volatility - What is a regime switch?

I've come across the term regime switch in volatilities when reading about the modelling of interest rates but could not find a definition for a regime switch and what a regime is.

Can somebody give an intuitive definition of a regime and a regime switch and provide examples?

Answer

The idea of regime switching in volatility is rooted in the observation that volatility is usually fairly consistent and "mild", and occasionally very high, say during a market crash. The concept goes further, though. Not only does the volatility level differ markedly in different regimes, but the behavior of volatility does as well (degree of mean reversion, shape of smile, term structure skew, etc). Many models use different regimes to allow the tuning of parameters under different regimes, then switching between regimes, to more accurately model observed behavior.

For an exploration for how market behavior can vary under different regimes: http://www.emanuelderman.com/writing/entry/regimes-of-volatility-risk-april-1999

Set a stroke to knockout a fill behind it with live text in Illustrator

I'd like to be able to set the stroke of some live text to knockout a fill that is offset so it appears as a shadow with negative space between the top fill and the "shadow" fill. I can't seem to find a way to do this in the appearance pallet. I would like the effect to to look like this image:

The white negative space between the yellow and the red needs to be transparent to show a background such as a photo, but it also needs to stay as live text for easy editing. Is this possible?

Answer

This is possible to do. You just need to know a very rarely used feature*.

1. First turn on transparency grid, so that you can observe the effect. Choose: View → Show Transparency Grid or hit Shift + Ctrl + D.


2. Next make a primitive shape like a box to design the effect on (due to text grouping it is easier to design on something else first).
   
   
   
   1. In the appearance window Select the entire object (usually Path topmost item)
      
      
      
      • In the transparency window click on knockout group 2 times so its a check mark (If you can not see options in the panel menu enable extra options).
      
      
      
      
   
   
   2. Duplicate the fill color
   
   
   3. Offset the shadow using transform effect.
   
   
   
   4. Add a white stroke
      
      
      
      • Magic step, turn opacity of stroke to 0 and it will cut trough the shape because you are using group knockouts.
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   

Image 1: You should have something like this.

Now drag this shape to the styles panel and apply to your text.

Image 2: Final result after some changes in stroke thickness and transform amount.

* In fact it is so rare that whenever I even suggest this to people I get blank stares followed by why would I need this?

fantasy - The role of the supernatural in hard science fiction

The response to this question makes it clear to me that I haven't quite asked the question I had intended, the answers are useful but not quite what I'm looking for.

So different but related question; to what extent can one include events that can only be explained in-universe as "supernatural", falling outside the science of the setting before they're writing fantasy instead of sci-fi?

usability - Filtering Tables/Grids vs Sorting Tables/Grids

What are the advantages and disadvantages with filtering and sorting tables.

Are there specific situations where one is preferred over the other?

usability - App title or page title in the title bar of an app?

So I'm creating an app right now and I'd like to get some opinions on what to put in the title bar. My gut feeling is that it's more intuitive for users to see the page title in the title bar. Here are 3 options I'm considering (This assumes the title bar is fixed to the top):

1. 
   
   

   Show the app title when the app first loads and then only show the page title in the title bar.

   
   


2. 
   

   Show the app title in the title bar and the page title at the top of the page (but not fixed, so it's not always visible).

   
   


3. 
   

   Combine the app title and page title in the title bar. To me this would look too confusing but it's worth considering.

   
   

Any thoughts on this?

Answer

To answer your question, which I believe that you have already.. Yes, definitely use the app title at first for the top bar and switch it out for the page once the user has gone deeper into the app.

Reasons why:

• If they aren't in a page we need a "placeholder" so they know where to expect an indication of their location inside the app


• (hopefully not, but "they keep making better fools") this will help people remember what app they are in (hopefully your app is distinguished enough to be recognized as itself)

This question reminds me of the "Settings" app from iOS 7-9+, where the top of the app serves as both location information and navigation, alike website breadcrumbs, as shown below:

As you spend more time developing your application eventually you may find that this functionality is no longer necessary or useful, as you add more features, but that is entirely up to you and your application!

Best of luck!

---

Additional Thoughts

When working with navigation, we may run into issues with long, drawn-out page titles. No worries! There are ways to handle this issue and after years of studying the art of design, I cannot stress how important proper use of screen real estate is!

Once again I will be using the Settings app from iOS 7-9+ to make my points clear, as the app also handles what would typically be leftover "white-space" better than most I've seen to date!

Let's start with some of the basic approaches, and then lead into the more strenuous, shall we?

1. Slightly Longer Page Titles

In the case you may have a page title that is slightly longer than most, a good practice to follow is to simply shift it towards the right until it fills up the space, then if necessary, convert the back button to the word "back." This should help make the app navigation user friendly in many more cases!

Longer Back-Button Titles

There will be cases where you are faced with the back button being the title of a longer page title as well! No fear! In this example we are inside of the "Mail, Contacts, Calendar" page of the Settings app. As you can see, a replacement "Mail..." Has been used instead in order to give more room to the current page title, which is the most important element of the navigation. This is another trick to keep in mind!

Extremely Long Page Titles

If all else fails and you run out of room, continue to prioritize the title of the current page by removing all but a back arrow graphic! This will give your page title the maximum space available!

If even when you've given it all the space it wants, throw an ellipsis on the end and call it a day!

---

There you have it! A complete how-to on mobile space efficiency for a navigation/title bar! Once again, I hope this helps you, and others, create fantastic end-user experiences!

adobe photoshop - Any tips or resources for designing e-mail newsletters?

After spending hours in Photoshop I haven't found a great template I like. I love the design style of many newsletters I subscribe to.. including Smashing Magazine and Hongkiat.. but I wonder what some of the best standards for designing newsletters are?

If anybody has resources or ideas I'd love to hear them. Newsletters are still a huge part of Internet marketing today. They almost cannot be overlooked. And when you create a custom template matching your design it's the best way to tie in your readers right to your website.

For a resource I've been digging through campaign monitor's template list which includes tons and tons of free examples.

Answer

According to me whenever you draft an email newsletter, it should be clear and simple to understand for your subscriber...You can include the followings in your newsletter mostly

Here is a list adapted from VerticalResponse.com:

• 
  

  A short paragraph from you to your audience or an introduction.

  
  


• 
  
  

  Customer Testimonial – A simple quote from a happy customer about how your product or service helped them or fixed a problem, a measurable result achieved; or, link to a video testimonial that you host on YouTube.

  
  


• 
  

  An Offer – Do you have discount, or promotion currently running to announce?

  
  


• 
  

  Quick Fact – What’s the most popular selling product last month? What do your customers view as the greatest challenge for them next year? Gather important insights and facts with a simple online survey tool and share results in each issue.

  
  

---

Tips For Creating Newsletter

1. 5 Tips for Creating Email Newsletter Content


2. Tips on Creating Email Newsletters – Email Marketing


3. Email Newsletter: 7 Useful Tips For Creating Attractive And Effective Designs


4. How to create an effective, eye-catching Internet newsletter


5. Top 10 Tips to giving your email impact

---

For Inspiration

Hope this will help you a bit.....

e commerce - Is it user-friendly to make the main navigation bar disappear when the user proceeds to checkout?

On e-commerce websites (e.g. Amazon), I noticed that the main navigation bar is not displayed any more when the user proceeds to checkout. Why?

If the user wants to go back, he can only do it by clicking on the 'back' button of his browser or on the logo of the website which is not that obvious for the lambda user.

Is this really user-friendly?

Answer

The question that was not asked directly:

Should we hide the main navigation in the checkout process?

Yes, we should hide it.

A merchant wants to hide the main navigation mainly because of the conversion rate (ratio between people entering the checkout process and the ones actually finishing it). For average users the checkout process can still be relatively complex. That's why we want to reduce visual clutter/noise and anything that could distract users from completing the checkout process.

Is this really user-friendly?

If the assumption is that the user wants to finish the checkout once they navigated there then the answer is also yes. But there are different opinions on this topic. I personally do not believe that users always want to navigate around, especially not if they entered the checkout process. And I do believe that users know how to use the browser back button.

There is some research about this topic. One is the Baymard 2011 checkout usability report (unfortunately not free). On page 66 their conclusion is to hide the navigation during checkout.

web app - Is there evidence to suggest that designing tabs within tabs creates a bad user experience?

I'm designing a complex web application and my colleague believes that using a tab panel is a bad idea. I'm more ambivalent.

Can anyone point to any evidence (anecdotal or research-based) that could help to clarify whether I should avoid this practice.

I've provided an example here.

prototyping - How to add page scroll on Adobe Xd?

I have recently started getting to grips with Adobe Xd, which seems great. I am creating a mobile app prototype and I am stuck with one problem.

It might be a very basic question but how do you enable page scroll on a screen?

gui design - Best way to handle long URLs

I have a list that contains long, in terms of character count, links and I am wondering if my solution is a good solution in terms of UX.

My solution is that if the link is over 80 characters, then truncate it and after the 80 characters add a '...'. Clicking on the link still navigates to the full, original link.

What are you guys' thoughts on that UX ?

Answer

This is a good approach, however I would recommend putting the ellipses in the middle of the shortened string rather than at the end. It is commonly the last portion of the URL that distinguishes it from others, so by putting the ellipses in the middle you are not truncating the useful part of the URL.

Example:

www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/category/really-long-page-one/
www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/category/really-long-page-two/

www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/category/really-long-page-three/

Ellipses at end:

www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/cate...
www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/cate...
www.thisisalongdomain.com/section/cate...

Ellipses in middle:

www.thisisalong.../really-long-page-one/
www.thisisalong.../really-long-page-two/

www.thisisalong.../really-long-page-three/

Edited to add example of how Xcode handles this:

Gimp - jagged pencil and brush strokes [SOLVED]

I am using Gimp 2.8.14 on Ubuntu 14.04 and a Wacom tablet (Intuos 3 6x8).

My problem is that I cannot make a smooth stroke even when I check the Smooth stroke in the Tool Options panel. When I do that the problem is less evident, but is still there.

I believe the tablet is not the problem because in Krita the problem does not appear.

Here is the link if you cannot see it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mcZJoyvCM0SHVIeFVuWEJiU2M/view?pli=1

I have already uninstalled Gimp and installed it again and the problem persists.

Can you please give some directions to solve the problem?

Thank you, very much.

software recommendation - Online Tool to Find Closest Google Font

I find it convenient to use Google Fonts on the websites I build.

Quite often I need to find the closest Google Font to a specific commercial font to match a client requirement.

This type of question is fairly common for specific fonts such as Helvetica Neue Equivalent on Google Fonts? but is there an online tool where I can show an example of a commercial font by uploading an image and then have the tool display the three closest Google Fonts?

Answer

The first thing to say, is that I want to be honest and I'm affiliate to the software I present bellow (I'm the software designer/programmer of this font identification engine) and I'm really proud about it :)

It's not an online service but a software application that runs on your Mac or Windows PC: http://www.findmyfont.com

It takes as input a Text image and identifies the font of any letters you select, by examining both your local fonts (installed or stored in a folder) and also querying the Find my Font online font database (currently about 125.000 fonts).

The reason I decided to post a message here, is that Find my Font has many advantages over the traditional WhatTheFont and WhatFontIs services, especially considering Google Web Fonts matching. Nothing is actually free on free services, everything has it's price when it comes to performance or final results.

WhatTheFont identifies only the fonts they sell (and most of the time they can't even accurately identify their own fonts). There is no reason ever to add Google Web Fonts on their database. In fact I think they wish that Google Fonts never existed.

WhatFontIs has a lot of free & commercial fonts in their database, but it's not their primary concern to add & update free fonts, as their main income comes from affiliation sales of commercial fonts from MyFonts.com (the owner of WhatTheFont service), fonts.com and other commercial font resellers. More than this, it will not tell you that the free font they identified belong to Google Fonts.

FindMyFont is not a "free service". You can download the 30-days-trial but if you really like it you have to buy the Pro edition (once). What you get in exchange for this (non-free service) is that we have no affiliation ties, so we can focus to offer you the best service:

a) The current online database of Find my Font contains all Google Fonts published until now. They are stored in a special group and the App always let you know that the font you identified belong to Google Fonts.

b) The same thing applies to other free/fremium/commercial fonts sources as our online database contains the complete collection of Dafont.com, OPTI Fonts, etc. as well as more than 300 commercial foundries.

c) If you want to find a Google Web Font which is a good substitute of a commercial font, there is no reason to create any images: Find my Font has a special function to select a font of your computer, type the letters you want and find all similar fonts (including Google Fonts).

d) If you want to focus your results only on Google Fonts, you can download the whole Google Fonts set on your computer, let Find my Font know where these fonts are, and find an equivalent / similar font within seconds (the local font identification speed is about 5 million fonts / minute).

More than that, the matching algorithm of Find my Font is superior in many ways to WhatTheFont and WhatFontIs: You can use images with text as small as 20 pixels high, it accurately matches both the font-family and the weight, it can match samples artificially italicized / emboldened / expanded / condensed and many more.

I declared off-course that all above info comes from a person affiliate to (and very proud of) the software presented here. Too good to be true? You can always try it yourself by downloading the 30-days-free trial:

http://www.findmyfont.com/index.php/download/download-free-edition

You will love it!

Regards

Fivos

UPDATE (31/3/2015) Satisfying the customer requests we received, the new Find my Font version 3.3.02 now supports the following options for Online Font Matching: "All", "Freemium", "Commercial" and "Google Web Fonts". Google Fonts will still appear in results if you select "All" or "Freemium", but if you select "Google Web Fonts" the matching results will contain exclusively Google Fonts + a matching percent for each one of them. This makes it even easier to choose the closest Google font to your image sample or to any font you have on your computer.

option pricing - Free or Relatively Less Pricey Quant Finance courses online

I am trying to figure out what all online Quant Finance courses are out there which are free or relatively less pricey?

• CQF is not less pricey


• Financial Engineering course on Coursera - Not so great unless you are a very basic learner


• Option Pricing course on EDX - I found it to be good.


• MIT Open Courseware videos - pretty good.


• Monte Carlo Methods in Finance - This was hosted on some MOOC platform in 2014. Pretty interesting for beginners

But most of the above ones except CQF is not a full fledged course which 1 can pursue. In today's world of MOOC's there are so many Data Science specializations out there but I don't see any on Quantitative Finance/Stochastic Calculus/Derivatives Modelling etc. courses out there.

Does anybody have any idea if any such courses are available or maybe about to be available?

Thanks a lot.

Answer

Just an update on my playlist, It has 33 videos now, roughly 3x more vids. I have included some more general economics and machine learning and programming vids, which have relevant applications in Q finance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXFNpDcYOxM&list=PLqMiStH7exaXmQqV7y-tg68f2ZYZK3Yur

icons - What does an folded corner (earmarked page) represent to a user?

I'm designing a user interface where the user will be editing letter templates. I'm wondering what a folder corner (earmarked page) represents in UX design. Thanks!

Like so:

Answer

Icons are subject to a broad range of interpretations by users.

From my understanding, the fold is a holdover metaphor for a physical piece of paper (i.e, creating a document, and the physical property of the document (a sheet of paper once you print it). Without that 'fold' in the current icon, you would have a simple rectangle.

You'll also see this in physical printers, where an extended fold (revealing the lines indicating content) instructs a user which side with the content should be inserted into the printer feed:

Ideally pair an icon with a text label if possible

From the research at Nielsen Norman: Icon Usability

There are a few icons that enjoy mostly universal recognition from users. The icons for home, print, and the magnifying glass for search are such instances. Outside of these examples, most icons continue to be ambiguous to users due to their association with different meanings across various interfaces.

The document icon with a corner fold is quite common, although many also have some lines mimicking some text. But without access to users and the larger context of your app, you might run into some misinterpretation. That is always a concern for icons that don't have a text label.

creative cloud - Hotkey to change Brush Hardness in Photoshop

Is there a keyboard shortcut to switch between soft and hard brushes in Photoshop CC?

adobe illustrator - Apply an action to each item in a selection in turn?

If you use an Illustrator action on a selection, it applies it to that selection as a whole.

Illustrator actions can be applied as 'batches', but this means batches of files, not batches of objects.

Is there a way to apply an action to each object in turn (like Transform Each does), not the whole selection?

For websites, is it better to have a variable width layout or a fixed width layout?

Due to different screen resolutions, the user experience browsing a website might be different. Is it better to layout the website with a fixed width? (and if so should there be different static widths for standard resolutions?) Or should a website always be laid out in variable width?

Answer

I don't think there's an easy answer here, because, ultimately, it depends on what you're building and who you're building it for. Both fixed width sites and variable width sites have their advantages and disadvantages.

One thing I should point out here, I will not be talking about mobile experiences for fixed / fluid sites, because mobile sites are best when the design is specific for mobile devices, not a port of a desktop site to a mobile platform.

Fixed Width - Advantages

A fixed width site is a more consistent experience and is faster to develop than a variable width site. It also allows for the designer to have more control over the presentation because you can set hard values for widths, line lengths, typography sizes, etc. It's also ultimately easier to maintain than a variable-width site.

Fixed Width - Disadvantages

On the other hand, fixed width designs begin to fail when edge cases appear. Right now, it's very common for people to design sites for a 1024px width resolution monitor, but there are still people out there with lower resolution machines. Right now, I'm working on an application that was designed using a 960px grid; I took a look at the analytics today and noticed 3% of the users were on 800 x 600 monitors, and about 5% total were at resolutions below 1024 x 768. Those users are probably getting a pretty bad experience because the site is fixed width.

Fluid Width - Advantages

Fluid width allows the design the expand based on the user's settings; the design adapts to them, which is a good thing. This allows the site to maintain proportional negative space, so the site never feels too cluttered or too open (unless it was specifically designed that way).

Fluid Width - Disadvantages

Unfortunately, fluid width designs aren't impervious to edge cases either. When widths get too skinny or too wide bad things can happen, especially with text. Line lengths that are too short or too long are essentially unreadable. Additionally, many forms of media, such as images or Flash objects, are difficult to scale in fluid-width designs; IE requires javascript to resize the images, otherwise they get pixelated.

Responsive Web Design

A few people have shown examples, but not referred to this technique by name yet. Ethan Marcotte recently coined the term to describe fluid layouts that can change completely based on a user's screen resolution (see details here). This is a hybrid of fixed width and fluid width - it allows you to set minimums and maximums so that the media or line lengths don't get out of control, and it also allows for the design to adjust to the user's settings. Of course, this technique also has its own advantages and disadvantages. While provided a layout specifically picked for a user's settings, this type of site is difficult to develop. Not all browsers support the media queries required to do this. Plus, you are essentially developing multiple layouts, extending the amount of time it takes to build and maintain.

I believe it's impossible to just lay out a blanket "Always use this" or "Never use this"; I would say that you should always evaluate your needs before making a decision. I feel for the majority of cases that a fixed width layout will serve your purposes, but that a fluid or responsive layout can provide a much better user experience, just at the cost of extra difficulty.

equities - Free intra-day equity data source

Are there any free data source for historical US equity data? Yahoo finance has daily prices but I'm looking for something more granular and goes back 2 or more years (doesn't have to be close to tick data, hourly is fine).

I've looked through Data sources online, there isn't much on stock market data.

planning - What are the first things I should do with an idea?

I have a lot of ideas for things I want to write, but I usually end up getting lost in a stream-of-consciousness and either lose interest in the idea, or suddenly feel overwhelmed by the breadth of the subject I wish to cover.

Is there some way of recording my ideas which is less restrictive than outlining, but perhaps more useful than simply writing random sentence fragments on a paper which will be meaningless to me later?

Answer

The unfortunate part of any answer to this question is that you have to find what works for you.

That said, I have heard from several writers that having a small notebook in a pocket, purse, or other bag that goes with you all the time is an ideal way to keep track of ideas. This might be ideas for starting a story, snippets of conversation that you know would perfectly come from a character's mouth, a sudden motivation for the defining fear your protagonist has that will make or break who she is in your novel, etc.

How you categorize such a book would be up to you. You might have a section in the front or back for general ideas and then keep a segment for each work you have concurrently. Or you might get very small notebooks (Moleskine, for example, sells three tiny pocket books in one pack) and have one for ideas and one for each specific work.

Within that making it more than a random idea that you won't understand later is entirely up to you. You have to write down enough that you will remember. Maybe just write down a quick snatch in the moment, and then the next time you have long enough, write down enough so that you know what you meant before, and then finally when you get back to it start writing.

usability - Do non-technical/non-web savvy users understand the concept of tags?

Here at Stack Exchange we're currently wrestling with weaknesses in our tags system. As we open up new verticals – some of which include very non-technical users like cooking – we suspect that the concept of tags confuses new users. Specifically, we suspect that your average web user doesn't have an accurate mental model of how tagging systems work.

I have a long and conflicted history with tags. At my first startup, we started with tags and over the next couple of years removed them bit by bit (because of confusion) until we ended up with categories. And we didn't even allow users to enter categories themselves.

Is the concept of tags confusing for your average web user?

If yes, is the problem simply a naming problem (i.e. would "topics" or "categories" be easier to understand? Or is the problem more conceptual or mechanical?

If some users don't understand tags, is it realistic to educate new users about how the system works on first use, or is it something that requires some amount of engagement over time to grasp?

gimp - How do you describe the color characteristics of this gif palette and how do you change it?

Substrate by Jared Tarbell is a procedural art work in the Processing language that I'm discovering again. Here is a screenshot of the program's execution on my computer:

The program uses a .gif resource file for the colors(scaled up jpeg here):

I would like to know what this palette "is made of" in terms of color - a description? I would like to make my own palette and change the existing one to use with the program and would like to understand the original choice that was made here in that respect.

Answer

The original file is a gif file with 205 indexed colors so it seems there is some color repetition in the image(more than 205 squares).

Palette color description

From what I can understand of color theory(little), looking at the original file, the hue is mostly yellow/orange range (H40-60), or made from adjacent colors. Average to low chroma, with one average and one low saturation segment, and pretty much all high value colors. Less than 10 % of 205 colors in the index contain any cyan. There are a some few high hue, low value colors which are saturated for contrast. And a few reds. Overall some kind of (bright) pastel palette of golds, with a splash of "lime" looking shaded yellows, and some few darker elements for contrast. I think. But the layout of the resource image doesn't help in figuring it out.

convert file.gif -unique-colors -scale 1000% color_table.gif

Result:

ImageMagick is useful here to reconstruct an image made out only of unique colors and presented in the order of the color index(and the order can be sorted with hue and saturation in Gimp). It's also possible to extract a list of values for the colors and an average color value:

convert file.gif -unique-colors -depth 16 txt:  #output not shown
convert file.gif -resize 1x1 txt:
# ImageMagick pixel enumeration: 1,1,255,srgb
0,0: (214,195,152)  #D6C398  srgb(214,195,152)

Which is a slightly desaturated orange (see also); a tint of dark orange. Visually I had focused on the most striking color in the palette I think, some vivid yellow. But a bright pastel of that orange looks like that yellow. In any case using that average value with Adobe Color and looking at triadic and complementary colors helped me understand those darker/more saturated colors in the palette.

---

Changing the palette

It's possible¹ to alter the indexed color space with Gimp in the Colors/Map menu (left: Rearrange manually or sort by hue or saturation, right: Set with the new palette colors):

So I ended up with this:

Which I could then use with the sketch to generate something like this:

---

_{1. See the Gimp documentation about palettes and converting an image to indexed mode.}

Photoshop: Filter>Render>Flame is not availabe

I am a beginner in Photoshop and trying to add flame in my image but I couldn't find that option at Filter>Render>Flame. I am using Photoshop CC 2015 version. Anybody please tell me how can I get that option?

Note: Photoshop has been updated to CC2017 and the filter is still missing.

Answer

You need to update your Photoshop! Because you are already using CC you can update using the Creative Cloud app.

Edit: Did some research and my previous statement may be untrue. You may have your 3D settings wrong or your computer doesn't have enough RAM to use the 3D settings. Check that you have "Use Graphics Processor" checked.

website design - Is there a problem with using black text on white backgrounds?

Why do a lot of websites use a text color other than #000000 black when the background is white?

For instance, this text will be displayed using a dark grey:

.post-text {
   color: #333;
}

Have some studies been made on that topic?

Answer

High contrast such as black on white can cause eye strain. Also there is evidence that it is particularly bad for people with dyslexia. For further info read articles at UX Movement and The Bristol Dyslexia Centre.

WCAG provide details on what is acceptable colour contrast, but dont state an upper limit. Personally, I like to use a different algorithm that provides an upper contrast warning. For further info, see this article at Spider Trax: "Does W3C Get Its Contrasts Wrong?"

Slightly off topic, but check out Contrast-A, a good tool made by Das Plankton for picking accessible color schemes.

typography - Aligning letters "Wrong" appears more "Right"

I'm currently working on a logo for a client. Here is the work in progress.

It seems obvious to me that the S should align with the line above. I feel that the best way of aligning it however is to align the bottom part of the S rather than the top curve, even thought the top curve does protrude more. See the following example

Also at the other end of the logo, the A I feel can do something similar, minimising the white space triangle at the end of the logo

The end result I think is more pleasing in its alignment

I feel that this is correct, but my client is questioning it. This alignment is a habit I have picked up during my career, so I haven't been formally taught this, in fact I can't remember where I picked this up.

Tell me, have I picked up a bad habit here? Is my client correct? If this is correct does this type of alignment have a name? Or is there an article somewhere I can refer my client to?

Answer

Yup, these are legitimate things and they have names.

This is the general principle - you're aligning by eye by what visually looks right, rather than by rule. It's used not just in typography but anywhere visual consistency is important, for example in designing icon sets - making icons with curves look neat when lined up with icons with straight edges.

---

The more specific technical terms below are not very commonly used (I had to look them up), they're just here for the curious.

This is when a character passes the appropriate vertical point because doing so looks more natural than stopping strictly. Joojaa's answer has lots of great examples of this, I'll just add this one from Microsoft's typography standards (don't laugh, despite unleashing Comic Sans on the world MS have a generally pretty good typography team) that shows it's not just the baseline where this is used:

Essentially horizontal overshoot, usually applied to curved or slanted characters, and other characters with little meeting the edge that would look wrong against a hard line. It's basically tight kerning at the margins, and the characters that it is applied to are generally the same ones that would receive tight kerning elsewhere.

Here's how Wikipedia currently illustrate it:

navigation - How Many Tabs are Too Many?

The mockup below, has a screenshot of a software I stumbled upon last week. It grabbed my attention that it presented information in the following way. It had Many Interface Level tabs, inside those, it had many Major level tabs, that contained many Minor tabs. I want to stop there, because it gets confusing. What I want to know if how to reduce complexity by reducing the number of tabs presented for the user. The system itself is complex, but I'm pretty sure there should be better ways of presenting information.

The information above and the mock-up below might seem insufficient, however, it might give you an idea of the problem.

The application is window based (no browser).

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

One quick solution I see, would be eliminating Interface level tabs and creating separate windows for those specific interfaces. But then I wouldn't like to have that many Major and Minor level tabs.

---

Is there any usability standard that would suggest the wise use of tabs?

Answer

The problem with tabs within tabs is mostly visual, not logical. The situation you describe has three navigation levels - that's not that uncommon. If you make the different navigation levels look different from one another, you'll find that the perceived complexity is reduced.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

user behavior - What is the best location to place an identity context control (avatar, name, sign out button)

I'm working on a (web) design that implements both an identity (user) context, and an organization context -- similar in the way that GitHub allows you to log in as yourself, then be a member of one or more organization and switch between them.

The site design as it currently exists today has a side navigation, and a top context bar, with the identity control residing at the bottom of the nav bar:

[ logo         bread > crumb                          ]
[ nav ]

[ nav ]
[ nav ]


[ usr ]
[ org ]

This obviously deviates from some of the more conventional placements of such a control -- most big players place it top-right, while some do top-middle or top-left.

My question is twofold:

1. Is there a behavioral or psychological benefit to placing the identity control in the top-right?


2. Is there a usability downside (or upside) to placing the control in the bottom-left or top-right?

Answer

Is there a behavioral or psychological benefit to placing the identity control in the top-right?

Reading Gravity - Top-right is a 'strong fallow' area

Various models that describe reading gravity (for languages that read left-to-right) make the top-right a 'strong fallow' area. So it's not a primary location in the reading/scanning process, but it gets seen early on, making it a great location for important but secondary actions (actions that are important overall, but not related to the primary function of a specific screen/page)

Is there a usability downside (or upside) to placing the control in the bottom-left or top-right?

Bottom-left doesn't meet users' expectations

Putting links relating to account (login/out, switching, etc.) in the top right is a very common design pattern, and part of designing good interfaces involves meeting user expectations.

By putting this links elsewhere, you're messing with a strong design convention, and potentially making users think and scan unnecessarily.

editing - Knowing when to disobey the advice of grammar software

When writing I try to be my own editor in order to improve the quality of what I write. When I feel happy I use Hemingway to further tighten up what I have written. Normally I aim for having a score of 9 since I am not particularly hung up on being perfect. However, in the event where "perfection" is required, I am not sure what is best practice. Do I unconditionally follow all of the suggestions that Hemingway suggests or not?

One typical complaint I have comes from the number of adverbs I use. In a 1100 word piece I have used 16 of them. I fully understand the issue with them, but often I feel they work. They are part of my character and how I speak. For example "the highly successful man". The word success already implies that something is performing well, but success is not a standard/constant. I might win a lot of swimming races and be considered a success, but I would not say I am as successful as Michael Phelps. Therefore, using an adverb seems correct in this case to really emphasize the success.

I generally ignore any sentences that are yellow (hard to read but not very hard). I am unsure whether to correct them. For long sentences, this is perfectly fine, but sometimes they are short.

Whenever I try to correct every single mistake, the writing has no character. It is robotic and lacking any sort of enthusiasm. What would be the professional standard for writing a review for example? Do you be dramatic and use all the adverbs you wish to get your point across or do you strictly follow all of the grammar rules?

Answer

I'm not familiar with Hemingway, but I use a different piece of software called AutoCrit that does pretty much the same thing.

Hemingway, AutoCrit, and their competitors are not to be thought of as the golden standard. Rather, they show you areas where you might need to work on your manuscript.

For example, AutoCrit has taught me I am a master of passive voice and abusing the word "that". Those are more general ideas that are easy to follow without crippling your style (unless you want your style to be in the passive tone with the word "that" everywhere).

Adverbs are a good example of a dilemma. Stephen King has said that "The road to Hell is paved with adverbs." Mark Twain also had a strong dislike of adverbs, but I can't remember the exact quote right now. In generality, I would follow Hemingway's suggestion relating to adverbs. In your example of "highly successful," could you replace successful with a stronger word like prosperous or wealthy? However, with any editing software like this, there will be exception. Some characters might be prone to use adverbs, and you should leave those.

When using software like this, be true to the story. The goal isn't to get a perfect score. The goal is make your writing better, but at the end of the day, you are the judge of what works in your book and what doesn't. That doesn't excuse you from making styling errors, but having styling "errors" could give your book a certain feeling it wouldn't have otherwise. Take for example Cry, the Beloved Country and The Unvanquished. The former disregards all common practices for formatting and dialogue, and the latter alludes to event rather than describing them and leaves off apostrophes. AutoCrit actually had a serious of blog posts where they ran their software on popular books and found those books weren't perfect. You can find the one for The Martian here.

Here's the TL;DR:

1. 
   

   The software is a guide.

   
   


2. 
   

   The software can help you find your stumbling blocks (excessive word usage, adverbs, passive voice, etc.)

   
   
   


3. 
   

   The software is not a gold standard

   
   


4. 
   

   It's your book; you know what's best for it.

   
   

designers - What job can help bridge me over to graphic design while I study?

I would like to have some kind of creative job role while I teach myself graphic design.

I currently work in a factory on an assembly line that has nothing to do with what I'm studying. So I've recently sent off my CV asking for printing jobs as print design is something I like to study the most but unfortunately no jobs are available.

Does anyone have any ideas of other jobs roles I could look for that would be a good bridge over to graphic design?

Many Thanks

user expectation - Is it worth making an exception to a single-click master/detail pattern?

I have a pretty standard table where each row represents a record. A single click on a row takes you to a different screen where you can view and edit various properties of that record. It's a common master/detail pattern and works well for most of our use cases.

Recently, we started getting complaints from a few users who want to be able select and copy text from the master table without loading the details screen. Depending on your input device, doing so ranges from difficult to impossible. Even if you can do it, the UX is pretty poor and has a high error rate.

We could simply ignore the complaints and tell these users to copy the text from the details screen instead of the master table, but it does mean they have to go back and forth wasting many clicks to copy the text from all the records they are looking for.

The other option is to make this table different from all the others on our site. Clicking on it wouldn't do anything so that text selections could still be made. I don't know if we would make double-clicks load the details, or add a button to do it, but the implementation isn't that important.

The problem with having this table be unique is the lack of consistency. Our users have learned that our tables work with a single click and had this pattern reinforced throughout the rest of the site. If this table defies their expectations they may assume it is broken or otherwise have trouble accessing the details screen. We could add a little bit of instructional text, but we all know how little users read. Even if they are successful they might be annoyed by this table just for being different.

The twist is that while only 10% of our users access this table, they access it on 90% of their visits. It would improve the lives of the "regular" users of that section, but anyone who "wanders in" from other parts of the site might be lost.

Is it worth making an exception on this table?

Answer

After talking with the affected users and a lot of root cause analysis it turns out that the problem was the master/detail pattern was misused in this situation. The master table contains the specific information they are looking for (and want to copy) the vast majority of the time. The details are rarely, if ever, referenced or needed.

The solution was to replace the interactive master table with a regular, static table so that the text can be selected and copied normally. Our site has plain tables on it, and since this is no longer conceptually a master/detail pattern, it's not really an exception. It will certainly meet user expectations about what you can do with a static table.

There are a couple of user entered details that needed a new control to be editable, but the expectation is that they will be edited far less often than the copy & pasting the other data.

Moral of the story: even common interface patterns can cause more harm than good if you don't understand the context of their use.

alignment - How to distribute an equal amount of space between each object in Photoshop?

I'm using "Distribute Horizontal Centers" in Photoshop, but it might be the wrong tool for the job. I'm guessing Photoshop will be distributing the CENTER of each text object and aligning that, so long links won't have as much 'spacing' either side.

Is there a way for me to distribute a group of objects evenly taking into account their overall size, rather than by their center points?

How to find authenticity in a character of color

I am working on a book. I am aware that, being a white guy, I always perceive characters as white men. I want to push myself into building a character that is black.

My problem is that most of the people in my world are white. The blacks friends that I have live in white communities and have adapted that culture.

I do have a really good Chinese friend, but don't "feel" a Chinese character in the world I created.

My concern is that I don't want to write someone with black skin who has a white character. I want to create a character who is black and has worked hard and is accomplished in their career.

How do I find this character's voice? Making black friends just to create this character seems shallow as does searching for a friend based on their color.

FontLab Studio and font editing

I have this problem, how i can solve?

risk - Choice of prior as a shrinkage target in portfolio construction?

There's various research showing how priors such as the minimum variance portfolio turn out to be a surprisingly effective shrinkage target in portfolio construction.

The sell point of these priors is they do not require a return estimate. Therefore these shrinkage targets add ballast to otherwise noisy return estimates fed into "error-maximizing" optimizers.

There are several candidate priors for shrinkage targets that do not require an expected returns term: i) minimum variance portfolio, ii) minimum risk, iii) equal risk , and iv) equal weight portfolio.

Is there out-of-sample research on the return-risk performance of these portfolios for S&P 500 or other indices? Perhaps there is another prior that I have not considered.

Answer

I know you're really looking for some empirical work on this topic, but I think the following theoretical paper puts your question into proper perspective.*

Risk-Based Asset Allocation: A New Answer to an Old Question by Wai Lee, JPM 2011.

Overall, he finds that supposedly risk-based approaches to portfolio construction are really making implicit assumptions on expected returns, and if their performance is evaluated on a traditional mean-variance basis, then we must closely examine those implicit assumptions. In other words, to evaluate a risk-based approach using risk-return metrics is fundamentally inconsistent with the use of such approaches to begin with.

NEW: A recent (10/13/2011 publication date) research piece from Deutsche Bank does an in-depth study of three major risk-based approaches to asset allocation:

• Minimum variance



• Risk parity


• Maximum diversification

They find in favor of maximum diversification (see Choueifaty and Coignard (2008), your list left this one out), which is also the only one of the three robust to the inclusion of redundant assets. If you are a client, it is called "Risk Parity and Risk-Based Allocation," but I could not find it on the public internet.

---

^{* Your question may be an instance of the Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle? problem. The correct answer is that your shrinkage target should be determined by your objective function, and if your objective is mean-variance efficiency, then you shouldn't be shrinking towards a purely risk-based target to begin with.}

screenwriting - Do episodes of the show House follow a constant structural pattern?

I've seen a few episodes of House M.D., and I wonder, are the episodes written according to a fixed structural pattern? If so, what are the details, and why does such a structure make the show popular?

The series is clearly compelling and has a large following. I would like to study the technical details of its structure, and see if I can take advantage of them in my own writing.

Answer

Yes, they do.

• They open with a problem occurring -- an unknown disease that no one can figure out.


• House has to be conned into taking the case.


• They sit around a room and throw ideas at each other.


• All of the ideas are wrong.


• Patient nears death and no ideas are working.


• House has a magical epiphany and solves the case.


• The End.

(Also, don't forget the sexual jokes thrown in at various times.)

UX & Usability resources for web?

I am interested in finding out about resources related to website usability and UX. Also, if the resources contain examples, that would be great.

gui design - Creating Interfaces that Build Emotional Bonds

What are factors in the user experience that lead to users having an emotional tie to an interface, why, and what would be an example of each factor.

Answer

People build emotional ties to almost any interface that they have spent a lot of time using. Just take a look at people's reactions to almost any change of interface on Facebook or Gmail.

I don't think there are any design factors that make emotional links, like cute buttons or happy colours, though. It's simply about people having invested time into an interface and learn't to use it. When you change that, you are to an extent undoing some of their work, and therein lies the emotion.

Making backgrounds of animated GIF files transparent

I have been creating animated GIF files using GIMP from several frames in PNG format that I created using Jmol and now I would like to know how to make the background of the resulting GIF files transparent. Any pieces of software or websites you suggest should be available for free, please.

Answer

You can do this with GIFsicle, using the following options:

gifsicle -U --disposal=previous --transparent="#ffffff" -O2 anim.gif > anim_trans.gif

where anim.gif and anim_trans.gif are the source and destination file names, and #ffffff is the hex code of the color you want to make transparent (here, pure white).

(The important options here are -U / --unoptimize and --disposal=previous, which together convert the animation into "flipbook mode", where each frame is fully erased before drawing the next one. This allows extra transparency to be added to the frames without letting the earlier frames show through the transparent parts. The -O2 option is not strictly necessary, but it's likely to shrink the file size of the resulting animation by optimizing the frames to avoid needlessly re-drawing static parts of the animation.)

For a demostration, here's an animation of the human glyoxalase I (GLO1) enzyme from Wikimedia Commons (left), and the same animation with transparency added using the method shown above (right):

^{Original animation by Wikimedia Commons user WillowW, used under the CC-By 3.0 license.}

One detail worth noting is that, if the GIFsicle command doesn't seem to have any effect, you should check that the background color is really correct. For example, for the animation shown above, the actual background color turned out to be #fdfffc (i.e. very slightly yellow-greenish white) rather than #ffffff (pure white). You can't actually tell the difference by eye (or, at least, I can't do that on this screen), but it's enough to make GIFsicle consider the two colors different.

Also note that GIF files only support 1-bit transparency, which means that the edges of the transparent regions will not be anti-aliased. This is OK as long as the background you're showing the animation on isn't too far from the original background color, but if it is, you may find that there will be some ugly color fringing around the edges of the animation. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do about that, except to choose a more suitable background or to re-render the animation.

illustration - If I reference a medical textbook or website for hand drawing bones is that considered copyright infringement?

I can't quite figure this one out. I am not copying a custom piece of work, I am copying something that is available in nature, bones. I am also not tracing it, I am drawing by hand using them as a reference for accuracy. So, is that considered copyright infringement? Does it depend on how similar my drawings are to the ones I visually copied?

So if I look at a medical website or book and see a knee bone, then I draw one on paper or in a graphics editing tool by looking, with my eyes, at the referenced image, is that going to get me in trouble somehow?

I mean, surely I don't have to go find my own skeleton to draw from... right??

value at risk - How is the formula for the VEV (VaR-equivalent volatility) in the PRIIP document derived?

The recent regulation (page 32) on PRIIPs requires to compute a VaR-equivalent volatility defined as

$$\mbox{VEV}=\frac{\sqrt{3.842-2\ln \mbox{VaR}}-1.96}{\sqrt{T}}$$

Does anyone have an idea how they came up with that formula?

Answer

Let's assume T=1 and let S be a geometric gaussian process with zero drift, i.e. $\ln(S_1/S_0)$ is normally distributed with mean $-1/2\times\mathrm{VEV}^2$ and volatility VEV.

Then

$$\ln(\mathrm{VaR}/S_0) = -1/2\mathrm{VEV}^2 - \mathrm{VEV} \times 1.96$$ with the VAR at $0.975$ quantile.

This is a quadratic equation in VEV, with solutions

$$\mathrm{VEV} = -1.96 \pm \sqrt{1.96^2 - 2\ln(\textrm{VaR}/S_0)}.$$

We take the positive solution and are done.

checkboxes - Radio buttons with none selected

I feel like there's an answer out there but I can't find it.

We have a situation where customers need to choose one of two options for billing their services, but we can't choose it for them.

I've toyed with a dozen options, including some proposed by co-workers.

Here are the scenarios:

1. Use checkboxes like radio buttons:

Here, neither is checked by default, clicking one or the other activates it and deselects the other.

I don't like this option as it doesn't follow checkbox conventions.

---

2. Radio buttons with a checkbox "enabler".

This has the advantage of making clear that no option is currently enabled (especially if they're greyed out) and enabling the checkbox then enables the radio buttons.

The problem here is that a radio button "must" be checked (traditionally). I've been struggling to find a precedence where no radio button is already selected but haven't found one.

If an unselected radio button is an option, there's no need for the checkbox.

---

3. Dropdown/pop-up box

A drop-down menu will allow for a "null" option but, given that there are only three options (including null), it seems like overkill.

It's also important to note that, once they choose either option, they cannot go back and choose the null choice.

---

Even as I write this, I'm leaning toward the "radio buttons with none selected but once one is chosen, they just toggle like normal radio buttons."

I guess the questions are:

1. Is there a better way?


2. How much of a sin is an unselected radio button?

vector - Illustrator CC Minus front not doing what I expect

This hair artwork is composed of dozens of paths.

A path (which has been Brought to Front) represents the hair parting. I'd like to delete this path, so there is a transparent area there. (This is so the hair can be overlaid on artwork of bodies of differing skin tones.)

When I select all the paths and click Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel, I get this:

I must be misusing the tool, but I don't understand how. I have tried both grouping and ungrouping all the paths beneath the parting layer, and moving the parting onto a higher layer than all the hair paths, but it still has the same result.

Answer

Sometimes is a little difficult to find the right pathfinder with many vectors. I propose a very efficient alternative.

Imagine my draw is made with many vectors and the light-blue line is the end of the hairs:

• Select this vector > fill it 100% black > Menu Edit > Cut

• Select the hair group (must be a group if it's made with more than a simple vector)

Open the Transparency window > Clic on the right square of the window and uncheck CLip > Menu Edit > Paste in Place

Clic on the left square of the window to go back to the editing area.

You have a transparency mask on the area you want to be transparent

formatting - Position of Footnote on Page

This question isn't about a case that I have a problem with; it's just a purely hypothetical thing that I've been thinking about.

Suppose you are writing a book or maybe an article for a journal. At the bottom of a page - the last line - you have a sentence that you want to put a footnote on. However, because you're on the very final line, if you put in place the space for a footnote (even a one line footnote), then the original line would move to the start of the next page. As such, the footnote should then be on the next page... freeing up the space for the line to return to its original space!

Basically, my question is just 'what do you do here'? I would imagine you put the footnote marker on the sentence in the original place (bottom of page), and then the footnote goes at the bottom of the next page. This is just my guess though.

Sorry about the lack of tags: if you can think of any others that I should have tagged it with, then feel free to add them in! :)

Also, I've migrated this from 'english.SE'. Hopefully this site is better for it. :)

website design - Which label text is good for "Enter email address"?

I'm about to place one text field in the log in area where user can enter email address and password for logging in, but I'm confused which text should I use for label and placeholder text?

Here are some examples where I found some different ideas.

Gmail:

• Only placeholder with text "Email"

Yahoo Mail:

• Only placeholder with text "Yahoo ID"

Outlook.com:

• Only placeholder with text "someone@example.com"

Which one should I use? Only placeholder, or with label?

Also, a couple more question. If I use label, should the text and placeholder be "Email", "Email address" or "Enter Your Email", "Enter Your email address"?

Which one is better? "E-mail" or "Email"? Logically E-mail is the right one but somewhere I've also seen "Email" in place of "E-mail".

Answer

I wouldn't use only a placeholder because of the browser support. Not all old browsers support the placeholder! Take a look to this Stackoverflow Question and to this article about placeholder support.

And I wouldn't use the term "Email ID". Many users are confused about the "ID". I also heard many stories about the confusion of the "Yahoo ID".
"Should I insert here an email or a username? Do I have a username on Yahoo?"
Just use "E-Mail". It is simple and clear for all users.

So for me the best practice is to use a label with "E-Mail" and a placeholder with an example Mail:

E-Mail">

Edit
I found an interesting article about your question "Email or E-Mail".
It say that official you should use Email.

A group calling itself the Email Experience Council has declared the official term to be email.

But many famous companys (e.g Microsoft) use also E-Mail. And in my opinion, E-Mail looks even better for me.
But keep your own counse and take a look to the article by The Fiction Desk.

Edit 2
I think I found the mistery of E-Mail / email!
On the english wikipedia, there is a really interesting part about the spelling:

e-mail is the most common form in print, and is recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides. According to Corpus of Contemporary American English data, this is the form that appears most frequently in edited, published American English and British English writing.

email is the most common form used online, and is required by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups and increasingly by style guides. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.

mail was the form used in the original RFC. The service is referred to as mail and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message. eMail, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and Hotmail.

EMail is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address", and is expressly required "for historical reasons".

E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial letter E as in similar abbreviations like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, H-bomb, and C-section.

Source en.wikipedia

And the reason why I like "E-Mail" the most is, that i'm from Switzerland, where I speak German. And in the German Dictionary, there is "E-Mail" the official version.
Source de.wikipedia

cc 2014 - Auto size image to page size in InDesign

I've got an InDesign document with 100 A4 pages.

I've got 100 assets (a mixture of .jpg and .pdf files) and I want to place 1 per page. If an image is not the proportion of the A4 page I would like to get it as big as it can be on the page before it hits into the margin. Ex. if it's a portrait image it should be as large as it can be before hits the top/bottom margin. If it's a landscape image it should be as large as it can be before hits the left/right margin.

At the moment I'm dragging each file across and resizing them manually. Is it possible just drop them on the page and get them auto resized ?

Answer

Having the A4 image frame at the master layout, drag the image at the page, then:

Menu Object > Fitting > Fit Content Proportionally

Cmd + Alt + Shift + E Mac

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E Win

Or

Menu Object > Fitting > Fit Frame Proportionally

Cmd + Alt + Shift + C Mac

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + C Win

checkboxes - Popup for a check box

Say there's a form (XAML) with a checkbox on it. If the check box is checked the user should be warned about something. The message to the user is basically, if you enable this then be aware that such and such will happen.

Is it good UX to put this message in a pop up when the checkbox is clicked or should the message be shown on the UI near the checkbox?

My thought is the pop is annoying and interrupts workflow.

Answer

There's a simple test:

• Is the action irreversible?


• Is the action executed the moment the checkbox is enabled?

If the answer to both of them is "No" then a simple additional warning text in the label will suffice. In all other cases, change the program's logic so that it would be "No".

adobe photoshop - How to select a global fill color for shapes

Working with Photoshop CS4, I have a file with 4 shapes and some portion of the same shapes to create overlay effects, I need to color a set of shapes with color A and the other set with color B, since the shapes are in the same group to create the overlay with partial shapes I need to define a global color A and global colo B is it actually possible?

Answer

While Photoshop does work with shapes, it is mainly a photo-editing tool. Conversely, Illustrator's main purpose is to work with shapes (not photos) and provides additional features, one of which is 'Global Colors'. See this question or just search 'global' in the official AI docs.

automation - Connecting dots on Illustrator

Is that possible to connect dots in Adobe Illustrator, automatically?

To do something like this:

novel - How do I keep the plot interesting in a humorous book?

I am about to start writing a fantasy-comedy novel. A problem I found in 1-2 books of this genre is that the plot becomes weak, and the story starts to slow down.

The reason I believe this happens is that there is no big struggle or evil villain. Since there is no tension in the plot (as it is a comedy book), the plot soon loses focus.

The story breaks down to "Hero goes to place A, does something funny, then goes to B, does something funny" etc.

How do I avoid this problem?

Answer

This is a misconception. Interesting plots are hard to write. Some people think "Oh, I put in some funny jokes to hide that I totally suck at the real story."

Therefore you find humorous books out there, which story is boring. But that has nothing to do with the humor in the book, it has to do with lazy writers.

The way to an interesting plot is paved with conflicts. There must be (at least) one huge conflict and several minor ones along the way. And it doesn't matter if there is any humor, sex, tragedy, or Pokémon dragon slayers in that book.

One gradient across multiple layers (compound path unites layers) illustrator

I know how to put a gradient across multiple shapes in Illustrator using compound path - however, in this specific case I have layers with other parts that need to show in front of each other - and using compound path unites those layers in front or behind (as one layer).

To show what I mean see image. I've drawn 3 cubes. I want one face to have one gradient. A single gradient on each is shown top right. Bottom left is what I want to achieve (that gradient stretched across all three) but crucially I need the blocks and layers still in order shown in the top right or top left set.

Important: I cannot CUT into/out these shapes because they will be part of an animation that shows the 3-sides of the cube, appearing one by one, moving into place.

My guess (but I don't know how to...) is make the compound layer as I have, then some keep that gradient as I release the compound layer, then reorder those layers back to where they were. Hopefully someone will know.

Answer

Essentially, this is the same answer as here only this is more specific to your particular artwork example.

---

Merely select the individual faces using the Shift key and the Direct Selection Tool (White Arrow).

After the faces are selected, use the Gradient Tool to click-drag across all three faces to apply the gradient across all three faces rather than the faces individually.

There is no need to create a compound shape.

In the animation below, each cube is its own group.

_{While this animation was created using AICS6, it's the same procedure for newer versions of the app.}

---

This works regardless of whether the cubes are on different layers or the same layer....

---

If however, you are seeking to keep the gradient position static, while moving the cubes, that may be another matter. I'm not really sure if that's what you are asking. If you can clarify a bit I can try and see if there's a method of achieving movable cubes with a static common gradient. Off-hand, I'd say you'd need clipping masks, but how one would accomplish that may take some doing.

What fields to drop from the registration form?

Our current registration form is too long and some fields should be omitted. All of these look important except 'Tell us something about yourself.'

Currently used fields are:

• User



• Password


• Company


• Home Page


• Title


• Position


• Name


• Surname


• e-mail


• Phone


• Country



• State/Province


• City


• Zip/Postal


• Address

Which ones would you recommend dropping?

Answer

All of them except "e-mail" and "Password".

This is the minimum information you need to uniquely identify a user and allow them secure access to your site. The only other piece of vital information would be their address if you were shipping them something - but you can ask for that when they actually order something and not before.

All of the other ones can be asked for on the user's profile page and you can do things like offer rewards (badges like Stack Exchange) or simple nagging (like LinkedIn) for filling them out.

The important part is to get the user to sign up. Once you have done this, then you can encourage them to fill out all the information your sales and marketing department wants.

probability - Quantum Mechanics and Economics... What

I was reading this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2002698&download=yes

The author has the model presented here: http://modelingcommons.org/browse/one_model/3443#model_tabs_browse_info

But I am confused. There's all this build up of using quantum mechanics and quantum probability in the model, but the only thing he adds in the code is a Normally distributed stochastic variable he calls the "business cycle quantum game term." What is quantum about this? Why bother with all the quantum formalism if the end result is effectively just Gaussian white noise? I'm not formally trained in QM, so am I missing something? Example of relevant portion of code (from second link):

; Business Cycle Quantum Game Term:

 z

to business-fitness-dynamics

ask patches [ set z random-normal 0 1.000 ] ; Gaussian wave packet reduction around the standardized fitness operator

ask patches [ set Mb (1 - m) * (b * x_t-1 - (b + 1) * x_t-1 ^ 3) + m * r_t-1 ] ; cubic map update (equation (18) with Mb := f_b,m)

ask patches [ set x_t (1 - epsilon - gamma) * Mb + epsilon * mean [ Mb ] of patches + gamma * z ] ; F update and result of the quantum wave packet reduction in terms of the fitness field operator eigenvalue

end

I also don't get this (from the second link):

There are three main advantages of the quantum approach to Evolutionary Financial Economics:

The explanatory effectiveness is expanded by the fact that one does not need any prior probability assumption, instead, one models the system's inter-relations and dynamics and from that result dynamical probabilities.

Probabilities can have evolutionary and game theoretical interpretations.

The adaptation process of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) can be fully integrated with the probability formation and quantum game equilibrium assumptions.

Can classical methods not do any of these things?

usability - Remember Me in an enterprise application: What to remember?

I've just finished a well-thought login validation mechanism and have asked myself the following question several times:

What does the user expect when he checks the Remember me checkbox in an enterprise application?

So, should I store only the username or the password alongside it, so the user gets logged-in right away when he starts up the application? Or should I simply save the username and have the user re-enter the password all the time?

I'm not asking whether or how to save the remembered password, that'd be a question for security.stackexchange.com and not ux.

This application (not necessarily mine) is used daily in a high frequency, so also remembering the password would be a good idea. But would it? Or wouldn't it? What does the user expect?

I've also considered implementing some kind of expiring-algorithm, but I do not fancy that so I'm now asking the experts: You!

Answer

This is mostly a security question, however, traditionally the "Remember Me" checkbox places a session cookie in the user's browser so as to "automatically" log the user in. Making the checkbox "remember" the user's username/password is a feature best left to the browser and could be unintuitive for users accustomed to the normal behavior.

I would go with the normal route of creating a session cookie - like you said, you can have this cookie expire to increase the security of the method. There is likely a very standard way of doing this depending on the technologies you are using to host/run your website.

Edit: Sullivan also has the good suggestion of naming this feature more properly (i.e., "Stay signed in").

style - Should a narrator ever describe things based on a character's view instead of facts?

There is something I find myself doing often while writing, and I don't even know what to call it, but I would like to know if its good practice. It happens when I'm writing from a third-person perspective. It's where the narrator begins to describe something based not on truth, but on a character's (potentially skewed) perspective. Here's a random example:

There is a peaceful alien race that has never done anything bad to humanity, however John falsely believes that these aliens killed his father, however the reader knows that this is not true, his father's death had nothing to do with the aliens. So the reader knows these aliens are innocent, and when John is saying bad things about them the reader will disagree with him. There are two ways I could narrate this

1: the 'plain way'

John thought to himself 'Those wretched slimy creatures! I hate them!'

or 2 is the way I'm asking about (that I don't really know what to call)

John thought about how much he hated those wretched slimy creatures.

Obviously those 'wretched slimy creatures' are not as bad as John makes them out to be, and the reader and narrator both know this. Is it a good idea to have the narrator describe them as 'slimy wretched creatures' when describing John's opinion of them, or just to use the 'plain way' by not even appearing to adopt John's view and just tell it like it is. Personally I prefer way 2, because it makes it more interesting and less plain, but I don't want it to seem like I'm contradicting myself.

Answer

This depends on the narration. If you have a third person omniscient narrator then they usually would describe things in a fair and even way. Most modern writing though does not use an omniscient narrator. Most writing is done in third person limited.

In third person limited the camera stays consistently over a specific character's shoulder for often at least a chapter if not the entire novel. In this case the narrator should absolutely take on the characteristics of the character being followed by the camera. All descriptions should be done through the lens of that character. All his knowledge and prejudices should be applied to descriptions. If it a character would not know what something is, the narrator should describe it in that way. Explain how the character sees the object, not what it is by name. If the character has beliefs then the narrator should have the same beliefs about the concept.
This is often a great tool if the camera ever moves to another character. The same things can suddenly be described in completely different ways. This can give the reader a great depth into not only your characters but also the setting.