Writing a book is a scary experience. And when it is published, you can be certain of only one thing: You will be criticized. Paul Boag’s book Digital Adaptation will soon be officially released, and he knows a lot of people are going to disagree with what he has written. They are going to argue that he focuses too much on digital and its characteristics and its impact on business, when ultimately digital is just a tool. But… is it just a tool?
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In this article, Joseph McDermott will walk you through the creation of a new “brand” entity in Magento that can be managed through the admin panel. Once you are finished, you will be able to create, update and delete brands that can be viewed in the front-end independently. The process itself is quite lengthy because he will explain each step in detail, but it really is easy once you know how, and it’s a great example of how powerful the Magento platform can be with minimal effort.
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The quality of available free fonts has increased dramatically. Fee fonts don’t have a good reputation, and often they are knock-offs of thoroughly crafted, already established typefaces. So is it time for professional designers to take a second look? Thanks to the open-source community, there are now free fonts available that even typography snobs would be happy to use. The following fonts all have multiple weights with matching italics. They are suitable for headlines as well as body copy, and they render well on screen and at small sizes.
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A powerful report combines data gathered from a variety of sources, such as interviews with users, and analysis of the website’s analytics. The goal is to put the key insights from your research of a website into a single document. For this article, Kyle Larson created a fictional Widgets website, which you’ll work on to build a data report.
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This article is the last in a series of articles covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we covered how to build a tip calculator in native iOS, native Android and PhoneGap. In this article, we’ll look at another cross-platform development tool, Appcelerator Titanium.
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WordPress powers websites for some of the world’s largest companies and is even being promoted as a platform to power the next generation of Web apps. In this article, David Smith will share with you how his team has used the PHP dependency-management tool Composer to streamline their development processes and to maintain their WordPress project dependencies across the development team consistently and reliably.
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During brainstorming sessions, UX professionals would generate concepts as paper or whiteboard sketches. But this artifacts limit participants from visualizing interactivity and the system’s flow. In this article Svetlin Denkov will look at clickthrough prototyping on the iPhone with the Prototyping on Paper (or POP) app. His goal is to introduce the tool, share his prototyping experience and discuss competitors.
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Responsive SVG icons can be used in a lot of ways. In this article, Ilya Pukhalski digs deeper into Joe Harrison’s responsive icons technique and explores what can be done with SVGs.
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Web Components are a suite of connected technologies aimed at making elements reusable across the Web. The lion’s share of the conversation has been around Shadow DOM, but probably the most transformative technology of the suite is Custom Elements, a method of defining your own elements, with their own behavior and properties.
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What practical steps can you take to make your brand more approachable for mobile users? While general statistics are useful for demonstrating the value of designing with mobile in mind, they don’t provide the guidance necessary to understand precisely how users will interact with a particular brand on their phone. Google Analytics offers a number of free features for incredibly detailed analysis of mobile activity, with the ability to easily compare to desktop activity.
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