8 Top Graphic Design Trends for 2020 [Infographic]

Design must withstand the hands of time. It should be relevant after the project launch but also a couple of years after. You may ask why that is? Because let’s face it, products such as packaging, ads, or any print materials are not the most flexible things. You can not change the book cover...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

The Devastating Price Developers Pay for Working Hard

You're a wonderful developer.

You come early, and you stay late. Your code is clear and well documented; you're eager to help others, and you're able to handle 3x the work your co-workers can handle.

You're an amazing developer, and that's your problem.

Your Boss and your co-workers all want your best work. It's an unspoken expectation in the workplace. No one prepares you for the horrible consequences that come with doing your job well.

The devastating price you pay for working hard

There are several unpleasant downsides that come with exceptional performance and hard work. There's one reward in particular that acts as a demotivator that destroys job satisfaction.

You're probably already familiar with it.

The reward for working hard and performing above expectations at your job is more work.

This is devastating to developers in the long term, and here are a few reasons why …

1. Price's Law becomes a dysfunctional cycle
Information scientist and physicist Derek de Solla Price discovered that the square root of the number of people in any domain does 50 percent of the work. If there are ten developers on your team, 3 of them do half the work. Who are these employees? If you're an A-player, you're already doing far more than your co-workers.

This is devastating because it creates a vicious cycle. In many organizations, you're rewarded with more and more work, but your salary, titles or earning power remains unchanged. When this happens, your employer steals from your future, minimizing your earning power and your ability to get a new job at an appropriate salary level with an appropriate title.

2. Mercenaries corrupt patriots
According to Gallup and Steve Rasmussen, former CEO of Nationwide, your co-workers are either Patriots or Mercenaries.

If you're a Patriot, you're engaged. You believe in your managers and co-workers, and they believe in you. You're focused on taking care of your organization because you trust your co-workers to look out for you. If you're a Mercenary, you're focused primarily on yourself. You're a job hopper or social climber. You're focused on getting as much value as you can for yourself; forget the company!

The employees who are willing to let others work for them? They're usually mercenaries, people who are willing to do the bare minimum to collect a paycheck. Left unchecked, these mercenaries kill morale in the company, causing A-players to leave or become B- and C-players.

3. Crab mentality sends A-players to the bottom of the social hierarchy
Mediocre employees don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre employees. If you're an A-player who's surrounded by mediocre B- and C-player employees, you'll be punished for excellence.

What does this mean specifically?

Your co-workers will attempt to destroy the self-confidence of any employee (you) who achieves success or outperforms the rest of the group due to envy, spite, resentment, conspiracy or competitiveness. This isn't mere speculation: the tall poppy syndrome, crab bucket mentality and tragedy of the commons are all examples of this kind of behavior in action. If you're a great developer and you're surrounded by mediocrity, you'll be punished for it.

"Yeah, well, I don't care what anyone thinks anyway!"

Here's why you should care. No man is an island. At some point, you're going to need help from others to do your job or complete a task. Want to find another job? You'll need references from your manager and co-workers.

4. Mercenaries sabotage patriots
Their methods are simple. They get A-player patriots to do the work for them. Then they immediately take the credit for the A-player's hard work. Mercenaries use a variety of strategies to accomplish this.

Machiavellianism, or interpersonal manipulation to shape alliances, is used to gain and maintain social status, regardless of their actual performance, to gain leverage against opponents or poison the well, turning managers against A-players they perceive as a threat.

Indirect aggression is characterized by bullying, slander, gossip, shaming or ostracizing others. It's common in office settings and typically involves some reputation destruction. The thing with indirect aggression is that it's incredibly difficult to prove and harder still to counteract unless you have a clear understanding of what it is and how it works.

Leverage. Malicious mercenaries will use anything as leverage: past mistakes, secrets shared in confidence, insecurities — anything that will get others (you) to do what they want when they want. For whatever reason, it's important that they win and you lose.

Successful patriots use their abilities and accomplishments as leverage to counter mercenary bad behavior. But they'll also rely on strong relationships with others as a balm for scheming behavior. Unfortunately this is the exception, not the rule.

See what I mean?

Working hard comes with a devastating price. So what's the alternative then? Doing the bare minimum? Working to keep my head down and collect a steady paycheck?

Many employees do that already.

Doing that is worse, because it comes with its own set of miserable problems. It's difficult to find and keep a job. The mediocre aren't paid all that well, and they're the first to go if your company initiates layoffs or mass firings.

The post The Devastating Price Developers Pay for Working Hard appeared first on SitePoint.

by Andrew McDermott via SitePoint

Where WhatsApp Falters, Telegram Proceeds and Shines

Telegram app is WhatsApp’s biggest messaging rival, and there is no doubt about it. Recently, Telegram upgraded its features. It has already proved itself as a user-friendly messenger, but now, with this recent update, it has become much better for larger groups and channels with multiple links....

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Chrome releases back on, form controls to get some polish in M81 and M83

#434 — April 1, 2020 Read on the Web Frontend Focus Updates to Form Controls and Focus in Chrome — Here’s a closer look at the recent changes introduced to HTML form controls within Chrome, designed to “beautiful, webby, and neutral”. They bring with them a host of accessibility wins, touch support, and more consistent keyboard access. Rob Dodson (Google) Google to Resume Chrome Updates It Paused Due to COVID-19 — Chrome 81 will now be released on April 7. Here's the official blog post from Google announcing that releases are now resuming. Catalin Cimpanu (ZDNet) Check Now to See If Your .TECH Domain Is Available — .TECH is the most definitive domain extension for the tech industry with the likes of Intel, CES and Viacom using it. Secure your online tech namespace before it’s gone. Use code frontendfocus for 80% off on 1 & 5 Year .TECH domains. .TECH Domains sponsor TOAST UI Editor 2.0: A Powerful WYSIWYG Markdown Editor — Two years in comes version 2.0, along with 10K GitHub stars to boot. v2.0 has a new Markdown parser, better syntax highlighting, improved scroll syncing and live previews, and more. GitHub repo. NHN Mozilla Re-Enables TLS 1.0 and 1.1 Because of Coronavirus (and Google) — TLS 1.0 and 1.1 has been re-enabled in the Firefox Stable and Beta browser because of Google and government sites that still rely on these protocols. Google has taken a similar, temporary, step due to the COVID-19 crisis, too. Martin Brinkmann (gHacks) What Should You Do When a Web Design Trend Becomes Too Popular? — This guide aims to help you figure out which approach makes the most sense when considering popular design trends for your site. Suzanne Scacca How to Improve Page Speed from Start to Finish — In this advanced guide Patrick Stox explains how page speed works, and what actions to take for your site. Ahrefs 📮 Introducing JAMstacked.. It's not often we launch a new newsletter, but JAMstacked is a new email digest from us covering the JavaScript, API, and Markup (i.e. JAMstack) movement. Issue 2 is landing in inboxes tomorrow (Thursday) but you can check out issue 1 here. Brian Rinaldi will bring you a concise round-up on the evolving JAMstack ecosystem — and you can sign up here. 💻 Jobs Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere. X-Team Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started. Vettery ▶ Get ready for your next role with PluralSight: Start a free ten-day trial on the technology skills platform. — SPONSORED 📙 News, Tutorials & Opinion The Top 10 Reasons to Switch to The New Microsoft Edge — Yep, this is a feature list trying to convince folks to give Edge a try. I didn’t know about a few of the things Edge now offers, including an interesting ‘vertical tabs’ mode. Liat Ben-Zur What Does playsinline Mean in Web Video? — Have you noticed how sometimes in mobile browsers a video will play right where it is instead of the fullscreen default? Here’s how that works. Chris Coyier Inclusive Inputs — An exploration into how to make inputs more accessible, touching upon semantic HTML and a bit of ARIA. Oscar Braunert Making a Responsive Twitch Embed — This works mainly as a refresher on how to do intrinsic aspect ratio sizing in CSS for any embedded media, but it’s specific to Twitch embeds. Phil Nash The Fastest Way to Get Great Bug Reports from the Non-Technical Folk — Simply click an element to provide actionable feedback with screenshots & metadata pinned to the task. Try free for 14 days. BugHerd sponsor HTML DOM: A Resource for Solving DOM Problems with Native APIs — A guide with a list of different things we might normally do with a JavaScript library, but can now be done using native APIs. Nguyen Huu Phuoc Bootstrap 5 Dropping IE 10 & 11 Browser Support: Where Does That Leave Us? — The upcoming version five of popular framework Bootstrap is officially dropping support for both Internet Explorer 10 and 11. Here’s a quick look at what that means for those relying on Bootstrap, and what workarounds (polyfills) to expect. Zoltán Szőgyényi Building a Code Editor with CodeMirror — CodeMirror is an open source project that makes it easy to build advanced text editors into your frontend apps. Here’s how to build a code editor with it and how to connect together all the pieces. Valeri Karpov 5 Reasons Why GraphCMS Could Be Your Next Backend for MVPs — An overview about why using a backend-as-a-service like GraphCMS is a viable way to go for MVPs. Stephen Jensen The Perfect Partner to MongoDB Atlas. Try It for Free Studio 3T sponsor Designing Web Applications for the Apple Watch using Toucaan CSS Framework Marvin Danig How to Display Different Favicons for Your Production and Development Sites Chris Coyier Web Font of the Week Source Sans Pro Drawing inspiration from American gothic typeface designs, this is Adobe's first open-source typeface family (and is made up of 12 weights). Designed by Paul D. Hunt it was conceived primarily as a typeface for user interfaces — boasting wide-ranging language support and a focus on clarity and legibility. 🔧 Code, Tools and Resources MoreToggles.css — A pure CSS library with plenty of stylish toggles. Here's the related GitHub page. Enkai Ji Bootstrap Icons Alpha 3 — Although still in alpha, this is a massive update that puts the icon library at over 500 icons and adds a permalink page for each. Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton, and Bootstrap contributors Animockup: Create Animated Mockups in the Browser — An open-source design tool to make animated GIFs and videos to showcase your products. Try it here. Alyssa X Snapfont: Chrome Extension to Test Any Font on Any Website — Based on a pay-what-you-want model, this allows you to test any of the ~900 fonts on Google Fonts or using any locally installed font. snapfont    🗓 Events Most, if not all, of the in-person events that we typically list here are now understandably cancelled or postponed until further notice due to the global COVID-19 outbreak. Because of this, more events are now looking at ways to run online. In the coming weeks, we're looking to devote this section to digital events, virtual conferences, livestreams, and similar online gatherings. Please do drop us a note (just hit reply) if you have such an event that we can promote here. Even if you're doing a single scheduled talk on Twitch or YouTube Live, say, we might be able to list it.

by via Frontend Focus

Microsoft Introduces Vertical Tabs for Edge Browser

One of the things that Microsoft has been trying truly hard to do as much as possible has been to make it so that you would be able to maximize the kind of experience you would have with the Edge browser, which in many ways is the tool that they are trying to push as an alternative to their widely...

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Here's how people are still eating healthy under social distancing (Infographic)

Since 2015, U.S. restaurant sales have exceeded grocery sales, but as COVID-19 causes restaurants across the country to shut down, how we eat may have to change. On average, American households spend $4,400 on food, but in some places, it’s far more. In Seattle, the average household’s monthly...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Facebook Deals with Plessey to Step Forward in Achieving its Augmented Reality Eyewear Goal

Facebook is working to bring evolution for social networks through VR and to reach that next level, it is focusing on AR as well. Recently, Facebook has moved ahead in the AR race by finalizing a deal with Plessey, a microLED providing company which will give the key component needed to make AR...

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by Aqsa Rasool via Digital Information World