Issue 66

Sci-Fi brands for cartoons and movies

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• How fictional brands are created for movies and cartoons

• How to structure a design system using new variables in Figma

• How to achieve great results in work. Big article

• Ultimate cheat sheet on gradient types with usage examples

• A set of character illustrations in Sci-Fi style

• More than 140 thousand icons in different styles

• Advanced browser service for creating lottie animations

• A free alternative to ChatGPT from Stability AI

Enjoy reading!

🗞 News and articles

How to Do Great Work

A monumental article by Paul Graham, in which he talks about how to achieve great results in work. The article is based on the analysis of many books and materials about people who created outstanding projects, and the ideas that are set out in it can be applied to various fields. The article also contains recommendations for strengthening their skills, training and developing their projects.

• Paul suggests and then very thoroughly examines the following recipe:

• Define the field of activity. It should arouse your natural deep interest, you should be initially talented in it, and also this area should have the potential to create something significant

• Develop the habit of working on your own projects that inspire you. It may be part of a larger project, but developed entirely by you

• Keep curious, because this is the key to fulfilling the remaining points, and therefore to achieving the result. Curiosity will help you choose the right field of activity, will make you work harder, and will also allow you to achieve real mastery and encourage you to explore new things

• Study your field deeply enough to become an expert in it. As soon as you learn enough, you will discover new gaps in knowledge that many do not pay attention to. These are areas where you can do something new, make a breakthrough

• Develop unusual, and most importantly, ambitious ideas. Especially if they are ignored by others, and you have enough confidence that your idea is worthwhile

Paul also notes that working on great things requires hard work, but as a reward you will get great satisfaction and the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution in your field of activity.

The Complete Guide: From Beginner to Pro

A voluminous practical article about the main aspects of split testing, its types, features and competent preparation. The article also has tips on how to improve test results, how to conduct preliminary research, analyze the data obtained, and much more.

Types of split testing:

• A/B testing. The simplest testing, in which traffic is divided between two versions of the page, and then the results are compared.

• A/B/n-testing. Allows you to compare as many options as you need, but this method requires a very large amount of traffic, because it will have to be divided into a larger number of options. There are 2 approaches to such testing:

• Multivariate tests. They are used when you need to compare several options at once. Traffic is evenly distributed between all versions of the page

• The method of one-armed bandits. Dynamic testing, which starts with evenly dividing traffic, and then updates and gives traffic to the most productive versions. This technique allows you to avoid conversion drawdown.

How I Structured My Design System Using Figma’s New Variables

Melissa MacArthur showed how to structure a design system using new variables in Figma using the example of design tokens for the color palette, margins and rounding. Such a system allows you to check in a couple of clicks how the design will look on different screens and in different themes. The article contains step-by-step instructions for creating tokens.

Fast Software, the Best Software

Craig Mod's article praising the speed of software products as an important component of their design.

The speed with which the tool responds to our actions is critical to our satisfaction with it. Fast software won't necessarily be good, but slow software will almost never be able to become really cool.

What does all this have to do with design? Direct. Designers make many decisions that directly affect the speed. Five custom font styles instead of one? Slowing down. A background video instead of a picture? Slowing down. A photo instead of a vector illustration? Slowing down. Smooth animations of the appearance of elements? Deceleration (perceived).

The secrets behind designing a great fictional brand for TV and film

A large detailed article about how fictional brands are created and developed in cartoons and movies, what are their differences from real brands, how they help to reveal characters and how they can be embodied in the real world.

To find out more details, the authors talked with designers who worked on the Barbie movie and Wes Anderson films, as well as with the president of the Cartoon Network channel Michael Ouweleen and other specialists.

Adobe announced the commercial launch of Firefly AI

It came out of beta test for all Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Express and Adobe Experience Cloud users.

The company announced plans for generative credits that will be spent on generation. All paid tariffs will include monthly free loans, there are usually 500-1000 of them, the basic generation costs 1 credit. Additional loan packages start at five dollars.

The model was trained on Adobe Stock and publicly available content, which makes it commercially safe. Adobe is also launching a standalone Firefly web application that will allow users to explore some of its generative capabilities without subscribing to specific Adobe Creative Suite applications.

New technologies

Stability AI has released a new powerful language model Stable Chat, which is positioned as a free alternative to ChatGPT. She is able to reason and solve complex mathematical problems, as well as take into account linguistic features.

At the time of publication, the model is at the testing stage and is available on the company's website after registration.

What’s New in Artificial Intelligence from the 2023. Analysts from the research consulting company Gartner have updated their hype schedule for AI technologies.

They also described two groups of technologies: innovations that develop at the expense of AI, and innovations that themselves drive the AI industry.

Nvidia has published on GitHub the code of the Neuralangelo model, which turns an ordinary video into a detailed 3D scene. Compared to its analogues, it reconstructs spaces in a quality never seen before. Real spaces can be digitized using a smartphone or drone, and then added to games, clips and videos.

🧘 Inspiration

Miro has redesigned its identity. The logo has become calmer, but has retained recognizable shapes, and the style of illustrations has changed completely to a more picturesque and slightly vintage one.

Among the general trend for 3D graphics, the shapeface looks a bit old-fashioned, but at the same time makes the style different from others. At the same time, it's great that the authors abandoned the supergeometric sloppy stylistics and did not use the characters with broken hyperbolized proportions that already bored everyone. The new style looks much more confident and thoughtful.