Sushi has been popular in the Western world since the 1970s, when it was introduced to diners in the U.S. You probably have a strong opinion about it – either you love it and are always looking for ‘the best’ sushi in your neighborhood, or you absolutely hate it and can’t understand how anyone could go near it, much less put it in their mouths.
Personally, I’m in the ‘love it’ camp, and today I’m going to share with you six ways that you can leverage the power of sushi to improve your designs. Yes, really!
1. Tell a Story For Your Clients
Traditional sushi chefs in Japan are known for chatting with their customers at length about the local ingredients so essential to their cuisine. If you sit down at their restaurants, they will regale you with stories about the work they do, informing you and engaging you at the same time.
Restaurants are social environments – we go out to eat when we could easily stay in because we want to be around other people while we enjoy a (hopefully) delicious meal. People, like this guy, have since turned this traditional, sociable behavior into an international legend, comparing every sushi experience to the pleasant, informative one they had in Japan.
As a designer, you too can leverage this narrative power when you engage your clients. People respond well to storytelling – it makes you stand out from the pool of other designers who never use this tool.
Make sure you have a story to tell about your work. Do personal projects you love, and make a habit of explaining your unique and fascinating process to potential clients. They’ll definitely be interested as long as you keep it brief.
2. Simplicity is key
For many Japanese people, eating a little raw fish with rice is a complete meal. The story you tell with your work need not be complicated or overly dramatic. The more you simplify your process, the easier it will become, and the more work you’ll be able to accomplish.
Take writing this article, for example. If I hadn’t started out with a process to keep things simple, I would have spent far too long going into details that aren’t necessary to tell the story.
Simplifying your process isn’t easy, but once you develop your own system for tackling your work, it will definitely make your life much less hectic.
3. Uncover New Paths
Originally, the rice in sushi served a very specific purpose – to keep the fish preserved as it traveled from the fishing docks to the fish markets. To accomplish this, the rice was fermented and consequently had a very strong flavor that few could stomach.
It was traditionally discarded until the 18th century, when people began reducing the fermentation levels and including it as part of the actual dish. Now, sushi rice is the most common ingredient in most types of sushi. Making the rice part of the flavor profile opened up a whole new range of possibilities for flavor combinations.
Coming up with a function, or a solution to a problem you didn’t even know was there is a crucial part of design. Imagine if chefs still threw away their sushi rice before they served you your meal. We’d be missing out on so many different types of delicious sushi – nigiri, temaki, gunkan, and all those delicious rolls we Westerners love. How sad would that be? Good thing someone figured out how to prevent this tragedy from happening.
As a designer, your job is to navigate uncharted territory, making use of things that others miss or overlook. Have a bunch of throw-away supplies, research, or junk mail staring you in the face? Look at it again with new eyes and see if you can’t create a ‘sushi rice’ moment of your own.
4. Details, Details
Because they work with raw fish, which can contain harmful microorganisms, professional sushi chefs are specially trained to pay attention to certain characteristics of the fish that most commercial inspectors don’t bother with. Things like the smell of the fish, its color, firmness, and sterility are examined much more closely to ensure a safe dining experience for their patrons.
Designers can learn a lot from this ultra-specific attention to detail. As you are a decision maker, expected to come up with solutions to your clients’ problems before they even realize the problems are there, you need to learn how to think like a sushi chef and closely examine your designs for tiny flaws that others might not see.
Be relentless; weed out whatever doesn’t belong and don’t be satisfied until you’re sure you can present your clients with the absolute highest quality designs you can possibly create. This does two things: one, it puts more awesome design in the world (and who doesn’t need more of that?), and two, it signals to your client that you are different from all the other average designers out there who just turn in work that’s ‘good enough.’
5. It’s All About the Presentation
The reasons for inspecting sushi and sashimi ingredients aren’t all dire and health-related. Fish used for sushi and sashimi is also inspected for its visual appeal. Only the most attractive and flavorful cuts of fish are used, and great care is taken to make sure the beauty of the fish is retained once it arrives on your plate.
More creative chefs have signature styles of presenting their sushi – things that make their dishes unique to them and which inspire a mythology among their customers. Does that remind you of anything? Sushi is definitely a designed product, from inspection to presentation.
In fact, I can’t think of another traditional food that incorporates more conscious design into every aspect of its creation than sushi. Everything from the way sushi chefs select their ingredients, to the way they proudly tell you about them at the restaurant is a carefully orchestrated production – almost a performance.
You can definitely harness this process for yourself in your design work, and create a similar production experience for your clients and your users. When you develop your own unique production style, clients and users will take notice, and your work will take on a life of its own in the stories people will tell each other about it.
You want those stories – that mythology – to take root. It’s the single most important part of your reputation as a designer. What people say about your designs, and how they say it, is vital to getting the best clients. Plus, you can actually influence people’s opinion of your work based on they mythology surrounding it.
People are more likely to respond positively to design that has a good mythology, than to design that has little to no mythology.
6. Juxtaposition: the ‘Secret Sauce’
In the West, we don’t really pair unremarkable cereal staples with other, much more flavorful dishes. Except for pasta, which, of course, comes from Asia and is traditionally made from…rice. Go figure. But in Asia, chefs and cooks do this all the time. Rice is used as a palate cleanser and a kind of ‘shock absorber’ for the spicy and flavorful foods it normally accompanies.
Sushi is no exception. I suspect the reason Japanese cooks began including rice in their sushi dishes was that they wanted to experiment with different types of flavors for the fish – flavors that would be a bit too strong if consumed by themselves, without the rice as a ‘buffer.’
When you employ this practice in your designs, you are having the same effect on people’s eyes and brains that sushi has on their palates. Simplicity paired with tiny moments of intense detail or “flavor” is a philosophy you can use to create designs that are intriguing and unexpected.
How else can you draw design inspiration from sushi? Could you really, really go for a Hawaiian roll right about now? I know I could…
The post Leveraging the Power of Sushi to Improve Your Designs appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy speaks to her role as the Executive Director of WordPress. Learn about the day-to-day of her role and how it supports the mission of WordPress.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Credits
References
Transcript
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!
I’ve been asked many times what the day-to-day work looks like for the Executive Director of the WordPress project. I don’t really think I’ve done a great job of answering that question. My default answer is either too broad, and I say, “I helped turn the WordPress vision into reality by supporting the community of contributors,” or way too narrow, and I start telling people what’s on my calendar. Probably no one cares about each entry on my calendar, and almost every contributor is covered by “I get things done by helping people.” So today, I invite you to join me in exploring the type of work required and the balance it takes to keep WordPress working.
First, some context on the weekly activity I see in WordPress, on average, 1,800 to 2,000 contributors a week, participate in conversations and tickets across the entire WordPress project in our entire ecosystem. There are about 20 volunteer teams that are each led by two to three team reps. Each of those teams actually has smaller groups that work on specific things; all told, it’s probably about 50 distinct teams. And probably quite a few more if you are very generous in your counting about what makes up a team for us.
Among those teams, a minimum of about 35 meetings a week are held, plus more for working groups. That doesn’t take into account the things most people are aware of externally. It doesn’t take into account the big quarterly or annual activity things like WordPress software releases or any of our events. When those sorts of things do happen, there’s a bit of an increase in our activity.
I work 40 to 60 hours a week on WordPress, depending on what’s going on, to make sure that I know what’s happening now; so that I have insight into what the next three to five years will bring. All of that is in support of the WordPress community, which I define as anyone who has ever interacted with WordPress ever, regardless of whether they know it or not. In case you’re feeling a bit lost right now, we can shorthand that entire context as this is really big and really complex.
Given that giant scope, it makes sense that people wonder what the work looks like. So I’ll talk about it in three big chunks: what I focus my time on, what I focus my attention on, and what helps me balance my decisions.
So first, what I focus my time on. I spend about a quarter of my time in meetings, mostly with current contributors, project leadership, and community members. I spend another quarter of my time in WordPress community outreach, checking in with current folks, reaching out to future WordPressers, and checking in with people that I haven’t heard from in a long time to make sure that I know what they need and if there’s anything that I can do to help. After that, I spend a bit under 15% of my time each on writing/communications work or ad hoc project work. I then spend 10% of my time reviewing proposals, editing, communication drafts for others, and determining my stances on discussions that we’re having in tickets and elsewhere. I spend all of my remaining time planning for various goals, projects, initiatives and personally working to remove blockers for our volunteer contributors. So the bulk of my time, about 50% or more, is spent in calls with people, which makes sense if you’ve ever worked with me; personal connections with the community have been the best part of my job for a long time. Since the community is what makes WordPress so great, it’s only natural that I want to stay connected.
The second big chunk is what I focus my attention on. I pay attention to four big pillars of work in the project. The first one is the WordPress CMS itself. So that’s the core team, accessibility, design, and many, many others. The second one is the WordPress community. And that’s the training team, everybody who is working on the Learn initiative, and the actual community team as well.
The third big pillar that I focus on is the WordPress contributor experience, which is mostly the meta team but includes all of the teams they work with: plugins, themes, polyglots, etc. The fourth big pillar that I turn my attention to is our communication; what I am saying about the WordPress project to people outside of it and what I am helping our team reps to say about the work that we’re accomplishing for the WordPress project inside the project. In general, we have to make sure that we coordinate a big group of contributors around a common idea or a common practice as we move forward.
Now, the way I focus both my time and attention probably isn’t quite right if you’re focused on a single feature or team. And it’s definitely not right if you aren’t spending 40 hours a week in the project; what that probably looks like for you is more like an hour in a team meeting, 30 minutes or so on clarifying conversations, and any remaining time that you are able to contribute focused on the feature that you’re actually contributing to. And so, there you have it all my time and attention. That is WordPress in a nutshell.
This brings us to the third chunk, the balance part. You might be wondering, how do I make sure I am fair and balanced in decisions that I have to make. That is something that I think about all the time, and I take very seriously. It’s hard to make decisions that might affect 2,000 people. It’s even harder when those decisions might affect 40% of the web. I know that I don’t have all the answers. And I’m fortunate enough to have 50 or 60 people in the community who offer me advice and guidance every single week. I’m in constant contact with the project lead, of course, but I also prioritize messages and concerns raised from team reps. And I always strive to understand before I try to problem solve. I don’t always get it right, but I do always work to get better. And that is the day-to-day work of a WordPress executive director.
That brings us to our community highlight. I tweeted out into the community asking for excellent examples of Freelancer success stories, and today I’m going to share a story from Arūnas Liuiza. Their story goes like this:
“For almost a decade, freelance WordPress gigs allowed me to support myself and my family and keep my full-time teaching position at the local college, which was paying peanuts but was an awesome, meaningful, and fulfilling. I am sincerely grateful for that.”
That brings us to our final segment of this brief podcast. The small list of big things to keep an eye out for in the next two weeks in WordPress. I only have two things this week. The first one is daylight saving time. It is that time of year where daylight saving time starts or stops at various parts in the globe. If you are a team rep here at WordPress, don’t forget to talk to your teams in your meetings in the next few weeks to decide what you’re going to do. You can move your team meeting if you want, and you can keep it where it is and see what new voices show up when it moves around for various people. Either way, make sure that you chat it out with your team and make sure that everybody understands what is and isn’t moving on your calendar. That will also be relevant to any of our brand new work-from-home folks in the middle of this global pandemic.
The second thing to share is that there is a major release of WordPress coming up that’s going to happen on March 9th. It’s WordPress 5.7; it’s going to be a good release. We’ve been working on it since December or maybe a little bit earlier. So keep an eye out for announcements about that here on wordpress.org/news, or if you want to follow more about the developer details and the process details you can head on over to wordpress.org/core. That, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks!
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Framework to develop PHP MVC applications
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This package provides a framework to develop PHP MVC applications...
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Classify and detect objects in images with Darknet
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This package can classify and detect objects in images with Darknet library
It uses the Darknet Open Source neural network framework written in C and CUDA to classify an object in an image...
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Manage user groups and their access permissions
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This package can manage user groups and their access permissions...
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Show the progress bar of sub-tasks for Kanboard
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This package can be use to show the progress bar of sub-tasks for Kanboard...
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Display the highlighted value of a given variable
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This class can display the highlighted value of a given variable...
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Manage user groups and their access permissions
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This package can manage user groups and their access permissions...
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We can’t help but to love flyers, especially when they grab attention and entice from the very first glance. No matter your chosen medium, digital or physical, flyers are still one of the best ways to engage potential customers.
Even if you (or your clients) don’t want to print actual flyers, you can create gorgeous digital flyers. Then, use them to promote your business through social media posts or advertising campaigns.
Beautiful flyers will add a personal touch to your digital marketing efforts, and allow you to connect with your potential customers on a personal level. And if you do want to create physical flyers, you have to make sure they’re gorgeous enough for customers to hold on to them.
There are all kinds of things you can do with flyers; from increasing brand awareness, to offering discounts and promo codes, and stimulating word of mouth marketing. So no matter the stage of your business, or the state of your marketing strategy, a flyer always comes in handy.
And fortunately, with these 25 gorgeous Photoshop PSD flyer mockup templates, you no longer have to worry about the end result. Instead, you can focus on your design.
“Small, yet effective, these A6 flyer mockup templates are perfect for advertising promotions and discounts to your loyal customers. You’ll get 5 photo-realistic mockups of stacked A6 flyers, and you can even change the background color and field of depth. Visualizing your beautiful designs has never been easier!
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Realistic and placed in neutral settings, these A4 flyer mockup templates are great for promoting events or increasing brand awareness. You’ll get 4 separate PSD mockups and scenes, and well-organized layers for a smooth editing process. Visualize your materials and amaze your audience with these photo-realistic flyer mockups!
Visualize your tri-fold brochure with this gorgeous template! It’s perfect for making sure that both your brochure’s content and your brochure’s visuals convince and convert. With 4 design options, as well as customizable glares and shadows, you can create an incredibly photo-realistic brochure mockup.
Simple square flyers depicted on a monochrome background work perfectly for highlighting the intricacy of your designs. These flyer mockups are positioned as a grid, and you can upload one design, as well as change the color of 2 flyers, and the background. It is time for an amazing presentation!
These poster and flyer mockups are the full package you need to promote your next project! Pick from 4 professionally-lit and diverse styles (poster, framed poster, and two flyer presentations), easily add your own designs with Photoshop smart objects, and get photo-realistic results that your clients and customers will adore.
Perfect for increasing brand awareness for elegant and refined brands, this flyer mockup set is everything you need to succeed! With 4 PSD files, changeable backgrounds, and photo-realistic presentation of flyers with marble in the background, this set is the full package. Easily customize it, and make your designs shine!
This dynamic flyer mockup is perfect for photo-realistically presenting your design. Positioned vertically, as though wind has blown it straight into your hands, this flyer mockup is perfect for making crucial branding decisions. You’ll also be able to change the background to suit your brand’s visuals!
Minimalist and clean, this square flyer mockup template set is perfect for showcasing your designs. You can upload up to 3 different designs, as well as customize the colors of the background (monochrome works best), and the flyer colors. Use it to present diverse designs, or compare three different options!
Clean and elegant, this square flyer mockup comes with 2 sides: front and back. This double-sided flyer mockup is perfect for presenting engaging flyers. You’ll also be able to pick from 5 different presentations, and easily change the background color. Your audience and clients will love your designs!
Simple and effective, this flyer mockup template for Photoshop is staged against muted industrial backgrounds, making it a perfect fit for both light and expressive designs. You can pick between 10 different views, and add selective varnish or change the backgrounds, which won’t change the automatic background perspective.
Simple and perfect for putting your designs in the spotlight, this abstract design flyer mockup template for Photoshop is just what the designer ordered! You’ll get 3 design options for showcasing your work, or helping a client pick the design they like the most out of 3 options.
Sometimes you just want to see the full glory of your design, depicted on a photo-realistic mockup. That is exactly what this square flyer template can do for you! Easily upload your flyer design, customize the background and flyer colors, and help your (or your client’s) business succeed!
Professionally photographed and well-lit, these flyer mockup templates promise photo-realistic results you’re going to love. Pick from 5 diverse PSD mockups (single page, bi-fold, and tri-fold flyers and brochures), easily edit them in Photoshop with smart objects, and get ready to show the world how amazing you are!
Simple and elegant, this flyer mockup set helps you highlight your amazing design – and your content. You’ll get 6 PSD files, 6 background textures that you can change as you see fit, and an extremely easy way to replace the placeholders with your own designs in Photoshop.
Depicting a paper on white background with realistic shadows, this flyer mockup is simple and effective. It’s perfect for corporate presentations and highlighting the content of your flyer. With 4 different paper sizes (A2, A3, A4, A5) and multiple layout options, you’ll get everything you need.
Entice your customers with this sleek flyer mockup set offering 5 different, bi-fold flyers. You can choose the poses and styles that suit your brand and visuals, adjust the shadows and effects, and replace the mockup’s background. Add your design, and you’ll receive beautiful, photo-realistic results.
Showcase your poster, artwork, or flyer design with these photo realistic mockup templates for Photoshop! With 3 different styles, you can showcase your design on a stand – it’s sure to catch the attention of your customers! You can even change the background with a few hue/saturation adjustments.
Brochures never go out of style. And with mockups like these, your business will be getting much more traffic! Highlight your design with the closed brochure, and offer a glimpse into your content with the open brochure mockup. Set against a neutral background, these mockups work great for all designs!
Elegant and organic, these A4 flyer mockups are perfect for showcasing the beauty of your designs. You can pick from four different presentations (one A4 flyer, two stacked A4 flyers, a customizable photo-realistic flyer, close-up of two A4 brochures), customize the effects and the background, and absolutely delight your clients.
One mockup to rule them all! This realistic flyer and card mockup set is perfect for all your branding and advertising materials; from flyers, to posters and cards. You’ll get 9 beautiful styles (front view, close-up, 2 flyers), and incredible photo-realistic results when you add your own designs.
This mockup template set is perfect for B2B or corporate flyers and brochures! You’ll get 11 photo-realistic PSD files, so all it takes is a few minutes in Photoshop, and your designs will look beautiful and true to life. Showcase your cover design, as well as your content!
If you want to see what your customers will see once they receive your flyer, this is the perfect flyer mockup template set for you! Composed of 5 incredibly realistic mockups in professionally-photographed environments, and with both bi-fold and tri-fold mockups, this set gives you everything you need to succeed!
Perfect for client presentations, this simple and effective DL flyer mockup template comes with 13 photo-realistic PSD files for easy editing in Photoshop. You can also pick from 10 available backgrounds included in the package, and set up everything you need for a perfect presentation in just a few clicks.
Compare different designs during your presentation with these 2 square flyer mockup templates. Perfect for hashing out the specifics with your clients, this set lets you upload 2 designs, as well as customize the monochrome background color, and both flyers’ colors. It is time to pick the best fit!
If you’re designing a flyer for a trendy brand, they’re going to love this industrial-style flyer mockup template! Two stacked flyers placed on a concrete surface help you easily visualize your design. You can also change the paper colors to make sure they fit your vision!
Ready to send your message flying? Share the news of your business and offer something extra to your customers with these stunning Photoshop flyer mockup templates! With 25 different options, there’s something for everyone.
If you’re promoting your own business, you’ll love all the brochure templates. And if you’re creating flyers for clients, make sure you bookmark this collection – there’s something for every kind of client; even the most demanding ones.
More Mockup Templates: Banners, Books, Booklets, Bottles, Box Packaging, Branding, Dresses, Frames, Hoodies, iPads, iPhones, Laptops, Logos, MacBooks, Magazines, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices, Mugs, Packaging, Sweatshirts, T-Shirts, Tote Bags.
The post 25 Photoshop PSD Flyer Mockup Templates in 2021 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Package:
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Manage a NoSQL database for users and features
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This package can manage a NoSQL database for users and other application features...
Read more at https://www.phpclasses.org/package/11972-PHP-Manage-a-NoSQL-database-for-users-and-features.html#2021-02-26-05:56:09
