Jasper AI Review: A Must-Have or Just Hype for Content Writers?
Decision Trees For UI Components
How do you know what UI component to choose? Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we use and when, we can avoid never-ending discussions, confusion, and misunderstanding.
Let’s explore a few examples of decision trees for UI components and how we can get the most out of them.
This article is part of our ongoing series on design patterns. It’s also an upcoming part of the 10h-video library on Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and the upcoming live UX training as well. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.
B2B Navigation and Help Components: DoctolibDoctolib Design System is a very impressive design system with decision trees, B2B navigation paths, photography, PIN input, UX writing, and SMS notifications — and thorough guides on how to choose UI components.
- B2B Navigation Patterns Decision Tree
- Form Components Decision Tree
- Actions and Calls To Actions Decision Tree
- Error Design Decision Tree
- Help Component Decision Tree
I love how practical these decision trees are. Each shows an example of what a component looks like, but I would also add references to real-life UI examples and flows of where and how these components are used. A fantastic starting point that documents design decisions better than any guide would.
Decision Trees For UI Components: WorkdayThe team behind Workday’s Canvas design system created a fantastic set of design decision trees for notifications, errors and alerts, loading patterns, calls to action, truncation, and overflow — with guidelines, examples, and use cases, which can now only be retrieved from the archive:
- Notifications Decision Tree
- Errors and Alerts Decision Tree
- Loading UX Decision Tree
- Calls to Action Decision Tree
- Truncation and Overflow Decision Tree
For each decision tree, the Workday team has put together a few context-related questions to consider first when making a decision before even jumping into the decision tree. Plus, there are thorough examples for each option available, as well as a very detailed alternative text for every image.
Form Components Decision Tree: LyftA choice of a form component can often be daunting. When should you use radio buttons, checkboxes, or dropdowns? Runi Goswami from Lyft has shared a detailed form components decision tree that helps their team choose between form controls.
We start by exploring whether a user can select more than one option in our UI. If it’s indeed multi-select, we use toggles for short options and checkboxes for longer ones.
If only one option can be selected, then we use tabs for filtering, radios for shorter options, a switch for immediately applicable options, and a checkbox if only one option can be selected. Dropdowns are used as a last resort.
Choosing Onboarding Components: NewsKitOnboarding comes in various forms and shapes. Depending on how subtle or prominent we want to highlight a particular feature, we can use popovers, badges, hints, flags, toasts, feature cards, or design a better empty state. The Newskit team has put together an Onboarding Selection Prototype in Figma.
The choice depends on whether we want to interrupt the users to display details (usually isn’t very effective), show a feature subtly during the experience (more effective), or enable discovery by highlighting a feature within the context of a task a user tries to accomplish.
The toolkit asks a designer a couple of questions about the intent of onboarding, and then suggests options that are likely to perform best — a fantastic little helper for streamlined onboarding decisions.
Design System Process Flowcharts: NucleusHow do you decide to add a new component to a design system or rather extend an existing one? What’s the process for contributions, maintenance, and the overall design process? Some design teams codify their design decisions as design system process flowcharts, as shown below.
- Contribution Process at British Gas
- Contributing Guidelines at Nordhealth
- Processes at Aviva
- Contribution Process at OpenCollective
- Contribution Process at Zalando
And here are helpful decision trees for adding new components to a design system:
- New Component Decision Tree at Boston Scientific
- Handling New Patterns at GitHub
- Design System Governance Process by Brad Frost
- New Component Decision Tree by Louis Ouriach
- Design System Contribution Template by Chad Bergman
- How To Launch A New Component + Figma template by Rama Krushna Behera
What I absolutely love about the decision tree approach is not only that it beautifully visualizes design decisions but that it also serves as a documentation. It establishes shared standards across teams and includes examples to follow, with incredible value for new hires.
Of course, exceptions happen. But once you have codified the ways of working for design teams as a decision tree and made it front and center of your design work, it resolves never-ending discussions about UI decisions for good.
So whenever a debate comes up, document your decisions in a decision tree. Turn them into posters. Place them in kitchen areas and developer’s and QA workspaces. Put them in design critique rooms. Make them visible where design work happens and where code is being written.
It’s worth mentioning that every project will need its own custom trees, so please see the examples above as an idea to build upon and customize away for your needs.
Meet Smart Interface Design PatternsIf you are interested in similar insights around UX, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview.
Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns, our video course on interface design & UX.100 design patterns & real-life
examples.
10h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.
Integrating Snowflake With Trino
In today's discourse, we delve into the intricacies of accessing Snowflake via the Trino project. This article illuminates the seamless integration of Trino with Snowflake, offering a comprehensive analysis of its benefits and implications.
Previous Articles
Previous articles on Snowflake and Trino:
Chris’ Corner: Type
I’m in the mood for a typography focused edition. I have some links saved up I’ve been meaning to read. I’m going to start reading now and the links that turn out any good I’ll put below.
Mike Mai put together a Typography Manual (for type on the web). It’s a pretty random spattering of 11 bits of advice. Originally a Pen! I can’t help but read through each of them and raise my Well, Actually finger, but I shall keep my finger down because more and more I like eliminating nuance in this industry. Just do this advice is pretty valuable. If you have no idea where to start, well, just follow the advice, and once you’ve leveled up you can do your own rule breaking.
Like #1 is “Use One Font” but Henry, as a very experienced designer, can do what he wants.
This was mid-last-year, but I still think Stephanie Eckles has the best guide at the moment for modern fluid type. There was this whole period where “fluid type” meant using viewport units (e.g. vw
), ideally in a calc()
, to set type size (and sometimes line-height
). Then things got a little better when we got clamp()
because the code got a lot more straightforward (by the way, this is a helpful mind trick). Now things are changing one more time, because we have container units and they change the approach again.
Just as
1vw
equals1%
of the viewport width, so does1cqi
equal1%
of a container’s inline size. We’ll be usingcqi
for purposes of defining fluid typography since we want the size to be associated with the horizontal axis of the writing mode.
Speaking of relatively new units, we now have units that represent the current line height (and “root” line height) in CSS: lh
and rlh
. Paweł Grzybek writes about how to use them to acheive the idea of “vertical rhythm”:
Vertical rhythm is a design concept that helps to create a harmonious layout by following consistent spacing between elements, typically using the height of a line as a base. I learned it in my design days when printed media was still a thing.
It’s kind of an invisible idea that theoretically makes a page more pleasant to look at.
In the past this was quite a bit harder to pull off, and these units are yet another example of a new CSS technology making an old idea a lot easier.
The why of typography is interesting. There are aesthetics. Making type look good is an art, but it’s an art with everyday consequences. Poor typography can make people feel a product is shoddy, a restaurant doesn’t care, or a service isn’t trustworthy. Great type can be a cheat code in making people choose one thing over another simply through aesthetics. But another Aspect of typography is legibility. If you want people to read text, and you do (and maybe even have them feel a certain way while reading it) then you’re very concerned with legibility.
Mary C. Dyson has a whole new book on this: Legibility. It’s certainly a book-worthy topic, as Mary makes clear in an early chapter:
Within typographic and graphic design, we might consider whether signs are legible (in particular from a distance), whether we can decipher small print (especially later in life), if icons can be easily identified or recognised (without text labels), if a novel or textbook is set in a readable type (encouraging us to read on). These questions emphasise that it is not only the physical characteristics of the text or symbol that need to be considered in determining whether or not the designs are legible, or how legible they are. The purpose for reading, the context of reading, and the characteristics of the reader also determine legibility.
My mind goes: pick fonts that are obviously readable, be generous with line height, don’t make the line length too long, and go big (but not too big). But that’s like legibility 101, and there is a lot more to consider, and a lot more depth to those basics.
Where do you actually go to find fresh fonts? I wish I had a perfect answer for you, but there are hundreds of font foundries with individual websites that all do things differently. My best advice is to bookmark them when you come across them, and when it’s time to pick fonts, make plenty of time to go window shopping.
Here’s one to save for sure though, because although I’m usually quite happy to pay for fonts, not every project has that in the budget, so free is what is needed. Google fonts, as ever, has a lot of potential there, but in the greater world of fonts is more limited than you might think. OK here is is for real: Collletttivo.
Collletttivo is an Open-Source type foundry and a network of people promoting the practice of type design through mutual exchange and collaboration.
It’s a pretty darn nice group of typefaces already.
I bet you know there are some generic keywords for fonts in CSS already, like serif
and sans-serif
. More recently, we’ve gotten keywords like system-ui
which is supposed to pick whatever font that operating system uses primarily (which is awesome). There are more in that vein:
font-family: system-ui;
font-family: ui-serif;
font-family: ui-sans-serif;
font-family: ui-monospace;
font-family: ui-rounded;
There is now discussion in the W3C for more generic font families, a lot of which is centered around fonts for non-Latin languages. I think that’s a fantastic idea. Imagine how disappointing it would be to choose a custom font for a non-Latin language, have there be some problem in loading it, and have the next font down the list not support the language you need.
These new generic font choices have practical consequences and apply in situations where your browser could cause readers problems if it falls back to a random font: either because different fonts are conventionally used to distinguish one part of text from another (eg. headings from body text,), or because the text may become unreadable with the wrong font (eg. non-nastaliq styles in Kashmir). It’s more than just presentational preferences.
Variable fonts: still cool.
Mandy Michael resurrected her site with the perfect URL: https://variablefonts.dev/
I’m tempted to say that variable fonts didn’t hit as hard as I thought they would hit when they were coming out. But… I might be wrong about that. They are supported across the board on the web. There are tons of them. Their support in design tools is pretty darn good. There are lots of good resource sites like Mandy’s. People generally know about them and think they are a good idea. So that’s a pretty darn good. I just feel like I don’t see them in use a ton. The biggest strike against them is how big they tend to be, and I think that scares people off.
How about we end with an actual font: Playpen Sans! It’s like a classy version of Comic Sans. I think it’s both more legible (a feat, as Comic Sans is already super legible) and more fun. I really like how there are a ton of alternate glyphs for each letter that automatically activate, meaning it actually looks like handwriting a lot more than if there is only one like most fonts. Plus it’s FREE so that rules.
Reminds me of Comic Code (which we offer as a code font family on CodePen) and all the variations of the Inkwell family.
Data Quality Survey: Resolving Data Issues Takes 166% Longer Year Over Year
The headline of the second annual The State of Data Quality survey was, without a doubt, the fact that data downtime nearly doubled year over year (1.89x).
The Wakefield Research data quality survey, which was commissioned by Monte Carlo and polled 200 data professionals in March 2023, found three critical factors that contributed to this increase in data downtime. These factors included:
Data Lineage in a Data-Driven World
Data Lineage
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the success of today's business is driven by the data. Whether it be a small enterprise or a big business house, everyone has understood that data can give them an edge in this competitive world. This realization of the importance of data is leading them towards implementing better data governance in their business. Data lineage is an important function of data governance that tracks the journey of data from its origin to its final destinations via various hops.
Importance of Data Lineage
The necessity for data lineage in businesses arises due to various factors and different reasons that may apply to different enterprises.
Processing Large Files With Repeating Elements and Header/Trailer Fields
When processing extremely large messages, there are a number of factors that need to be considered when designing a flow. There are a variety of in-built limits that need to be tuned or configured in order to successfully process files of this type and there are a number of actions that should be considered when designing a message flow in order to ensure that processing is efficient. This article will explain the main challenges that need to be overcome and then present a pattern for enabling very large processing that can be adapted to fit with other business requirements.
The Project Interchange files which accompany this article are available here.
Understanding and Mitigating the Potential AI Risks in Business
Developing a well-functioning AI model is no less than an uphill battle. You need to provide it with the right training data sets and program it wisely so that it can make sensible decisions in different circumstances. If this job isn’t done properly, it can have severe repercussions. It is the main reason you need to be familiar with certain AI risks and challenges that come with AI implementation. Be it the fear of job replacement, security and privacy concerns, or unethical use of simulated intelligence, all can come true if the cons of AI technology are not properly dealt with. And if you want to get the hang of how to do that, all you need to do is to peruse this write-up entirely. First, let’s talk about:
Top 10 AI Risks That Can Hurt Your Business
1. Privacy Concerns
AI technology often garners and analyzes a sizeable amount of personal data that raises concerns about data privacy and security. To address this issue, it will pay off if businesses support data protection regulations and safe data management practices. Doing this can minimize AI risks to a massive extent.
Online Business Cooperation
Tips on how to Effectively Control a Project
Discover the Best Free Ink Fonts: Handwritten, Calligraphy, and Script Styles
In the world of typography, ink fonts hold a special place. They evoke a sense of nostalgia, artistry, and elegance that can transform any design project. Whether you’re working on a digital art piece, creating a unique brand logo, or simply looking to enhance your documents, free ink fonts can add that extra touch of sophistication. In this article, we’ll explore the best free ink fonts, covering various styles such as handwritten, calligraphy, and script fonts. Let’s dive in and find the perfect ink font for your next project.
Why Choose Ink Fonts?
Ink fonts bring a unique charm and character that other font styles can’t match. They mimic the fluidity and unpredictability of real ink, often featuring varied line thicknesses, natural-looking strokes, and artistic flourishes. This makes them perfect for:
Personal Projects : Adding a personal, handcrafted touch to invitations, greeting cards, and scrapbooks.
Branding : Creating distinctive logos and brand identities that stand out.
Digital Art : Enhancing illustrations, posters, and digital art pieces with a classic or artistic feel.
Popular Styles of Ink Fonts
Handwritten Ink Fonts
Handwritten ink fonts replicate the look of natural handwriting, offering a personal and authentic feel. These fonts are perfect for projects that require a human touch, such as personal notes, invitations, and social media graphics. Some of the best free options include fonts that imitate casual handwriting, cursive scripts, and more elaborate, decorative styles.
Calligraphy Ink Fonts
Calligraphy ink fonts are designed to mimic the intricate strokes of traditional calligraphy. These fonts are ideal for elegant and formal designs, such as wedding invitations, certificates, and high-end branding. Free calligraphy ink fonts often feature beautiful flourishes and ornate details that can elevate any project.
Ink Script Fonts
Script fonts with an ink style combine the flowing characteristics of cursive writing with the natural texture of ink. These fonts are versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, from elegant headers to stylish logos. They often have a more relaxed and artistic feel compared to strict calligraphy fonts.
Free ink fonts offer a wonderful way to add personality, elegance, and a handcrafted touch to your design projects. Whether you’re looking for handwritten, calligraphy, or script styles, there’s a wide range of options available to suit your needs. Explore the vast collections on font websites, experiment with different styles, and find the perfect ink font that brings your vision to life.
By incorporating ink style fonts free, handwritten ink fonts download, free calligraphy ink fonts, ink pen font free, and free ink script fonts into your project, you can achieve a unique and captivating design that stands out. Happy designing!
Top Picks for Free Ink Fonts
Although we can’t provide a specific list of fonts, it’s crucial to highlight the wide array of outstanding free ink fonts accessible on the internet. We have compiled a top font list here.
See also
Arkipelago Font
Ink Free Handwritten Font
Beth Ellen 2 Font
Anitha Script Font
The Secret Handwritten Font
Hamish Script
InkVerse Font
Yoko Ink
Roses Please Signature Typeface
Hot Ink Font
Girly Sunrise Font
Travel November Font
Tyrowo Inked
White Scratches
Bread Butter Font
Roastink Script
Handletterink Script
Scratch Ink
Foxbot Font
Kingthings Printingkit
Wintersoul Brush Script
Take Over Ego – Ink Brush Font
Kepolu Font
Arrange Signature Font
Atusan Script
Brook Holmes Font
The post Discover the Best Free Ink Fonts: Handwritten, Calligraphy, and Script Styles appeared first on CSS Author.
Tips For Time Management For Students
How to Setup RAID10 on Dell Servers
When it comes to IT Infrastructure, there are several components that play a vital role in a successful deployment, storage is one such component and it plays a crucial role in keeping the data safe and secure. Understanding different types of storage configurations is important and today we will discuss how we can achieve redundancy and performance by using RAID
arrays. RAID
stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks and RAID
supports various types of configuration and in this article, we will focus on hardware RAID10
setup on DELL servers and if you are new to RAID
and would like to learn more about it please go through this information.
Step 1
Boot the server and wait until you see the option to enter into RAID
configuration <Ctrl + R>
and once you enter into the configuration menu navigate through VD mgmt
and PD mgmt
screens and look for the available physical disks on the server.
Chris’ Corner: More Like Scalable Vector Goodness
I’m going to do an SVG issue here, because I find that technology persistently interesting. It’s a bit of a superpower for front-end developers who know how it works and can leverage it when needed to pull of interesting effects. For example, this compelling line drawing scroll effect is powered by SVG features.
There have been some really cool SVG tools I’ve only just seen recently, and some great writing about SVG techniques. Warms my little heart to see SVG still being actively explored even as it sits rather dormant from a standards point of view.
Let’s start with some tools and resources, since those are easy to digest and if you really love one of them you’ll be all like thanks CodePen Spark, you’re a good newsletter and ya know that’s what we’re in it for.
Tech Icons
SVG icons tend to be single-color as a trend, but actual logos tend to involve brand colors and can often be multi-color. I like how it’s super easy to use, offering both downloads and quick copy-and-paste.
Durves
I can’t explain it but sometimes you need an SVG of a grid of dots that are waving. This allows you to control all the Aspects of that. Has some tearable cloth vibes.
svghub
Squiggles, scribbles, shapes and… other stuff.
I love this because they are the kind of things that are perfect for vector art, but that you don’t typically find in things like icon sets. One click to copy right to clipboard or download.
SVGMix
Big one! 193 Icon collections. I do like that they are grouped in collections, so in case you need a bunch of assets, there is a good chance they’ll go together aesthetically. I’m a big Noun Project guy, but find it isn’t quite as well organized into collections.
OK I suppose we’d better move on to some techniques and explanations.
SVG Gradients: Solving Curved Challenges
How do you get a color gradient to follow the path of SVG artwork? Michael Sydney Moore solved it by breaking up the art into smaller sections and applying gradients to each section.
This is an interesting contrast to another technique that Ksenia Kondrashova explains.
SVG viewBox
The viewBox
on SVG is pretty simple really: it sets up the visible coordinate system where everything else is drawn. Interestingly, you can change it at any time, and it effectively acts as a camera, especially if you animate it.
Brad Woods has perhaps the best explanation of it I’ve ever seen, via an interactive post.
Making noisy SVGs
Turns out <feTurbulence>
is up to the job of making a noise effect in SVG, but there is a little more to it to make it nice, as Daniel Immke writes up:
To create noise, I used the
<feTurbulence>
filter which is explicitly for generating artificial textures but required quite a bit of fiddling to get to my liking. Then, I had to use other filter effects to eliminate color variance and blend naturally with the fill color selected, and finally apply the filter to the circle.
Noise sometimes feels like the perfect way to chill out the mathematical sharpness of vector art.
Also — did you know there is a weird trick to make noise with CSS gradients?
Responsive SVGs
There is a technique in this post from Nils Binder where he stretches just a part of an SVG according to variable content elsewhere and I love it.
Speaking of responsive… did you know the illustration in Ethan’s original article was responsive in itself?
Making SVG Loading Spinners: An Interactive Guide
This is part of what makes SVG so attractive to me: simple primitives that all combine together to do elegant things. Here, to make a specific kind of fun spinner, Sébastien Noël uses
<circle>
with astroke
stroke-dasharray
to control exactly how the stroke should be dashedstroke-linecap
to control the nice look of the dashed partsstroke-dashoffet
to control the position of the dashes@keyframe
animation to animate thestroke-dasharray
making it feel like a spinner.
Icon transcendence: customizing icons to complement fonts
This one is from the “I hope your client has a lot of money” files. I love the idea but it’s wild. The idea is that SVG icons could swap out to match the vibe of the font they are next to.
But by “swap out”, really, somehow, it’s the same source icon.
Although these icons look quite differently visually, they were actually crafted by using the single source icon you saw above as a reference. For each of the fonts here, we’ve modified that source icon, thus producing a custom icon that better matches the style and mood of each font:
11 Things Every Website Footer Needs with Real Examples
A website footer is the section you can find at the bottom of a website, typically shown on all pages …
11 Things Every Website Footer Needs with Real Examples Read More »
The post 11 Things Every Website Footer Needs with Real Examples appeared first on .
How to Optimize Website Content for International Audiences
Shipping Tumblr and WordPress
Didya see that Tumblr is getting a WordPress makeover? And it’s not a trivial move:
This won’t be easy. Tumblr hosts over half a billion blogs. We’re talking about one of the largest technical migrations in internet history. Some people think it’s impossible. But we say, “challenge accepted.”
Half a billion blogs. Considering that WordPress already powers somewhere around 40% of all websites (which is much, much higher than 500m) this’ll certainly push that figure even further.
I’m sure there’s at least one suspicious nose out there catching whiffs of marketing smoke though I’m amicable to the possibility that this is a genuine move to enhance a beloved platform that’s largely seen as a past relic of the Flickr era. I loved Tumblr back then. It really embraced the whole idea that a blog can help facilitate better writing with a variety of post formats. (Post formats, fwiw, are something I always wished would be a WordPress first-class citizen but they never made it out of being an opt-in theme feature). Tumblr was the first time I was able to see blogging as more than a linear chain of content organized in reverse chronological order. Blog posts are more about what you write and how you write it than they are when they’re written.
Anyway, I know jobs are a scarce commodity in tech these days and Auttomatic is looking for folks to help with the migration.
I was about to say this “could” be a neat opportunity, but nay, it’s a super interesting and exciting opportunity, one where your work is touching two of the most influential blogging platforms on the planet. I remember interviewing Alex Hollender and Jon Robson after they shipped a design update to Wikipedia and thinking how much fun and learning would come out of a project like that. This has that same vibe to me. Buuuut, make no illusions about it: it’ll be tough.
Shipping Tumblr and WordPress originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.