAQAAAA3fa6RAAAADklEQVR42mNkAANGCAUAACMAA2w/AMgAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" data-src="//picsum.photos/900/600" alt="Lazy loading test image" />

The inline PNG there has a 3:2 aspect ratio (the same aspect ratio as the final image). When src is replaced with the data-src value, the image will maintain its aspect ratio exactly like we want!

Here’s a demo:

See the Pen Image Aspect Ratio: inline base64 PNG by James Steinbach (@jdsteinbach) on CodePen.

And, yes, this approach also comes with some drawbacks. Although the browser support is much better, it’s complicated to maintain. We need to generate a base64 string for each new image size, then make that object of strings available to whatever templating tool that’s being used. It’s also not the most efficient way to represent this data.

I kept exploring and found a smaller way.

Combine SVG with base64

After exploring the inline PNG option, I wondered if SVG might be a smaller format for inline images and here’s what I found: An SVG with a viewBox declaration is a placeholder image with an easily editable native aspect ratio.

First, I tried base64-encoding an SVG. Here’s an example of what that looked like in my HTML:

<img src="data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0naHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmcnIHZpZXdCb3g9JzAgMCAzIDInPjwvc3ZnPg==" data-src="//picsum.photos/900/600" alt="Lazy loading test image">

On small, simple aspect ratios, this is roughly equivalent in size to the base64 PNGs. A 1:1 ratio would be 114 bytes with base64 PNG and 106 bytes with base64 SVG. A 2:3 ratio is 118 bytes with base64 PNG and 106 bytes with base64 SVG.

However, using base64 SVG for larger, more complex ratios stay small, which is a real winner in file size. A 16:9 ratio is 122 bytes in base64 PNG and 110 bytes in base64 SVG. A 923:742 ratio is 3,100 bytes in base64 PNG but only 114b in base64 SVG! (That’s not a common aspect ratio, but I needed to test with custom dimensions with my client’s use case.)

Here’s a table to see those comparisons more clearly:

Aspect Ratio base64 PNG base64 SVG
1:1 114 bytes 106 bytes
2:3 118 bytes 106 bytes
16:9 122 bytes 110 bytes
923:742 3,100 bytes 114 bytes

The differences are negligible with simple ratios, but you can see how extremely well SVG scales as ratios become complex.

We’ve got much better browser support now. This technique is supported by all the big players, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE11, and Edge, but also has great support in mobile browsers, including Safari iOS, Chrome for Android, and Samsung for Android (from 4.4 up).

Here’s a demo:

See the Pen Image Aspect Ratio: inline base64 SVG by James Steinbach (@jdsteinbach) on CodePen.

? We have a winner!

Yes, we do, but stick with me as we improve this approach even more! I remembered Chris suggesting that we should not use base64 encoding with SVG inlined in CSS background-images and thought that advice might apply here, too.

In this case, instead of base64-encoding the SVGs, I used the “Optimized URL-encoded” technique from that post. Here’s the markup:

<img src="data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 3 2'%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="//picsum.photos/900/600" alt="Lazy loading test image" />

This is just a tad smaller than base64 SVG. The 1:1 is 106 bytes in base64 and 92 bytes when URL-encoding. 16:9 outputs 110 bytes in base64 and 97 bytes when URL-encoded.

If you’re interested in more data size by file and encoding format, this demo compares different byte sizes between all of these techniques.

However, the real benefits that make the URL-encoded SVG a clear winner are that its format is human-readable, easily template-able, and infinitely customizable!

You don’t need to create a CSS block or generate a base64 string to get a perfect placeholder for images where the dimensions are unknown! For example, here’s a little React component that uses this technique:

const placeholderSrc = (width, height) => `data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 ${width} ${height}"%3E%3C/svg%3E`

const lazyImage = ({url, width, height, alt}) => {
  return (
    <img
      src={placeholderSrc(width, height)}
      data-src={url}
      alt={alt} />
  )
}

See the Pen React LazyLoad Image with Stable Aspect Ratio by James Steinbach (@jdsteinbach) on CodePen.

Or, if you prefer Vue:

See the Pen Vue LazyLoad Image with Stable Aspect Ratio by James Steinbach (@jdsteinbach) on CodePen.

I’m happy to report that browser support hasn’t changed with this improvement — we’ve still got the full support as base64 SVG!

Conclusion

We’ve explored several techniques to prevent content reflow by preserving the aspect ratio of a lazy-loaded image before the swap happens. The best technique I was able to find is inlined and optimized URL-encoded SVG with image dimensions defined in the viewBox attribute. That can be scripted with a function like this:

const placeholderSrc = (width, height) => `data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 ${width} ${height}"%3E%3C/svg%3E`

There are several benefits to this technique:

  • Solid browser support across desktop and mobile
  • Smallest byte size
  • Human-readable format
  • Easily templated without run-time encoding calls
  • Infinitely extensible

What do you think of this approach? Have you used something similar or have a completely different way of handling reflow? Let me know!

The post Preventing Content Reflow From Lazy-Loaded Images appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Strategies For Headless Projects With Structured Content Management Systems

November 29th, 2018 No comments

Strategies For Headless Projects With Structured Content Management Systems

Strategies For Headless Projects With Structured Content Management Systems

Knut Melvær

2018-11-29T13:35:41+01:002018-12-02T12:47:19+00:00

This is the guide I wish I had the last couple of years when running projects with headless Content Management Systems (CMSs). I’ve been a developer, a user-experience and technology consultant, a project manager, information architect, and an author. The different hats have made me realize that even if we’ve had so-called “headless” CMSs for a while now, there’s still a way to go about thinking how to use them best.

We are now at a place where many of us rely on JavaScript frameworks for frontend work, using design systems made of components and compositions, rather than just implementing flat page layouts. There’s a lot of traction towards the JAMstacks and isomorphic/universal apps that run both on the server and the client. The final piece of the puzzle then is how we manage all the content.

Traditional CMSs are adding APIs to serve content through network requests and the JSON format. In addition, “headless” CMSs have emerged to exclusively serve content through APIs. My argument in this article though, is that we should spend less time talking about “headless”, and more about “structured content”. Because that is the essential quality of these systems. There are lots of implications for our craft implied by these systems, and we still have a way to go in terms of figuring out the good patterns of how we should deal with these technologies.

Coming to technology consulting from a background in humanities, I have learned a lot about how to organize and work with web projects that take a content-centric approach — both with the newer API-based as well as the traditional CMSs. I have come to appreciate how getting started early with actual live content from a CMS; doing so in a cross-disciplinary setting has not only made it possible to uncover complexities at an earlier stage but also lends agency to everyone involved, and gives opportunities to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of technology and design in its broadest sense.

Headless WordPress

Everyone knows that if a website is slow, users will abandon it. Let’s take a closer look at the basics of creating a decoupled WordPress. Read article ?

In this article, I’ll suggest some overarching strategies, with some concrete, real-world examples on how to think about working with structured content. At the time of writing, I have just started working for a SaaS company that provides such a content management service, for hosting content delivered over APIs. I will make references to it, both because of my past experience with it in projects I was involved in as a consultant, but also because I think it aptly illustrates the points I want to make. So consider this a disclaimer of sorts.

That being said, I have been thinking about writing this article for a couple of years, and I have strived to make it applicable to whatever platform you choose to go with. So without further ado, let’s jump twenty years back in time in order to understand a bit more where we are today.

First Moves With Web Standards

In the early 2000s, the Web Standards movement inspired a field to change their ways of working. From a “layout-first” approach, they directed our attention towards how content on a page should be marked up semantically using HTML: A website’s menu isn’t a

, it’s a