fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
What’s Going On in the US: Cyber Attacks or Propaganda?
By: Lasha Pataraia
Tags: Intelligence, Russian Hacking, Propaganda, Security, Cybersecurity

From day one the mainstream media was conducting the biggest informational warfare, heavy propaganda against President Trump in favor of Hillary Clinton. After they lost it was obvious that they did not had plan B for Trump and all this propaganda that they conducted after only gave an upper hand to the Russian government. We saw fake news from the biggest broadcasters, campaigns from big sharks in social media, leaks from government’s most secure agencies and role plays from top government officials.

This is an unprecedented campaign not only from foreign, but also by the domestic groups in the US. The mainstream media is deliberately engaged in false reporting, social attacks even on President Trump’s family members. Propaganda campaign become so nasty that it even attacks the sovereignty of the US. Every aspect of this informational warfare indicates that it is very well organized and managed. All this can lead to very serious, devastating consequences as the radical wing is also talking about military coup.

Some of the unverified and fake news that took place in informational campaign against President Trump:

All these efforts reminded me the Kremlin style propaganda campaigns.

Like the Russian State television channel “Russia 1” falsified the video to claim that the young American boy had the pictures of naked men in his bedroom. The US company responsible for the advert Fathead stated that they would not tolerate the manipulation of its material for a “hateful, bigoted, and outrageous attack on the gay community as well as children”.

Journalists should try to be neutral in their observations, but unfortunately in this game too much powerful groups are involved dictating extreme rules. We see celebrities, Hollywood actors and activists groups involved in extensive campaign against democratically elected president and therefore against sovereignty of their own country.

For more information about the Russian cyber capabilities visit: https://www.globalcase.org
Boy howdy!
By: John Allen
Tags: Media Criticism, Politics, Propaganda, Caitlin Johnstone, Revolution

Boy howdy! I thought about pursuing this ‘extrication’ process when I was still working. I didn’t. I chose to play golf and chess and do copious amounts of drugs. Working was too taxing to ‘work’ at extrication from the ‘grand narrative’. This isn’t as easy as it may first seem. It’s a painful process, It requires some grieving for what was instilled and reinforced relentlessly from birth on. I still somewhat alienated from the general population and keep my mouth shut in the case if politics comes up. It’s easier that way. The same goes for my atheism. Mum’s the word there too. It’s OK ’cause I can sleep at night. I’m fine with my ‘wokeness’ even if others don’t want to disturb the slumbers woven by the propaganda masters of the ‘grand narrative’. But as the flames of a heating Earth due to war or climate disruption become unavoidable they might just wish they’d unplugged from video games, posting selfies, and read a book instead. Keep the great work going Caitlin. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy
Damn, I lost the first paragraph of my draft.
By: John Allen
Tags: Media, Media Criticism, Politics, Propaganda, Journalism

Damn, I lost the first paragraph of my draft. — There are many of what I call landmines on the net meant to keep people from the real truth. They are meant to control the narrative. They are meant to control info flows. They are meant for people to accept trillion+$US (unofficial but actual) as normal military spending. That’s the way the sociopathic oligarchs want it. This is not ancient fucking Rome where they depleted the treasury in hegemonic expansion and pricey shows in the coliseum. They collapsed. The US will too, in time.

Then there comes the finding of good sources for real(not fake)news. There are many landmines to misdirect you to the ruling classes’ ‘approved’ sites. This plug-in seems to be quite ambitious in funneling folks away from ‘unapproved’, but real, news sites. I finally realized there are many landmines claiming that RT is propaganda and the downright demonization the site. Putin, ya know. The site had to register as foreign agents. Most of the good journalists have shows on RT. So as Lee camp says,(paraphrased) that Americans are reporting about Americans as foreign agents. That’s fucked up. Another form of censorship in my book. “Fascinating”, as Spock would say. We get better news funded by the Russian govt than we get here funded by commercial corporaists. I’ve found a lot of good info written by Americans from foreign lands. They choose to live there instead of here in the US. Glen Greenwald comes to mind.(Brazil)

Finally don’t rely on any app or plug-in to vet your news. You will, most likely, be fed corporatist propaganda or worse. Then they will sell your info to the highest bidder. You will feel used in the end. That’s what they want and will go to great lengths to grab you and not let go of your mind. Think about two electrodes plugged into you brain until all you see is the inverted totalitarianism we live under as normal. Endless war as normal. War is not fucking normal! Never was and never is. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy.
Communities of Hate: Why People Join Extremist Movements
By: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Tags: Holocaust, Extremism, Propaganda, Anti Semitism, Conversations

People salute Hitler while attending a Nazi Party parade in Nuremberg, Germany, 1937. Courtesy of Shawshots/Alamy Stock Photo

Recent events remind us of the ever-present dangers of hatred and propaganda. Some individuals throughout history and today have embraced hate, and even murder, to fulfill their own needs.”

Personal grievances and hardship drove nurse Pauline Kneissler to become a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. Peer pressure eventually influenced her to kill on behalf of the German government. A half century later, loneliness and bullying left American Christian Picciolini vulnerable to a white supremacist organization, which encouraged him to channel his emotions into hate and violence against Jews and other minority groups.

On January 13, 2021, amid a rise in antisemitic incidents and extremism more than 75 years after the Holocaust, experts discussed the reasons why some people in search of belonging use racism, conspiracy theories, and antisemitic lies to justify hate and violence.
I point to this absurdity when I write about the stupid impeachment spectacle playing out ad…
By: John Allen
Tags: Narrative, Media Criticism, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology

I point to this absurdity when I write about the stupid impeachment spectacle playing out ad nauseum on TV on a semi- regular basis. Now that they’ve gone ahead and done the deed maybe we can get down to business. Oops, it’s Christmas time and time to go into debt for things your loved ones may not need. Pardon my cynicism. The holiday message screams consumption in its worst way. Working people are struggling to make it and the holiday narratives encourage folks to add more debt, as if that’s a way to redemption, a way forward that ensures one’s well being. Maybe the hysteria will abate some. Come together, be as one in the Universe and each other. That’s what really matters.

And by the way I like Christmas. It’s my favorite holiday even though I’m an atheist. I simply love the mythology of the birth of the One to rid us of our indiscretions(sins). I used to watch the Midnight Mass on TV before I finally got Netflix. The holiday, even if it’s so commercialized as to be silly, still has meaning for a big portion of Earth’s population. A way to forget about stupid political shenanigans on impeachment that won’t amount to anything. so I have a message. Concentrate on your own narratives, they’re the most important in anyone’s lives. See that your family is secure as best you can. Don’t start violence against those that refuse to ‘get it’, it’s just not worth it. But above all love those you cherish. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy
Book Review: Less than Human
By: Dave Volek
Tags: Propaganda, Genocide, Evolutionary Biology, Morality, Philosophy

Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

Philosopher/researcher David Livingstone Smith takes us on an interesting journey into a dark side of our human nature: “dehumanization.” This humanistic attribute allows us to see others not in our group as less than human, which then leads to various forms of prejudice, discrimination, outcasting, and eventually genocide.

One reason to read this book is again to remind us of the dark side of humanity. Smith does use mildly graphic reminders of various dark spots in recent history from colonization to Auschwitz to Rwanda to point out that under the right conditions, we can turn the other way when atrocities are forthcoming.

Smith summarizes various sociological studies of our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees do kill other chimpanzees for no other reason that the outgroup is not part of the ingroup. In some ways, we are the same, in some ways different.

He posits an evolutionary biological trait that our hunter gatherer ancestors had for outsiders. Outsiders were to be distrusted, avoided, and if given a chance, exterminated. Genetic tendencies were passed down by the victors. Today, some current primitive tribes usually have little remorse for killing members of other tribes. We seem to be carrying those genetics.

Smith also offers social conditioning as a means to justify our dehumanizating ways. The societal turning away from the Jews or Tutsis was not an overnight act. There was preparation of the masses to that eventually allowed the perpetrators to effect their rampage. The big question is “what is the bigger influence: our genetics or the propaganda?”

Smith is also critical of western culture. While claiming to be on the forefront of “human rights,” the west has been also on the forefront of dehumanization, even in recent history.

I like possible solutions, and for this reason, I found the end of this book unsatisfactory. But Smith says the science of dehumanization is still an open field for study. While the answers may not be there, we still need to work towards accepting everyone else as an equal partner in humanity. Maybe the real reasons for dehumanization really don’t matter. We just need to know that everyone of us can be susceptible to these forces. In this way, the book succeeds.
Ironhack Precourse #3 — Sketch Visual Exercise
By: Rasmus Gessner
Tags: Ironhack, Ironhack Prework, Sketch

The next task in our precourse was to copy two screens for an app as precisely as possible. Luckily the nice people at Ironhack gave us some advice beforehand on handy resources/plugins for both Firefox and Sketch (Colorzilla, Noun Project and the Unsplash plugin, to name three).

I started by redesigning the location-like arrow on top and that’s what took most of my time. The rest was, with some googling and trial-and-error, just fun.

So, this is what I was supposed to copy:

Some nice colour contrasts and font work going on here.

And this is what I came up with:

I chose an iPhone 8 artboard as it seems to fit the scale of the original quite well.

It’s clear I didn’t quite catch the dark blue colour of the original start screen. But other than that, I’m fairly content with my design. I consciously chose icons that differed from the original and had more of an “outline” character.

Like I said, designing the small arrow-shaped icon at the top took me some hours, especially to get the colours and the shape and the cone at the bottom right.

The next screen was fun to do. After figuring out how I wanted to achieve that angled box I used mostly tools that Sketch had onboard, e.g. for inserting the faces of the journey’s other guests.

Thanks to Google for letting me find the exact same picture for the header :)

What do you think? Where could I get better?
Design Practice
By: Allyson Mcabee
Tags: Ironhack Prework, Headspace, Sketch, UI

This exercise was designed to ‘learn by doing’, and that I did!

In this practice the goal was to get to know UI design a bit better through mimicking the exact colors, layout, text, icons, and style of an existing app. Ideally if you do something, or see something, enough it becomes second nature. Therefore I chose an app which I already love and use, which is known and adored for its calm and easy to use design, Headspace.

While I was already familiar with using vector tools in Photoshop and Illustrator this was excellent practice as it’s a bit different experience, as each program varies slightly. In the end I found the vector tool actually quite easy to use! I also found it useful creating each little piece of artwork from scratch, because I learned how to better layer & mask the elements while practicing my organization skills of naming layers and grouping. While constantly locking layers and hitting, save, save, save!

Some might initially think copying is bad, but I will continue to do this type of practice! While it pushed me to learn new technical skills in Sketch, I also felt I was subtly becoming more aware of layouts, text and text spacing. I also began to notice how the small details such as slightly rounded corners can make quite a big difference in the overall look and feel of the design. Therefore, my thoughts are learn the basics from the best, personal style comes with time.
Polar Vortex
By: Nick Lee
Tags: Daily Challenge, Sketch, Memories, Winter

Note: This is day one of a personal 28-day challenge I’m setting for myself. One sketch and a bit of writing every day in February. Giddyup.

I grew up in Minnesota. I distinctly remember the cold snap that closed schools in the winter of (I think) 1996–97. It was awful, but sort of a badge of honor, as most awful weather items are for so many in the upper Midwest. That’s just how you’re raised in such a climate — not only is it wonderful in the summers, but the winters make you tough as nails! Hooray!

Now as an adult in Colorado… eh, not so much. When the high temperature doesn’t top 30° F in the winter, that’s reason to complain. I have no misgivings about this, as though I’ve somehow betrayed my roots. No, sir. I now believe that people who voluntarily put themselves through winters cold enough to kill your skin within a few minutes of exposure kinda sorta deserve it.

If they want to be tough, good. Let them. But it’s generally not going to get my sympathy on Facebook.

This week’s polar vortex is a glaring exception. This looked absolutely brutal. My old high school was closed for four consecutive days. That simply doesn’t happen. Not only do I think my Minnesota friends and family are crazy, I think it’s reached the kind of crazy that puts them in danger in some way. 27 below zero?! That’s no joke.

So for my peeps back in Minny, good on ya for making it through. This really was a badge of honor. But honestly, how many badges do you need? We have all the winter we need here in the Rockies, but plenty of sunshine and warmth to balance it out. You can keep your badges.
Prototypes and their importance, The best tools for amazing interactions 📲
By: Álvaro Souza
Tags: Design, UI Design, Prototyping, Sketch, Animation

Don't make your client and developer think!

The prototypes are increasingly present, they are no longer a question of aesthetics and today are extremely important for the understanding of your work and how each interaction will work!

Have you ever thought how complicated it was to explain to a programmer or even to your client how each animation or transition would work?

Designers (the vast majority) often make the mistake of thinking that everyone thinks exactly as he or she thinks, but most of the time this does not happen, what we imagine may not be as easy as another person’s understanding, or even this animation might not as good as we thought.

A few years ago, showing an interaction could be very difficult, and it was often necessary to involve other professionals (developers or motion designers), but fortunately with the advancement of technology every day new prototyping tools come up, from the simplest ones where you simply connect screens to the more complex ones where you can actually animate an object or make more fun transitions.

I will list below tools I have already used is my honest opinion about them!

InVision

Easy, fast and straight to the point.

In my opinion, the best tool to do rapid prototyping without many animations, but nevertheless with a very easy to use interface, you can create Hotspot in a fast way and connect screens.

Currently with a great plugin for Sketch you can automatically upload the screens that you have been using, thus facilitating the workflow. Its main functionalities are:

Hotspot Creation Fixed Header and footer Hotspot template Easy way to share (link, Dribble, Slack) Inspect mode
THE POWER OF SKETCHING
By: Ruslan Galba
Tags: UI, Design, UI Design, Sketch, Design Knowledge

THE POWER OF SKETCHING 📝

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Courtesy of @ux.patricia

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I always start an Idea with pen and paper because I think concepting and designing the user interface is a process 🧗‍♂️

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It all begins with an idea, but that idea needs user interface translation.

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〰️ Simple sketching allows you to visualize the screen-to-screen interaction so that your idea is something that’s visible and clear in user interface form.

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〰️ It’s easy to mistakenly think a sketch is a wireframe. They are similar but they are not the same thing.

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Both are useful for illustrating an interface concept, but a wireframe and a sketch are done in different mediums and produce different results.

A sketch is not a wireframe

It’s impossible to go from a simple idea in your head to immediately building it out.

Every idea needs user interface translation.

Wireframing is where refining the concept is done and during the design phase the visual graphics and content placement is done.

It allows you to express your ideas quickly to help your client and team members understand your idea.

Bonus — 4 tools that may be useful in your designer way:

Funnelytics — an incredible tool that helps you build the best marketing funnel mapping.

Flowkit — allows designers to create frighteningly fast user flows within Sketch and Figma.

Crello — the simplest online image editor. A simple but powerful tool to create awesome designs for any social media format — posts, covers, graphics, and posters using the best software on the web. It’s easy! A lot of animated designs.

Webflow — all-in-one web design tool that allows users to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually.

Be free to send us any feedback by reply or reach us in DM on Instagram

Do you want to receive insights using FB Messenger or Telegram or Email? 👈 Subscribe now.
The fastest way to create a stunning responsive website using Overlay, Nuxt.js and Prismic
By: Baptiste Jan
Tags: Nuxtjs, Headless Cms, Sketch, Low Code, Figma

I have been a developer for 3 years, with a special passion for front end topics and great interfaces. I have always been sceptical about low-code tools and their ability to generate clean code.

But during this post-Covid month of August 2020, I helped the Hublo team ship their brand new website, and tested a new workflow, that changed my mind.

At Hublo, the leader in human resources management in health care., there were two groups of stakeholders involved in the project :

The marketing team, whose goal was to be autonomous on content edition on the new website

And the core tech team, whose goal was to be able to easily maintain and reuse the code.

And the main focus : make a great new UI and branding 💎

We (me and Côme, the designer) decided to use to use the following stack :

During this project, we tested a new workflow to automate front end component creation. I decided to share it here step by step since I am deeply convinced this is the fastest way to make a fast, well ranked and scalable website.
20 Sketch plugins to supercharge your productivity
By: Pranav Ambwani
Tags: Design, Visual Design, Productivity, Prototyping, Sketch

Find and Replace is a plugin that sifts through all text layers and replaces the keywords instantly.

Icon Fonts offers more than a thousand icons from Font Awesome, Ionicons, and Material Design directly within Sketch.

Image Optim is a that makes images load faster. It does so by removing bloated metadata. This plugin also saves disk space & bandwidth by compressing images without losing quality.

With today’s Retina display, the difference in quality is negligible.

Looper is a fun plugin that duplicates a shape many times to produce interesting effects. Looper lets you duplicate, rotate, and scale layers to build beautiful patterns and illustrations.

With this plugin, you can control every single detail when you duplicate layers or groups.

As a product manager, presentation plays a huge role in my daily workflow. Magic Mirror is an image perspective transformation plugin for Sketch.

This plugin adds Perspective Transformation so that you can create perspective mockups and add other distorted effects to your UI design.

Sketch Map Generator generates beautiful map interfaces, mobile applications, and more in a few clicks.

This plugin is powered by Google and Mapbox, so you’ll need a Google Maps API Key or a Mapbox token for the plugin to work properly.

Measure makes it fun to create specs for developers and teammates. Usually, style guides take days or weeks. The biggest hurdle I’ve faced is iterating over mocks every time I need to make a change.

Measure strips all the mundane bits and lets you generate style guides in an instant. You can select an element and generate Sizes, Spacings, Properties, etc. in a way that makes sense to developers.

The Merge Duplicated Symbols plugin merges Symbols that have the same name but look different. You can choose the one you want to keep.

This plugin will then replace all other Symbols and their instances with the one you chose to keep.
How to use React in our Sketch Plugin
By: Fredrik Ward
Tags: Plugins, Skpm, Sketch, JavaScript, React

Despite this shiny new door being wide open, there are still surprisingly few “How to” tutorials about how you create Sketch plugins using their JavaScript API?!

This is what I want to change… Here we go!

Creating a plugin

There are two ways of creating a Sketch plugin:

Setting up and organizing all the files yourself

Sketch Plugin Manager — the official utility tool to create, build and publish Sketch plugins

Guess which option we’re going to use 😎

Sketch Plugin Manager

When I started looking into Sketch Plugin Manager I realized that it’s WebView boilerplate project is running Babel. This, in itself, is not surprising. Babel is being used in, more or less, every modern web application today.

What did surprise me was all the pre-installed Babel plugins for React and JSX

All that was missing was a few lines of code in the project’s webpack configuration and well... React itself…

Prerequisites

You need to have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. You can download them here (npm is included in the installation of Node.js)

Setting up your development environment

Let’s start by heading over to Sketch Plugin Manager’s (skpm) Github page. We’re going to follow the installation instructions for setting up a WebView boilerplate project.

Side note

Sketch’s WebView is basically a web browser (including DevTools). Its API is mimicking Electron’s BrowserWindow API.

The WebView floats, in a separate window, on top of the Sketch UI.
Sketch 61 — Improvements to Help You Work Faster
Tags: Sketch 61, Design, Design Tools, Sketch, Design Resources

Components Panel — Ultimate Tip

I have seen designers confused with new stuff. I understand them because I also needed some time to find a way to work faster with the new panel. But now, my workflow is much faster than before. How to do that? Here is the tip:

You have to change the way of thinking about Styles and Symbols names.

Before Sketch 60, you had to “pick the style” from dropdown menus. Now you have to think about how to “find the style” thanks to the search filter feature.

Thanks to this, you are able to find Symbols and Styles much faster! Believe me, “this is the way.”



It is also good to have your components library organised in a better way. Below I described techniques that helped me:

Tip 1. Flatten Typography Naming Convention

The original typography naming was quite complex. It was good for dropdowns, but if I wanted to search faster, I had to make modifications. I removed one level in the hierarchy in my Design System Kit. Here is the example of how it looks:

Before:

Light Theme/08 Body/Center/Black/Bold

Now:

_ Light/08 Body/Center/Black — Bold

Thanks to this, I receive the list of fonts to pick from very quickly. Actually, it takes me just 2 letters to type…

How it is possible? Here is the next tip:

Tip 2. Use Numbers to structure Typography Scale

As you noticed, we are able to work faster in the new Components Panel if you prepare the right naming convention.

I recommend using numbers as the prefix of text style names. Thanks to this, you got a nicely organized list ordered from the biggest to the tiniest one. My UI Library includes 13 sizes and here are samples of their names:

01 H1

02 H2

…

07 Subtitle

08 Body

…

12 Caption

13 Small

Full naming samples:



_ Light/03 H3/Center/Black — Bold __ Dark/07 Subtitle/Left/Primary — Regular _ Light/08 Body/Right/Warning — Bold



If you use similar ones in your project, you will be able to reach every style extremely quickly.

Tip 3. Modify Symbols Naming

For Symbols naming, you should remember that lots of components got multiple states. You may name category as the component (Radio Button, Checkbox) and the specific symbols as their states (Normal, Disabled, Selected, etc.)

Thanks to this, after typing component name, you got the list of its all states ready to be used!

More Tips:

If you would like to get more details on how to work with the Components Panel introduced in Sketch 60. Here is the full tutorial:

Summing up

Improvements of UX while working with Cloud Documents are noticeable in Sketch 61. Now, you may take your time to get more familiar with the Components Panel. As you may see Sketch Team constantly works to improve the feature! 👏

By the way…

If you plan to start a new project or you would like to organize your UI Library — do not waste your time creating everything from scratch. Feel free to use mentioned above Design System Kit called Prime. It is All-In-One UI Design Starter Kit for Sketch. See Prime in action.

🎁 Now, you can get 10% Off for The Kit with MEDIUM10 offer code!
This was really a beautiful surprise from my fan : Khushi Shah
By: Dhollywood Life
Tags: Khushi Shah, Gujarati Actress, Ronit Patel, Sketch, Dhollywood Life

One of the most known and very talented actress of Dhollywood industry , Khushi Shah, who is much popular amoung all for her beautiful nature and best work. The well-known actress marked her name with her first horror comedy movie , ‘Affraa Taffrri’. In her very first move she proved herself by playing three roles in one movie. She is also much popular for her different style statements.

The Affra Taffri actress, Khushi Shah loves to enjoy her massive fan following on social media as well as in real life . Khushi Shah never regret to give response to her fans. Because of her kind heart , she is always available for her fans. Khushi Shah recently received a beautiful gift from his fan . It was a wonderful portrait of Khushi Shah and it looks perfectly like a carbon copy of Khushi Shah. As we all know about her nature , she responded her fan by posting that portrait on her social media handle.

Khushi Shah says,” this portrait is wonderfully sketched , it looks even more beautiful than the real picture. Ronit Patel who is a 17 years young boy from Gujarat , had sketched that portrait . Thanks to home for such a wonderful gift. I loved that portrait soo much.”

After getting a wonderful response from khushi Shah, that portrait artist , has become much popular amoung celebrities as a celebrity sketch artist. Ronit Patel is now also known for his beautiful sketch works.
Meri Wali Chai
By: Mehak Satija
Tags: Tea, Sketch, Art, Chaayos, Memoir

It’s about one of those Sunday evenings ….

After a week’s hustle and coding, I gather all the courage to get out of my bed and get ready in comfy clothes with my bag packed with sketch pens, a sketchbook, and Laptop (just in case of any production issue) to grab a cup of tea at Chaayos in Galleria market.

Galleria Market, its a shopping complex located in the heart of Gurgaon which happened to have all my favorite dine-in and shopping places back then. I get off the cab and smile, seeing the normal rush at Chaayos from distance.

As I go inside and lookup for my fav back table spot with the view of the whole place, I can hear people chit-chat. As soon as I settle down, here comes someone to greet you with a smile and ask for your order. I place my usual order of Desi Chai with tulsi, adrak, and elaichi. While I wait for the tea, I take out my sketch pens, sketchbook and nicely arrange them over the small table making sure to leave space for tea :)

By this time, unconsciously I have observed everyone sitting around me be it a couple casually enjoying tea after shopping, be it another couple planning/fighting about their future, a couple of aunties having a get-together, people having a business meeting and 2–3 groups of people working on their startup ideas and plans. Within 15 mins, it feels like you know everyone, and trust me, I have overheard a lot of startup ideas over my visits to this place (but never disclosed 😅)

Here comes my tea, and as always I ask for white sugar and a stirrer to make sure it’s as per my taste. While stirring, I decide what to draw by browsing over Pinterest on my phone. Now, my workstation is all set up. So, I fold my legs to be more comfortable not caring about being judged and I take a sip of tea and start sketching. And the moment I start sketching, I am in my own world paying attention to detail with earphones plugged in one ear. By the time I complete my sketching, and chai, and look around, some of the mates had left and new have joined — family enjoying an outing, friends chilling over tea. Suddenly, out of nowhere someone comes and overlooks at my sketches, compliments them, and asks — Did you just draw them here? to make it less weird for me and I nod with a smile :)

Then, either I used to get a work-related ping or a call from my mom due to which I had to leave for home. I remember having this typical conversation with my mom every time — “Are you still there? What you do all alone, don’t you get bored? Anyways go back home it’s late!” I wish I could have explained to her, it doesn’t feel so alone when you are surrounded by a good crowd and good tea :)

After paying for the chai and all the good time I had, I used to leave with a smile on my face and another good memory of this place.
Figma to HTML! Design to Responsive: Getting started with pxCode and Figma/Sketch
Tags: CSS, Sketch, Pxcode, Web Development, Figma

Figma to HTML! Design to Responsive: Getting started with pxCode and Figma/Sketch pxCode Mar 8·1 min read

📢 Finding a way to convert your design files into code? pxCode gives you the fastest way.

In this video, you can learn to import your design files into pxCode, with all the instinctive and simple editing stages, you can convert your Sketch/Figma design into a fully Responsive Webpage, while pxCode auto-generated code in HTML/CSS/React/ReactNative to you.

Through this tutorial video, you can also learn the essential yet revolutionary features that pxCode provides. From Split Sections, To-do(cmd+F), POSIZE(Position+Size), & etc. You can now have a fun and simple way to convert your design files into a fully Responsive Webpage, while pxCode auto-generates various codes for you.

Here’s the tutorial video:

【Design to Responsive: Getting started with pxCode】by Tom

▶ Install the file from the link below to follow the tutorial: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WPg4ar0QWQeFZnXtu8bykgu45sL4_qvd?usp=sharing

No more hand-coding & handoff, you give us your design, we save you time and cost. Try out pxCode on:

🟥 pxCode: https://www.pxcode.io/​

🟧 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pxCode​

🟨 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pxcode/

🟩 Medium: https://pxcode.medium.com/
Advantages of Using Sketch to HTML for Web Designing
Tags: Sketch To Html, Sketch To Html Services, Sketch, Html Conversion Service, Design Conversion

Nowadays, no other designing tool is as flexible and innovative as Sketch. Launched by a Dutch company, Sketch is a vector graphics editor that has given a new definition of code transformation. Sketch to HTML conversion not only increases the performance of a website but also ensures a healthy website in the long run.

Though Sketch is not as strong as Photoshop, yet web developers prefer Sketch to make minimal designs and fully-functional websites.

Why Sketch to HTML Conversion is Important in Web Designing?

Here are the top three advantages of using Sketch to HTML for web designing in brief.

Designing artboards have never been easier

Photoshop lets you work on only one artboard at a time, where Sketch allows you to be a multitasker. You can create more than one artboard and complete other tasks simultaneously.

Moreover, the Artboard toolbar of Sketch is handy, faster, and easier. Easy buttons and sub toolbars are helpful to create innovative icons and various dimensions for your website.

User’s choice and quality — equally important!

Sketch prioritizes its users without compromising the quality of the design. It respects the designers mindset and lets them customize grids, columns, and other ornaments. Not only that, Sketch has the feature of changing width, which adds another layer of creativity.

Most importantly, UI designers with Sketch can plan and arrange their webpages neatly. While running as per user requirements, Sketch does not blur the objects. Rather, it delivers clean and HD-looking outputs as the user resizes the layout and size of objects.

A truly user-friendly designing tool

With an user-friendly interface and existing templates, you can create any design as you wish, easily and quickly. If you are a newbie in web designing, you should start with Sketch. Adobe Photoshop is not friendly for everyone, only mid-level to expert designers can handle it. Contrastingly, Sketch is ideal for everyone, especially for beginners.

If you build a website with Sketch, your site will appear in Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows in the shortest time possible with SEO-friendly codes. Along with the web, you can design site/s for Android and iOS also. Once you choose Sketch, you are welcomed to a big and passionate user community. And the enormous library of plugins is a plus.

Another noteworthy point of Sketch is, it is lighter in size and provides smaller files. The scenario is opposite in Photoshop, and users often suffer from disk space issues.

End words

Because of its scalability, Sketch has become a new trend. The conversion from Sketch to HTML results in increasing efficiency of a design, simplified workflow, interactive and highly optimized website.

So what are you waiting for? Try Sketch to HTML conversion and be an outstanding web designer!
How Sketch and Legos can kickstart your UI design library
By: Ananth Pai
Tags: UI, Visual Design, Symbols, Sketch, Design System

Here in the Product Design team at Hotstar, Sketch is our workhorse. Chances are that you use Sketch as much as we do. To kickstart our design system, we recognized the need to make our Sketch files smarter and more semantic. We designers strive for consistency, and want our UI elements to look and behave consistently across our design.

Think of UI elements as Legos we can reuse to build interfaces. Legos are modular and repeatable — which are great for consistency.

Building Robust Legos

To build robust Legos, we need to make robust symbols. If your design uses a few symbols to fulfil many use cases, while making semantic sense, your symbols are robust.

Let’s make a robust symbol of the humble tray thumbnail.

Use Image Fills

Create a rectangular shape, and then apply an image fill. This lets you:

Replace images by overriding symbols.

Resize images without stretching (choose the “Fill” option in Display)

Have border radii without any extra fuss.

Add dark overlays and scrims without extra layers (click the “+” icon to create an additional fill)

Now, add other symbols within your symbol. If there’s an instance where you don’t need that particular symbol, you can remove it using an override.

Use Constraints

When you make a symbol with elements in it, add constraints to them so they’re 100% responsive.

Take the overflow menu icon on the top right. We want this icon to always be on the top right, no matter what.

The constraints will be:

It should always stay at a fixed distance from the top and right edge, so we pin to the top and right edge .

. It should never get stretched, so we fix the height and width.

You can distort the instance all you want and the icon stays put. Your symbol is now totally responsive! Constraints work on groups, too.
Converting Storybook Stories into a Sketch File
By: Utkarsha Bakshi
Tags: Sketch, JavaScript, Storybook, React, Web Development

Storybook serves as a fruitful platform for both developers and designers. A designer can review the designs of basic components on the go and can share feedback. Also, for a developer, it is a unified platform to store all the building blocks of an app. Sketch is a widely used application by designers to create mockups. This article is a step-by-step guide to convert the storybook stories into a Sketch file.

The first step is to install the sketch addon:

yarn add -D storybook-addon-sketch

# or

npm i --save storybook-addon-sketch

Once you have the addon installed, you need to register it in your storybook webpack config file:

module.exports = {

addons: ['storybook-addon-sketch/register']

}

Now we have registered this plugin in storybook, but this plugin won’t do the actual conversion. Now, we need to do two things:

Sketch App: Install asketch2sketch.sketchplugin for your sketch app. Open the zip file, you need to add this plugin to your sketch app. For that go to Plugins → Manage Plugins → Drag and drop the downloaded file there. Install story2sketch: This plugin will do the actual conversion of the storybook components to a sketch file.

npm i story2sketch -g

And also you need to add the following configuration in your package.json file

"story2sketch": {

"stories": "all",

"input": "storybook-static/iframe.html",

"output": "dist/great-ui.asketch.json"

}

stories: Here we can declare what all stories we would want to convert into a sketch file. In the above example, we have given “all”, meaning we want all the stories to be converted. input: Input source for all stories. output: Declaring path of the output file where the stories would be converted to sketch file.

Now, we are all set, the only thing left is to run the following commands:

a) Make sure to run npm run build-storybook , to get the output in storybook-static

b) Once you get the output inside the “storybook-static” folder run the following command:

story2sketch --url https://localhost:6006/\?path\=/story/ --output stories.asketch.json

Once the command is successful you will see this on your terminal.

Terminal after converting stories into sketch

The stories.asketch.json file would have been created under the root folder. Now go to the Sketch app, under the “plugins” option, choose “From *Almost* Sketch to Sketch, click on that and it will show you the option of the importing file, choose that option and import the newly created stories.asketch.json from your project into it.

Sketch app showing the plugins options

As soon as the import is completed, you will see all the stories being converted into Sketch format. That’s it for this post. Please leave a clap if you found the post useful.

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Design systems: Creating a floating label text field in Sketch
By: Parker Audrey
Tags: UI, Design Systems, Material Design, Sketch, Sketch Tips

The solution

Link to file: Link

—

Sketch is still a bit buggy in creating responsive symbols but the key trick for this solution was the utilization of masks. Masks actually follow the same properties as any other element within Sketch symbols allowing them to responsively subtract and mask out any unwanted areas.

By using masks within the top field bar, it subtracted the space necessary for the label text without it being destructive to the text field.

How it works

*Warning: geeky technical design ahead*

1. The Top

The first and biggest problem was making the top portion of the field scale properly. To make this happen, there are actually 2 main sub-problems: making the label have an invisible background and making the bar/line itself resize responsively.

Invisible Label background

For the label, we needed it to have an invisible background. To do so, we created a text field outline with only left, right, and bottom bar, as well as the first and last 13 pixels of the top bar. We kept both these 13 in order to maintain the corner radius of the text field.

Next, we created an INVISIBLE BOUNDING BOX. An invisible bounding box is a rectangle layer with no fill, no stroke, and no other properties other than the width and height in which you want to “block out”. Sketch, when reading this box within a symbol, still recognizes it as an element and applies its pinning and auto-layout properties to it. With a label text layer on top, it effectively gave accurate padding from other elements. With the box having no fill, it effectively turned the background of the text box invisible. For this box, we followed the left and right Google specs padding of the “empty space” between the text and the top line.
How to Make Badass Shadows
Tags: UI, UX, Design, Sketch, Figma

Tip 1 — Make it Soft

Don’t use default application shadows. Instead, adjust the shadow opacity around 5–25%, and set a higher level of blur.

Tip 2—Use multiple shadows

To better mimic the distance between element and background, apply multiple shadows on a single layer.

Bonus Tip:

You can also perform this trick with CSS. Here is a great material showcasing many use cases of applying multiple shadows within a single property.

Tip 3—Don’t use pure black

Avoid using #000 for shadows. To make the shadow look more realistic — pick a color based on the element background or its surroundings.

Tip 4—Use a separate layer as a shadow

For a more decorative purpose. You can duplicate the layer and put it beneath the original to emit a more natural-looking shadow.

Add a smaller layer with a maxed blur behind your fore element.

Tip 5— Add depth

Position your shadows based on the light source to emit its direction. Lower the fore layer’s opacity and a add a slight border for more depth vibes.

Tip 6— Make it crisp

Add a 2-step gradient stroke/border to highlight the shadow and make it crispy.

Tip 7 — Blur images background

Put a blurred image behind another to radiate a more natural colored shadow and match it with the image.

Tip 8—Handy tools

Tools

▪ neumorphism.io — Generate Soft-UI CSS code;

▪ brumm.af/shadows—Make a smooth shadow visually and copy the code;

▪ softui.io—Generate neumorphic styles;

▪ neumorphic.design—Neumorphic playground.

Resources

▪ Material shadows & elevation;

▪ CSS shadow-box.
Rolling out Figma to the design team — tips, learnings, and challenges
By: Alexander Fandén
Tags: Design Process, UI, UX, Sketch, Figma

Challenge 2 — It’s hard to get a more visual overview of your projects

The masonry-style gallery presentation in Zeplin made it easy to get a good overview of the general design direction of a project and to find a specific UI just by scanning the board. The boards could be divided into sections, which helped further.

Apart from the file thumbnail, there’s no way to get this type of overview in Figma. Therefore, our designers have to spend more time browsing files to find the right thing, which is the opposite of what we were trying to achieve.

Since we started to explore Figma, their team has managed to pinpoint and solve many of the issues we were facing as designers. Limitations in the tools we use inside the files when designing.

However, these first two challenges relate more to what happens outside of the files, and we haven’t seen as many improvements in this area yet. For freelancers and smaller design teams, these might be non-issues, but for larger teams, this might be the difference between canceling Zeplin once and for all or keeping it on retainer.

We’re eager to see what the team at Figma has in store for us!

Challenge 3 — Our master files are hard to work with

In order to maintain our master files at scale, we decided to distribute the responsibility to different designers, based on the page/feature they are working on.

The challenge with this is that everyone works differently and has more or less time to make the files organized and easy to use. This harmed the efficiency of our team as our designers had to spend a lot of time cleaning up and tweaking the files before they could implement their own changes.

Out of the three challenges listed here, we felt this was most urgent and easy to tackle, plus it would help to solve many other issues down the line. So we set up a checklist of to-do items for each page owner:
Demystifying Line Height on the Web — Part 2
By: Sebastian Müller
Tags: UI Design, Typography, Sketch, Line Height, CSS

Relative line height

Developers can define the line height with a decimal Number without any unit. The result is a relative line height which acts as the multiplier to calculate the absolute line height. The little math happening in the background looks like this:

absolute line height / font size = relative line height

To make this clearer, let’s look at the example:

Imagine a text field in your design file with an absolute line height of 28px and a font size of 19px. Your calculation is now: 28px/19px = 1.48

(Note: Actually it’s 1.47, but there are some rounding inaccuracies in Sketch. You should always double check design against code. That’s why I used 1.48 in my example)

absolute vs. relative

1.48 is now your relative line height value which can be used in Sketch by multiplying it with each font size. Unfortunately you have to do this manually or by using the ‘Set Line Height’ Plugin. So when the font size changes just don’t guess the line height, but rather calculate it by using this formula:

font size * relative line height = absolute line height

For example: 19 * 1.48 = 28

The developer is now able to work with one simple value which equals the absolute line height for each font style but calculated. Font sizes can now easily be customized for e.g. special cases or responsive breakpoints without losing its associated line heights.

One value to rule them all :)

Using a relative line height is the recommended method because you define only one value for every font size. You then have a consistent line height which is relative to each font size and very easy to change globally.

Sidenote: There are diverse unit options: Number, percentage, em and rem but the visual result is basically the same. Since Number is the most recommended option I only went into detail of this.