In web design, change is the only certainty. New tools, trends, and techniques mean that we always have to be on our toes. Indeed, it seems there’s never a dull moment.
But moving your career forward isn’t so easy. Things often get in the way of the linear ascension we hope for. Sometimes it’s the result of outdated skills. Or perhaps your business just isn’t allowing you to grow at the desired pace.
Whatever the cause, these obstacles can leave you feeling stuck in neutral. Personal and professional growth is stunted. All the while, you watch from the sidelines as others seemingly move ahead.
However, all is not lost. There is plenty you can do to jumpstart your career. It’s all about identifying the obstacles in your way and taking action.
Not sure where to start? We’re here to help! Join us as we look at common obstacles and how to get past them.
Web design is constantly being pushed forward by new technologies. Yet it’s still rooted in some foundational methods for putting a website together.
In practice, this means that it’s still possible to design and build a website using an “outdated” workflow. That’s not to say it isn’t functional (hence the quotes around “outdated”). At the same time, it might not provide many growth opportunities.
If you find that you’re still using techniques or technologies that are in decline, that’s a sign of stagnation. For example, think about a content management system (CMS) that is no longer receiving updates. Or a CSS layout method that has long since been supplanted by something more efficient.
There are plenty of other examples. But the idea is that it’s possible to hold onto a workflow a little too long.
This provides a great opportunity to learn something new. You don’t have to jump on the bandwagon of every buzzworthy technology that comes along. Rather, look for skills that make sense for your particular niche.
When you’re managing multiple projects, efficiency means a lot. And if your projects tend to have a certain sameness to them, it can be difficult to break out and try something new.
That leaves little room to experiment and grow. The daily grind becomes more about crossing items off of your to-do list, as opposed to breaking new ground. It’s a common trap for web designers – particularly established freelancers.
Going with what pays the bills is fine. But, how can you level up when you’re stuck in survival mode?
There are a few possible avenues to explore. The first is to look for projects outside of your comfort zone. Something that goes against the grain in terms of your typical clientele or technology.
At first, it may sound a bit scary. But there’s a certain energy that comes along with being uncomfortable. It can be a great motivator and forces you to look at a project from a different perspective. Plus, you might have the opportunity to learn something new.
If hunting for new clients isn’t a good fit, then it never hurts to try the trusty side project. The benefit here is that you get to choose what you want to do. Find something you’re passionate about and start building!
Survival mode is more than just working on “boring” projects. It also encompasses projects that simply don’t pay enough. Try as you might, it’s hard to get your career on track when caught up in a web of cheap clients.
There’s a school of thought that says you can rake in the revenue by working on a larger volume of little projects. That may be fine if you’re willing to work seven days a week. But not so great if you’d prefer to have a life outside of your job.
Prior commitments aside, this is a situation that can be resolved. Take a look at your revenue and determine what areas are hurting your bottom line. If they can be salvaged, don’t be afraid to raise prices. Otherwise, they can be trashed.
In a broader sense, raising your prices for new projects may also be in order. This could be a turn-off for some prospective clients. However, those that see the value in your expertise won’t think twice about the cost.
Suddenly, you’ll find yourself with the ability to make more money while working on fewer projects. That’s how you get ahead.
Sometimes, the biggest obstacle in our way is mental. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing you’re not good enough to find success. Impostor syndrome, as they call it, is all too real.
Being a part of a large, diverse industry that features a variety of ways to build websites leaves so much open to interpretation. That can be both a good and bad thing. If you’re not following the trends, you might wonder if you’ll be able to learn the latest technology – or if you’re doing the wrong thing altogether.
Many of us can feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of knowledge out there. And there’s often a fear that any change we need to make must happen all at once. It’s no wonder we can feel like imposters.
Defeating imposter syndrome takes time. But it starts with a belief in yourself.
Think about everything you’ve already accomplished. The skills you have mastered and the projects completed. The happy clients and colleagues. Those are signs that you are indeed good enough to keep moving onward and upward.
Every web designer will face peaks and valleys in their career. Whether it’s a lackluster client roster, projects that don’t challenge your limits, or self-doubt – we’ve all been there. Thankfully, you don’t have to stay in a rut.
The most effective way to get past these obstacles is to first identify them. Once you know what you’re dealing with, you can do something about it.
Even better is that, after you’ve conquered one obstacle, you’ll have the confidence to take on the next one. Over time, you may start to see them as just temporary bumps in the road. Certainly, nothing to lose sleep over.
Remember, whatever stands between you and your career goals doesn’t have to stay that way.
The post Identifying the Obstacles in Your Web Design Career appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Introducing 5.9, Joséphine. Named in honor of acclaimed international jazz singer Joséphine Baker, this latest, most versatile WordPress release is here: download it or update it directly from your dashboard.
As a lifelong civil rights campaigner, Joséphine Baker believed that all people could live in harmony together, just as different instruments in a jazz band blend together to make a whole piece. Turn on a playlist from your favorite music service and enjoy her famous renditions of “You are the greatest love”, “Sans Amour”, and “Love is a Dreamer” as you discover all the features of this brand-new WordPress release.
It puts you in control of your whole site, right in the WordPress Admin.
And say hello to the first default block theme in the history of WordPress. This is more than just a new default theme. It’s a brand-new way to work with WordPress themes.
Block themes put a wide array of visual choices directly in your hands, from color schemes and font combinations to page templates and image filters, all from the Site Editor. So in one place, you can give Twenty Twenty-Two the same look and feel as your organization’s other materials—or take your site’s look in another direction.
You already have the Twenty Twenty-Two theme—it came installed with WordPress 5.9. You will find it with your other installed themes.
Twenty Twenty-Two is not the only theme built for full site editing. More block themes are in the Themes directory, and the number will grow.
When you use any of those new themes, you no longer need the Customizer. Instead, you have all the power of the Styles interface inside the Site Editor. Just as in Twenty Twenty-Two, you build your site’s look and feel there, with the tools you need for the job in a fluid interface that practically comes alive in your hands.
Blocks come to site navigation, the heart of user experience.
The new Navigation block gives you the power to choose: an always-on responsive menu or one that adapts to your user’s screen size. And your choices are remembered! In 5.9, the block saves menus as custom post types, which get saved to the database.
Do you love to blog? New tweaks to the publishing flow help you say more, faster.
WordPress 5.9 features new typography tools, flexible layout controls, and finer control of details like spacing, borders, and more—to help you get not just the look, but the polish that says you care about details.
The WordPress Pattern Directory is the home of a wide range of block patterns built to save you time and add to your site’s functionality. And you can edit them as you see fit. Need something different in the header or footer for your theme? Swap it out with a new one in a few clicks.
With a nearly full-screen view that draws you in to see fine details, the Pattern Explorer makes it easy to compare patterns and choose the one your users need.
In 5.9, the List View lets you drag and drop your content exactly where you want it. Managing complex documents is easier, too: simple controls let you expand and collapse sections as you build your site—and add HTML anchors to your blocks to help users get around the page.
Treat every image in a Gallery Block the same way you would treat it in the Image Block.
Style every image in your gallery differently, or make them all the same, except for one or two. Or change the layout with drag-and-drop.
In 5.9, theme.json supports child themes. That means your users can build a child theme right in the WordPress Admin, without writing a single line of code.
This dev note has all the details. Take a look!
Now you can lock any block (or a few of them) in a pattern, just by adding a lock attribute to its settings in block.json—leaving the rest of the pattern free for users to adapt to their content.
Now you can register more than one stylesheet per block, which lets a given block load only the styles its markup requests, and not a whole sheet. Read the details in this dev note.
The changes to the Gallery Block listed above are the result of near-complete refactor. Have you built a plugin or theme on the Gallery Block functionality? Be sure you read this dev note. It tells you what you need to do for compatibility.
Want to dive into 5.9 but don’t know where to start? Check out this free course about Simple Site Design from Learn WordPress. There are a variety of learning materials including short how-to video tutorials and resources on new features in WordPress 5.9, with much more planned.
Check out the latest version of the WordPress Field Guide. It has lots of useful information with links to detailed developer notes to support you building in WordPress for everyone you serve. WordPress 5.9 Field Guide.
The WordPress 5.9 release was led by Matt Mullenweg, and supported by this highly enthusiastic release squad:
WordPress 5.9 also reflects the hard work of 624 generous volunteer contributors. Collaboration occurred on 370 tickets on Trac and more than 1900 pull requests on GitHub.
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By release day, 71 locales had translated 90 percent or more of WordPress 5.9 in their language. Community translators are hard at work ensuring more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps to make WordPress available in 205 languages.
Many thanks to all of the community volunteers who contribute in the support forums. They help to answer questions from people across the world. The success of releases from the first one in 2003 owes much to the efforts of the support contributors.
If contributing to WordPress appeals to you, it’s easy to learn more and get involved. Discover the different teams that come together to Make WordPress website and find out the latest plans on the core development blog.
I was first introduced to the concept of webhooks via a 2009 blog post by John Herren, a former colleague at Zend. At the time, they were in their infancy; today, they're ubiquituous, as they provide a mechanism for a service to notify interested parties of events. This saves traffic; instead of consumers polling an API for event changes, the service notifies them directly. It also means that the consumer does not need to setup things like cronjobs; they instead setup a webhook endpoint, register it with the service provider, and their application takes care of the rest.
The thing is, handling a webhook can often lead to additional processing, and you are expected to send an immediate response to the provider indicating you received the event.
How can you achieve this?
It's likely no secret that I'm a fan of Mezzio and OpenSwoole1. Running PHP in a persistent process forces me to think about state in my applications, which in turn generally forces me to be more careful and explicit in how I code things. On top of that, I get the benefit of persistent caching, better performance, and more.
One feature I pushed into mezzio-swoole (the Swoole and OpenSwoole bindings for Mezzio) was functionality for working with swoole task workers. There's a variety of ways to use the functionality, but my favorite is by using a PSR-14 EventDispatcher to dispatch an event to which I attach deferable listeners.
What does that look like?
Let's say I have a GitHubWebhookEvent, for which I have associated a GitHubWebhookListener2 in my event dispatcher.
I would dispatch this event as follows:
/** @var GitHubWebhookEvent $event */
$dispatcher->dispatch($event);
The nice part about this is that the code dispatching the event does not need to know how the event is processed, or even when. It just dispatches the event and moves on.
To make the listener deferable, in Mezzio applications, I can associate a special delegator factory provided by the mezzio-swoole package with the listener. This is done with standard Mezzio dependency configuration:
use Mezzio\Swoole\Task\DeferredServiceListenerDelegator;
return [
'dependencies' => [
'delegators' => [
GitHubWebhookListener::class => [
DeferredServiceListenerDelegator::class,
],
],
],
];
This approach means that my listener can have any number of dependencies, and be wired into the container, but when I request it, I'll be returned a Mezzio\Swoole\Task\DeferredServiceListener instead.
This class will create a swoole task from the listener and event, which defers execution to the task workers, offloading it from the web workers.
Event state
Task workers receive a copy of the event, not the original instance. Any state changes your listener makes in the event instance will not be reflected in the instance present in your web workers. As such, you should only defer listeners that do not communicate state back to the dispatching code via the event.
Sharing an event dispatcher with the web server
mezzio-swoole defines a marker interface,
Mezzio\Swoole\Event\EventDispatcherInterface. This interface is used to define an event-dispatcher service consumed byMezzio\Swoole\SwooleRequestHandlerRunnerfor the purpose of dispatching swoole HTTP server events, getting around the "one event, one handler" rule swoole follows. However, that can mean that you end up with two different dispatchers in your application: one used by the swoole web server, and one by the application, and that means you cannot delegate tasks.To get around this, alias the
Mezzio\Swoole\Event\EventDispatcherInterfaceservice to thePsr\EventDispatcher\EventDispatcherInterfaceservice:use Mezzio\Swoole\Event\EventDispatcherInterface as SwooleEventDispatcher; use Psr\EventDispatcher\EventDispatcherInterface as PsrEventDispatcher; return [ 'dependencies' => [ 'alias' => [ SwooleEventDispatcher::class => PsrEve
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6872 bytes)
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Latest PECL Releases:
The simple act of light reflecting off of or refracting through a surface can produce stunning visuals. We see it every day in the physical world. It might be the way the sun peeks through your office window or light hitting a mirror at just the right angle. They’re like little science experiments that take place right in front of us.
Thanks to the latest CSS and JavaScript techniques, these effects are also dazzling web users. Everything from relatively simple reflection details to light-bending refractions is popping up on our screens. Even highly-realistic behaviors are possible.
Today, we’ll introduce you to some outstanding code snippets that bring mirror, reflection, and refraction effects to life. Let’s take a look!
This gently-animated bonsai provides a calming feel that belies the serious technology that makes it work. It utilizes SVG and the GSAP animation library to create a lovely water reflection effect.
See the Pen Bonsai animation by Kamil
Here’s a very unique snippet that features multiple effects. First, there’s a rotating shape that hovers in front of a mirror-like surface. Notice the shiny reflection underneath as well. The lighting and shading are gorgeous. You can also use your mouse or touch to change the perspective.
See the Pen PBR Reflection by ycw
This snippet is proof that mirror effects can be applied in unconventional ways. Two brightly-colored orbs appear against a black background. Move your cursor to take control of the left (white) one, while the other mirrors your movements. Dragging these orbs all over the screen in tandem is more fun than it should be!
See the Pen Mirrored Light Orb Cursor Movement by Diana Le
The color and texture of this animation are mesmerizing. Rows upon rows of spheres move toward you, while your cursor position changes the refraction index. The look ranges from glassy to old-school television static. HTML 5 canvas and JavaScript are used to create the ultra-smooth movement.
See the Pen GLSL: Refracted rays by Liam Egan
Mirrored text is surprisingly easy to implement. With just a few dozen lines of pure CSS, you can achieve an attractive effect that is sure to grab a user’s attention. The secret is in the CSS transform property, which flips the mirrored version upside down. From there, a gradient is used to create a more realistic look.
See the Pen Pure css text mirror by Tim
Add some custom text and this snippet will make it look as if it’s being viewed through a crystal ball. Cursor movements change both the perspective and size of the effect. When combined with the colorful background, the whole presentation has a 1960s vibe to it.
See the Pen Text Refraction by Juan Fuentes
Check out this abstract take on a modern obsession – staring blankly into your phone. Click on the phone and simulated text reflects slowly up the subject’s body. It’s similar to what you might see in a darkened movie theatre.
See the Pen Phone Reflection by luke lincoln
Speaking of abstract works, this virtual game board is something to behold. Mirrored 3D balls roll around as light bounces off of them. You can also change the perspective of the scene, adding even more intrigue to the outstanding special effects. If astronauts play games in space, this might be the one.
See the Pen Three.js Reflection by seanwasere
Amazing as it may seem, developers are crafting some seriously stunning mirror, reflection, and refraction effects for the web. Not only do they look incredible, but many also make great use of physics to add a layer of realism as well.
Want to see even more top-notch snippets? Take a peek at our CodePen collection!
The post 8 CSS & JavaScript Snippets for Creating Reflection & Refraction Effects appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
