Global Industry Insights, and Forecast to 2025

Exclusive insight on Russia Games from American champion.

All children's soccer teams in the United States are eligible to win the "Pop Rocks Cup", whether they are a school, club, elite, or beginner soccer team, after registering online at: www.poprocks.com/my-soccer-team.

Premier global sports investment bank retained as exclusive buy-side advisor to assist Mirwan Suwarso of Super Soccer and the Hartono family of Indonesia with the acquisition of Como 1907 Football Club

The beloved and go-to spot for movie set designers, prop houses, collectors, renovators and antique hunters is sadly closing its doors.

The official Ford Licensee and one of the leading manufacturers and fragrance distributors on the global market - Palm Beach Beaute Inc. announces the launch of the new Men's Ford Mustang Fragrance.

'MexicoNow Supply Chain Summit', March 1, 2018 in El Paso, Texas will provide answers to questions that executives may have about Manufacturing in Mexico. The Tecma Group will be on site to provide personal review sessions about Tecma Services.

Milford-Haven USA broadcast reached 4.5 million in the U.K. on BBC Radio, now launches to a new audience as a podcast to millions in the U.S.

HSSV's "Paint a Better Future" Beats Campaign Goal with $59.7 Million Raised to Help Homeless Pets

HSSV Advances Animal-Welfare Leadership

Carol Novello is the author of "Mutual Rescue: How Adopting a Homeless Animal Can Save You, Too"

SL6500 Silicone Lubricant for Slitting Media

Lectrifi to test viability of cordless charging pads at corporate HQ car parks in Silicon Valley.

Jaye Connolly-LaBelle will Discuss How Blockchain, AI and Mobile Technologies is Driving Sustainable Change in Developing Countries

Would you like to know what your customers, users, contacts, or relatives really think? NuWave Solutions' Executive Vice President, Brian Frutchey, leads participants as they build their own sentiment analysis application with KNIME Analytics.

NASCAR Driver, Jesse Iwuji offers his support to the Fallen Officers and K-9's Memorial Fund

Gregory Berns, the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University and author of "Iconoclast."

Walter Frick, HBR editor, explains why we valorize tech heroes from the past, but scoff at today's entrepreneurs.

AnnaLee Saxenian, author of the classic book "Regional Advantage," still thinks the area's future is bright.

Alex Lazarow, venture capitalist at Cathay Innovation, says that start-ups in cities around the U.S. and the world are creating their own rules for success. While Silicon Valley companies have sparked key innovations and generated huge wealth over the past few decades, not everyone should use them as a model going forward. In fact, we can learn more from frontier entrepreneurs, who are thinking more creatively about raising capital, sourcing talent, and pursuing social impact. Lazarow is the author of the book "Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs--from Delhi to Detroit--Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley."

A special thanks to Core77 reader Ross Oliver, who read our post on Cheat Sheets and commented that silicone--which I always thought was inert--may in fact leach harmful chemicals into food.

Oliver provided a link to Life Without Plastic, a company founded in 2006 by two parents seeking alternatives to plastic for their then-newborn child. Today the company sells over 450 products made from nontoxic alternatives to plastic, like good ol' glass and stainless steel. Because they do sell some items that feature silicone gaskets and seals, their website has a section on silicone, where they provide links to several peer-reviewed studies done on how the material reacts with food. Here's some relevant information:

Silicones are not completely inert or chemically unreactive and can release toxic chemicals. They can leach certain synthetic chemicals at low levels, and the leaching is increased with fatty substances, such as oils.

One study tested the release of siloxanes from silicone nipples and bakeware into milk, baby formula and a simulant solution of alcohol and water. Nothing was released into the milk or formula after six hours, but after 72 hours in the alcohol solution several siloxanes were detected.

Another study found siloxanes [a byproduct of the polymerization process used to create a silicone product] being released from silicone bakeware, with leaching increasing as the food fat content increased.

A review of the literature indicated that the key critical effects of common siloxanes, as shown in animal studies, are impaired fertility and potential carcinogenicity (2005 Report by the Danish Ministry of the Environment: Siloxanes - Consumption, Toxicity and Alternatives).

The European Union considers certain siloxanes to be endocrine disruptors (Study on enhancing the Endocrine Disruptor priority list with a focus on low production volume chemicals, ENV.D.4/ETU/2005/00w28r).

If you use silicone in your kitchen, I'd say the entire page is well worth a read.

There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little campfire to indicate that something is flammable. Those icons are pretty obvious, but there are others that aren't so straightforward. Like, why do a triangle and a stick in a circle indicate "peace"? Where does the smiley face actually come from? Or the power symbol? We sent out the 99PI team to dig into the backstory behind some of those images you see every day.

Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness

Google has unveiled a new logo and a four color G icon.

Read more on howtoweb.com

India’s diverse culture is truly a photographer’s delight.

Horace P. Albright Training Center was officially listed to the National Register of Historic Places on September 30, 2013. The only National Park Service (NPS) training center in the West and located within the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park, the Center is a state significant Historic District exemplifying simple, practical, modernist design of the Mission 66 Era. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/albright-training-center.htm

A zoom icon with a popup sub menu in a speech bubble.

Using CSS3 transitions to produce a smooth zoom on hover icon menu.

Using CSS3 to animate an icon menu with associated text.

A flyout set of social network icons with slide action aimed at the Safari Mobile browser (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch).

Using only CSS to animate (zoom/fade/skew) a set of icon images.

Using just CSS to produce a circular set of icons with enlarge on hover.

Using CSS to style 'Awesome Icons'

Divi lets you control and design every detail of your website, from header to footer and everything in between. Some of the most-clicked elements of any website are social media icons. An engaged audience wants to find you elsewhere and get to know you. Obviously you’ll want to make that as easy and frictionless as […]

The post How to Add More Social Media Icons to Divi appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

Have you ever wondered why Adidas, Nike, Apple, Unilever, and many others have such remarkable logotypes? What is the inner side of their success? We have an answer! These companies have followed certain rules to create meaningful and interesting logos. We analyzed their experience and chose the 5 best tips for an iconic logo design....

Yesterday, Cameron Koczon shared a link to the dingbat font, Pictos, by the talented, Drew Wilson. Cameron predicted that dingbats will soon be everywhere. Symbol fonts, yes, I thought. Dingbats? No, thanks. Jason Santa Maria replied:

@FictiveCameron I hope not, dingbat fonts sort of spit in the face of accessibility and semantics at the moment. We need better options.

Jason rightly pointed out the accessibility and semantic problems with dingbats. By mapping icons to letters or numbers in the character map, they are represented on the page by that icon. That’s what Pictos does. For example, by typing an ‘a’ on your keyboard, and setting Pictos as the font-face for that letter, the Pictos anchor icon is displayed.

Other folks suggested SVG and JS might be better, and other more novel workarounds to hide content from assistive technology like screen readers. All interesting, but either not workable in my view, or just a bit awkward.

Falling down with CSS text-replacement

A CSS solution in an article from Pictos creator, Drew Wilson, relies on the fact that most of his icons are mapped to a character that forms part of the common name for that symbol. The article uses the delete icon as an example which is mapped to ‘d’. Using :before and :after pseudo-elements, Drew suggests you can kind-of wrangle the markup into something sort-of semantic. However, it starts to fall down fast. For example, a check mark (tick) is mapped to ‘3’. There’s nothing semantic about that. Clever replacement techniques just hide the evidence. It’s a hack. There’s nothing wrong with a hack here and there (as box model veterans well know) but the ends have to justify the means. The end of this story is not good as a VoiceOver test by Scott at Filament Group shows. In fairness to Drew Wilson, though, he goes on to say if in doubt, do it the old way, using his font to create a background image and deploy with a negative text-indent.

I agreed with Jason, and mentioned a half-formed idea:

@jasonsantamaria that’s exactly what I was thinking. Proper unicode mapping if possible, perhaps?

The conversation continued, and thanks to Jason, helped me refine the idea into this post.

Jon Hicks flagged a common problem for some Windows users where certain Unicode characters are displayed as ‘missing character’ glyphs depending on what character it is. I think most of the problems with dingbats or missing Unicode characters can be solved with web fonts and Unicode.

Rising with Unicode and web fonts

I’d love to be able to use custom icons via optimised web fonts. I want to do so accessibly and semantically, and have optimised font files. This is how it could be done:

1. Map the icons in the font to the existing Unicode code points for those symbols wherever possible.

   Unicode code points already exist for many common symbols. Fonts could be tiny, fast, stand-alone symbol fonts. Existing typefaces could also be extended to contain symbols that match the style of individual widths, variants, slopes, and weights. Imagine a set of Clarendon or Gotham symbols for a moment. Wouldn’t that be a joy to behold?

   There may be a possibility that private code points could be used if a code-point does not exist for a symbol we need. Type designers, iconographers, and foundries might agree a common set of extended symbols. Alternatively, they could be proposed for inclusion in Unicode.

2. Include the font with font-face.

   This assumes ubiquitous support (as any use of dingbats does) — we’re very nearly there. WOFF is coming to Safari and with a bit more campaigning we may even see WOFF on iPad soon.

3. In HTML, reference the Unicode code points in UTF-8 using numeric character references.

   Unicode characters have corresponding numerical references. Named entities may not be rendered by XML parsers. Sean Coates reminded me that in many Cocoa apps in OS X the character map is accessible via a simple CMD+ALT+t shortcut. Ralf Herrmann mentioned that unicode characters ‘…have “speaking” descriptions (like Leftwards Arrow) and fall back nicely to system fonts.’

Limitations

1. Accessibility: Limited Unicode / entity support in assistive devices.

   My friend and colleague, Jon Gibbins’s old tests in JAWS 7 show some of the inconsistencies. It seems some characters are read out, some ignored completely, and some read as a question mark. Not great, but perhaps Jon will post more about this in the future.

   Elizabeth Pyatt at Penn State university did some dingbat tests in screen readers. For real Unicode symbols, there are pronunciation files that increase the character repertoire of screen readers, like this file for phonetic characters. Symbols would benefit from one.

2. Web fonts: font-face not supported.

   If font-face is not supported on certain devices like mobile phones, falling back to system fonts is problematic. Unicode symbols may not be present in any system fonts. If they are, for many designers, they will almost certainly be stylistically suboptimal. It is possible to detect font-face using the Paul Irish technique. Perhaps there could be a way to swap Unicode for images if font-face is not present.

Now, next, and a caveat

I can’t recommend using dingbats like Pictos, but the icons sure are useful as images. Beautifully crafted icon sets as carefully crafted fonts could be very useful for rapidly creating image icons for different resolution devices like the iPhone 4, and iPad.

Perhaps we could try and formulate a standard set of commonly used icons using the Unicode symbols range as a starting point. I’ve struggled to find a better visual list of the existing symbols than this Unicode symbol chart from Johannes Knabe.

Icons in fonts as Unicode symbols needs further testing in assistive devices and using font-face.

Last, but not least, I feel a bit cheeky making these suggestions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Combine it with a bit of imagination, and it can be lethal. I have a limited knowledge about how fonts are created, and about Unicode. The real work would be done by others with deeper knowledge than I. I’d be fascinated to hear from Unicode, accessibility, or font experts to see if this is possible. I hope so. It feels to me like a much more elegant and sustainable solution for scalable icons than dingbat fonts.

For more on Unicode, read this long, but excellent, article recommended by my colleague, Andrei, the architect of Unicode and internationalization support in PHP 6: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets.

In 2015 we launched Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM with the intent to provide WordPress users with a simple and easy-to-use widget for adding social links to their websites. With over 100k installs at the moment and continuous positive feedback from the users, it kept us motivated to constantly improve and keep updating this free plugin. Now, to keep the […]

https://www.noupe.com/design/how-to-design-an-iconic-logo.html

Welcome back to another Illustrator based tutorial, in which we’re going to learn how to create a location pin icon, using nothing more than a couple of basic shapes that we’re going to adjust here and there. So, assuming you already have the software running in the background, bring it up and let’s jump straight […]

The post How to – Create a Location Pin Icon appeared first on Vectips.

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to take a quick look behind the process of creating a pair of reading glasses icon, and see how we can take some simple shapes and turn them into a finished usable product. So, assuming you already have the software running, let’s jump straight into it! Tutorial Details: Reading Glasses […]

The post How to – Create a Pair of Reading Glasses Icon appeared first on Vectips.

Welcome back to another Illustrator tutorial from our retro hardware series! In this how-to, we’re going to learn to create a NAS Icon (or a Network-Attached Storage icon) using some simple geometric shapes and tools. So, get your software up and running let’s jump straight into it! Tutorial Details: How to Create a NAS Icon Program: Adobe […]

The post Create a NAS Icon in Just 30 Minutes Using Adobe Illustrator appeared first on Vectips.

Welcome back to another Adobe Illustrator based tutorial, in which we're going to take a close look behind the process of creating a simple iPhone icon, using nothing more than some basic geometric shapes that we're going to adjust here and there. 1. Set Up a New Project File As with any new project, we’re […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create an iPhone Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

In today’s tutorial, we're going to take a close look behind the process of creating a simple computer icon, and see how easy it is to build one of our one using nothing more than some basic geometric shapes. 1. Set Up a New Project File As with any new project, we’re going to kick […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create a Simple Computer Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to take an in-depth look behind the process of creating a folder icon, and see how easy it is to build one from scratch using nothing more than a couple of basic geometric shapes, which we’re going to adjust here and there. So, assuming you already have Illustrator up and […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create a Folder Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

Welcome back to another Illustrator based tutorial, in which we’re going to learn how to create a simple watch icon, using nothing more than a couple of basic geometric shapes and tools. So, assuming you already have the software running in the background, bring it up and let’s jump straight into it! 1. Set Up […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create a Watch Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

Welcome back to another Illustrator based tutorial, in which we’re going to take a close look behind the process of creating an incognito icon, using nothing more than a couple of simple shapes and tools. So, assuming you already have the software running in the background, bring it up and let’s jump straight into it! […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create an Icognito Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to take a quick look at the process of creating an Ice Cream icon, and learn how easy it is to build one from scratch using nothing more than a couple of basic geometric shapes that we’re going to adjust here and there. So, assuming you already have the software […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create an Ice Cream icon appeared first on Bittbox.

n today’s tutorial, we’re going to take a quick look behind the process of creating a notification bell icon, and see how easy it is to do so using nothing more than a couple of basic geometric shapes and tools. So, assuming you already have the software up and running, let’s jump straight into it! […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create a Notification Bell Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

Welcome back to another Illustrator based tutorial, in which we’re going to learn how to create a recycle bin notification icon, using nothing more than a couple of basic geometric shapes that we’re going to adjust here and there. So, assuming you already have the software running in the background, bring it up and let’s […]

The post Illustrator Tutorial: How to Create a Recycle Bin Notification Icon appeared first on Bittbox.

Did you remember how was your life before Freepik and Flaticon. No I can’t remember the dark ages either. To celebrate this golden times, they are giving away once more an incredible package of 210 User Interface Icons in 3 versions: Flat, filled and lineal.  Download This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License …

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Icons packs are among the most desirable freebies around. There are several out there, going from a wide array of topics from user interfaces to personal finance. But sometimes you can find some rather unusual but clever additions to the icons universe. This Vector Audio DJ Pack is a nice example, brought to you exclusively …

Freebie: 264 Vector Audio DJ Pack Icons Read More »