Table of contents for Summer 2017 in net

Sara Soueidan, Lebanon AD: It’s nothing fancy or that exciting. Besides my online banking, it’s FreeAgent, my calendar and my calculator app. FREEAGENT The main one is FreeAgent which handles all my book-keeping, invoicing, expenses, VAT and so on. CALENDAR I rely heavily on my calendar to estimate how many days I have available for client work each month versus when I’m away at conferences and so on. I have a minimum amount that I aim to bill each month and keeping track of my different work engagements in my calendar helps me stay on top of that schedule, as well as ensuring I have time for my own initiatives. CALCULATOR Since I have a couple of different income streams, I use the calculator app regularly while I’m underground on…

After spending most of my free time improving as a front-end developer and failing on hobbies such as learning guitar, for my own sanity, I needed to find a new hobby that provided quicker gratification. Then, while browsing Twitter one day in 2014, I stumbled upon a photo of simplistic felt recreations of various superheroes and thought: “this is it!” Not wanting to diverge from computers completely, I used Fireworks to recreate the heroes to ensure the design was mathematically perfect while adding my own twist. I bought various sheets of felt, then borrowed the motherin- law’s printer, cutting board, fabric scissors, scalpel and craft glue. I first assembled Spider- Man and was really impressed with the result. Over the next two weeks, I assembled the remaining 11 heroes, glued…

“Talk to stakeholders and users, and follow up with further research where required” The success of a project hinges on the maturity of the delivery processes and practices at play within the organisation. So what are the fundamentals of a good delivery and how can you go about achieving them? 1. WIN THE RIGHT PROJECTS The sales and delivery team need to work together to win the right shaped projects and clients, and involve the delivery team as much as possible in proposal writing, pitches and estimates. Before you get started on a new project, run a one-day workshop to check it’s feasible from a technical, financial and design perspective, challenge assumptions and talk openly about any project risks that arise. 2. KNOW YOUR CLIENT Before the workshop, send a…

YOGA STUDIO MARKO JOTIĆ? Marko is multidisciplinary designer focused on designing experience for digital devices. w: dribbble.com/markojotic t: @markojotic SARAH COULTON Sarah is a senior designer at Relish, a creative and digital agency in Surbiton, UK. w: sarahcoulton.com t: @Sarah_Coulton ELIJAH SMITH Elijah is creative director and lead product designer at RIFT.io. w: tofua-animation.com t: @tofua BRIEF This month we would like you to design a website for a yoga studio. You may wish to base the homepage around images of the space where classes will take place, or you could focus on creating good vibes with colour and type.…

CLOSE UP Amsterdam book store Mendo (www.mendo.nl) is driven by a love of beautiful books and demonstrates its infatuation by showing them off in an equally beautiful and inspiring setting. For its new site, Mendo hired Build in Amsterdam ( www.buildinamsterdam.com) to create an eCommerce experience that fully reflected the world of Mendo, giving customers the chance to see, read and almost feel the books without touching them. Tell us a bit about Mendo. DK: The books Mendo sells are obviously very beautiful: we wanted the site to be the stage for those books. It’s a unique experience to buy a book in the physical Mendo store, and we wanted to match that feeling online. The new site had to be one experience, where you can feel the books. What…

Never mind Brexit; GDPR is looming and it could seriously affect your business. Here’s why… “I think the one thing that the industry as a whole does not seem to be taking seriously is the upcoming changes to data protection in May 2018, in the form of the GDPR,” reveals Delete’s Alex Ellis. “Brexit will not affect the GDPR coming into force next year, and the government have already said that they plan on bringing the regulations into UK law without making any changes.” So what’s GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulations is a European law that puts the onus on businesses to protect the data of all their data subjects; not just customers and employees, but also any prospective clients. The real kicker? You need consent for all the…

Confining the PM role to managing timelines, budgets, and a to-do list is a mistake. Project management is not about box checking – it’s about people: building relationships, facilitating valuable communications and collaboration, and most of all, understanding the motivations of clients and teams, to craft a project path that works for everyone. When agencies de-prioritise a PM’s involvement with a team and clients, and don’t allow them to be active members of their teams, it shows. Details get missed, people are confused, and clients lose faith in the agency because they see the disconnect between the budget and timeline and the actual work happening. When a PM is deeply involved, things happen more smoothly. Not only are the budget, timeline and tasks in check, people communicate openly and in…

Panini is a powerful node library and a part of Foundation’s advanced build system template dubbed the ZURB Stack. Panini is a Handlebars templating engine made into a handy Gulp plugin. You can use Panini stand-alone or with the ZURB Stack installation. Essentially, it can be used for maintaining several templates and allows interchangeable content. Panini is based on the powerful JavaScript-based templating engine Handlebars. This lets us write semantically named partials like {{> ecommerceheader}} that we can use over and over again in our prototype. Headers, footers and other repeatable content can be easily included in your projects and modified in one place. Handlebars gives your entire team more control and flexibility, including support for iterating over a collection (loops) and conditional data. Read up on how to make…

JIM MCCAULEY One of net’s treasured freelancers, Jim was tasked with compiling this year’s lead Money Issue feature. Head to page 60 to find out how your business can thrive this year w: wordsbyjimmccauley.com t: @JimMcCauley RACHEL GERTZ Great project management has a great effect on your business. Louder Than Ten’s Rachel explains why it’s so magical in her brilliant feature starting on page 68 w: rachelgertz.com t: @TheStrayMuse TRACEY WALLACE Head over to page 22 to read BigCommerce’s Tracey reveal how great UX results in supercharged eCommerce performance. Essential reading w: traceywallace.net t: @TraceWall GERGELY NEMETH Just because it’s our Money Issue doesn’t mean we forget the web’s fast-moving technologies. Node.js has a new version – Gergely runs through what’s new on page 76 w: risingstack.com t: @nthgergo…

It’s not uncommon to experience a dip in traffic, users or user engagement after a big site redesign. Users are often stuck in their ways after all. We asked the @netmag Twitter followers their solutions for making their redesigns more efficient. GET INITIAL FEEDBAC K IN PLACE “Many sites do a ‘preview the new look’ option prior to launching the new design which allows feedback gathering and audience weigh-in,” says @KojiFlowers. User feedback combined with a thorough examination of your team’s reasoning for the new approach should stand you in good stead. MAKE CHANGES STEP-BY-STEP “Redesign step-by-step,” advises @ailin10 – introducing changes gradually will avoid sudden bumps. “Our redesign involved an IA update too,” says @ResWebDev. “Ensure all the old URLs have 301 redirects to the new structure to avoid…

SERE NA CHEN Product Designer w: serena.nz CSS STATS CSS is one of those languages that’s hard to write well, and it easily gets out of hand. CSS Stats displays your CSS rulesets in a way that exposes inconsistencies and redundancies. I use it before and after each code change that touches CSS. cssstats.com TABSLEEPER Handiest thing I’ve worked on so far. I’m one of those people who always has three windows open with 20 tabs in each one. TabSleeper is a Chrome extension that’s basically the digital equivalent of shoving all the crap into drawers. Feels great. tabsleeper.com A SOFT MURMUR Open office plans don’t seem to be going away, but neither shall my focus! A Soft Murmur is fancy white noise – I put it over my ears…

Adages become adages because they reflect something fundamental about humankind. The adage doesn’t have to be pretty, often depicting humanity’s more unsavoury traits. The only commonality across adages is that they are accurate (albeit overused). Most of them are to do with our senses and how those senses colour the lens through which we see the world. Sure, we’ve advanced technologically, but our senses still colour our individual perspectives of the world more subconsciously than most of us are comfortable admitting. Touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight; the greatest of which is sight. At least it is when it comes to eCommerce and how much your brand can make online. Yes, this old adage is true. FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER They matter so much in fact that brands who redesign their…

The Great Outdoors offered We Make Websites a unique proposition for their approach to the site for sustainable (and practical) clothing company Finisterre. “Finisterre has a unique take on fashion,” says Lewis Sillery, project manager at We Make Websites, “It stands behind its quality and durability of its brand, encouraging you to repair rather than replace. [Finisterre] wanted an eCommerce store that could stand the test of time.” Originally built in Magento, the site had become sluggish and expensive to keep up to date, and so the site was overhauled and migrated to Shopify Plus, which offered greater flexibility and dramatically improved performance. “The lifestyle photography used by Finisterre glorifies the outdoor lifestyle,” explains Lewis. “We designed bold, fullpage image-based landing pages, with minimal text boxes, allowing the images to…

iliketoplay.dk Copenhagen-based designer and developer Michael Vestergaard has been making a name for himself of late with a series of vibrant campaign and product sites for high-end audio company Bang & Olufsen. He’s also likely to have caught your attention in recent years as the coder and animator behind The 100 Meter Scroll (the100meterscroll.com), a viral smash that picked up one of many awards that he’s won during his career. We quizzed him on his work, his approach to eCommerce sites and his thoughts about the web industry. Hi! Who are you and what do you do? Hi, I’m a front-end developer and UX designer living in Copenhagen with my wife and two sons. I have been freelancing for eight years for a long list of clients and agencies. I…

BIMA www.bima.co.uk Zone’s Jon Davie is chair of BIMA’s London Council, and recommends BIMA as an organisation that can help digital businesses connect and help ensure they survive in uncertain times. “The work that BIMA does is vital in representing the interests of digital professionals at a policy level,” he says. “I invest my time because strong industry representation is good for all of us.” r/Entrepreneur www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur Reddit’s far from perfect, but if you’re after solid business advice from people who’ve been there and done that, the Entrepreneur subreddit can be a really useful resource. Department for International Trade trade.gov.uk Whether you’re looking to expand your business internationally, or you’re simply concerned about maintaining international clients in a hard Brexit future, the Department for International Trade can be a lifeline.…

One of the coolest plugins from Craft is Data. It lets you pull real content from a range of sources and place it directly in your design. It works with photos and text layers and magically turns grey and boring wireframes into something that looks closer to the real deal. Out of the box, it can replace placeholder images with beautiful photos from the Unsplash library, and turn lorem ipsums into real content relevant to your design. With Data, you can spend less time downloading photos or text from the web and more time focused on what’s important. You can customise the kind of data you use, and it can also pull information from websites and JSON files. It can be very powerful when used with data relevant to your…

Send your questions to netmag@futurenet.com THIS MONTH FEATURING... ANNA DAHLSTRÖM Anna is a Swedish UX designer based in London. She’s the founder of UX Fika, which partners with inspiring venues to give you practical learning sessions over a morning, afternoon or evening. w: annadahlstrom.com SACHA GREIF Sacha is a designer, developer and entrepreneur. Originally from Paris, he now lives in Osaka, Japan. He co-wrote Discover Meteor, and created Telescope and the Sidebar IO newsletter. w: sachagreif.com QUESTION OF THE MONTH When you’ve made a software or ebook product, what does a rough launch sequence look like? Michael Frankland, Japan SG: The term ‘launch sequence’ is a bit misleading, because it evokes a relatively short and straightforward process. But the truth is that successful launches are built going to your favourite café to…

HOW TO RETAIN USER ENGAGEMENT AFTER A WEBSITE REDESIGN We all know the frustration of being impeded by a new design when familiar features are suddenly not there. This article explores five case studies in which redesigns resulted in lower traffic and lost sales. We can all learn some lessons here. netm.ag/296-engagement THE FUTURE OF FRONTEND DEVELOPMENT Chris Coyier explores what’s next for front-end development, touching on ideas about how expectations of what a website can do are rising; how we’re building systems now, not pages, and the complexity that comes with that; and how performance is becoming a key player. netm.ag/296-frontend BRUTALIST REDESIGNS We’re all getting a bit bored of slick photography, mystery icons and samey design patterns, and so-called brutalist web design has emerged as an antidote to…

A creative, vibrant and bright open-plan space based in central Bournemouth, our Managing Director describes the Greenwood Campbell studio decor as “everything my wife wouldn’t let me do at home!” While we have the ever-common modern office, games area and beer fridge, what really sets us apart is that every single small detail of the Greenwood Campbell studio has been thought through intrinsically. On the horizon of the office, across the sea of developers, the studio showcases a 3ft x 6ft graffitied wall mural of the companies ethos: “Know Thy User” [1] – we don’t put pen to paper or finger to keyboard until we truly understand our users. The Map Room [2] shows our stance as digital traditionalists - we still understand the importance and value of shaking hands,…

Cole Henley is probably best known for his freelance rate calculator, which you can find at ournameismud.co.uk/fraq. You may also know him as technical director for award-winning Bath web design agency Our Name is Mud, which he co-founded with Matt Powell in 2013. But what you probably won’t know is that he began his professional life as an archaeologist. Originally from the Midlands, Cole completed a degree in Archaeology at Cardiff University and in 2005 got a job with a government agency in Scotland, RCAHMS. But it wasn’t his dream job. “I was basically a desk-based landscape archaeologist, which was really tedious and dull, ” he recalls. Since his student days he’d been getting interested in the possibilities of the web. “Rather than having this linear narrative, it meant the…

CASEY HALD Product designer, Nasdaq caseyhald.com Practising self-discipline when tracking our hourly rate. I think we have a tendency to approach exciting projects overzealously , especially when we’re really excited about them. So we ignore the extra time we’re spending trying to solve problems in order to stay within the client’s budget. We become dishonest with ourselves and we pay the price (literally). Be honest to both yourself and your client on how much time you’re really spending, especially when you’re stuck on something. NATHAN POWELL Designer and founder of @nusiiapp nusii.com For me the biggest mistake came after getting paid. I would commit the greatest financial sin of all and think that all that lovely money was for me. When you live like this you’re continually chasing your tail…

Superdenim approached Nottingham-based Magento specialists JH with just a logo and a typeface. Superdenim is a high-end fashion retailer who uses a rare Union Special 43200G machine to create an authentic hem, and with such a straightforward (but extensive) product line it made sense to let the products do the selling. “The logo and typeface were set in stone,” explains Oliver Chenery – a member of one of the design teams on the project. “They laid the foundations for the site’s design and it was apparent from early on the direction we should take. With such a strong statement about the product from these elements, the rest of the site slotted in neatly around it.” However, the real challenge for Oliver and the team was how to match simplistic (but…

What’s on your desk today? MacBook Pro, external screen, headphones, pen and paper – and a bunch of devices for testing! Little things that make your life worthwhile Websites: eBay, clientsfromhell, CodePen; apps: Twitter, Gmail, Spotify; audio: rock, pop and indie (I try to find new stuff every week); reading: food magazines and children’s books! What do you have on the walls? On the walls are Hvass&Hannibal, Julie Nord and Walton Ford. What will you do for lunch? Probably go out for something spicy and tasty in the neighbourhood! What hours do you work? Varies a lot, but something like 9am-4pm and then sometimes in the evenings/nights. What else do you do in the office? I have always been a very focused and intense worker. So when I’m done working…

Here are three books that will help you become better at creating simple and useful designs, helping you incorporate Prototype into your workflow. Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited – Steve Krug You can’t help but think that the points Krug makes in this book are obvious, yet we make the same usability mistakes every day. I like to keep this book as a reminder that I need to keep my designs simple and ensure that users can accomplish their tasks as easily as possible. Sprint – Jake Knapp This book gives you a five-day process to building awesome products in a short amount of time. It explores the importance of prototyping in the design process and how it can help you iterate and find better solutions faster. It’s a guide…

Foundation Building Blocks are open source and anyone is free to contribute. The pieces of code that you find yourself using repeatedly can make great Building Blocks, and we’d love to grow our library to reflect more of what people want to use. Plus, every contributor is recognised on the site and in our Foundation social channels. Building Blocks are an easy, self-contained way to get involved in open source. Learn more at foundation.zurb.com/building-blocks/how-to.html#submit.…