fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Ultimate Guide to Color in UX/UI Design
By: Christine Vallaure
Tags: UX, Uxui Design, Figma, UI, Colors

UX/UI Design

Ultimate Guide to Color in UX/UI Design

This article is an excerpt from my full course about UX/UI Basics on moonlearning.io You can find a preview video here.

Color is one of the main elements in your UI Design. It can shift the first impression of your product from sophisticated cool to crazy and wild. It is not about mixing pretty colors; it’s about creating a system. But let’s start at the very base and work our way up to pro-level:

Color Values. What to use when.

Colors can be noted down in different ways, and the most common ones you will probably come across are Pantone, CMYK, HEX, and RGB. We only use HEX and RBG in screen design, but it is still essential to understand the difference as you will most likely be dealing with a brand on- and offline.

Pantone → Use for PRINT

Pantone Swatches. Source: Official Pantone website

It is an exact mix of ink, so it is the same color globally. You cannot print Pantone on your home printer but you can look at an official Pantone color book as a reference. A professional printer would get the specific Pantone for you and add it to their machine for the print. Hence, it is usually more expensive to print Pantone colors which is why it is mainly used for logos or brand elements that need to match across different media, the rest stays is in CMYK

CMYK → Use for PRINT

CMYK

Mixing the four colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black), is the base of all other print colors. These are also the four colors found in your home printer and professional printshops.

RGB → Use for UI Design

RGB

RGB stands for red, green, and blue. The monitor emits these colors, so they are made of light and not ink. The color spectrum of light is larger than print. Due to their different systems, print and screen colors will never match 100%. That is no problem as long as the palettes are harmonious within themselves. Just be aware of it.

When giving RGB values in UI design, it ranges from 0–255 e.g. R= 255, G =255, B=255 or RBG=255,255,255 is white while RGB= 0, 0, 0 is black.

RGBA → Use for UI Design

Is the same as RGB, the A stands for an additional alpha channel. Alpha regulates the transparency from 0.0 (fully transparent) and 1.0 (fully opaque).

So for example RGBA = 255, 255, 255, 0.5 would be white with 50% transparency.

HEX→ Use for UI Design 👈

Use this one! RGB is perfectly fine, but it is a little tedious to note down so HEX is just a short form of it, and it will always display the exact same color as the RBG counterpart. It is just a little easier to handle, copy, paste and share due to its string format.

Hex consists of 6 digits with a hash in front of it. The first two digits are for R, the second for G, and the third for B. This is why RGB and Hex are identical.
Why Crawling Is So Good For The Baby?
By: Gary Fan
Tags: Baby, Motherhood, Parenting, Children

Physical benefits

Physically speaking, crawling can make motor skills better — both gross and fine. It can develop overall strength, balance and also make the hand and eye coordination quite good. The posture becomes defined and later when the walking stage comes, the child learns quicker. These skills are helpful in adulthood too — the same skills help in ball games, running and writing and jumping.

Mental skills

Crawling helps a child mentally too! The activity of crawling assists the two sides of the brain to interact with each other. This result in coordination of the two sides, in turn, helping many other daily life activities the baby would be doing later in life. Crawling also promotes risk taking, boosts the confidence and also helps the child understand concept of success and failure.

Visual development

While crawling a child learns the idea of distance between objects and understands concepts of far and near. The understanding of how to reach the object, adjusting eyesight to that object and then finally reaching them develops eyesight and judgment.

Spatial benefits

Problem solving skills are also put to use while crawling! How much distance to cover in lowest time and grab the toy, but there is the dog who’s sleeping in the way and one might get thirsty suddenly, or hurt. Obstacle crossing, speed management and avoiding difficult pathways can be some basic problem solving skills they develop.

Apart from this, there are more benefits which are relevant to the baby’s psychology and social skills. You need not help; the baby will be able to commute to you if he needs you.

They get a lot more freedom too, in order to explore new things and this sparks their creativity and curiosity as well. The observation of surroundings while moving increases the optic flow as well, igniting in the child the sense of direction in order to get back to where he started from. A lot of decision making, focus on the goal and intense emotions define their actions while they are crawling — it is indeed an important skill and a very defining milestone to achieve.
BABY SLEEPING SECRETS TIPS 2
By: Anuj Sharan Verma
Tags: Parents And Children, Baby, Baby Care, Baby Products, Baby Sleep

Drown out sound…with sound.

“Blackout shades and a white-noise machine transform a nursery into a womb-like environment — and muffle the noise and light from outside. Half of a baby’s sleep is REM, or rapid eye movement. This is the light-sleep stage in which dreams occur, so it can seem as if almost anything will wake him: Your phone rings in the living room, you laugh too loudly at your Netflix show, you pull a tissue out of the box. But that is less likely to happen with a white-noise machine running because the background noise covers it all. Some have timers, but I prefer the ones that plugin so they stay on all night. The Marpec Dohm is my favorite. I tell parents to test the volume by having one person stand outside the doors and talk. The white machine should muffle the voice but not drown it own completely.” — Brooke Nalle, a sleep consultant and founder of Sleepy on Hudson in Dobbs Ferry, New York

>>CLICK HERE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT BABY SLEEP SECRETS

>>CLICK HERE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT BABY SLEEP SECRETS
How to motivate our loved ones to get vaccinated?
Tags: Covid 19, Vaccine Hesitancy, Covid Vaccine

It is true that our routines are changing with the changes brought by COVID! Masks and sanitizers have become the essentials in our shopping list and ‘I am vaccinated’ posts have taken control over vacation posts!

So much has changed. People are showing considerable interest in taking their vaccine shots but the questions about the safety of vaccinations are still thriving among some people! Fear of the rumored myths, long-term effects of vaccinations, the involved side effects, and their efficacy has shadowed the idea of getting vaccinated! It is essential to vaccinate everyone to avoid COVID-positive cases in the future but the need of the hour is to provide information about vaccines to weed out the fear involved!

I have heard a lot of questions on vaccination, in general, based on the efficacy and need of vaccines! What is a vaccine? Why do we need a vaccine in spite of being healthy? Well, the answer lies in the very definition of the vaccine, issued by the World Health Organization (WHO)

‘Vaccination is a simple, safe, and effective way of protecting people against harmful diseases, before they come into contact with them’

But, what is in the vaccine?

Scientists develop ‘Antigen’, the part of disease-causing virus or organism, which is an important component of every vaccine. The presence of disease-causing pathogen itself forms the crux of the greatest myth — Why should I inject and get myself infected?!

The presence of antigens is to activate our immune response and develop antibodies that protect us from particular diseases in the future! In simple terms, a vaccine is simply an amplifier that boosts immunity to a particular disease that is naturally unavailable in our body! It trains our body’s immune system to fight against the disease-causing agent. Edwar Jenner’s smallpox vaccine saved millions of lives by providing immunity against the disease and the world would have witnessed several diseases and fatality cases if vaccines were not discovered!

The elixir to resume our world without losing any valuable life to corona is spelled as COVID Vaccine! Our scientists worked hard to identify the genetic material of the virus to discover vaccines that cease the rising cases! In other words, vaccine acts as the security code that protects our home from unwanted guests! To protect us and to relieve ourselves from the clutches of the corona, it is important that we take our vaccines! I did, did you?
3 Things We Can All Learn From The Pandemic
By: Regular Guy
Tags: Personal Development, Covid 19, Life Lessons

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

1. Please for the love of God don’t go to work if you’re feeling sick

It’s just a cold, I don’t even feel that bad, what will my boss say?

Who are we kidding, we’ve all had this train of thought, and what’s crazy is that most of us actually used to listen to this, we didn’t know any better back then, but we do now, next time you’re feeling sick, even if it’s “just a cold”, just don’t go to work, save your co-workers a whole lot of trouble.

2. Not everything has to be done in person

Personally, I’m one for human contact, and I prefer doing things in person, but if I’ve learned something from the pandemic, is that I can also do most stuff from home, and it’s fine to do stuff from home sometimes, it can be a time saver.

3. We all need some alone time

Sometimes, I need some time on my own

Sometimes, I need some time all alone

Ooh, everybody needs some time on their own

Ooh, don’t you know you need some time all alone? (Insert Slash solo)

In all seriousness, all of us need to be alone sometimes (apparently even Axel Rose sometimes needs some time), some of us more than others, but regardless of if you’re naturally introverted or extroverted, being alone with yourself is very healthy and a great way to check in on yourself, and to really be able to take a pause and think and meditate about whatever you need to. Don’t be afraid to be a little antisocial every now and then, stay in maybe watch a film, or listen to some music (Like November Rain…all right I’ll stop), or whatever you feel like doing, you get the idea.
14th Reason Why
By: Dr. Jarryd Willis Phd
Tags: Gender Roles, Sex Differences, Gamer, Covid 19, Health

RPG Gamers

🎮 Consider the scan ability most games have. T-Helper cells basically scan the enemy to reveal its weaknesses & HP, then the B-Cells create the correspondent antibodies.

T-Helper Cells are akin to the White Mage role & B-Cells are the Elemental Mage role: if the T-Helper Cell’s scan says the enemy is weak against fire, B-Cells cast that antibody spell. (Image from Remake of Final Fantasy 7, the greatest game ever made)

Stated differently, T-Helper Cells are akin to the White Mage role & B-Cells are the Black Mage role: if the T-Helper Cell’s scan says the enemy is weak against fire, B-Cells cast that antibody spell.

Moreover, you remember an enemy’s weakness(es) after scanning them the first time, so you never have to scan the same enemy twice. Similarly, B-Cells remember invaders so that they can be eliminated swiftly should they reappear.

Helper T-Cells scan pathogens’ HP & Weaknesses so that B-Cells (Black Mages) know what antibody spell to cast against it 🎮 👩🏻‍⚕️

For those who play Pokemon Go, this is just like appraising Pokemons’ IVs/Individual Values → T-Helper Cells are the Pathogen Raters 💁🏻‍♀️

(Adapted image) — Source: Glen Fox of Nintendo Life, https://www.nintendolife.com/guides/pokemon-go-ivs-how-to-check-a-pokemons-ivs-using-an-iv-calculator

Getting my annual flu shot sometime in the next month. Basically, the ice elemental that was weak against fire early in the game has mutated over the past year & so now CVS is going to teach my immune system Fira 💁🏻‍♀️

Even when neutralizing antibodies wane many months after your vaccination, B-Cells are capable of creating new antibodies should an infection occur. Of course, there’s a difference between having antibodies suited up & ready to go vs. having to train new ones.

⁠

Stated differently, receiving Pfizer/Moderna is like starting a boss fight with Protect/Shell automatically activated. Unfortunately, those defensive spells wear off after about 6 turns (or 6 months), but you still have your general defensive stats.

⁠

Of course, you could also have your summoner or white mage give you a third dose of Protect/Shell 🎮⁠
How come YOUR body is sacrosanct, but the bodies of the people you and your anti-vaxx buddies…
By: Georgia Nesmith
Tags: Lockdown, Anti Vaxxers, Covid 19, Vaccines, Patriotism

How come YOUR body is sacrosanct, but the bodies of the people you and your anti-vaxx buddies ultimately infect are throw-aways?

Why are THEIR BODIES throw-aways when yours is supposedly sacrosanct? The anti-vaxx crowd, led by Donald the Traitor TRUMP (who HAS BEEN vaccinated) refuses to be vaccinated, and by that "choice" has enabled new variants immune to the current vaccines to grow...and spread...and maim...and kill.

Why are YOUR bodies more sacrosanct than those of the people who die or are permanently disabled because your brain cannot comprehend your responsibility to your communities? To your country?

Why does your supposed “freedom not to be vaccinated” trump (yes, TRUMP) the freedom of others TO LIVE??

The anti-vaxx movement is killing our country — not “just” in terms of bodies, but in terms of economics. Why can't you see that? Why do you not recognize your responsibility to help save YOUR OWN COUNTRY?

When your country is weakened by a deadly disease that you refused to help stop, you commit the most unpatriotic act of all.

You help to kill your own countrymen, women, and children. In the process, you weaken and ultimately destroy your own country.

So get off your high (but obviously crippled) horse and get vaccinated. And encourage everyone else to get vaccinated as well.

Your country's survival depends on it.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” — Leonard Cohen

******

(PS I will be developing a longer and more detailed response to the anti-vaxx movement later today. Or maybe tomorrow. Or...my already disabled body sometimes can't fulfill my promises. But at LEAST I have been vaccinated. Only now, obviously, I have to keep an eye out for people who could be carrying a new variant. Thanks to lovely, -- ever so thoughtful of others -- people like YOU.)
Embrace the Covid Economy. Therefore, businesses will need to…
By: Hannah Smolicz
Tags: Covid 19, Economy, Workplace Culture

The past year and a half has brought many difficulties to businesses, while others were able to flourish. The United States completely shut down for a few months, and then slowly began to reopen with new norms in place. People needed to wear masks, practice social distancing, and limit social gatherings. Of course, all those practices are still recommended and are advised if that makes you most comfortable. However, the government released new mask mandates within the past couple of weeks. Every state has their own rule and certain states opened up their economy before others, but now most vaccinated people no longer need to wear a mask. Restaurants are full, bars are open, and we are even seeing clubs starting to open up as well. This is exciting, as most people can not wait to get back to work and spend more time with friends and family.

Therefore, businesses will need to stand out and prosper on this excitement. Experiencing a global pandemic seems insane, and now the possibilities are quite optimistic. Companies must recognize these changes and capitalize on them. Below are some further explanations on what businesses should be thinking about as the economy recovers.
Building ScrollyTelling with Free Camera API in Mapbox GL JS v2
By: Hiroya Kato
Tags: Mapbox, Maps, Scrollytelling, Data Visualization, Web Development

Full code

The Full code can be found at the following link.

Commentary on the main points

This demo is a ScrollyTelling that integrates scrolling events with the FreeCamera API.

The FreeCamera API uses two data from routes to control the camera: one is the data of the moving route of the camera gazing point. The other is the data of the moving route of the camera itself.

First, here is an example of how to create these data.

Data 1: Moving route of camera gazing point

The data used here is the movement route of the gazing point located in the center of the camera. In other words, it is the pathway data that is the theme of ScrollyTelling.

The theme for this demo is “the route to the summit from the fifth station of Mt. Fuji”. The route I chose was the Yoshida route, which is used by more than half of the climbers.

The data was obtained from OpenStreetMap (OSM) Export.

Once the OSM data is retrieved from OSM, convert it to GeoJSON with osmtogeojson.

Extract the route you want to use from the GeoJSON you created in this way.

(Don’t forget to credit OSM when you use it)

Data 2: Moving route of the camera itself

This is the route followed by the camera itself. You can specify the parameters for the altitude separately, so you can use the same data as in Data 1.

However, for example, if a zigzag route is included the camera will swing violently along that route. That user experience can cause 3D sickness, so the data needs to be simplified.

To simplify the data, mapshaper is useful.

Code essentials

The following is an excerpt of the code that operates the FreeCamera API.

To explain briefly, the following process is repeated every time a scroll event is fired.

Using Turf.js, manage scroll rate as a variable called rate. Using the rate, calculate the position according to the scroll rate from the gazing point of the camera and the movement route of the camera itself. Using each calculated position, set the FreeCamera API object (use lookAtPoint in this case) Move the camera

(For your information, scrolling events are managed by EventListener and requestAnimationFrame.)
The Art of Problem Solving
By: Ali Osia
Tags: Research, Academia, Problem Solving, Ideas, Problems

The Art of Problem Solving

Problems start with asking questions, interest in unknown phenomena, or simply curiosity. They are general and inclusive at first, but become exclusive when the questioner adds her own details and constraints, and forming a special case.

Example

Image Classification is a general problem, instantiated in many sub-problems considering different situations. In its simplest form, such as Face Recognition, there are many disjoint labels, and each image could only accept one of them. However, in cases like Scene Understanding, images can be labeled with many tags, called Multi-label Classification. Additionally, if we want to classify product images into Amazon hierarchy, the label set is very large, and structured in a hierarchy; In this case, we call the problem Extreme Classification. There may be many more challenges in real world problems; the dataset may be imbalanced or we may have missing values. Hence, adding constraints to the general problem results in different individual cases.

Fig 1. Sub-Problems. Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash.

Solving a specific problem starts with getting to know the general problem it is derived from, its different aspects, and what others have done till now, by studying the prior works and literature. It should be followed by taking enough time to think and let your mind process what you have found about different ideas and their pros and cons. And finally, you may come with a new idea for your own specific problem.

Example

Recently our company decided to have an automatic Description Generator that takes the product title, image, and tags as input, and writes a description, describing the product. This could be a helpful tool for shop owners without copy-writing skills. That time, I knew that Natural Language Generation (NLG) is pacing fast, but I didn’t exactly know how NLG models work. So I decided to start with the literature and read GPT papers, where I found out how to fine-tune a pre-trained model on a new dataset. Since we had experience working with eCommerce data, we easily collected a large dataset, cleaned it with standard NLP models, and used it for fine-tuning. We have also trained a multi-label image classifier to predict some labels for the image, and feed them together with the title and tags to the NLG model, which highly boost our results when we have no text data.
Scan Environment Variables in Production Application
By: Shubham Chadokar
Tags: Best Practices, Nodejs, Development, NPM, Software Development

There is no production application which is complete without environment variables. Majority of projects saves environment variables in .env as de facto. With growing environment variables in the application it gets difficult to track them in production without any error.

It is not an ideal way to define or update env variables in the production while deploying the application.

For this I have created a simple npm package scan-env . This simple package scans the application environment variables and prints report with missing environment variable.

Go and try yourself link.

In the next section I am creating a dummy project to use it.

Getting Started

Create a scanenv-demo project.

Initialize the project using npm init -y .

Install scan-env

npm install scan-env

Project Structure

scanenv-demo

|- index.js

|- .env

|- .env.example

Create 3 files in the project index.js , .env and .env.example .

index.js

Copy and paste the below code in index.js .

const scan = require("scan-env"); // scan env

const status = scan(); if (!status) {

console.error("Missing Envs.");

process.exit(1);

} console.log(

`${process.env.GREETING} ${process.env.REGION} from ${process.env.FROM}.`

);

.env

From this file, application will use the environment variables.

Copy and paste the below keys in the .env .

GREETING=Namaste

REGION=World

.env.example

List all the required environment variables of application.

Copy and paste the below keys in .env.example .

GREETING=Anything

REGION=Anything

FROM=Anything

Note: Syntax of .env.example must be like .env .

Run the application

FROM key is missing in .env . We are expecting an missing report here.

node index.js

Output

Env Scan Report

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Total Missing Environment Variables:

1 Missing Environment Variables:

FROM

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Add FROM key in the .env

GREETING=Namaste

REGION=World

FROM=India

Run the application using node index.js .

Output

Namaste World from India.

Ignore Environment Variable

When you run the application in different environments that time you might want to ignore some environment variables.

For this use .envignore file.

Create a .envignore file and paste the below key.

REGION=Anything

By default scanenv checks if .envignore exists or not. If it exists then it ignore those keys.

Run the application node index.js .

Output

Namaste undefined from India.

Conclusion

If the name of file is anything else than .env , .env.example and .envignore then pass the file name in the same order to the function.

Thanks for reading.
How To Parse Data Using Python and Selenium
By: Mahbub Zaman
Tags: Selenium, Programming, Python, Software Engineering, Data Science

Setup

For this setup, we need to install a Python package and ChromeDriver. Also, make sure you have Python installed on your machine. I’m using macOS. You can quickly check which version of Python you’re running by using the following command.

python --version

In my case, I’m running Python version 3.8.8. Now, run the following command in your terminal. Here we are using pip (package installer for Python) to install the package.

pip install selenium

After installing Selenium, we need to install the ChromeDriver. I’m using Homebrew to install the driver.

brew install chromedriver

Here are some basic troubleshooting steps for macOS if you’re facing any problems with the driver.

Troubleshooting

Chromedriver cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.

open /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/chromedriver

First, open the chromedriver folder in the finder. After that, right-click on the chromedriver file and select open. It should fix the problem.

2. This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version # Current browser version is # with binary path.

We need to make sure the version of ChromeDriver and Chrome browser are the same.

brew upgrade --cask chromedriver

Brilliant, we are done with the initial setup. Now you can download the Python script from GitHub. Let’s break down the individual ingredients of the web_scraper.py file.

web_scraper.py

First, we added a headless option. Then we initialize a Chrome webdirver with the option. Now, we navigate the URL along with the page number. After that, we extract all the elements from the page using the find_elements_by_class_name method, and finally, we loop through all the elements and extract a single element using the find_element_by_class_name method. Now, we can increment the page number by one and repeat the same process until no data is left to parse. You can read all the available WebDriver API from here.

If you don’t provide the headless option, it will open a chrome browser and run the rest of the code. If that’s your desired behavior, remove lines 23, 24, and modify line 25 like below.
How To Parse Data Using Ruby and Selenium
By: Mahbub Zaman
Tags: Testing, Selenium, Programming, Technology, Software Engineering

Setup

First, we need to install a ruby gem and ChromeDriver. For this setup, I’m using macOS. If you don’t have Ruby installed on your machine, then get it from here.

Run the following command in your terminal.

gem install selenium-webdriver

Now, run the following command in your terminal to install ChromeDriver. Here, I’m using Homebrew to install the driver.

brew install chromedriver

If you're facing any issues with the initial setup, have a look at my GitHub or use the error message to solve the problem. Alright, we are good to go. You can download the following code from GitHub. Let’s break down the individual ingredients of the web_scraper.rb file. For this post, we will be scraping data from the website called toscrape. It’s a web scraping sandbox.

First, we are initializing our selenium WebDriver with a headless chrome browser.

def init_selenium_webdriver

options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new

options.add_argument('--headless')

return Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome, options: options

end

Now, we have the URL we will be using to parse data. Here, we are starting from page number 1. Inside the loop, we navigate the web page using the driver, URL, and page number.

def main

driver = init_selenium_webdriver

url = "http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/"

page_no = 1

loop do

navigate(driver, url, page_no)

data = get_data(driver, {class_name: 'quote'})

parse_data(data, {text: {class_name: 'text'}, author: {class_name: 'author'}})

page_no += 1

break unless has_data?(data)

end

driver.quit

end

Inside the navigate method, we are constructing the final URL using the base URL and page number.

def navigate(driver, url, page_no)

driver.navigate.to URI.join(url, page_no.to_s)

end

We are using the get_data method to extract quotes from the data returned by the navigate method. The find_elements method will return all elements matching the given arguments.

def get_data(driver, pattern)

return driver.find_elements(pattern)

end

After that, we are looping through all the quotes to print individual quote information in the console using the parse_data method. The find_element method will return the first element matching the given arguments. You can read more about it here.

def parse_data(data, pattern)

data.each do |quote|

text = quote.find_element(pattern[:text]).text

author = quote.find_element(pattern[:author]).text

puts "#{text} -- #{author}"

end

end

After completing this step, we increment the page number by 1 and repeat the process for page number 2. Finally, We will increment the page number until there are no quotes to parse.
Helping writers build a portable email audience
By: Medium Staff
Tags: Medium

Helping writers build a portable email audience

Medium has two important jobs: connect readers with the stories and writers they care most about, and help writers find and grow their audience. It’s in that spirit that we’ve moved towards a more relational Medium: re-orienting the app around following, prioritizing writer discovery, and launching email subscriptions, which let writers send Medium story notifications to their readers’ inbox and build an audience list of readers who have agreed to receive emails off-platform.

Based on writer feedback, we’re making some important updates to email subscriptions that make it even easier to build a lasting, direct relationship with your most loyal readers.

Here’s How It Works

The “Subscribe” button is now front and center on your profile page, right next to Follow.

We’ve introduced a new section in the Stats page to give deeper audience insights. You can also find a downloaded CSV file on the Settings page if you want to port your email list.

Promote email sign-up to your readers by adding a customizable subscription unit. You can add a personalized headline or a short bio. The unit lives at the bottom of every story page and you can turn it on by going to Settings page > Audience Development.

Want to promote email subscriptions on other platforms? You can share a link to your dedicated landing page where readers can sign up. It’s a quick and easy way to connect with more readers, even if they’re not on Medium. Go to Settings page > Audience Development to find your landing page link.

As always, if you publish a free story, readers get the entirety of the story in their inbox. If you publish a story through the Partner Program, readers receive a link back to the story on Medium. This ensures your earnings will not be impacted.

To learn more, check out email subscription and audience stats in the Help Center.

Stay tuned for more updates. We’re working on additional features to make connecting to devoted and new readers even simpler, like importing email lists of interested readers and more.
What Comes to Mind When You Think About the Pandemic Anniversary?
By: Anna Maltby
Tags: Writing Prompt, Pandemic Reflections, right here

Writing Prompt: Pandemic Reflections

What Comes to Mind When You Think About the Pandemic Anniversary?

Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images

On Leap Day last year, I went to my friend Matt’s ninth birthday party. (To be clear, Matt is a full-blown 36-year-old, but because he was born on February 29, he’s only had nine actual birthdays. I find this terribly funny, and he’s a good sport about it.) I still remember standing in a warm, crowded bar that afternoon with Matt’s friends and family, sharing bowls of potato chips and chatting about the sinister virus making its way through Asia and Europe and how it was affecting our travel plans and grocery lists.

Suddenly, I found myself having a strange out-of-body experience: I looked around the room and thought, “Is this the last party I’ll ever go to?”

I wasn’t totally off, although there were certainly early pandemic assumptions that didn’t quite shake out: that we should be wiping down our cereal boxes with bleach (I’m embarrassed to say I totally bought into that viral YouTube video and even shared it with my blessedly skeptical colleagues who run the Coronavirus Blog); that (gulp) non-health care workers shouldn’t be wearing masks; that we’d never be able to find toilet paper again.

Since the first known Covid-19 cases appeared in January 2020, the disease has touched the world — nearly every aspect of our lives — in ways we couldn’t have imagined a year ago, though we certainly had our suspicions.

We’d love to see your reflections on the first anniversary of the pandemic. Share your story on Medium and use the tag Pandemic Reflections . (Once you hit “Publish” on your post, you can type it into the “Add a tag…” box.) You’ll be able to browse all submissions to the tag, unfiltered, right here, and some of our favorites may be curated or featured in a Medium publication over the coming weeks. A few prompts to get you started, though you’re welcome to write about anything you like:

What final pre-pandemic memory do you keep returning to?

What did you get wrong about the pandemic when it was just beginning?

What do you wish you’d known or done differently one year ago?

What were you and your loved ones or colleagues talking about a year ago?

What early pandemic purchase are you happiest about? What do you regret buying (or not buying)?

If you’d like, feel free to link to this post at the end of your story so that your readers and followers can participate, too.

Stay safe, stay masked, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Curate and Share Stories with Lists
By: Jacqueline Yue
Tags: Medium

Introducing lists: a new product feature in beta. Lists are an easy way to quickly organize and share stories, from personal favorites, to recommended reads within a topic or area of expertise, to themed lists around stories that inspire you. Want to save your favorite stories so you can revisit them? Organize ideas on the best writing on UX Design for your colleagues? Share helpful advice with friends? Tap the bookmark icon on a story to get started.

If you’re an avid Medium user, you may be familiar with the bookmark icon. Previously, it allowed you to privately save stories for later. Now, using the same icon, you can create a list about anything, give it a title, add context with a description, then share your list widely or set it to private. Stay tuned for more enhancements and keep sharing your feedback with us.

In addition to making and sharing your own lists, you can find out what others on Medium are curating. As you’re exploring new writers or ones you already love, visit their profiles to see the lists they’ve curated.

How to create, share, and discover lists

Create a list.

Add a story to a list by clicking on the bookmark icon on a story page, your homepage feed, or topic pages. From the bookmark icon, you can add a story to an existing list, or create a new list.

Customize lists and add your commentary.

Give your list a title and description, even add a note with your perspective to each list item to give context to people viewing your list. A note for writers in the Medium Partner Program: Creation of lists or inclusion of a story in a list has no direct bearing on distribution or earnings.

Share your lists.

Your lists will appear on your profile, unless you choose to make them private. To share your lists or lists from authors you trust, simply click the share icon.

List inspiration

💡 If you’re looking for some inspiration, we’ve included some examples below from across Medium and our staff team.

👉 Share your lists in the responses to this blog post. We can’t wait to see what you create.

📱 Tip: Update your app to the latest version to make sure you have access to lists.

Autism Unmasked, Devon Price

Zulie’s TIL List, Zulie Rane

Nonbinary Dreams, Tiffany Jana

Stories that just feel perfect for this moment, Michelle Woo

💚 faves, Ev Williams

Prizewinning book excerpts, Sarah Begley

Our Favorite Productivity Advice, Medium Staff

Stories to Help You Overcome Writers Block, Medium Staff

Personal essays that will change your perspective, Medium Staff
Design system: LEGO kits syndrome
By: Budi Tanrim
Tags: Design Patterns, Ts, UX, Design System, Product Design

What happens when you have 5 designers creating a text field simultaneously?

They’ll come up with unnecessary differences: different border colors, various border radius, or different structures.

Letting this type of unintentional inconsistency cost us at least two things. One, it creates an issue for usability and expensive interaction cost for the users. The other obvious issue is the redundancy of the engineering effort.

The pattern library typically comes as a rescue for that problem. The team will use the existing library as opposed to creating unnecessary inconsistency. While this approach can resolve the unintentional inconsistency and I still advocate for it to some extent. We should be careful because it can create another problem.

Pattern library can create a LEGO kits syndrome.

Without a doubt, the result of the LEGO kits looks great.

However, as Derek Cabrera, Ph.D., points out, adults making LEGO kits are the ones thinking creatively. But it ends up teaching kids to follow instructions.

When the culture around the design system sends the signal, “please use the pattern library, so we are consistent.” This mindset is selfish.

I call this a pursuit of uniformity—the design system team see success when the “adoption” of their library is high and aim for the consistency for the sake of consistency.

This approach forces the designer to see the design system as LEGO kits.

As a result, when designers work on a specific interaction problem, they will think, “Okay, what available components or patterns can I use here?” Without further evaluating whether the component helps them solve the problem effectively.

I’ve seen this, over and over — no research or study around this. But the result of the design system survey by Seesparkbox can be a signal. 54% of in-house respondents of the design system survey reported that their design system users rarely contribute to the system or don’t contribute at all.

I suspect the LEGO kits syndrome is one of the factors that contribute to the lack of contribution.

The problem with this phenomenon is that the system would become stale. Without any participation and contribution from the community, it is simply a pattern library — not a design system.

Balancing act

When you want to utilize the pattern library to eliminate the unintentional inconsistency, consider what kind of culture you want to build.

Having participation and contribution from the community is what differentiate design systems from pattern libraries. I’ve learned the hard way and invested over 3 months to solve this lack of contribution back in the previous company.

The remedy? Consider building a community and enable contribution, which we’ll talk about in the next article.
Analyzing the new Tesla update “2021 .24.5”
By: Diana López
Tags: UX Design, Electric Car, Tesla Motors, Tesla, UI

These days, Tesla is actually a software company, changing the concept of mobility and constantly striving to offer its users safe, reliable, and always iterating transportation.

For those of you who work in software development, you will agree that releasing updates is a complicated issue, requires many decisions, analysis, planning and is not as easy as listening to users and doing it, the release takes many months of job.

Therefore, for many Tesla users, the iterations do not happen at the speed that they would like, but we know that it is a more complicated subject than it seems at first glance.

The points of this release

Let’s take a brief tour of the features of this release.

Car wash mode

Many users had complained that there were two problems when they put their car in an automatic car wash if they did not manually disable the windshield wipers, these were activated automatically as well as the charging port, which can be opened by just touching it, and was in danger to be damaged.

In this new version, Tesla offers the “car wash mode”, and they comment that to activate it, we must enter> service> car wash mode.

👌 When I try to enter the mode, this modal window appears informing me of the functionalities that will be activated.
Learn to Design “Progress Indicator” from Dropbox, Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
By: Jaskaran Singh
Tags: UX Design, Design, UX, UI, UI Design

Designing UI si not simple, small things matter a lot and if something went wrong a little can cause a serious problem. therefore I started to teach you various things about UI design and today I’ll talk about designing progress indicators in a way that’ll enhance your user experience.

and to teach you that I divided all the lessons into points so that you can note them and remember them easily so that if you want to read this article again you can just swipe up and read the heading, see the images and you’ll remember all of the important lessons..

#1 Make The Progress Visible

just remember that you have to make the progress visible to the user so that he can feel informed and satisfied, for example when downloading a large file and doesn't even know how much percentage of download is already done you feel confused and uninformed which is not good.

Try to use the progress indication with some kind of information like percentage, lines, steps, numbers, size of the file, etc. it helps a lot.

#2 Avoid Infinite Spinning Wheels

as users, we love to be informed and we don’t like to wait for thanks to social media and stuff. we love fast and things that update as therefore using infinite spinning wheels doesn't help instead use the percentage of how much progress is actually done. in short term they are fine but if the process is longer, then make sure you have the progress indicated on the screen.

#3 Show the Current Status

Progress indicators are useless without the current status indication, the percentage, the lines, the circle, etc. any shape that can show the exact progress of the current situation which is occurring can help a lot.

thanks for reading I hope you like some of the stuff I think making short lessons and tips might help, but if you wanted the long content share your response below thanks.
Elements of design: The wows and hows of abstract art
By: Hiloni Shah
Tags: Principles Of Design, Ui Ux Design, Design Principles, UI Design, Gestalt

Don’t worry, I am not trying to fool you with hypnosis. When I first started this design with just a leaf shaped element, I had no idea where it would lead me. I was amazed by the outcome of this design knowing that only a single element is used in different sizes. They are arranged in a kind of hierarchy and catches the eyes of the observer in just one second. To me, the design looks a road in one perspective filled with puddles. They also look like a group of spaceships in space. The same composition when rotated looks like frequency waves. The composition represents proximity, similarity, figure-ground, continuity, and common fate.

“When trying to make sense of the world, we do not simple focus on every small component. Instead, our minds tend to perceive objects as part of a greater whole and as elements of more complex systems.” — Gestalt

Parallel universe

Image courtesy: Gallery

I believe the design looks scary. What do you think? As soon as I created the design, my immediate instinct was fear. After I started analyzing the design, I thought of the big white circle also the focal point as a white bright sun who is trying to radiate its positive energy towards the giant black circle which I interpreted as a different face of the sun. This composition is a perfect example of focal point, proximity, similarity, common fate and continuity.

Out of the box

Image courtesy: Gallery

The composition might look similar to you if you’ve ever played pinball. Although it has some elements which are alike, my perception of it might not be. Apart from looking like a game, it also looks like someone standing in solitude. Usually, we consider people who are distinctive crazy as artists are often called. But here the arrows represent pressure from society that an individual has to bear. And there is 1 in a hundred chance that a unique person falls off who is free of such burdens. You’re probably wondering “Wow, that is not what I thought of.” This is my personal view. This composition includes almost every single principle of closure, proximity, similarity, common fate, focal point and continuity.

Creepy crawlies

Image courtesy: Gallery

I know the composition looks mystifying but isn’t art all about expression? You wouldn’t believe me when I say that this composition is made out of heptagons. Isn’t it remarkable how our mind can understand the use of space and elements to form compositions beyond our skillset and yet perceive them exclusively? The smaller elements are considered far from our sight, probably on the horizon. As per my understanding, the design can be deemed as space debris or germs in a stomach or t might also look like animated ladders.
Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz
By: Rosamund Pearce
Tags: Data, Data Visualization, Information Design, Infographics, Journalism

Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz

It’s easy to visualise data badly. Choose the wrong chart type, omit labels or overload the graphic and you can quickly end up with something that is confusing, misleading or that fails to tell a story.

To combat such crimes, a number of best practices have sprung up as the field of data visualisation has matured. From steering clear of pie charts to getting rid of “chartjunk”, these are the conventions anyone dabbling in data viz should learn first.

But sometimes it’s helpful to revisit the things we learn early on with the benefit of experience. In the six years that I have been making data visualisations, I’ve found that sticking doggedly to the “rules” can sometimes impede effective visual communication. It’s easy to get bogged down in following technicalities, and lose sight of what actually works.

The trouble is that best practices tend to have little nuance, and there are times when they may be irrelevant, or worth the cost of breaking. Since joining The Economist I have broken many of them myself. But if you are going to do the same, it’s helpful to understand why they became rules of thumb in the first place. As the old saying goes, you have to know the rules before you can break them.

With this in mind, and with the help of The Economist’s archive, I’ve re-examined five things I was taught not to do when I first started out in data visualisation.
The iPhone X is the Beginning of the End for Phones
By: Owen Williams
Tags: Future, Apple, Tech, Technology, Startup

Another year, another phone announcement. On September 12 Apple unveiled its tenth-anniversary iPhone fittingly named the ‘iPhone X’ and showed off what it calls the “future of phones” featuring a fancy edge-to-edge screen and futuristic augmented reality cameras.

But while I was watching the event, all I could think about was that this phone might be the last smartphone to matter at all. That it marks the beginning of the end of phones as we know it, and we’re at the precipice of them just becoming tools.

What triggered this response wasn’t so much that the iPhone X was amazing — it’s that Apple figured out how to put cellular into a Watch.

Smartphones, as a category, are racing to the bottom. Each other year a trend sets the stage for what phone makers will try to cram in to help market yet another phone in various different ways.

The big trend a few years ago was high-end fingerprint unlocking (started by Touch ID), followed by focusing on camera performance, and now, cramming as much screen onto the front of the device as possible. Bezel-less phones are here, and they’re a thing.

Essential, Samsung and LG have all released phones with ‘edge-to-edge’ displays that look so similar to each other it’s hard to even make an informed decision anymore.

Do you want a black rectangle or a white one? A slightly bigger rectangle or a thinner rectangle? The rectangle with a camera bump or without it?

We’ve seen this before. In around 2004, suddenly computers became boring after being a hot-ticket item you’d need to replace every year or two. Intel’s dual-core processors hit the market and suddenly meant that upgrading your computer didn’t really mean much anymore because your old one was ‘good enough’ and continued to work for many more years.

As a result, the PC market collapsed almost entirely over the following years.

HP, one of the world’s biggest laptop makers, imploded.

Sony pulled out of the industry.

Toshiba continues to be in chaos to this day.