At the end of 2012, I was talking with a good friend of mine who runs a small custom woodworking company. We were discussing business over the last year and a few things we learned. While his business did about double the revenue that mine did in 2012, I made considerably more profit.

That’s when it sank in how unusual my business really is: Instead of having a 10 to 20% profit margin like many businesses, I had an 85% profit margin in 2012. That actually could have been much higher, except that I spent some money on equipment (I needed that 27-inch display) and hiring freelancers. After creating each product, I have only 5% in hard costs for each sale. And the product can be sold an unlimited number of times.

Compare that to the custom woodworking company, which has to bear not only the material cost for each new project, but also the time, because everything is custom. To be clear, I’m insanely envious that my friend creates such beautiful real-world furniture, but from a business perspective, I far prefer selling digital products.

Drug Dealers

Back in 2008, I read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek. From the section in which Tim talks about different kinds of businesses to create, one quote really stuck with me:

There is one class of product that meets all of our criteria, has a manufacturing lead time of less than a week in small quantities, and often permits not just an 8–10× markup, but a 20–50× markup.

No, not heroin or slave labor. Too much bribing and human interaction required.

Information.

Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.

It took a few years, but that quote is a big part of why I got into selling design and marketing books and courses online. I create the product once, then sell it over and over again to people all around the world. Every time the product is sold, I pay credit-card processing fees, but otherwise I don’t have any costs tied to each sale.

Because there is nothing to manufacture or ship, my day-to-day involvement can be quite limited. I’ve taken multi-week trips during which I just check in every few days — and actually made more money when I wasn’t working!

Any Digital Product

This business model works not only with books and training, but with tools, themes, plugins, software and so much more! I’ve seen plenty of creators sell everything from Photoshop brushes to songs to WordPress plugins, often making $3,000 or more per month!

Sell Your Byproducts

If you work in any kind of creative field, then you have byproducts. As you focus on creating products or running your business, you create other tools or resources that help in the process. A great way to start selling digital products is to look at your workflow and see what tools or skills you use every day.

I’ve written two books about designing software. The byproduct of writing those books on design is that I became quite good at writing, packaging and launching ebooks. I took that knowledge on how to write a profitable book and released it as Authority, my latest book on marketing.

Kyle Webster¹ is a fantastic designer and illustrator who has created many tools to improve his own workflow. Instead of just keeping those tools to himself, he decided to sell some of his custom Photoshop brush sets. Other designers are thrilled to be able to buy such high-quality tools so that they don’t have to create them themselves.

²

Those brush sets are the byproduct of design work that Kyle was already doing for clients. Now he has an entirely new stream of revenue (in addition to what his clients pay him) from selling digital products.

What byproducts do you create from your everyday work?

How To Get Customers

Unfortunately, just creating the product isn’t enough to make money from it. You need customers. For my first few products, I had no idea how to get customers, which became obvious from the sales figures. Sales ranged from nothing for three or four different products to a few hundred dollars for WordPress themes — not even close to enough money to quit my job.

Marketing That Works

Marketing can’t be that hard, right? After all, practically every college teaches marketing, and the Internet is filled with articles on how to market products. It turns out marketing is very hard — at least it was for me.

From my college marketing classes, I learned that I should brainstorm ideas, share them with a focus group, build brand loyalty, synergize with other sellers and… I have no idea. Really it was all just a collection of marketing buzzwords that might work for a multi-million dollar business but didn’t give me any way to start selling digital products online.

My Product Track Record

I’ve launched a lot of products over the last few years. Here is a list, in order of launch date:

• Shoestring: no sales
• Shop208: $60 per month
• OneMotion: $300 per month
• Legend Themes: $70 (3+ years)
• OneVoice $2,000 per month (average, non-recurring)
• Fluent: $40 (2+ years)
• Commit: $9,000 (1 year)
• The App Design Handbook: $53,000 (6 months)
• Designing Web Applications: $95,000 (3 months)
• Authority: $34,000 (1 week)

Can You See the Inflection Point?

Because the time scale is different for each product, it can be hard to see exactly, but there is a point in my product marketing education when I learned a valuable lesson. I’ll give you a hint: It happened when my launch numbers were consistently over $10,000.

This lesson was repeated to me dozens of times over the years, but I never really learned it until I started the launch strategy for my first book, The App Design Handbook.

A Story

While you’re trying to figure out what particular idea could have had such an impact on my business, let me tell you a story. Like any good story, it happened a long time ago.

Marco Polo was a Venetian explorer who lived from 1254 to 1324 and became famous for being the first to explore the Silk Road to China. At least that’s how he is remembered. There is only one small problem. He wasn’t an explorer at all. Like all good Venetians of the time, he was a merchant.

Plenty of people had explored the roads to the East long before Marco Polo. In fact, Marco’s father and uncle had made exploratory trips of their own well before Marco was born. So, why does Marco get all the credit? Why is he the one we remember?

Marco learned the same lesson that I did. That’s why we remember who he is. But good ideas span centuries, so let me introduce you to someone who is still alive today.

Back in 2007, Chris Coyier launched a website named CSS-Tricks⁴, dedicated to teaching people how to code websites. When CSS-Tricks launched, I remember reading a tutorial and arrogantly thinking, “I know that already.” Chris and I were at about the same skill level, so I wasn’t learning anything new from him.

This continued for a while as he kept putting out new tutorials. But over time, as friends started asking me questions about CSS, I found it easier to link to one of Chris’ articles (because they were really well written) than to explain everything myself.

Years later, Chris ran a Kickstarter campaign to redesign his website. Those who contributed would get behind-the-scenes access to additional tutorials and content related to the redesign.

The goal was set fairly low at $3,500. He quickly blew past the goal and by the end of the campaign had raised $89,697.

He and I started at the same point, and our skills progressed at about the same rate. The difference was that he taught and shared, whereas I kept what I was learning to myself. That made the difference between being able to make tens of thousands of dollars on a new project and sharing with no one.

Teaching is what Marco Polo and Chris Coyier have in common. Instead of keeping knowledge to themselves, they shared it eagerly with anyone who would listen. Because of that, they built trust and credibility. They built an audience.

Chefs

Jason Fried calls this “emulating chefs.” In most industries, trade secrets are kept… well, secret — locked down behind firewalls and protected by non-disclosure agreements. Quite the opposite with chefs. They write down their secrets in a way that is easy to follow, which we know as recipes.

These recipes get bundled into books and sold to everyone for just $15 or $20. Imagine that! The trade secrets of your business, your competitive advantage, made available to the entire world!

But chefs don’t stop there. They go a step further and get cameras to record every step of the process, while they narrate, providing every detail that you might have missed from reading their recipe.

Aren’t they scared that another restaurant will open up across the street, steal their best recipes, and put them out of business?

Of course not.

By teaching, these chefs build credibility and an audience. Think of every chef you know by name. My guess is that most who come to mind have cookbooks and TV shows through which they give out every secret recipe. In doing so, their restaurants get booked up months in advance. The reputation they build helps to sell their product even more.

The Lesson

That inflection point you saw in my product revenue is the moment when I learned to teach. Jason Fried and others had been preaching this message for years, but it took far too long for it to sink in with me. Once I took teaching to heart and made it a core part of my business, sales skyrocketed.

Instead of scratching and clawing to find a few people who would listen to my sales pitch, I had an audience coming to me, eager to learn more and buy products.

So, what can you teach that relates to your product?

Using Email

Let’s say you start teaching through blog posts, webinars and tutorials. As your posts get shared around the web, some visitors will start to come to your website. At first, each visitor will be incredibly valuable. Once 10 visitors are coming each day, you’ll start to feel like you’re seeing some success. Unfortunately, most of those visitors will read your articles, forget about you and never come back.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Ignore Traffic

Early in my blogging career I made the mistake of focusing on traffic. Each day, I would check my Google Analytics statistics from the previous day (before they were real-time). Traffic is necessary to building an audience (and gaining customers), but you shouldn’t focus on it.

After blogging for a few months, I wrote a post that I knew would be popular: “How I Made $19,000 in the App Store While Learning to Code.”

How could you not click on that headline?

Sure enough, the post climbed to the top spot on Hacker News and was featured on Reddit and a bunch of other websites. In a single day, that post received more visitors than my entire blog had received up to that point.

Here’s the traffic pattern:

⁵

I was thrilled! I felt like my few months of writing a post every week had finally paid off. I started planning my career as a successful blogger.

Can you guess where this is going?

⁷

The traffic was unsustainable.

If you hid November in that chart, you would never be able to tell that there was a meaningful spike in traffic. That post did not make a long-term impact on anything, all because I didn’t have a good way to turn those visitors into regular readers.

Push, Not Pull

To stay in touch with your readers (and keep them coming back), you need a way to push content to them, rather than wait for them to remember who you are and come back to see whether you have anything new to say.

The next obvious question is, which platform to use?

RSS is common to all blogs, and Twitter and Facebook are supposedly the future of online publishing. So, the answer has to be one of those, right?

Nope.

I’ve always felt that my Twitter posts didn’t convert to sales very well, so I finally decided to run the numbers⁹. The short version is that, comparing click-through and conversion rates between Twitter and email, an email subscriber is worth at least 15 times as much as a Twitter follower!

Email Subscribers Are Easier to Get

I was having a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about this very topic. He said something that I’d felt for a long time but hadn’t quantified yet: “It’s so much easier to get email subscribers than followers on Twitter or RSS.”

I completely agree. When you ask someone to follow you on Twitter, the call to action is usually pretty lame: “Follow me on Twitter.”

But with email, you can actually incentivize the subscription by offering valuable content. My friends at Think Traffic offer their Traffic Toolbox for free to everyone who subscribes to their email newsletter.

¹⁰

What Can You Give Away?

Think through what valuable content you can offer. One of my most successful giveaways for getting new subscribers is a free course named “Mastering Product Launches¹².” Linking to that at the end of a guest post can drive hundreds — sometimes over a thousand — new email subscribers.

One idea is to take some of your best posts on a particular topic and edit them into a single guide.

That’s exactly what I did with The Productivity Manifesto¹³, which has been downloaded thousands of times!

Value-Based Pricing

How much is a book worth? The most common way to answer that question is by comparison. Print books often retail for $20, but Amazon will sell a copy discounted down to $14. Mine are just digital, so we should probably knock at least $6 or $7 off because ebooks aren’t worth as much.

So, is your newly published ebook worth $7? Well, the ebooks at that price are by professional authors at major publishing houses. You’re just a first-time author who hired your mom to proofread the book. (Luckily, my mom is a professional proofreader.) So, your book should be priced at just $3 or $4, right?

But remember those tales of authors hitting it rich on Amazon by selling their books for $0.99 or $1.99? You’ll want to sell tens of thousands of copies, so is that the right price?

Stop.

Seriously, stop thinking this way.

Whether you are selling books or any other product, comparison pricing like this is a great way to be a poor starving creator. Don’t do it.

What’s the Value?

A designer or developer at a software company could earn thousands of dollars in value from the ideas in my book Designing Web Applications¹⁴. Just implementing the ideas on designing first-run experiences could radically improve their trial retention rates and generate a lot more revenue. So, is that self-published book worth $2? No, it’s worth hundreds. Maybe not to everyone, because people working on small projects without many users wouldn’t get the same value out of each improvement, but pricing some people out of the market is OK.

A Photoshop plugin that saves a designer 10 minutes every workday isn’t worth just $15. If it’s integral to their workflow, you could easily charge $50. After all, good designers charge over $100 per hour for their time, so a good $50 plugin would pay for itself in a couple of days of saved effort.

If your product is focused on business customers, you could — and should — charge far more than you think. Because my business is teaching and training, I reason that I can charge premium rates if I am teaching a skill that makes money for people who have money.

I teach design to professional designers and developers. They use those skills to make their products easier to use and more profitable. If you were to teach knitting to middle-school kids, not only would they not be able to use those skills to make a living, but they wouldn’t have money to spend on your product.

Value-based pricing doesn’t work as well with consumers, who tend not to think about purchases based on the return on investment. But you should still probably increase your price to focus on the higher end of the market.

A Small Audience

I’ll assume that you don’t have a massive audience (10,000+ fans) that is eager to buy everything you produce. More likely you are in the early stages of your online business empire and are working on those first 500 or even 100 followers. The percentage of any following that will actually buy is quite low, so you’ll need to maximize revenue from each one.

If only 10% of your audience will actually buy from you, I doubt that lowering the price by a couple of dollars would encourage significantly more people to purchase. Conversely, in most cases, doubling your price wouldn’t cause you to lose 50% of your sales — meaning that you would come out ahead on revenue.

Pricing is flexible and hard to get right. Experiment with it. But if your goal is to maximize revenue, think about increasing your price.

Tiered Pricing

What if I told you that one simple method could triple your revenue? Would you pay attention?

I’ve used this method to triple my revenue on two book launches and more than double my revenue on two others. Implementing it does take some time, but not nearly as much as creating the rest of your product.

What is it?

Selling in Multiple Packages

You know when you subscribe to a web application and it asks which plan you would like? That’s tiered pricing, or multiple packages.

The vendor is segmenting their customers to allow those with larger budgets to pay more and get more value from the product. It’s common in software, but you can apply it to any other kind of product.

I do it with books. I sell just the book for $39 (remember, price based on value), then for $99 I include video tutorials, expert interviews and some other resources. Finally, the top package at $249 has even more resources (Photoshop files, code samples and anything else that would save the customer time), as well as double the interviews and video tutorials.

I’ve already spoiled the surprise by saying that this method doubles or triples revenue compared to offering just the book at $39, but let’s look at exactly how.

For my book Authority (which is precisely about how to write and profit from your own technical ebook), I used the package method mentioned above. According to the sales count (i.e. the number of copies sold), this is how the packages broke down:

• the book ($39): 48%
• the book + videos ($99): 26%
• the complete package ($249): 26%

So, just the book by itself sold nearly 50% of the copies. Were the other packages worth offering, then? Definitely!

Here’s the breakdown by revenue:

• the book ($39): 16%
• the book + videos ($99): 24%
• the complete package ($249): 60%

¹⁵

Without Excluding Anyone

Raising prices almost always increases revenue. So, why don’t we just raise prices to ridiculous amounts? Because every time we raise the price, we exclude some people from buying. For some products, that’s good: Low-paying customers have higher support costs in general. So, in that case, getting more revenue from fewer higher-quality customers is a good thing.

But I still want my books and training to be accessible. While businesses have plenty of money to spend, I don’t want to price freelancers out of my training.

That’s the beauty of tiered pricing. You get all of the benefits of selling a high-priced product (the top package) to customers who have money (i.e. real businesses), while people who are just getting started can still afford a version of the product (the lowest package) — something for everyone, and you maximize revenue from the entire market!

While You’re Waiting For Part 2…

Well, that concludes part 1. Check back next week for part 2! There is plenty more to learn about email marketing while you are waiting though. For example, you could start off with a free course¹⁷ I’ve put together — with one lesson per day for the week you get a great introduction to making your email marketing efforts more profitable.

If you’ve had any experiences with selling digital products, I’d love to hear them!

(al, il)

Footnotes

1. 1 https://gumroad.com/kyletwebster
2. 2 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1-brushes-large-opt.jpg
3. 3 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1-brushes-large-opt.jpg
4. 4 http://css-tricks.com/
5. 5 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2-partial-graph-large-opt.jpg
6. 6 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2-partial-graph-large-opt.jpg
7. 7 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/3-full-graph-large-opt.jpg
8. 8 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/3-full-graph-large-opt.jpg
9. 9 https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-worth/
10. 10 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/4-traffic-toolbox-large-opt.jpg
11. 11 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/4-traffic-toolbox-large-opt.jpg
12. 12 http://nathanbarry.com/launch
13. 13 http://nathanbarry.com/productivity-manifesto
14. 14 http://nathanbarry.com/webapps
15. 15 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/5-authority-sales-revenue-large-opt.jpg
16. 16 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/5-authority-sales-revenue-large-opt.jpg
17. 17 https://app.convertkit.com/marketing/sellingmore?ref=smashing

The post How To Profit From Selling Digital Products (Part 1) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

During my second and third years in college, I made some poor decisions regarding which classes to take. Those poor choices, during a period when I was no longer sure about my major, ended up tacking an extra year onto my college experience.

Read more...

In the earlier parts of this series, you've learned how theme frameworks work and have considered your approach to the framework you're developing.

Now it's time to dive into some code!

In this tutorial you'll take a basic theme and edit the template files so they're ready for hooks and functions to be added to them for your framework. The purpose of this tutorial is to tidy up the theme so that code isn't duplicated, which means you'll be creating include files for the loop. 

This means you won't have to create duplicate loops in your child themes when you create new template files, and if you need to edit the loop you only have to do it once.

Note: the starting files are based on the theme I created for my series on creating a WordPress theme from HTML, with a few changes. You can download them from the GitHub repository accompanying this series.

What You'll Need

To follow this tutorial, you'll need:

• a development installation of WordPress
• your own starting theme or the starting theme files in the GitHub repository for this series
• a code editor

Creating Include Files for the Loop

For my framework I'm going to create three loops:

• one for archives (including the main blog page)
• one for single posts
• one for pages

This is because I want each of these to display slightly differently than the others.

Even though there'll be three loops, it will still be more efficient than including a loop in every single template file in your framework.

The Main Loop

The main loop will be for archives and the main blog page. In your theme folder, create a file called loop.php.

Copy the following into it from archive.php:

<?php
/* Queue the first post, that way we know if this is a date archive so we can display the correct title.
 * We reset this later so we can run the loop properly with a call to rewind_posts().
 */
if ( have_posts() )
    the_post();
?>

		<h2 class="page-title">
			<?php if ( is_day() ) { ?>
				Archive for <?php echo get_the_date();
			}
			elseif ( is_month() ) { ?>
				Archive for <?php echo get_the_date('F Y');
			}
			elseif ( is_year() ) { ?>
				Archive for <?php echo get_the_date('Y');
			}
			else {
				echo get_queried_object()->name; 
			} ?>
		</h2>

<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
			
			
<?php // start the loop ?> 
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

<article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>

	<h2 class="entry-title">
		<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'compass' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark">
			<?php the_title(); ?>
		</a>
	</h2>

	<section class="left image quarter">
		
		<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { ?>
			<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
				<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'medium', array(
					'class' => 'left',
					'alt'	=> trim(strip_tags( $wp_postmeta->_wp_attachment_image_alt ))
				) ); ?>
			</a>
		<?php } ?>
	</section><!-- .image -->

	<section class="entry-meta">
		<p>Posted on <?php the_date(); ?> by <?php the_author(); ?></p>
	</section><!-- .entry-meta -->

	<section class="entry-content">
		<?php the_content(); ?>
	</section><!-- .entry-content -->

	<section class="entry-meta">
		<?php if ( count( get_the_category() ) ) : ?>
			<span class="cat-links">
				Categories: <?php echo get_the_category_list( ', ' ); ?>
			</span>
		<?php endif; ?>	
	</section><!-- .entry-meta -->
	
</article><!-- #01-->

<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php // ends the loop ?> 

You don't need to display a heading on the main blog page, so add a conditional tag around the first loop, to check that we're not on that page:

if ( ! is_front_page() ) {
}

The first loop will now read as follows:

if ( ! is_front_page() ) {
 
    if ( have_posts() )
		the_post();
	?>
	
			<h2 class="page-title">
				<?php if ( is_day() ) { ?>
					Archive for <?php echo get_the_date();
				}
				elseif ( is_month() ) { ?>
					Archive for <?php echo get_the_date('F Y');
				}
				elseif ( is_year() ) { ?>
					Archive for <?php echo get_the_date('Y');
				}
				else {
					echo get_queried_object()->name; 
				} ?>
			</h2>
	
	<?php rewind_posts();

} ?>

Now you need to include this loop in the relevant template files. In archive.php and index.php, replace the existing loop with the get_template_part() tag, which includes your loop file in the right place:

 <?php get_template_part( 'loop' ); ?>

You now have a working loop for archives.

Page Loop

Next you'll create a loop file for pages. Create a file called loop-page.php.

Copy the loop to it from the existing page.php:

<?php
    // Run the page loop to output the page content.

     if ( have_posts() ) while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

		<article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>
			
			<?php if ( ! is_front_page() ) { ?>
				<h2 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
			<?php } ?>
			
			<section class="entry-content">
				<?php the_content(); ?>
			</section><!-- .entry-content -->
		</article><!-- #post-## -->

	<?php endwhile; ?>

Now in all your theme's page templates (page.php and page-full-width.php), replace the loop with:

<?php get_template_part( 'loop' , 'page' ); ?>

Single Post Loop

Finally, you'll create a loop file for single posts, which will work for normal posts and for any custom post types you create in future. This is similar to the main loop except that it doesn't include a link to the post, and there's no initial loop to check what kind of archive we're on.

Create a file called loop-single.php and another called single.php.

Copy the contents of the index.php file into single.php, and edit the comments at the beginning of the file and the call for the loop, so it reads:

<?php get_template_part( 'loop', 'single' ); ?>

Now in single-loop.php, copy the code in loop.php, not including the first loop looking for archives. Edit the opening heading tag inside the loop to remove the link, so that the code reads:

<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

<article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>

    <h2 class="entry-title">
		<?php the_title(); ?>
	</h2>

	<section class="left image quarter">
		
		<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { ?>
			<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
				<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'medium', array(
					'class' => 'left',
					'alt'	=> trim(strip_tags( $wp_postmeta->_wp_attachment_image_alt ))
				) ); ?>
			</a>
		<?php } ?>
	</section><!-- .image -->

	<section class="entry-meta">
		<p>Posted on <?php the_date(); ?> by <?php the_author(); ?></p>
	</section><!-- .entry-meta -->

	<section class="entry-content">
		<?php the_content(); ?>
	</section><!-- .entry-content -->

	<section class="entry-meta">
		<?php if ( count( get_the_category() ) ) : ?>
			<span class="cat-links">
				Categories: <?php echo get_the_category_list( ', ' ); ?>
			</span>
		<?php endif; ?>	
	</section><!-- .entry-meta -->
	
</article><!-- #01-->

<?php endwhile; ?>

Save these two files. You now have all of your loop files ready to go.

Summary

Tidying up a theme and reducing duplicate code before using it as at the basis of a theme framework will save you hours of work in the long run. 

As you create child themes to work with this parent theme, you'll find yourself creating bespoke loops to simply create content in exactly the right way for a given project. By only having three discrete loops to work with, you'll avoid the necessity of creating duplicate template files in your child theme and you'll just have to create duplicate loop files.

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Awesome #type on fire http://bit.ly/1A05POB via @BrushLovers

Selling services on Amazon http://bit.ly/1vYxGQO

Blazingly fast open source music player http://bit.ly/1A097Bv

Yandex Gives Its Browser A Minimalist Makeover http://tcrn.ch/1HL0P5u via @TechCrunch

How to strengthen your design portfolio http://bit.ly/1HJ2Pex

Beautiful illustrations from the Geologic Atlas of the Moon http://bit.ly/1ywMeoj via @butdoesitfloat

Where are the women software engineers? http://bit.ly/1FwTFOA

Clever comics by Shanghai Tango http://bit.ly/1zCCWL5

The 25 most admired typefaces by typographers, type designers and letterers http://bit.ly/1ycgUMr #type

JavaScript library enabling SVG icons to morph from one to the other http://bit.ly/1vp5G7i

Most Americans don’t know what “Privacy Policy” really means http://mklnd.com/15yamhN

Very very awesome comic book art by Robb Mommaerts http://bit.ly/1ttlRuT /@cruzinecom

Common problems with popular designs http://bit.ly/1vNFkOx

Design inspiration: 30 personal websites of musicians and performers http://bit.ly/1ygXebc

Sublime Text for Front End Developers http://bit.ly/1zS239U via @Real_CSS_Tricks

“No-CAPTCHA” reCAPTCHA http://bit.ly/11SxENN

Nice read: What I learned from building an app for low-income Americans http://bit.ly/1AHL9hv via @FastCoLabs

Great Designers Have A Conscience http://bit.ly/1vFxdDE

Here’s how to create a Landing Page in #WordPress http://bit.ly/1y5ssAQ

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

Mega Bundle of 105 Incredible Vector Infographic Templates – $27!

More and more clubs are going digital. When you go out to hear a band, they’re plugging into an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) box on stage, and the digitized audio data is transmitted to the mixing console over Ethernet. This saves the venue having to run many audio cables over long distances, but it’s a lot harder to hack on. So [Michael] trained popular network analysis tools on his ProCo Momentum gear to see just what the data looks like.

[Michael]‘s writeup of the process is a little sparse, but he name-drops all the components you’d need to get the job done. First, he simply looks at the raw data using Wireshark. Once he figured out how the eight channels were split up, he used the command-line version (tshark) and a standard Unix command-line tool (cut) to pull the data apart. Now he’s got a text representation for eight channels of audio data.

Using xxd to convert the data from text to binary, he then played it using sox to see what it sounded like. No dice, yet. After a bit more trial and error, he realized that the data was unsigned, big-endian integers.  He tried again, and everything sounded good. Success!

While this is not a complete reverse-engineering tutorial like this one, we think that it hits the high points: using a bunch of the right tools and some good hunches to figure out an obscure protocol.

Official NFL footballs are crafted by hand by a company in Chicago called Wilson Sporting Goods. The footballs that are made there typically range from 11 to 11.5 inches in length and weigh anywhere between 14 and 15 ounces on average. Originally, animal bladders lined the outside, occasionally from the inside of a pig, giving the traditional American football the long-standing nickname of a “pigskin.” Now a days, they consist of cowhide leather or vulcanized rubber with laces that are stitched to the top adding mass. This causes the oblong spheres to be naturally lopsided. This is fixed by inserting extra weight to the opposite side of the football balancing it out. Knowing this, a clever hacker will realize that the balancing spot is a perfect place to subtly add a motion tracking transmitter like this one. Doing so makes it possible to the track not only the position of the ball on the field, but its precise location in 3D space!

Since each football is unique, variations between one ball to another exist. This means that embedding a circuit into a football only modifies the equipment slightly, which is a good thing because sports fanatics tend to be very opinionated about whether or not technology should influence the game. So long as the transmitter and loop antenna added to the air bladder doesn’t pass that threshold of about an ounce (or so) difference in weight, then the football itself really isn’t affected much.

The research for this project was developed and tested at the NC State and Carnegie Mellon Universities with the help of funding from Disney (who owns ESPN). Using magnetic fields was chosen instead of other ball tracking systems that are camera-based because it would allow the computer to recognize the football when pile ups occur. Unlike soccer, the footballs in the NFL are usually hidden from view.

The question now is “will the NFL accept this type of system?” They already have integrated instant replay to the game; and as of the 2014 season, teams have Microsoft tablets on the sideline which are used by coaches and referees for in-between play analytics. Yet, the game still uses the same old ‘stick and chain’ method that was initiated in 1907 to measure downs. Implementing it in high schools or colleges would serve as a prototype. From there, the researchers could try to get into pre-season games before attempting nationwide integration. But will fans like it? Will it take away from the game? It’s up to you to decide.

[via Vox]

Portable battery packs for your smartphone or tablet are handy. You could buy one, but you can save money by making your own.

Read more...

Lasers are some of the coolest devices around. We can use them to cut things, create laser light shows, and also as a rangefinder.[Ignas] wrote in to tell us about [Berryjam's] AMAZING write-up on creating an Arduino based laser rangefinder. This post is definitely worth reading.

Inspired by a Arduino based LIDAR system, [Berryjam] decided that he wanted to successfully use an affordable Open Source Laser RangeFinder (OSLRF-01) from LightWare. The article starts off by going over the basics of how to measure distance with a laser based system. You measure the time between an outgoing laser pulse and the reflected return pulse; this time directly relates to the distance of the object. Sounds simple? In practice, it is not as simple as it may seem. [Berryjam] has done a great job doing some real world testing of this device, with nice plots to top it all off. After fiddling with the threshold and some other aspects of the code, the resulting accuracy is quite good.

Recently, we have seen more projects utilizing lasers for range-finding, including LIDAR projects. It is very exciting to see such high-end sensors making their way into the maker/hacker realm. If you have a related laser project, be sure to let us know!

Over time, dishwashers stop cleaning as well as they used to and need a bit of a cleaning. The Kitchn points to two parts of your dishwasher, the trap and the seals, that might be in need of a little care.

Read more...

Here, we are presenting some cool and funny optical illusions for you. What makes optical illusions so interesting is that it always leaves you perplexed and questioning about your eyesight. You keep thinking about the photograph and wondering if it is real or not. Although many people find optical illusions so frustrating while many other find it so much interesting and enjoy it.

Basically, optical illusions are the images that differ from the object reality. There are some famous examples of optical illusions that include the classic young girl that turns into an old lady portrait, sets of geometric figures that turn out to be of a different size than it appeared.

Here, we have gathered some interesting and funny optical illusions for you that will surely mesmerize you. Let us have a look at this collection and enjoy!

1. Fixing the WA Monument

In this picture it is shown that a crane is working around a tower, giving the impression that it is trying to straighten the tower.

2. I eat soldiers for breakfast

Excellent illusion is being created in which a soldier lifts up his face with full open mouth and nearby some other soldiers are making try to move down from an army helicopter. It looks as an army soldier in the air is in the mouth of soldier on the earth.

3. Good taste?

Wow, an exclusive kettle is overflow with smoke of clouds. In fact kettle is empty but in the close-up it looks as the clouds are there at the pinnacle of cattle.

4. Little Push

What a magnificent finger that is touching the air balloon people are going to sit in.

5. Yawning Dog

Beautiful optical illusion in which a dog picture and a man picture are placed very beautifully that they give the impression of a single picture.

6. “Scara perfecta (a perfect stairway)”

WOW! Stairs on wall and young woman is trying to step up the staircase.

7. Candy Clouds

What a scene, man is trying to eat up cloud on the sky.

8. A Giant Amongst Women

View of the day, a young girl is standing far away the rope bridge and looks in a close-up scene touching the bridge with her hand.

9. My Rides

Interesting optical illusion in which a large wood trolley is carrying a car.

10. Shoot it!!

Wow, In the picture of sunset a man is attempting to pinch throw the smallest sun on his palm.

11. Splitting headache

Here, two men are lying down on the staircase and at upper stairs two women are peeping down.

12. Weird

What a superb panorama, a hand pump is covering up the whole grassy ground.

13. P o o l. X

This illusion is being created by rotating the picture clockwise so that it gives the impression as if the people in the picture are sitting upright and water is flowing perpendicularly.

14. Forced Perspective

Great optical illusion in which babies are trying to get a hold of their parents in a picture frame.

15. Monty Python

Unexpected sight, a shoe is trying to hit up a man and woman and they are trying to save themselves.

16. Crossing my fingers…….

This picture gives the impression as if the plane’s fumes are emerging from the man’s fingers.

17. I Guess I Overpacked…

Lovely scene, a man on ice standing with his luggage bag and it looks that the bag is providing support to the man.

18. Scara perfecta (a perfect stairway)

Fabulous, a young woman is sitting on the poolside and a fountain is sprung up from her mouth in the mid of water pool.

19. At the Lake catching some Rays….

Awful surprise, the whole sun is in the circle of thumb and finger of a man.

20. Forced Perspective

What a technique of camera, a woman is standing far away the lying man but grab hold of man’s foot.

21. Picc station 2

Really superb, man is touching his pen to the mirror of his office looks touching impact on the bus.

22. SKYraker……..

Terrific, a man is making strings on the clouds through his tool.

23. Nubes de paz/ Nuvole di pace

Superb picture, gun machine is set up on the earth and clouds are spreading on the sky looks machine is being on the fire.

24. Kicking the barn down

Splendid view, a boy is lifting up his leg ahead a house but it looks as he is hitting roof of the home through his foot.

25. Children steal huge island from Firth of Forth…..

Wow, babies are standing on the coast and trying to pick up the sandstone far away in the sea with their tiny hands.

26. Pillada infraganti

Marvelous photography technique in which it is shown that a woman is trying to kiss the statue.

27. Forced Perspective

Most amazing, a hand with a light drink tin pack is attempting to fill up the thirst of man, it is entirely a work of camera close-up.

28. It’s too big for the hole!

Wonderful Camera performance, a man is trying to stair up and catches a ball in his hands at a grassy ground.

29. Schnipp

Magic of the Camera, hand is attempting to push up, throw a young man in the seawater and at last it is successful.

30. 188/366

Wow, what a scene, the sunset is shown in the fist of a man. Isn’t it an incomparable view?

31. Stupidi giochini

Most amazing view, in a close-up scene it looks that hand is grasping the apartment building, what a twist?

32. I need TIME…………

Astonishing, a man is standing with his storage bin and his shadow is attempting to catch the clock.

33. Perspective gourmande ~ Greedy Perspective

Wonderful view, a young girl is shouting on the ice ground and nearby a motor vehicle is passing, it gives the impression as the girl is trying to eat up the vehicle.

34. Twin Soul

Unimaginable, a pinch of hand is picking up a man standing beside the wall. In fact hand is far away the man.

35. Humor

What a view, a man is trying to light up his cigarette with the fire of declining sun putting in the hands.

36. Stickman3

An outstanding look where a boy and a girl are positioning with the half of drawing sketches on a wood shutter.

37. Flying south for the winter

Really superb, Bird is flying in the rows of fuel strings of an aircraft.

38. SunBall

Fantastic sight, a man is lifting up his foot but the optical illusion makes this picture as if the man is playing with the sun.

39. How warm is the water……???

Wow, what a wonderful close-up, a man is indicating something but looks like as he is making whirl in the water through his finger in the pool.

40. “Baskeeeeett:))”

Top view, players are playing basket ball with the moon.

41. Who needs Photoshop?

Spectacular view, Girl’s face is hidden behind the camel’s baby face and looks a unique scene of affection for animals.

42. Moon

Fabulous view, it looks like the moon is hanging with the fastener of crane.

43. Fake perspective

Beautiful mode, A young man is throwing sand in the air and this attempt makes a wonderful depiction in the desert of sand.

44. Sun-gulping coyote

Fantastic and eye catching optical illusion in which a man is seizing the declining sun in the pinch of fingers.

45. God’s Canvas

What a spurt, a man is holding the spray bottle in hands and lift it up in the air, on the top clouds are passing and it looks clouds are coming out of bottle.

46. Perfect soapy bubbly timing

Excellent scene, a girl is making bubbles through her plaything and two of bubbles are fixed on her glasses. This formed a really beautiful view.

Visit InstantShift

In this screencast tutorial I’m going to walk you through one of Gumby’s most powerful features; toggles and switches. This toolset allows you to trigger actions on and off, which can be helpful in all kinds of situations. We’re going to use toggles to bounce a kitten (though obviously, you should never bounce a kitten..)

Gumby’s Toggles and Switches

This is one of those tricky CSS things that I see come up every few months. I guess what better place to address it than CSS-Tricks eh?

The situation involves ragged-right inline text. Like when a paragraph of text breaks to the next line whenever the next word won't fit (i.e. most text on the internet). You want to add a background behind that text which:

1. Follows the ragged-right edge
2. Is padded along both the left and right edge of each line

What you can't do is simply apply a background and padding to, say, the <p> element. Paragraphs are block-level, so the background will simply be a rectangle and not follow the ragged-right-ness.

You also can't simply apply the background and padding to a <span> or an inline element. The left and right padding will only apply to the very first and very last line. On each of the middle lines, the background will butt up immediately next to the text.

Describing this is a bit futile. Here's the problem visually:

What we want is for each line to be padded like the beginning of that first line and end of that last line. We don't want to resort to anything gross like wrapping each line in it's own span (where lines break is to unpredictable). And there is no such thing as :nth-line unfortunately.

There are some solutions though!

Harry Robert's Pseudo Element / white-space Method

The big trick here is using white-space: pre-wrap; That gives us the padding on the ragged-right lines. Then to get the padding along the left, a pseudo element is added along the left edge. Here's the original and then my fork to show the elements at work:

See the Pen BtpGo by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Unfortunately Firefox doesn't dig the way the pseudo element is positioned in that technique. Probably fixable, but, there might be a better way...

Fabien Doiron's box-shadow Method

Turns out you can use zero-spread box-shadow on an inline element on only the x-axis to pad each line. Essentially:

.padded-multi-line {
  display: inline;
  background: orange;
  box-shadow: 10px 0 0 orange, -10px 0 0 orange;
}

Here is the original and then my fork to show how it works:

See the Pen Wrapping Highlighted Text by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Dave Rupert's JavaScript / Unicode Method

Fair warning: Dave says don't use this. I'm including it because I think it's clever and in some weird way actually feels less hacky to me. The idea is to go through the text of each element and replace the spaces with the unicode character \u205f, the MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE character. This works with the padding better on the right edge for whatever reason. For the left edge, you just use a border-left along the block-level parent element.

Here is the original and my stripped down fork:

See the Pen Wrapping Highlighted Text by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

It's a bit tricky to get the line-height just right so the border lines up with the padding, but I'm sure you can figure it out. There is probably even some fancy math to use to make sure it's right.

If JavaScript works for you, there is also a jQuery wraplines plugin in which then you could apply the padding to each individual line. Demo.

Matthew Pennell's Triple Element Method

Turns out you can do this with almost no fancy CSS or JS at all, but using three elements. You need a block-level parent for a border-left. Then an inline element to apply the padding and background to. Then another inline element to nudge the text back to the left to get the padding on the right edges.

<div class="padded-multiline">
  <h1>
    <strong>
      How do I add padding to subsequent lines of an inline text element?
    </strong>
  </h1>
</div>

.padded-multiline { 
  line-height: 1.3; 
  padding: 2px 0; 
  border-left: 20px solid #c0c;
  width: 400px;
  margin: 20px auto;
}
.padded-multiline h1 { 
  background-color: #c0c;
  padding: 4px 0;
  color: #fff; 
  display: inline;
  margin: 0; 
}
.padded-multiline h1 strong { 
  position: relative;
  left: -10px; 
}

The original is in this thread, and my demo:

See the Pen pvBFg by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Adam Campbell's box-decoration-break Method

During a discussion that popped up over this, Adam pointed out there is a new CSS property that is (as I understand it) specifically for this. This removes the need for three elements. Technically you only need one, the inline element, but it's likely you'll be doing this on a header so you'll probably end up with a block-parent anyway, which is best for spacing.

Here is the original and my stripped down demo:

See the Pen hIvFe by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

This is working in modern Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox, in my quick tests. Even Chrome and Safari require it to be -webkit-box-decoration-break.

Any more?

That's all I was able to dig up, but I didn't spend an entire day searching or anything. Would love to hear more, particularly ones which require very little code, have good browser support, and don't feel hacky.

Multi-Line Padded Text is a post from CSS-Tricks

Welcome, friends, to WebdesignerDepot’s first monthly WordPress plugin roundup. (Try saying that out loud really fast a few times!)

If there’s one word that I would use to describe the WordPress community, it’s this: huge. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are plugins being released and updated every single day. Some of them bring features that we all wish WordPress had by default. Some of them might only be useful to any given website creator once in their lifetime.

Either way, there’s a lot to explore, and every month, I’ll be writing about the freshest plugins making their way out of beta.

Now, without further ado, here’s this month’s batch of eye-catching plugins:

Subscribr

Subscribr is a simple plugin in concept. You activate it, and each user can choose to receive updates about new posts in any category. As of now, anyone who wishes to subscribe to your posts must have an account on your WordPress website. It’s a bare-bones plugin currently; but there are a slew of planned features, including: front-end notification signup via a widget, integration with mass-mailing systems like MailChimp, notifications via SMS, and more.

Google Page Speed Insights

As its name would suggest, this plugin requires a Google API project and key. Once you create one of those, turn on The Page Speed Insights service, and paste the API key into the plugin’s admin section, you’re good to go.

It starts by performing an analysis of every page on your blog, and scores them based on how light/heavy on the bandwidth they are. It’ll tell you what the heaviest elements on the pages are (usually images, in my case), giving you… well… insights (sigh) into how to reduce the size of your site.

There are two “pro” versions, but the free plugin is more than enough to get you started on the path to a lighter, faster website.

My only problem so far: it adds certain pages and posts to a list of “ignored” links, and I can’t figure out why.

Simple Hierarchical Sitemap

A dead simple plugin that creates a site map out of unordered lists. The plugin’s authors suggest using it to provide your users with a way to find all of the content on your site.

For larger sites however, that may be impractical. On the other hand, it might be the perfect way to provide search engines with a quick and easy index of all your content.

Manual Image Crop

Manual Image Crop distinguishes itself from other cropping plugins by allowing you to create any number of cropped thumbnails from the same image.

Here’s the thing though: the dimensions of these thumbnails are the ones defined in your WordPress theme. This means that instead setting your image sizes, and hoping to whatever deity you may or may not pray to, that the cropped thumbnail looks good in your theme, you can make sure that you always put the most relevant part of the image on display.

Iframely Responsive Embeds

You have to love a plugin that does exactly what it says. With Iframely all you have to do is put a link to some content from one of a long list of sites in your page or post content, and it will be embedded there. The embedded element will be responsive, where possible (it’s apparently not always possible), and that’s that.

You can embed content from Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, GitHub, Google Plus, Imgur galleries (I like Imgur, so I like this), and quite a few more.

It will not affect any existing plugins that embed content via shortcodes, so you can install from the main plugin repository, and go. It’s that simple.

Easy Pricing Tables

Allowing a plugin to dictate things like markup, especially for UI elements as critical as pricing tables, goes against my nature. However, there are times when you need a system that would allow your client to easily edit the said UI elements, and that’s when a plugin like this comes in handy.

The interface for editing your price tables isn’t just good, it makes sense. A lot of sense. Calling up the price table is a simple as using a shortcode. The plugin comes with its own styles and color scheme; but those are easy enough to override.

Advanced Comments Moderation

A great plugin for anyone who has to deal with a lot of comments on a regular basis. It strips out comments that either aren’t comments (such as pingbacks), comments by the post’s author (if that’s what you want), and so on, leaving only the comments that require a response.

Of course, it’s all configurable.

Aeolus – Creative Portfolio

Where portfolio “functionality” is usually something that will come with a theme, this plugin gives you the means to easily integrate a good-looking portfolio with an existing theme. If you’re not a coder, and you want to have a good-looking portfolio without committing to a particular WordPress theme, this could be a great option.

My only qualm so far is the page template for the individual portfolio items. When you click on an item, it takes you to a page that is supposed to be cross-theme compatible. However, it doesn’t work very well with mine, which means that it might require some custom styling after all. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, though, I like how it handles portfolio-style content.

BAN – Blocked Ads Notifier Lite

Who actually likes ads? No one, really. But then, some of us make a living from them. BAN detects ad-blocking software, and allows you to replace the missing ads with unobtrusive messages asking the user to turn their software off for your site.

Their compliance is, quite understandably, not guaranteed.

Conditional Themes

This plugin is very much for developers only. It provides a simple API that allows you to switch the website’s theme based on specific conditions.

The first example provided on the plugin’s page changes the theme if the user is browsing with Internet Explorer. (I suppose that would be one way to keep the CSS hacks out of the main stylesheet.) There are other uses, though, such as changing the theme if the user is on a mobile device.

Why would you, specifically, want to use this plugin? Well, that’s up to you. Whatever your reasons, the functionality is there. It raises some interesting possibilities.

gcal-table

This plugin just does what is says on the box: it calls in a Google Calendar feed, and presents the information in a table.

Since it’s a new plugin, that’s all it does. In the future, I’d like to see ways to customize the data that gets output. Imagine being able to replace massive, complicated event calendar plugins with one that just gets all of its information from a Google Calendar, thus simplifying the process of managing it.

Just put in your shortcode (with the public XML link provided by Google) and go.

However, it currently has some teething problems, and may not work for everyone. But the concept and the potential uses are just that cool. Or they will be, if the devs get on this!

Have you tried any of these plugins, and if so, what did you think? Have we missed one of your favourites? Let us know in the comments.

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