Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 28 May 2014

Great con­tent found by Pariah and shared to the design and cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties on social media.

  • Detect Hacked Files on Your Server (Such as in WordPress) via CRON/PHP

    The log­ic is sim­ple: “Build a data­base of hashed val­ues for vul­ner­a­ble files (those which hack­ers will mod­i­fy to exe­cute code on your serv­er) and com­pare those val­ues to the actu­al hash­es on a reg­u­lar basis and report added, changed and delet­ed files.”

  • 10 Things You Had No Idea RSS Could Do

    For every­thing else, there’s RSS.

  • 10 Unusual Domain Name Search Tools to Find Hot Domains

    I am not sug­gest­ing that you rely on them, but domain name gen­er­a­tors take your key­words and can come up with unique word com­bi­na­tions that you wouldn’t have thought about. A lot of them also allow you to lookup the names with the Domain Registrars to see if they are available.”

  • A Real Creative Cloud is Coming!

    Professional-quality, com­plete­ly cloud-based cre­ative apps will be a real­i­ty in 2014. We speak to Adobe, AMD, Autodesk, Nvidia – and cre­atives – to dis­cov­er if the tools will live up to the hype.

  • Newegg Takes a Stand Against Patent Trolls

    Thanks to the efforts of Lee Cheng and his legal team, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a tri­al court to recon­sid­er its ear­li­er denial of Newegg’s request for attor­neys’ fees and costs in the patent infringe­ment law­suit brought on by SUS. Newegg pur­sued jus­tice in the mat­ter because it is con­sis­tent with our cor­po­rate mis­sion of bring­ing the ben­e­fits of tech­nol­o­gy and tech­nol­o­gy prod­ucts to our val­ued cus­tomers. And, when defen­dants set­tle these friv­o­lous claims, it’s always the cus­tomer that ends up pay­ing. We care too much about our loy­al cus­tomers than to sub­ject them to pay­ing these trolls.

  • 2014’s Hottest Trends in Digital Publishing

    Over the past decade, the rate at which the pub­lish­ing indus­try has moved toward dig­i­tal con­tent has increased expo­nen­tial­ly. Though pub­lish­ing has been drift­ing away from print for some time, it’s only in the last few years that pub­lish­ing dig­i­tal­ly has begun to become the rule rather than the excep­tion. Digital pub­lish­ing used to be con­sid­ered sec­ondary to print—a nov­el tech­nol­o­gy that could aug­ment print sales—whereas today that par­a­digm is shift­ing very quick­ly. Consider that from 2008 to 2012 hard­cov­er book sales expe­ri­enced a slight decline (from $5.2 bil­lion to $5 bil­lion), while in that same peri­od ebook sales sky­rock­et­ed from $64 mil­lion to $3 bil­lion. To put that in per­spec­tive, that’s more than a 4500% increase in only four years. In fact, in 2011 Amazon report­ed that their ebooks were out­selling their hard­cov­ers and paper­backs com­bined. This is all old news for pub­lish­ers of course, and as we move into the sec­ond half of 2014 the real ques­tion is where dig­i­tal and iPad pub­lish­ing is headed—not in terms of sales but rather con­tent and marketing.

  • Watermark Images Automatically When They’re Downloaded From Your WordPress Site
    It applies water­mark on new images as well as images already uploaded. By deac­ti­vat­ing the plu­g­in, the water­mark will be removed on all images.

    What makes this plu­g­in a real­ly pow­er­ful one, is that the water­mark is placed on your images throug…

  • Pay-What-You-Want Pricing for Self-Published eBooks

    Pay What You Want pric­ing can work – or not. The dif­fer­ence lies in the exe­cu­tion. (Writing real­ly good stuff is a given.)

    Here’s a 6‑step frame­work you can use to apply PWYW pric­ing to your work to start lever­ag­ing the upside of your fanat­i­cal readership.

  • Adobe Releases New Open Source Typeface, Source Serif

    Source Serif was designed by Frank Grießhammer as the serif coun­ter­part to our pop­u­lar Source Sans fam­i­ly. In addi­tion to being Adobe’s third open source type­face, Source Serif hits anoth­er impor­tant mile­stone as the 100th type­face from the Adobe Originals pro­gram, which is cel­e­brat­ing its 25th anniver­sary this year.

    Adobe’s prin­ci­pal type design­er, Robert Slimbach, con­sult­ed with Frank on the design of Source Serif, help­ing to ensure its com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with Source Sans. With its sim­pli­fied, emi­nent­ly read­able let­ter shapes, Source Serif is well-suited for dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, and shines when used for extend­ed text set­ting on paper or on screen.”

  • We Celebrate Creativity… Falsely. We Actually Don’t Like Creative Thinkers

    In the United States we are raised to appre­ci­ate the accom­plish­ments of inven­tors and thinkers—creative peo­ple whose ideas have trans­formed our world. We cel­e­brate the famous­ly imag­i­na­tive, the great­est artists and inno­va­tors from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world cre­ative­ly is sup­posed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst with ads recruit­ing “idea peo­ple” and “out of the box” thinkers. We are taught that our own cre­ativ­i­ty will be cel­e­brat­ed as well, and that if we have good ideas, we will succeed.

    It’s all a lie. This is the thing about cre­ativ­i­ty that is rarely acknowl­edged: Most peo­ple don’t actu­al­ly like it. Studies con­firm what many cre­ative peo­ple have sus­pect­ed all along: People are biased against cre­ative think­ing, despite all of their insis­tence otherwise.