http://www.tayyabrashid.com

Clinical Positive Psychology: Explore and use your strengths to enhance your well-being.

Tayyab Rashid (Ph.D) | Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Rashid works at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada as psychotherapist and researcher. He also is a consultant with the Values in Action Institute, USA. Dr. Rashid’s expertises include positive clinical psychology and resilience training in school settings. Dr. Rashid, completed his completed his pre-and post-doctoral clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the leading experts in the field of optimism and happiness, on several studies. Dr. Rashid is part of University of Pennsylvania’s team which has trained mental health professionals and educators in Australia, United Kingdom and in the United States.

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Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments.

And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Cuepoint JS

Cuepoint JS is an open source plugin for adding subtitles or cue-points to HTML5 video.

jRumble

jRumble is a jQuery plugin that makes any element you choose rumble, vibrate, shake, and rotate.

Circle Menu

Circle Menu is a jQuery plugin that emulates the menu in the Path application, and includes various animation options for opening and closing menus.

Hovercard

Hovercard is a free jQuery plugin that lets you display related information when you hover over a link, label, or any other HTML element. It includes Twitter and Facebook hovercards, and uses minimum CSS and no external stylesheets.

Sharrre

Sharrre is a jQuery plugin for creating widgets for sharing for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and more. It includes Google Analytics tracking, and is highly configurable and personalizable.

Flow Slider

Flow Slider is a jQuery plugin that lets you slide HTML content in a variety of ways. It’s cross-browser compatible, customizable, and easy to set up.

Gitview

Gitview is a JavaScript widget for listing Github repositories. It includes asynchronous loading of all data, a canvas element for the participation graph, and many other features.

Leaflet Maps Marker

Leaflet Maps Marker is a WordPress plugin that lets you pin your favorite places with markers, use integrated address search for finding your places, and much more.

Initializr 2 Responsive Template

Initializr 2 is now offering an HTML5 responsive design template generator. You can create slightly customized and highly customized templates in under a minute.

AntiMap

AntiMap is an open source toolset for recording and visualizing your data. There’s a smart phone app for data capture, as well as desktop and web applications for analysis and visualization.

Kinzaa

Kinzaa is a web app that lets you create infographic resumes that will set you apart from other job seekers.

HexHelp.com

HexHelp.com is an easy-to-use app for getting hex codes for any color.

Visual Heap

Visual Heap is a visual aggregator for designers that pulls images from all over the web for inspiration and ideas.

accentColor

accentColor is a JS script for grabbing the main accent color from any website.

Croply

Croply is a fast, secure, free online image cropping service. Just input the dimensions, upload your image, and that’s it.

Revolver.js

Revolver.js is a new content slider that’s equivalent to a boilerplate or framework for creating your own slider. It’s easy to use and completely customizable.

Scrollorama

Scrollorama is a jQuery plugin for doing various “scrolly stuff”, like transitions.

Tmpltr

Tmpltr is a tool for rapid web iteration, using JSON, HTML, and CSS.

Standard International (free)

Standard International is a modern sans serif font with slightly retro stylings.

Poly (free)

Poly is a traditional serif typeface suitable for text or display use.

Sofia (free)

Sofia is a feminine script font with lots of character.

Brix Slab ($174.30)

Brix Slab is an extended family with 24 fonts. It’s a robust slab serif font with subtle detailing, optimized for longer texts and readable in smaller sizes.

Rosarian ($55.10)

Rosarian is a beautiful brush serif font with curvy stems on many of the letters, designed by Laura Worthington.

Blanch (name your price)

Blanch is a display typeface that comes in six weights. It was designed for the Fruita Blanch brand, and is traditional but with a contemporary feel.

Cubano (name your price)

Cubano has rounded corners and wide strokes, and features 167 glyphs.

Hexa (free)

Hexa is a blackletter typeface that has a modern look and feel.

Haiku’s Script (free for personal use)

Haiku’s Script is a hadwritten script font, created by Poemhaiku.

Gaunt (free)

Gaunt is a varying-width, uppercase font. The varying widths can be mixed together to give it a more unpredictable, non-uniform effect.

Garamond Serial ($14.99)

Garamond Serial is a traditional serif typeface with seven widths.

Bad Script (free)

Bad Script is a script font designed with a tablet to resemble casual and neat handwriting.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Residing in different parts of the world, these role models to many, may include: volunteers, teachers, environmentalists, humanitarians, artists, spiritual leaders, researchers, etc.

The Question: What actually inspires the individuals who are an inspiration to others, to bring about change in people’s lives and in the society they live in?

Goal: To gain insight into the inspiration and motivation that drives these extraordinary individuals to make a positive change, so that their work can affect others and continue to inspire for positive change in our surroundings.

“The reward of our work is not what we get, but what we become.”

More information:

http://www.nomanslandpromotions.com/inspiring.html

By Ivo Weevers

A positive first impression is essential to relationships. People look for trust and integrity, and they expect subsequent encounters to reflect and reinforce their first impression. The same principles apply to brands and their products. Design plays an important role in building lasting relationships with end users and, thus, in supporting the brand’s promise.

Users expect mobile services to be relevant and user-friendly and to perform well. The limitations of the medium, however, impose significant challenges to designing products that meet all of those expectations. While often underestimated, performance is a crucial contributor to a trustworthy mobile user experience. Therefore, it should be considered a key driver in the design process.

In this article, we’ll discuss performance in relation to design and present seven guidelines that can help shape design decisions related to performance while accounting for the needs of end users and businesses. These guidelines are based on the experiences of our teams in designing native mobile apps for a broad product portfolio and on multiple mobile platforms.

Performance For Mobile

People use their mobiles to enhance productivity, comfort and pleasure, everywhere and at anytime: waiting for the bus, walking on the sidewalk, checking which platform their train leaves from. Mobile applications need to focus on a core utility, and they need to be fast and reliable in order to be valuable in those environments.

Paradoxically, we’ve noticed that many mobile design cycles start with requests for great aesthetics first: “It has to look amazing!” Of course, stunning visuals will attract customers by making a great first impression. However, a long-lasting relationship depends on the quality of each encounter, which is also heavily influenced by how the app performs. An application that looks stunning but performs poorly can damage integrity. Users quickly notice software that is slow or likely to break (whether because of downtime, crashes, etc.), and this impairs both usage and brand perception. Users expect an app to be fast and responsive. If it’s not, it will get poor reviews, low ratings and low adoption numbers.

The visuals in the Twitter app are not as rich as Cookmate’s (which are stunning), but reviews for the Twitter app in the App Store are much better.

Performance Supports Brand Differentiation

Every product encounter affects the brand perception. Users are looking for the best tools to enhance their lives. To attract a significant user base in a landscape that is becoming more populated each day, a mobile app has to stand out. It should do something no other app does, or do it better than others do. These benefits reinforce the brand. Because performance is an essential element in the user experience, it directly helps to differentiate the brand. Taking this one step further: making a technically challenging feature perform smoothly will give the product a unique selling point, one that will be difficult to imitate.

A good example is the Flickr iPhone app. Flickr states on its website that it has two main goals: to help people to make their photos available, and to enable new ways to organize photo and video. Guess what? That is exactly what its app does well, thus fulfilling its brand’s promise.

Flickr does a good job of optimizing the key brand encounters.

So, when planning an app, it is worth analyzing the market and trying to answer two questions. (1) What should it do differently from its competitors? (2) What should it do better than its competitors? Then, focus your design and development efforts on the resulting top three goals.

A Key Design Exercise

Crafting products of any kind requires an appreciation of the way they are built. Well-established design and engineering disciplines have recognized this for a long time. A car’s design influences its aerodynamics. A beautiful eye-catching bridge has to cope with wind and with traffic passing over and beneath it. The same applies to interactive mobile services. Design choices affect features, content, interactivity, graphics and, therefore, performance.

We’ve noticed on several product teams that performance is believed to be exclusively the responsibility of developers, and therefore it is considered too late in the design process. But in order to assess feasibility, development needs to be considered during the creative process. Applying the seven guidelines below and considering relevant factors for mobile UI (see the next section) up front will help to incorporate the topic of performance into design discussions. Achieving a high-performance experience is not just a coding exercise. It is a key design exercise.

The Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. (Image: Wikipedia)

Relevant Factors In Mobile UI Performance

The perception of performance is based on start-up time, page-loading behavior, smoothness of transitions and animations, errors, and waiting times. The diagram below illustrates these factors: the “app” (with its graphics, interaction, content, features and code) runs on a “mobile” device with certain technical capabilities (CPU, screen size, etc.) and a platform (Android, iOS, etc.). In many cases, the app connects over a “network,” with a set coverage and standard (LTE, 3G, 2G), to a “back end.” The two factors at the top are heavily influenced by the decisions of the design and development team. The bottom two factors are constraints that need to be taken into account.

Factors that influence performance.

Decisions for each factor will affect performance. Any combination, enhancement (such as advanced visuals) or limitation (such as poor network coverage) could increase complexity. For example, content being loaded from the back end in addition to advanced graphics traveling over a slow network are a combination of factors that will reduce performance.

Seven Guidelines

The last years have seen dramatic changes in the mobile platform landscape. New UI paradigms have emerged, screens and processors are becoming as advanced as desktop computers, and input mechanisms have been revolutionized.

Within these shifting constraints, designers should always try to create a look and feel that is cutting-edge, memorable and high-performing. This is not just a matter of reducing image sizes. Decisions made at various levels of the design and the design process will have a significant impact. Let’s look at seven guidelines that have proven to be helpful tools at all design levels to achieve high-performing mobile user experiences.

1. Define UI Brand Signatures

Each user interaction with an app should reflect the story of the brand and should increase recognition, loyalty and satisfaction. Identifying which elements contribute most to the brand’s identity is essential. Examples are features, visuals, wording, fonts and animations. Our design teams work on many different products on different product teams. This could easily lead to several design and implementation variations of similar UI elements. Defining the core building blocks encourages reuse and discourages reinvention and, therefore, optimizes the design and implementation of a set of components.

One approach is to define the UI elements that form the core building blocks of the user interface and, together, to create the interface’s unique character. In the concept phase, identify those elements that do the following:

• Differentiate the app (for example, the photo-viewing feature in the Path app);
• Represent key functions (for example, a check-out feature for a store);
• Set the pattern of the design language (for example, the header in the screenshot below).

Windows Phone 7’s Metro UI is a great example of how fonts, layout and interaction can establish a unique design DNA. (Image: Wikipedia)

The core signature elements need to be the most responsive. They will be seen by users over and over and will be reused in different product features. By focusing the design and implementation on this set of elements, each optimization will pay off multiple times.

Visit new website:
www.bellairlasercenter.com

Published Jan 11, 2011 by Preston D Lee

Offering price quotes to potential clients can be one of the most difficult tasks a freelance designer faces. But the difficulty of quoting clients grows exponentially if those clients don’t even offer a ballpark budget for you to work within.

No-budget clients make designers play an irritating guessing game in hopes that the quote is close enough to the secret budget amount the client surely has in their head.

If you’ve ever had trouble offering a price quote to a no-budget design client, your troubles will be solved today. Just keep on reading.

All clients have a budget. All of them.

There are clients out there who are most interested in getting the best deal on design services. These kinds of clients are usually the ones that act like they have no budget in mind. That’s right, I said act. Because if you ever believe that any client doesn’t already have a budget in mind when they come to you, you’re crazy.

The important thing to remember is that all clients have a budget. You have a right to ask them what their ballpark figure is when offering them a quote for your design work. Even if you have to be as pushy as a car salesman, insist on finding out what their ideal budget is. It will make the quoting process much more enjoyable for both of you.

If they insist on keeping their budget a secret, they may not be the kind of client you want anyway. We’ll cover more of that in a minute.

Don’t drastically adjust your price according to budget

Just because you work hard to find out what your future client’s ideal budget amount is, it doesn’t give you the right to change your rates drastically. Some designers might decide to take advantage of a bigger budget and charge more than they normally would.

But imagine the impression you’ll give your potential client when you quote them at 15% lower than their maximum amount instead of right at it or a little above. They’ll love you for it!

However, just like you shouldn’t inflate your price, don’t drastically reduce your price to fit the client’s budget. If the budget is too low, offer an honest quote and be prepared to not get the job. Some clients hire designers based solely on price.

Not all clients are worth it

The kinds of clients that make a decision based solely on the amount of money a designer charges, may not be the kinds of clients you want. They’ll likely be the kind of client that is constantly asking for more discounts, looking for free labor, searching for shortcuts, or paying their bills late. These aren’t the kind of clients you want.

It’s also been my experience that clients who refuse to divulge their budget aren’t worth it either. The key to a healthy designer-client relationship is open, honest communication from both ends.

Add your price-quoting tips

Offering quotes can be one of the most difficult tasks a designer faces. With these few tips and handy ideas, I hope you’ll be better prepared for the next time a no-budget (remember, they don’t actually exist) clients comes knocking on your door.

The Bellair Laser Group of Clinics, winner of the 2011 Consumer Choice Award, is a cosmetic-medical center offering only FDA approved, result-oriented skin care and hair removal technologies.

view website:

www.bellairlaserclinic.ca

The Bellair Laser Group of Clinics, winner of the 2011 Consumer Choice Award

I met quite a few great Japanese volunteers when I was working in Santo Domingo, on a program by the Canadian Society of International Health,  back  in 2003.

I was there for a year, but most of the Japanese interns came for at least 3 years and worked on various projects from sustainable development to further improve the technological infrastructure and  lifestyles of many Dominicans in various cities. Their expenses were covered by the Japanese Government. They have done similar work in most developing countries like the Dominican Republic.

Let us help the people of Japan in these difficult times.. Even if each of us donates a minimum of $10 to $20 a month, it could be an enormous amount for their aid in the months to come. This totally makes sense if we put our selves in their shoes.

You can donate through many agencies including The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), IDRF,

DONATE HERE

An internet site is really a powerful advertising tool in the current business community. Websites was previously just for the tech-savvy and major corporations but on the short time, have quickly been adopted by small business owners and do-it-yourself type people.
Within the not distant past, should you didn’t possess a website, your company was nothing. Now, it’s almost assumed when you’ve got a business, it’s also wise to possess a website. Bear in mind, not every websites are identical!

A lot of companies have capitalized about the requirement for using a website and it is obvious there’s a market that’s over-saturated with website designers – by using different pricing and skills. Actually, you might or might not have seen advertising that reads, “Websites as low as $199.00″ or major domain companies now jumping in about the “we do websites” craze with offers that appear too good to be real. Unfortunately, for most of us spending their money – it’s.

The word “You get that which you pay for” only holds a lot weight nowadays. You realize you would like the very best work with the very best price but exactly how can a company owner understand what to consider inside a website design company? How’s the price of creating a website determined? How would you know you’re making the best decision for the business?

The answer is easy – Take time to RESEARCH AND PREPARE.
Remember, your site will reflect what individuals think about your company!

1. Possess a budget. An internet site is really a true investment inside your business. Whenever you hire an expert developer to construct your website, you’re spending money on some time and you’re spending money on ideas and expertise. The real price of an internet site is generally divided because when long vs. at what rate. Consider it getting a full-time employee for any duration of 2 to six weeks.

2. Understand what you would like inside a website. This might sound easy but it is surprising the number of people don’t! If you do not understand what you would like inside a website, then you definitely shouldn’t even be searching for one. Look your competition and find out what they’re doing. Jot down plenty of notes prior to making a telephone call or dropping any inquiries.

3. Don’t shop the cheapest bidder. Also, don’t shop the greatest bidder either. Shopping based solely in price will bite you over time. Many smaller businesses which have never obtained a website wind up spending more income attempting to cut costs since the “cheaper” websites didn’t meet their expectations. Some smaller businesses wind up spending money on 3 websites once they might have simply spent cash on one. Cheaper isn’t always better. However, some smaller designers could see larger companies charging quite a penny and think they are able to do exactly the same, and then deliver a smaller product. This pitfall could be avoided so long as you stick to the next few steps.

4. Spend more time with your prospects. Don’t just speak with someone over the telephone when attemping to locate a design firm. Visit their whereabouts or ask them to arrived at yours. Again, inquire but more to the point, ask them to demonstrate types of what they’ve already done.

5. Spend some time READING the look firm’s website. You simply might find out more about the organization and their customers than you believe. You could also find hidden indicators when browsing a design firm’s website. Web site design company pages change often but when you begin to see a lot of being built pages, not far off pages, or an infrequent quantity of broken links or poorly information, maybe it’s a sign this company is lazy and could take you for any ride. Consider it, when they do not take time to create their very own business website look great, what’s going to they are doing for the business?

6. To outsource or otherwise to outsource? To reply to this really is simple, in case your customers are likely to be close to your neighborhood – hire an area developer or firm you never know the surroundings and it is acquainted with the neighborhood cultures. In case your clientele is of the foreign base, you might like to hire a developer from the targeted foreign market who realizes that particular culture.
7. Get references. If your company can’t supply you a minimum of Two or three references, it might not be smart to rely on them. Request a reference that’s been using the services of the look firm for any year or even more. This will be significant because it can certainly eliminate most fly-by-night web-site designers.

8. Search for Analytics or Website Reports. If you want not only quite a website with actual traffic statistics, you ought to have your website design company demonstrate the website reports or analytics. Web analytics will highlight the number of people go to a website daily in addition to demonstrate how well an internet site performs. Companies who provide seo (also called SEO) services are experts who may bring visitors to your website. Unfortunately, 80% of design firms who claim they are doing SEO – don’t truly understand how to. Analytics = Proof is incorporated in the pudding!

9. Search for innovation and ideas. Worthwhile website design company will offer you suggestions to build your business shine online. Listen of these golden tidbits of knowledge because they usually add up to using a site built much better than you would expect. Just bear in mind, the greater innovation, the greater cost. Just be sure this innovation shows up within the quote or proposal and just how much it will cost you. (Remember rule #1 – your price is based from ideas, expertise, and time).

10. Have your articles and pictures ready! Before you decide to attempt a journey to construct your company, take a seat together with your business partner, spouse, or friends and physically jot down your company model or structure. Also, gather an accumulation of images you’re looking for and set them into organized folders doing this can help your designer know very well what goes where. Otherwise, expect you’ll spend much more money to possess your articles written for you personally and stock images also have a price without having photos. Getting your content written for the business needs time to work and research. Should you follow this path, make certain your copywriter can write your company content in a manner that is internet search engine friendly. Just bear in mind, it is a copyright infringement to chop and paste content out of your competitors or take images using their company websites in the event you think you will save money!

source:
creativity.im