Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 17 December 2014

The day’s best and most impor­tant design- and design business-focused arti­cles, tuto­ri­als, and resources hand-picked by Pariah Burke.

  • Everything You Know about Hashtags is Wrong!

    Have you always thought of hash­tags as the most annoy­ing phe­nom­e­non in the his­to­ry of social media, refus­ing to include them even in your infor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion? Or have you been in the oth­er camp, using #hash­tags to #com­mem­o­rate #every #event in #yourlife #far­be­yon­dit­s­ac­tu­alor­rel­a­tiveim­por­tance? I sym­pa­thize with the for­mer group myself, hav­ing spent most of my Twitter tenure as a hash­tag cur­mud­geon. But, whichev­er posi­tion you align with, I have good news and bad news. The bad: none of you know how hash­tags work, and you’re los­ing impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ties because of this. The good: you are about to learn every­thing you nev­er knew about the ori­gins and prop­er use of the osten­ta­tious octothorpe. 

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  • How To Draw – a col­lec­tion of community-contributed tutorials

    How to Draw” is a col­lec­tion of tuto­ri­als that will teach you every­thing from per­spec­tive basics to shad­ing chrome. Never picked up a pen­cil before? Fear not! From sim­ple line draw­ings to mod­ern art and easy ani­ma­tions, we’ve got you cov­ered. All projects come from Instructables​.com and con­tain pic­tures for each step so you can start your mas­ter­piece today! 

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  • 10 Classic Christmas Stories (Free eBooks)

    Get clas­sic Christmas sto­ries for your new Kindle, Kobo, Nook or iPad. They are free to down­load in ebook format.

  • 33 Amazing Gifts for Designers and Creative Pros

    Designers can be a difficult-to-buy-for bunch, so I scoured the Web (and my own wish list [hint, hint]) for gifts that help design­ers do their work, cel­e­brate cre­ativ­ity, and express them­selves as cre­atives. I came up with 33 amaz­ing design­er gifts, and anoth­er 50 in two addi­tion­al arti­cles [linked from the main article].

  • How To Save Twitter Links To Pocket Or Other Bookmarking Services
    Given how often peo­ple share links on the micro-blogging net­work, even­tu­al­ly, that means Twitter turns into a fan­tas­tic social-powered list of must-read items. So how do you track and save them them?
  • A Beautifully Illustrated History of Mac OS X
    The his­to­ry of OS X start­ed with a bear, not a cat: in September of 2000, Apple pre­sent­ed Kodiak. For 30$, users could pur­chase this first pub­lic Beta of Mac OS 10.
  • 5 gor­geous iPhone apps with sur­pris­ing designs and amaz­ing visuals

    hen thou­sands of paid apps are added to Apple’s App Store every week, pre­sen­ta­tion becomes a vital tool for suc­cess. If a cus­tomer is going to spend mon­ey on an app, it needs to stand out from the dozens of oth­er apps that per­form a sim­i­lar func­tion, which is why we’ve decid­ed to round up some of the new and recent­ly updat­ed apps that we can’t take our eyes off of.

  • 28 Awesome Holiday Gifts for Designers
    It’s that time of year again. There’s fun to be had, but for now you’re focused on what gifts to buy. A tough task for many, but it’s espe­cial­ly tricky when it comes to find­ing that per­fect gift for your design­er friend or rel­a­tive. Or maybe yo…
  • 28 Awesome Holiday Gifts for Designers
    It’s that time of year again. There’s fun to be had, but for now you’re focused on what gifts to buy. A tough task for many, but it’s espe­cial­ly tricky when it comes to find­ing that per­fect gift for your design­er friend or rel­a­tive. Or maybe yo…
  • Skype’s newest app will trans­late your speech in real time

    Microsoft’s Skype soft­ware will start trans­lat­ing voice calls between peo­ple today. As part of a pre­view pro­gram, Skype Translator makes it pos­si­ble for English and Spanish speak­ers to com­mu­ni­cate in their native lan­guage, with­out hav­ing to learn a new one. It sounds like mag­ic , but it’s the result of years of work from Microsoft’s research team and Skype to pro­vide an ear­ly work­ing copy of soft­ware that could help change the way the world com­mu­ni­cates in the future.

  • Adobe DPS named by InfoTrends as Leader in Enterprise Digital Publishing Platforms

    We are excit­ed to announce that ana­lyst firm InfoTrends, in its lat­est “Digital Publication Platform Market Overview” report, ranked Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) as lead­ing the pack of enter­prise dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­forms. We believe this rec­og­nizes Adobe’s unique abil­i­ty to deliv­er the best dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­form to enter­pris­es today.

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  • Scrap Your Work From Home Policy
    I was recent­ly asked by an HR man­ag­er if I had a sam­ple of a pol­i­cy about work­ing from home. My answer was:

    Do you want some­thing more than “Get your work done. Meet your objec­tives. Do that from wher­ev­er you want.”

  • 8 Things Bad Designers Need to Hear
    I just don’t want to see the same crap I’ve seen a mil­lion dif­fer­ent times in a hun­dred dif­fer­ent places. I don’t want to cre­ate it either. I think, or at least I hope, that all design­ers aspire to cre­ate some­thing from their own orig­i­nal thoug…
  • 9 WordPress Plugins To Detect Malicious Code In Your Site

    They could pos­si­bly filled with mali­cious code that can eas­i­ly hack your blog. Sometimes, back­links to their sites are also added into these themes and a nor­mal user has no idea how to cope with these back­links. In this post, we’ve gath­ered 9 effec­tive tools to deal with mali­cious code in a WordPress theme or website.

  • Adobe to Acquire Fotolia: Adds Stock Content Marketplace to Creative Cloud

    The acqui­si­tion of Fotolia will rein­force Creative Cloud’s role as the pre­em­i­nent des­ti­na­tion for cre­atives,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice pres­i­dent, Digital Media, Adobe. “Creative Cloud is becom­ing the go-to mar­ket­place for the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ty to access images, videos, fonts and cre­ative tal­ent, through crit­i­cal cre­ative ser­vices like Fotolia and our new Creative Talent Search capabilities.”

  • Mysterious Russian Malware Is Infecting 100,000+ WordPress Sites, Google Blocking 11k Domains
    A Russian mal­ware called SoakSoak has infect­ed over 100,000 WordPress sites since this Sunday, turn­ing blogs into attack plat­forms. It’s a poten­tial shit­show, and it could’ve been pre­vent­ed ear­li­er this fall.

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  • Stats Show Digital Marketers are “Getting Mugged”

    He cites a new study by White Ops (an ad fraud detec­tion firm) that shows “11 per­cent of traf­fic pur­chased may be fraud­u­lent, actu­al­ly traf­fic gen­er­at­ed by bots (a soft­ware appli­ca­tion that runs auto­mat­ed, repet­i­tive tasks such as ping­ing websites

  • Learn To Program In Processing: A Language For Visual Designers

    If you’re think­ing, “But won’t I have to learn math and text manip­u­la­tion before I can do any­thing visu­al?” Well, ban­ish the thought!
    Today I’m going to intro­duce you to a pro­gram­ming lan­guage that was cre­at­ed in 2002 with visu­al design­ers in mind: it’s called Processing.
    This is just one beau­ti­ful exam­ple of 3D art made by using Processing to cre­ate a fil­a­ment sculp­ture that explores the prop­er­ties of fil­a­ments and the move­ment of a 3D print­er printhead:

  • How to Spot & Avoid Bad Web Hosting Companies

    So what should you look for when you’re eval­u­at­ing host­ing com­pa­nies? How can you sep­a­rate the good from the bad? While it’s not always cut and dry, keep­ing an eye on all of the fol­low­ing is a tremen­dous start.

  • Why You Should Get A Receipt Every Single Time You Get Gas
    Well, I’ve known peo­ple who saved them reli­gious­ly and it ben­e­fit­ed them and I’ve known some who ignored receipts and it cost them. One client of mine always got receipts for his gaso­line even when he went inside and paid cash for his fuel. One…
  • Why Business Cards Still Matter (and How to Effectively Use Yours)
    With most busi­ness being done dig­i­tal­ly, you might think that busi­ness cards don’t mat­ter any­more. But they can offer a lot. Here’s why they’re still impor­tant for busi­ness and how you can get the most out of yours.
  • Get Into a Good Workflow Using Video Game Principles as Inspiration
    Video games suck you in and hold your atten­tion in a way that’s beyond oth­er medi­ums. They have a flow, or a way about them that makes you want to keep play­ing. The visu­als, sounds, and inter­ac­tions are all designed to make you want to play mor…