At Oktane 23, Okta’s annual flagship conference, CEO Todd McKinnon and other executives introduced one of the company’s most ambitious identity and access management (IAM) roadmaps to date during the keynote Go Beyond with AI and Identity.
With pressures in the macro environment, new waves of technology like AI, and an ever-changing threat landscape, organizations today are tasked with more challenges and opportunities than ever before. Okta aims to help companies tackle these demands and thrive amidst the complexities of tomorrow.
API Management projects are straightforward. It's all about exchanging data from system A to system B. But that's without taking into account the fact that an API Management project involves a large number of players, which creates complexity.
The Actors Involved in API Management
To begin with, we can list the typical players involved:
In the vast and ever-evolving digital landscape, having a strong online presence is vital for businesses to thrive. To achieve this, businesses must embrace effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, and one of the most critical elements of SEO is link building. Link building involves acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, which not only boosts search engine rankings but also enhances organic traffic and overall online visibility. However, for many businesses, especially smaller ones with limited budgets, the cost of professional link building services can be daunting. Thankfully, affordable link building services offer a valuable solution, empowering businesses to bolster their online presence without compromising on quality.
Why Do Affordable Link Building Services Matter?
Leveling the Playing Field: Link building is not exclusive to large enterprises with ample resources. Affordable link building services bridge the gap, allowing smaller businesses to compete on a more equal footing with industry giants.
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The Process of Affordable Link Building Services
Comprehensive Website Analysis: The link building service provider starts by analyzing your website's current link profile and identifying areas for improvement.
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Conclusion
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What can you do, however, if you use a different editor? What if you want to use your Markdown document in an environment that does not integrate Mermaid yet? What can you do if the diagram is not Mermaid but PlantUML, Graphviz, or any other diagramming tool?
Marketing managers are essential to the success of any business. They are responsible for developing and implementing marketing strategies that drive sales, increase brand awareness, and engage customers. With their significant role, it is no...
While I don’t think you should publish to Medium (at least not as the only place you publish something, you should write on your own site that you control), I get why other people do. You quickly sign up, write some words, hit publish, and the result is a pretty clean-looking presentation of your writing. Not to mention familiar to the general public. Medium is big and popular enough that people have seen it and are comfortable with it. I mean Barack Obama writes there so goes a long way in terms of endorsement.
It’s that clean comfortable design that I think it’s especially notable (when it’s not being covered up by a mysteriously activated paywall). So it’s interesting to see their designers write about the effort that goes into that look. Breana Jones says they re-focused on the single-column look:
We’re bringing back the single-column page layout and removing the two-column layout across all stories on desktop.
You can still find recommended stories from Medium and author bios, but these sections will now be below the story, instead of right next it. This allows readers to focus on the story without any distractions on the side.
I applaud that, really. The single column look really works great on the web for primarily written content and it’s harder than it looks to pull off, especially at a huge company with lots of business objectives fighting for space on that screen.
Design does tend to be associated with cleanliness. Like a “clean” design is a “good” design, generally, especially when we’re talking product design for wide varied audiences. I like how Matt Birchler says:
If you are sitting next to someone at a computer and you know how to use the thing and they don’t, it’s very easy for you to say, click here, do this. When you click this, this is what’s going to happen. It’s very easy to do that. The goal of a good user interface is to give someone that experience without you having to be in the room with them.
That’s as good of an explanation for digital product design as I’ve heard. I caveated it with “digital product” because design is a pretty broad discipline. Designing a wooden bookshelf is a pretty different endeavor with different constraints and goals. Wood has a grain that the designers will work with. The web, too, has a grain. Amelia Wattenberger says:
In the digital world, especially on the web, we’re used to things being stacked vertically. Scrolling, scrolling, through boxes of content, one… on top… of another.
Things are always arranged linearly — top-to-bottom. Or, if we’re feeling spicy, left-to-right.
This is all great for neat, orderly content. But what about when thoughts are complex, unsorted, exploratory?
This is her introduction to thinking about infinite canvases, which is a little against the grain on the web, but absolutely doable and sometimes quite useful. Consider how you can drag and zoom a Figma canvas anywhere without any constrained edges at all. But this approach isn’t just for design, it can be useful for things like thinking through problems with teams, doing organizing and grouping.
I love me some good “general rules” for design concepts. There is so much nuance and it depends situations in design and development, when there is some just do this advice I appreciate it. I think of things like how headers always have less line-height than body text, things should align with other things, and you should probably double the white space.
If you’re moving an object from out of the frame/stage in to the frame/stage, use an ease-out variation.
If you’re moving an object from inside the frame to outside the frame, use an ease-in variation.
If you’re moving an object from one place to another in the frame, use an ease-in-out variation.
I can remember that!
Lemme leave you with a little one: Magick.css. It’s one of those “just link it up and your semantic basic classless HTML will look nice. It’s got a pretty fancy look to it with some unusual font choices, but it might be your bag. My favorite in this genre is still new.css.
Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values.
Successful candidates must neatly fit within established roles and excel at tools and workflows that are perceived as the best practice in the industry — from user needs to business needs and from the problem space to the solution space.
There is nothing wrong with that, of course. However, many companies don’t exactly know what expertise they actually need until they find the right person who actually has it. But too often, job openings don’t allow for any flexibility unless the candidate checks off the right boxes.
Job openings typically cast a very restrictive frame for candidates. It comes with a long list of expectations and requirements, mostly aimed at T-shaped designers — experts in one area of UX, with a high-level understanding of adjacent areas and perhaps a dash of expertise in business and operations.
But as Brad Frost noted, people don’t always fit squarely into a specific discipline. Their value comes not from staying within the boundaries of their roles but from intentionally crossing these boundaries. They are “V”-shaped — experts in one or multiple areas, with a profound understanding and immense curiosity in adjacent areas.
In practice, they excel at bridging the gaps and connecting the dots. They establish design KPIs and drive accessibility efforts. They streamline handoff and scale design systems. But to drive success, they need to rely on specialists, their T-shaped colleagues.
Shaping Your Own Boxes
I sincerely wish more companies would encourage their employees to shape their own boxes instead of defining confined boxes for them — their own unique boxes of any form and shade and color and size employees desire, along with deliverables that other teams would benefit from and could build upon.
🏔️ Hiring? → Maybe replace a long list of mandatory requirements with an open invitation to apply, even if it’s not a 100% match — as long as a candidate believes they can do their best work for the job at hand.
🎢 Seek a challenge? → Don’t feel restricted by your current role in a company. Explore where you drive the highest impact, shape this role, and suggest it.
✅ Searching for a job? → Don’t get discouraged if you don’t tick all the boxes in a promising job opening. Apply! Just explain in fine detail what you bring to the table.
You’ve got this — and good luck, everyone! ✊🏽
Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns
If you are interested in UX and design patterns, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview.
Posts about Website Building written by Maab Saleem, Vagisha Arora, Shweta S, Bethwel Njore, Onajite Omare, Nick Schäferhoff, and The WordPress.com Team
For example, the comparison with the OECD appears limited by the fact that the Chilean indicator focusses on all employed individuals aged 15 years old, or above, whereas the OECD indicator covers the entire population between years. This caveat withstanding, the extent of the gap in Chile is wider than the OECD average. At nine […]
SVG is normally a pretty efficient file format. If an image is vector in nature, leaving it as vector is normally a good plan as it will like scale well and look pretty darn crips. But of course, It Depends. Super complex vector graphics can get huge, and a raster (i.e. JPG, PNG, etc) version can actually be smaller. This can happen with little tiny images too where the straight up low amount of pixels is just pretty efficient.
This should be the kind of thing computers are good at, right? You’re in luck if you’re using Eleventy. Zach wrote about a thing the Image component can do for Eleventy called SVG Short Circuiting. The idea is, if your source image is SVG, it can make raster versions to help with efficiency. But if the SVG version ends up smaller than any of the other produced versions, it will discard the raster versions.
A nice looking font that helps dyslexia
Worth knowing:
According to the International Dyslexia Association, as much as 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. population may have symptoms of dyslexia. Those include slow or inaccurate reading, weak spelling, and poor writing.
Also worth knowing: these people, and really probably anybody can be helped along with better typefaces. That is, typefaces designed in such a way that the are less confusing and less problematic for people with dyslexia.
I’ve seen Dyslexie before, which is pretty neat. But to be frank, it does look a smidge childish which might make it a tough choice when a brand voice needs to be more serious looking. A crappy trade-off, but such is life.
I’ve just seen Oliva King’s Inclusive Sans which, to my eyes, it extremely nice looking and covers the general criteria laied out by Sophie Beier in Designing for Legibility.
Clear distinction between I, l and 1
Non-mirroring of letters d, b, q and p
Distinction between O and 0
Wider, more open counter forms on c, o, a and e
A higher x-height for easier readability at small sizes
Wider default letter-spacing
Clear difference between capital height and ascender height
Just look at how #2 is handled:
Super classy if you ask me. I wanna use it for something. I’m stoked at how good it looks at body copy sizes.
An HTML element as a mask
The vast majority of masks are either shapes in black/white such that they hide or reveal what is behind them in that shape exactly. Or a gradient, such that they fade out what is behind them little by little.
Artur Bień has another idea of what a mask can be: any HTML element. You can set up a simple-but-clever SVG filter to filter out all black.
Now that you’re primed into thinking of layering things on top of each other and doing exotic filtering to get weird and cool results, you’re ready for this next one.
Say you wanted to look at a video where only the things that are moving are visible, and the rest is essentially blacked out. Why? I don’t know don’t think about that part too hard. Maybe it’s a way to spot changes in security video easier. Or more likely it’s just a really cool final effect.
You’d think getting that done would involve sophisticated video processing technology. But nope: CSS. The trick is so perfect:
One video is placed on top of the other, playing slightly ahead. Then, by styling the top video with mix-blend-mode: difference in CSS, we make is so only the pixels that have changed between the two frames are shown.
So cool. That’s my favorite trick I’ve seen in a while.
Single Element Gradient Borders
Actually I have another trick that is right in the zone with the last two that is also just extremely cool. You gotta admit the gradient border look is pretty hot right now.
There are number of ways to pull that off, but they typically involve multiple stacked elements and decently involved trickery or limitations. The above is just one element, and it’s showcasing how you also aren’t limited with what you want to do in the body of the element (there using a backdrop-blur).
Ben Frain documents a trick he found in the freeCodeCamp forums. You slap a pseudo element on the main element to create the border, and then essentially knock out a hole in the middle.
Here is the clever bit I have never seen before; we then use a mask, and a mask composite. This allows us to create a ‘shape’, that our gradient border will inhabit. To create this shape, we need to composite two images together and find the difference. That might sound like a lot of work but we can make those two images with CSS using a linear-gradient. It doesn’t matter that the linear-gradient is actually just a flat white colour, the fact that it is defined as a linear-gradient means that the browser renders the outcome of that notation as an image and the image can be composited. So the first mask is a linear gradient set to the padding-box, which then crucially does not include the border, and the second gradient is the full size, and the difference between them is the border shape. Genius!!!!
This past weekend I had the opportunity to be what every father wants, if only for a moment: the “cool dad”. My wife was out of town and my youngest son wanted to play PUBG. I caved in, taught him the basic FPS key binds, and he was having a great time. While he was fragging out, he pressed a bunch of random keys and ended up changing movement buttons. Suddenly the traditional WASD movement keys were useless and the arrow keys triggered movement.
Of course, this was a degradation of player experience. After struggling to figure out what my son did, I found the solution.
To restore the WASD keys as movement keys, press the FN+W key combination. You’ll switch back to WASD keys for movement and be back on top of your game!
